THE STATE OF CRITICISM
437
the outset Moreover, one might wonder even further whether literary
study is in fact the most favorable occasion for the teaching (the
manifesting) of this Enlightenment notion of thinking. What litera–
ture, what specific texts, does Donald Marshall have in mind?
Finne–
gans Wake? The Cantos? Moby Dick? Heart of Darkness?
The inherent
modern difficulty of saying what the real subject of classroom talk
about literature really is becomes doubly difficult when "literature"
remains as abstract as it does in Donald Marshall's paper-a form as
empty of genuine content as the term "classroom." We may all take for
granted (one hopes for exceptions among us) that the term refers to
things we commonly recognize as poems, novels, plays-authored by
figures who through some process that precedes our own reading
have been singled out, named, as worthy of classroom talk. The term
literature translates in practice as texts deemed "great" by our own
teachers, and theirs before them, judgments confirmed by dense appa–
ratus of publishing, distributing, reviewing, and curriculum making.
The judgments may be correct; and Arnoldian vision may indeed
inform the paperback industry which in turn supports the apparent
democratization of the classrooms of higher learning Donald Marshall
alludes to. But still, the specific content of our presumed subject,
"literature," remains a blank in his argument And if by chance the
subject is "modern literature," then surely the valued ends of commit–
ted thinking and so on face a particular resistance. "The disenchant–
ment of our culture with culture itself," "the bitter line of hostility to
civilization" -these challenges to the implied values of the very enter–
prise of humane learning (as it is constituted in the apparent "free
space" of the classroom) Lionel Trilling identified as the very "shap–
ing and controlling ideas of our epoch," "the characteristic element of
modern literature." Certainly no one will charge Trilling with a secret
bent toward "deconstruction." But in his essay first published in
Partisan Review
in 1961, "On the Teaching of Modern Literature,"
what else is he saying but that the full force of meaning in Nietzsche,
Dostoevsky, Proust, Freud, Mann, Eliot itself deconstructs any compla–
cent assurance about certainty, truth, memory-or at least, it
should.
Trilling's great essay takes its occasion from its own pathos: it should,
but the classroom intervenes all-powerfully: "I asked them to look into
the Abyss," Trilling wrote with a note of despair, "and, both dutifully
and gladly, they have looked into the Abyss, and the Abyss has greeted
them with the grave courtesy of all objects of serious study, saying:
'Interesting, am I not? And
exciting,
if you consider how deep I am and
what dread beasts lie at my bottom. Have it well in mind that a
