PARTISAN REVIEW
537
as embodied literary forms. In any case, chances are that the experi–
ence will induce in the student the further recognition that perhaps
the best way to study women in literature is to read
a:
lot of books
written by men-maybe George Eliot is more profitably read along
with Wordsworth than along with Jane Austen-and that the best way
to understand minorities in literature is by seeing in novels written by
white as well as in novels written by black writers the degree to which
literary form and language itself is perhaps by nature repressive.
There can be no such thing, as I tried to show in
A World Elsewhere,
as
a successfully imperial self in literature. Literature and the nature of
language are so efficient in disposing of such selves, be they in
Shakespeare or Melville or Faulkner, that it is scarcely the responsibil–
ity of literary criticism to warn against them. There is no need
to
worry about the subversive effect of American or of modern litera–
ture so long as the students have been taught to read it. Literature is
even more tough on aberration than life is, even more systematic in
dealing with liberation, be it the liberation of Faustian aspirants or of
servants, women, blacks, Indians, and people like oneself. Only think
of the impulses it represses, continually, in the interests of form. We
pay a human price for a good book and the determination of this
price seems to me an exciting and wondrous activity that must ndt be
corrupted by political moralisms of any kind.
Literature is altogether less powerful in its effect than is gener–
ally believed. But that is the very reason why it is all the more reveal–
ing about the true destiny within cultural systems of the impulse to–
ward freedom, of the subversive or minority imagination. Literature
is greatest in its visionary modes precisely because the visionary mode
is so fantastically difficult to reach, and above all difficult to sustain.
Literature itself-by which I mean the Ideal of the term, not the
candidates for fulfilling that Ideal-is itself a visionary possibility.
It
is
a visionary possibility for those who write it, for those who read it,
and, it must be remembered, for those who want to be elevated to it
out of obscurity and obliviousness. That, to counteract the self–
aggrandizement of literary-critical rhetoric, is simply a worthwhile
way to feel.
It
helps keep literature, the Ideal of literature, the Ideal of
reading as In intense experience, a charge upon the conscience of
people who might otherwise put their energies to less sociable uses.
But the function of literary
studies
has sociable uses of a quite different
