PARTISAN REVIEW
387
The most exciting recent literary criticism has been an attempt to
break down the entrenched antagonism between criticism and liter–
ature. Criticism, in its most familiar academic form, is the enemy of
literature: analytical, detached, reductive and judgmental; such
criticism, although inspired by art, is antithetical to the nature of
art. The passionate, nonanalytical intelligence of the artist
has
been
the object of the critic's idolatry and suspicion, the alien, threatening
nature to which criticism has given an appearance both tame and
supernaturally awesome by enclosing it in the sacred zoo of Culture.
Is a reenactment of the intentions and the spirit of art incompatible
with criticism? Is there a way of elucidating sense from art which
does not merely translate its existence into fixed "meanings" which
make its very mode of existence appear superfluous?
If
there is a way, it would involve neither repeating the contents
of specific acts of art, nor being inspired equally by all such acts. It
may, however, mean the disappearance of written criticism.
Art
may
finally seduce us out of discussion and into our own experiments in
the restructuring of consciousness.
If
the re-forming of critical re–
sponses does not mean the disappearance of criticism, it does imply
new definitions of both interpretation and judgment. The former
would be a kind of respeaking of the text, an explicit version of
im–
plicit structures. The two dangers here are of course those of mere
paraphrase and, at the other extreme, of a thematic generality indif–
ferent to particular contexts. Finally, the judgment of art would be
contained in the richness, the coherence and the imaginative orig–
inality of the critic's own performance - which would at least have
the advantage of reintegrating supposedly objective evaluations into
the experience which determines them, that is, into the critic's own
stimulations and satisfactions.
This,
I
think,
would be the sort of criticism the radical young
deserve. Like all critical acts, the criticism of reenactment involves a
certain distance from the text. The assumption of Jerry Rubin's
Do
It!
-
an assumption many of the radical young would agree to -
is
that to take the distance
is
already to make a negative judgment of
the political goals which yippie performances claim to serve. The
latter seem to demand the preemption of a radical politics by a par–
ticular style of political behavior. The reason for opposing this demand
is
that it is no more than a polemical strategy against
other
political
