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PARTISAN REVIEW
word "text," a text is another way of getting us away from
literature-that is, one evaluated a book, deciding whether it was
good or bad. One decided whether it was good or bad to some extent
by exercising one's personal taste and judgment, to some ex tent
comparatively, by relating it to other works in the history of our
civilization, not other civilizations, also relating it to other elements
and forces in the culture.
Now, in my opinion-this you may quarrel with-the primary
paradigm, if you want to call it that, of criticism, is actually one
performed by people who are creating works in the same genre. And
that is, that when a novelist reads a novel or a painter looks at a
painting, what he is doing is thinking of that work in terms of its
accomplishment, both in terms of the history of the medium and in
terms of the history of other elements and forces within our culture.
That is its meaning for him.
To shift for a moment; I think we're double talking, and the
double talk is a kind of idiomatic term for tautology. That is, we
keep talking about language. We're going to examine the language.
What do we do when we examine the language? What critical ideas,
concepts, judgments, relations to the culture as a whole do we arrive
at when we are examining the language? Suppose we take a common
work. Everybody here has read
Portnoy's Complaint.
What happens
when you examine the language? You'll discover that it's a mixture
of classical American, literary English, Jewish vernacular, and
certain elements of jargon picked up, that is the jargonization of the
language in the last few decades. It's of interest, but I don 't see where
else you go from there. I think we're constantly begging the question
when we say it is useful to examine it; it is necessary to see language
as part of literature. Well, that's a tautology. Of course language is
literature, and literature is language, but we never answered the
question, "What is criticism?" As I tried to suggest this morning, the
old ideas of criticism are defunct; they're obsolete. We have to have
new ideas of criticism. One can argue that, and I would be prepared
to argue that, and I think some of you might guess the position that I
might take in that argument. But, on the other hand, we're blowing
up the argument by saying that there are different types of criticism,
that there are different types of thinking, different types of approach–
ing things, and let's examine this and let's examine that.
PETER BROOKS: Can I just make one remark, not attempting to answer
all that William Phillips said? I agree that I'm opposed to the
blurring of distinctions and lines, and I hoped that what I was doing,
