'ARTISAN REVIEW
57
in
what is called literature and of writing generally. "It is a very
great part of life," Lawrence reminded us.
"It
is not superimposi–
tion of theory. It is the passionate struggle into conscious being."
Locating, then watching, then describing and participating in that
struggle as it takes place in the writings of any period could be the
most exciting and promising direction of English studies. It points
to
where language and history truly meet. Literary study can thus
be
made relevant to life not as a mere supplier of images or visions,
but as an activity; it can create capacities through exercise with the
language of literature that can then
be
applied to the language of
politics
and power, the language of daily life. It's simply terribly
hard to do this, however - to make this shift of muscularity of
mind and spirit from one allegedly elevated mode of expression,
where the muscles can
be
most conveniently developed, to another
mode of expression both more inaccessible and considered so ordinary,
so
natural as to be beyond inquiry. And yet in this transfer of ac–
tivity, and in the reciprocations that would follow from it, is the
promise of some genuine interplay between different and multiply–
ing cultural traditions.
If
English studies is not in command of a field of knowledge
it can be in command of a field of energy. I doubt that this func–
tion will satisfy the ambitions, especially the rhetorical ones, either of
many of the critics of English studies in its present shape or of many
of its defenders. The latter think English studies so much more than
it
is-
the bastion of English literature and of the values in it; the
former want it to be more than it ever legjtimately can be - the
bastion of political and moral health. Defenders and critics share the
same illusion about the power of literature as a series of finished
works, rather than a feeling for the power, still generating
in
those
works, of
~he
retraceable acts of writing, composition, performance.
"What is the late November doing / With the disturbance of the
spring," asks Eliot of "East Coker," in lines any poet would have
been happy to have written, one imagines. Only we are then told
"That was a way of putting it - not very satisfactory: / A pari–
phrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion, / Leaving one
still
with the intolerable wrestle / With words and meaning. The poetry
does not matter."
English studies cannot be the body of English literature but
it can
be
at one with its spirit: of struggling, of wrestling with words
