George Levine
OUR CULTURE AND OUR CONVICTIONS
The profession of literature has a bad conscience. Or perhaps
it
is
only a bad case of the jitters. However one identifies it, it is not
altogether a bad thing, because it is forcing in many places a freshly
serious (sometimes solemn, sometimes hysterical) consideration of what
it means to "profess" literature; and it is making most of the earlier
answers to that question seem wholly inadequate. Professing literature,
in
the sense I am using it, does not of course mean writing literature,
but writing about it - an altogether more solemn and dubious thing.
Novelists have only to write novels. Critics have to justify them. Under
such circumstances, consciences are likely to be very tender and to make
very
great demands. Under such pressure, literature can become a
coherent field of knowledge to be systematically studied, or a means to
personal and social salvation, or, at very least, a mark of the superior
civilized man.
Yet no matter how the claims of criticism escalate, it is difficult
not to sound cynical discussing a profession so radically uncertain of
itself even while the majority continue to express confidence about their
function. Many critics and scholars are by now in academia, ostensibly
earning their wages by teaching, their dignity by contributions to knowl–
edge or to speculation. One finds, consequently, that perhaps the most
bitterly cynical antiacademics are in the academy. Yet most of them
want to believe or, at one time or another, have believed that the
profession is itself vitally important. This condition is well known and
several decades old; something new has been added in the past five
or six years to provoke what is now almost a crisis of faith and voca–
tion. Until recently, the bad conscience was only latent because those
of us who "professed" - however much
we
might have patronized Ar–
nold - believed ourselves to
be
saving the best that had been thought
