72
GEORGE
LEVINE
mythology from both radical and conservative wings, but the
ef·
forts to keep it open have to
be
strenuous, constant, delicate, un·
popular, and above all largely negative. When it comes to meeting
the threat to identity, a myth of freedom seems very ineffective
in
comparison with the narcotic charm of a closed myth of concern,
with its instant, convinced and final answers. It takes time to
realize that these answers are not only not genuine answers, but
that only the questions can be genuine, and
all
such answers cheat
us out of our real birthright, which is the right to ask the questions.
Seeing the price of liberalism, Frye is prepared to suffer the martyrdom
of defending it. As a professor, he has already had to do battle, and
the immediate form of it is in the attempt to preserve the university,
which he sees as the "engine room" of liberal ideas of education, the
place where the "appeal to reason, experiment, evidence and imagina.
tion
is
constantly going on. It is not and never can be a concerned
organization, like a church or a political party, and the tactics of
trying to revolutionize society by harassing and bedevilling the univer·
sity are not serious tactics." Here is the immediate threat and the
im.
mediate response. Ourselves wanting so much to believe this and to
be
protected (powerless in a way not to believe it), we are in danger of
adopting the sort of moral stance which will allow us to turn indignantly
away from the passionately intense who have no interest in our kind
of disinterest. The university may in fact be the place where reason
and the will of God are most fully explored and prevalent, but we can·
not blind ourselves to the fact that it is in practice a concerned organ·
ization, that it fulfills immediate social needs which, were they eliminat·
ed, would virtually wipe it out; and those disinterested contemplators
within it must learn .to understand precisely how disinterested it
is.
At any rate, it is a problematic sort of institution at the moment for
which to undertake martyrdom.
Bradbury, too, is concerned with the problems that arise from the
democratization of culture and with the place of literature in its larger '
social context. But despite a good deal of theorizing, his book is less
theoretical- at least less preoccupied with the ideal- than Frye's. It
belongs in the good solid tradition of English empiricism, and is an
attempt to make and prove an argument on a much smaller scale -
I
simply, that the study of literature from a sociological perspective can
be an extremely useful enterprise, can, in fact, help illuminate par·
j
ticular texts in ways unavailable to "timeless" analyses. Bradbury sees
literature as embedded in social contexts (although he is distinctly
not
Marxist in orientation), as used for a wide variety; of purposes, as aimed
