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mediated and thus delivered anew . The split between subject and object
would be closed by mental labor, and here Hegel was truly prophetic. For
what he acknowledged is what literary criticism , or indeed all critical
discourse , covertly admits :
the need to reestablish response in depth through
conceptual mediation .
Naive reception is beyond us . Myth is only myth; fictions are fictions ;
and their generative power, which depended on taking them for real , on
accepting their surface as their truth , has drained away . How hard, for
example, Yeats worked to keep the aura of those "sacred books" he loved in
his youth . How stridently he insisted , against his ingrained skepticism , upon
the force ofsymbols, upon the mysterious heart ofmere stories. He arrived at a
sort of truce , neither side claiming victory , and so with ourselves : we too strive
to
read the depth ofsurfaces and stay in the presence ofmeaning. This striving
is the activity we call criticism. Of course criticism concerns itself with history ,
biography , social milieu ; with analysis of style and linguistic structure ; with
judgment and interpretation and methods of scholarship. But beyond these,
or precisely in the doing of these many things , criticism achieves its deeper
aim.
It
becomes the medium through which we reenter the great works of art.
It
is how we hold beauty before us , how
we
share in its life, how
we
live again
in its presence .
And often criticism is
the
prior, or concomitant, act of perception which
allows the margin of genuine enjoyment we feel while reading . Take, for
example , Pater's remark in his essay on style: "one of the greatest pleasures of
really good prose literature is in
the
critical tracing out of that conscious artistic
structure , and the pervading sense of it as we read . Yet of poetic literature too;
for, in truth, the kind of constructive intelligence here supposed is one of
the
forms of imagination .. , For many of us, in other words, the exercise of critical
perception has
become
a habit ofmind as we read , and may even be the device
through which we are
able
to read . When T . S. Eliot remarked that" criticism
is as inevitable as breathing ,"
he
was suggesting that reading and criticism
have become aspects of a unified act, the mutual conditions of each other.
Northrop
Frye
makes a similar point : "it is not possible for any reader today
to
respond to a work of literature with complete or genuine
naivete.
Response
is what Schiller calls sentimental [self-conscious] by its very nature, and is
hence to
some
degree involved in criticism ... Surely this was not the case for
Shakespeare 's audience , let us say, or for the readers of Richardson . But if
criticism has become " inevitable,"
we
hardly do justice to the problem if we
say , as many do , that the critical faculty has crushed all purer response . On
the
contrary , the mediating act ofcriticism allows , as if by stealth , entrance to the
power of the work itself.
I am assuming , then , that
the
amazing proliferation of critical activity
