278
PARTISAN REVIEW
amounts to a cultural phenomenon in its own right; that it is a mode of
mental behavior rooted in our time and plight;
o~
that, as Roland Barthes
describes it, "criticism is not at all a table of results or a body of judgments, it is
essentially an activity, i.e . , a series of intellectual acts profoundly committed
to the historical and subjective existence (thej are the same thing) of the man
who performs them." Barthes goes on to define criticism as "a second
language, or a
meta-language
(as the logicians would say), which operates on a
fust language (or
language-object) .
...
It is the 'friction' of these two
languages which defines criticism." Criticism, in other words, is the act of
penetrating a text by refracting it through another text, the former concrete
and inaccessibly vibrant, the latter conceptual and as readily applied to the
density of its object as, say, mathematics is to the otherness of multi–
dimensional space.
Barthes stops short with a formal definition. The relation of criticism to
spiritual need is left to others, to Paul Ricoeur for example, a French
theologian who goes to the heart of the matter by defining criticism as a means
of provisional grace. "We are in every way the children of criticism," says
Ricoeur in
The Symbolism o/Evtf,
"and we seek to go beyond criticism by
means ofcriticism, by a criticism that is no longer reductive but restorative."
Having lost "the immediacy of the symbol," we resort to criticism as "the
modern mode of belief in symbols." By means of this strategy we participate
once more in the depth and sensation of meaning . As Ricoeur puts it : "I can
still today communicate with the sacred by making explicit the prior
understanding that gives life to the interpretation . Thus hermeneutics, an
acquisition of 'modernity,' is one of the modes by which that 'modernity'
transcends itself, insofar as it is forgetfulness of the sacred. I believe that being
can still speak to me-no longer, of course, under the pre-critical form of
immediate belief, but as the secondary immediacy aimed at by her–
meneutics ." What is hoped for, and already partly achieved, is the birth of a
"second naivete," a new fullness of response made possible through
criticism. Ricoeur concludes : "In every way, something has been lost,
irremediably lost: immediacy and belief, But ifwe can no longer live the great
symbolisms of the sacred in accordance with the original belief in them, we
can, we modern men, aim at a second naivety in and through criticism. In
short, it is by
interpreting
that we can
hear
again . "
There is, of course, an altogether mundane reason for the compulsiveness
of modern criticism : we do it as a trade, as a job like any other.
It
is also the
form of warfare which self-interest takes among factions contending for
dominance in academic and literary worlds . These are decisive factors, and in
the context of economic necessity the older justification-the pursuit of
excellence-looks silly indeed, especially when (as Edmund Wilson liked
to
