Quentin Anderson
NOTES ON THE RESPONSIBILITY
OF THE CRITIC
Much contemporary literary criticism denies any effectual
connection between writers and what they .write. Twenty years ago,
when voices as diverse as those of Empson and Leavis or Trilling and
Wilson had an audience more or less in common, literary criticism
could be thought of as characterized by the authority of individuals;
their readers could make choices or express differences, and literary
criticism in English was only marginally affected by theories which
offered general assertions about the properties of language.
At present, critical rhetoric characteristically creates contexts in
which the critic is not heard from as a judge of anything in particular;
instead he makes an assertion so inclusive that one has to resee the
world under his lordship. Deserts of detached textuality, scoured of
effectual reference to us and our world, become private playgrounds for
those who simply assert that we cannot
explain
how language really
works to sustain meanings, express feelings, and tie us
to
breathing
others. There are many other highly important questions in human
affairs which are quite as inexplicable; why is this one such an exciting
and engrossing discovery just now? Whether we are left, as Derrida,
with an infinite regress in our attempts to ground meaning, or, as in
the inquiry into civilization of Michel Foucault, with the conclusion
that our whole perspective on the world is the work of a Nobodaddy
who seeks to dominate us hardly matters. What does matter is that both
literature and history are being considered as subject to conditions that
necessitate apocalyptic resolutions. Brilliant as the two I have men–
tioned are, their taste for apocalypse indicates a strong impulse to
transcend the human scale, significant because it seems appealing to
many able people. What are the personal powers assumed by those who
make these massive appropriations of the world, so extensive as to
demand a total change, powers assumed by a Derrida, a
J.
Hillis Miller,
or a Harold Bloom?
Bloom's is a suggestive case because, although he too transports us
