PARTISAN REVIEW
55
ing
conversation? There's very little evidence, I
think,
that people
of
conventionally achieved literary culture or people who produce
literature
are any better at "the exploration of life's problems" than
are some, and not a few, who cannot read or write. Those who write
&imply
ask
us to take their language in that rather than in some other
fonn. The fonn makes them neither better nor worse with respect
to
''life.''
Most
calls
for "relevance" now being heard manifest a perfectly
clear and familiar intention: namely, that English studies is, once
again,
to be no more than a conveyor belt for the transmission into
life
of those parts of English literature which can be considered
relevant to it. What about any
parts
of English literature that can't
be
made "relevant"?
Do
such writings (let's say "Lycidas" as a
pastoral
poem,
since Mr. Louis Kampf, now First Vice-President of
MLA, seems almost as exercised, in "The Scandal of Literary Schol–
arship," by the damned irrelevance of pastoral conventions in t,he
teaching of that poem as by the reported appearance of a new
journal devoted to the study of Henry James, Jr.) - do such writ–
ings constitute literature even
if
they
are
irrelevant to life's problems?
Or another question.
If
one work is relevant to more of these prob–
blems than is another, does it therefore have measurably more of
literature in it? Mr. Kampf's faith in the possible saving conse–
quences of reading literature in a relevant way is quite literally
dis–
arming: "What relevance," he asks, "has the physicist's love of
Marcel Proust to his work on missiles?
If
the love were real, he
would, I assume, stop working on them." I'm afraid I don't see why
this should be so.
If
the suppositious physicist hadn't already stopped
out of love for
his
family or
his
dog, why should he stop for Marcel
Proust? Are we. to believe that literature's relevance to life is finally
a matter of it's being more relevant
than
life? Nor does one need
George Steiner's operatic pronouncements that the humanistic tradi–
tion of literature somehow failed to prevent the gas chambers. While
I never knew of any presumptive relationship anyway, Steiner ap–
parently did, so that he can discover that "We now know that a
man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening-and go to his day's
work at Auschwitz in the morning." Anyone can propose such con–
nections but they don't happen to be necessary ones. Literature and,
by
extension, literary studies may have enormous powers, but we
