PARTISAN
REVIEW
65
tions or were sickened by guilt at not doing so. Yet we were too liberal,
too
sophisticated, to believe wholly in anything we did, and struggled to
make sense of those Yeatsian lines which had become the profession's
justification in the fifties: "The best lack all conviction, and the worst
are full of passionate intensity."
Academics, as we should have known, turned out to be wonder–
fully incompetent politicians and remarkably uneducated about what
education is. Bad consciences are inadequate weapons either for re–
form or revolution, and much of the political and pedagogical argu–
ment that has been going on about the relation of literature to society,
of teaching to the student, of politics to all of this, has been sadly over–
simple.
It
is still difficult to believe that studying literature with a high
sense of political and moral relevance can matter at all in the reshap–
ing of consciousness and behavior that obviously needs to be carried
out. Nor is it easy to get comfortable with the politicization of the
classroom or its transformation into group therapy or consciousness rais–
ing. But self-consciously to return to the old comforts of the liberal
verities is to court catastrophe. We all, I think, can use a sharp re–
consideration of the nature of the profession, of what it means to do
criticism in the context of a society that insists on making such activity
either trivial or difficult or both, and under the auspices of institutions
which -
whether they be journals, publishers or universities - are fully
involved in all those extraliterary businesses which give us our bad
conscience.
All three of the books I want to talk about here are evidence that
such a reconsideration is the concern of a wide range of critics and
scholars.
1
It is remarkable that within six months these three self-con–
sciously important books on the subject should have been published by
critics who have made their reputations in other ways, and all of whom
live outside the United States.
It
would not be quite fair to say that all
three
are expressions of the bad conscience I have been discussing: none
but Steiner begins to admit to the feeling. But if they are not the direct
product of conscience, then they are surely a response to the pervasive
threat to the business of criticism as we know it. And it is interesting to
note how important Arnold's presence is to each, how persistently each
1THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF MODERN LITERATURE. By Malcolm
Bradbury. Schoc.ken. $9.00. THE CRITICAL PATH: AN ESSAY ON THE
SOCIAL CONTEXT OF LITERARY CRITICISM. By Northrop Frye.
Indiana. $4.95. IN BLUEBEARD'S CASTLE: TOWARD THE REDEFI–
NITION OF CULTURE ['The
1971
T .S. Eliot Lectures]. By
George
Steiner.
Yale. $5.95.
