PARTISAN REVIEW
49
in his city. One needn't have been a schoolboy Marxist to recognize
the
process.
Literary study might well consist of such "lessons" in how to
meet and know words under different kinds of social and historical
stress. The point would be that any given expression in words has
to
be
confronted as if meant pointedly, personally for
you,
meant
as a violation, pleasurable or otherwise, of the self you'd put together
before this shape of words entered into it and before the self in tum,
with all its biases, cautions, histories, moved reciprocally back into
those words. Literary study should show how in this engagement
words can sicken and befoul, heal and uplift us, and how precarious
and momentary each such induced state can be. A class can watch
how words suddenly get snatched from our possession and are so
recast that we don't want to possess them any more.
This
active way
of responding to language and to the structures of imagination that
are made from it is not, alas, what goes on in the classrooms of our
colleges and universities. There's little effort to show how words and
what is shaped by them are transformed in their passage through
various contexts.
There's a lot of talk about "context" to be sure, but the word
refers most often to the "work," whatever that is imagined to be,
or some part of it, or to the genre of the work or to the historical
pressures of the time, whatever those are supposed to
be.
But what
about the "context" wherein the cluster of words is received - that
odd place known as a classroom with all those ratty chairs and an
actor up front? What about that "context" which is the reader
him–
self and the various other "contexts" he carries in him to the con–
text of the campus and the classroom? "Contexts" swirl around and
in and out of the writing being looked at and listened to even before
we begin pretending that we can firm up a literary or historical
context of an authorized kind.
We ourselves, each of us, insofar as we are composed in and
by language, should
be
as much the subject of literary studies as
is
any literary work similarly composed. The confrontation of these two
kinds of composition - that should be the substance of our work.
It's murderously hard work, however, except for those who take for
granted the self known as the reader or for those satisfied with the
almost invariably slapdash compositions of a self put together for any
