PARTISAN REVIEW
79
experience as "professor," a genuinely problematic or eccentric role.
In different ways, these books are all apologies for the way things are
in
high culture.
Frye makes a sharp distinction between the critic as person and
the critic as critic. As a person, he is free to be engaged, to value, to
judge; as a critic he must avoid engagement at all costs. Bradbury
sees the writer's cultural isolation as something with which to struggle,
and his role to be that of the historian of our culture. Steiner seems
unwilling to allow the separation of man and critic, man and writer,
and insists that the transmission of our culture demands engagement;
but he surrenders to the risk of the inseparability of writer and man.
Together they urge the pursuit of knowledge; separately they deal
with what they take to be the real moral relation of the humanist
to his culture.
There is much to be disentangled here, and I frankly cannot ima–
gine how it is to be done. But surely we can avoid the sort of dual–
isms that must result from grandiose and aspiringly comprehensive vi–
sions of literature and culture. We need not choose between accepting
or rejecting Western culture but might, less ambitiously, think rather
more of specific expressions of it and learn to become less complacent
about the provincialism we are likely to discover. We need not choose
between scholarly objectivity and detachment on the one hand, con–
stricting personal engagement, subjectivity, intuition on the other.
Instead, we might recognize the interestedness of our disinterest, and,
with as much respect for the literature as we can develop, allow our
engagement to color our reading (it will do so, more dangerously, any–
way). We will make fewer pretenses about contributions to knowledge
in this way, but we are likely to make criticism, if not literature, more
creative and insightful. Only the corpse of literature is a body of knowl–
edge. And we need not choose between continuing the "eternal quest
for knowledge" and a new Ludditism. What we can do is ask ourselves
much more serious questions about the consequences of our quest on
each particular occasion of it. Much of the shock to the profession in
the last decade or so has come from the revelation that dispassionate
quests for truth, even about literature, have social and moral conse–
quences that seemed not at all related to those truths. We must, surely,
unburden ourselves of the high moral sense of vocation (which is some–
times an equivalently snobbish high aesthetic sense). Taking it all so
seriously is one of the sure ways to bring culture around to strange
political allegiances.
