PARTISAN REVIEW
43
insisting on the invulnerability of its own materials. Enterprises in
the
humanities, of which literary study is preeminent, have been con–
sidered especially valuable, then, in ways not unarguably belonging
to
literature itself: as a conditioning of the sensibility with respect
to what are called "concrete" human situations; as a humanizing,
• civilizing influence in that it bears witness to the irresolvable per–
plexities of living in time and to the magnificent thrusts of human
energy as it tries to transcend time. A long held assumption about
literature has become the presumption of literary study: that it makes
us
conscious of the heroism of transcendence. Not merely the fictional
hero but the writer himself, in his acts of creation, tries to establish
realms freed of the contamination and erosions of time, tries to create
forms that will become fuller and more beautiful from the accretions
of time.
Literary study has come increasingly to depend on this way of
thinking about literature. Classroom teachers are not, however, re–
sponsible for inventing this view of literature and are only beginning
to
inquire into the premises behind it. Of the many sources, a notably
eloquent one is Henry James, Jr. of the
Prefaces
and of "The Art of
Fiction," and Henry James, Jr. is not at all popular (though Sr.
may soon, for good reason, become fashionable) with those who
cry out against the irrelevance and disgrace of literary scholarship.
It's therefore instructive, in seeing, again, how apparently dissident
factions are closer to the traditionalists than they'd like to imagine,
to note in Herbert Marcuse a position somewhat analogous to the
younger James's. For Marcuse, art and literature are essentially higher
forms of life. They are attached to historical or daily life by virtue
of a provocative alienation, a challenge to the way things really are.
Art
contains, he says, "the rationality of negation. In its advanced
positions, it is the Great Refusal-the protest against that which is.
The modes in which man and things as they are made to appear,
to sing and sound and speak are modes of refuting, breaking and
recreating their factual existence." However, he argues, society has
iound the mea1l5-in the mass production and distribution of high
culture-to assimilate and coopt the essentially antagonistic contents
of literature. Surely the invention of literary studies, the whole idea
of making works of art available to a classless class, is a prime instance
of this cooption.
