PARTISAN REVIEW
53
class
of things called plays," and then on "to the 'meaning' of the
drama as a whole." Frye leaves even less room than do adherents of
"understanding poetry" for measuring or even allowing an unmea–
sured response to the
activity
which is reading and writing, the ener–
gy
generated in a reader by some corresponding expenditure in the
writer.
Looking into modern criticism in English for someone who will
help in this matter and who has had some influence on the class–
room study of literature, I would suggest Leavis, not because he is
alone - I've mentioned others - but because his claims for "rele–
vance" have been so pronounced and so articulated. Along with
Blackrnur, quite unlike him in so many other ways, he has been
exceptional in his superiority to any mere talk about meanings; he
hasn't thought of his principal job as interpretation at all, as a search
for significances and the complication of these by ambiguities, ironies
and paradoxes. Of course Leavis likes to insist, notoriously, that
what's going on as he confronts a poem is really "there" in it, and
he's seriously deficient where Frye is most useful. While Frye is happy
to treat the genre of any work as "an essential part of the critical
context," the context for Leavis is nearly always only the language
of the work itself, though by language he means not simply words
on a page but the accumulations from literature each word carries
with
it.
Still, the impressive "relevance" of Leavis - a favorite word of
his with meanings that are only rarely approximated in current
uses of it - and the claims to "relevance" which he makes for cer–
tain writings are indistinguishable from a thirst for verbal confron–
tation and intensity, a thirst for what he calls "life." Life for him is
evidenced in the very effort of expression, an effort the more power–
ful in writers aware of oppositions, in the resistant, time-ridden na–
ture of language, to anything but the most fashionable and facile
modes of expression. There's something Maileresque (and Mailer has
some
aper~us
about Leavis in his review of Norman Podhoretz) in
the degree to which Leavis imagines that the historical context really
is himself as a reader and writer; however much the poem is "there,"
it
is he who decides, dogmatically as well as deliberately, that it
should be "there," along with the extent to which
it
makes proper
use of the resources of its language; however much he locates a
