274
PARTISAN REVIEW
through the New Critics, has gone down with the leveling wind . Grand
prospects no longer lend import to the critical enterprise , no longer sanction
the literary overload of brilliant minds, and in the path of their come-down
stand practical questions. What more is there to read? \'V'hat more to say,
write, teach? What more, in short, can "make it new" mean now?
But that, again , is only a part of the problem . If we were moved by works
ofliterature the way Rilke was struck when he beheld the Archaic Apollo-Du
muss! deinLeben a·ndern-there
could hardly be this prevailing sense of
deja
vu.
There would be no projection of a death in the heart , no symptomatic
plaint ofennui and loss. Literature does not die, no more than the world itself
goes down, despite the claim, two thousand years of it, that doom impends.
Never, perhaps , has literary creation been more fertile, diverse, or just plain
plentiful. No, the prophets of doom have something else in mind , and the
persistence of their cry is a measure of genuine pain .
In youth the reader comes to literature as to a world of wondrous truth.
He consumes book after book of poetry and prose, and ranging thus the
heights, borne onward by joy , he comes to acquire fields, disciplines ,
methods . He becomes critical- and at some point, finally , he becomes aware
that his fundamental relation to literature has changed . The large works are
behind him, naive delight is gone . The realms of gold have receded and no
new world, no second dawn, no alternate route to transcendence remains.
And now he grows to covet that first look into Chapman 's Homer ; he begins
to envy the young their innocence . What has died , in this case , is not
literature, but the capacity for naive response, that state of openness and
wonder which is necessary to literature
as an expen·ence.
The " monuments"
become monuments merely , and the realm they occupy begins to look like a
graveyard or, at best, a museum .
Not a happy situation . But let us not revive the old excuse and say we
murdered to dissect ; not dismiss the problem by calling criticism the villain .
Let us rather examine a strange bit of literary experience, a fact more common
than the silence surrounding it suggests : that at least for some of us, a day
comes when we admit to more pleasure, and often more fine satisfaction,
from reading criticism than from reading original texts. Literature, that is,
begins to engage us less than the realm ofcritical discourse . Ofcourse there are
exceptions : new publications , new discoveries , texts in areas of intense
concern . But for literature in general the case is otherwise , especially for those
big works which make The Tradition. These we discuss in class, write about in
journals, build books around in order to keep jobs and maintain prestige . But
we do not , I think, come to them freely, in need , or with that earnest joy of
youth . Among those who care for literature , many will read the next book
about Greek drama or Milton's art , but very few will ever go back to
