438
PARTISAN REVIEW
knowledge of me contributes to your being whole, or well-rounded,
men ,'"
I am not arguing that all literature compels us to the Abyss, but
only that we cannot speak of
teaching
literature without a concrete
notion of the particular intellectual, moral, emotional-and
political-urgencies embodied in our specific texts. To speak of "text"
only as a verbal construct, not as a moral enterprise and a political
event, is hardly the way to surpass any of the theories that deny a
discussable meaning. And while Trilling is before us, I cite him again
to underscore another view I share: that "literary situations" are
"cultural situations." And that we cannot grasp the text in ignorance
of its situation in the world, except at the risk of trivializing it into a
verbal game. And if teaching consists of resituating the text from world
to classroom, then classroom becomes
a
new or additional grounding
of the work, a new place for the apprehension of meaning, a new social
and cultural situation for the literary event. Here seems to me to lie the
peculiarity-and the extraordinary richness-of the subject: to talk
about literature is inevitably to talk about what literature itself talks
about. To engage it as an event in culture, in society, in history, is to
engage all that is implied by it, all that is compacted within it-not
only the breadth and depth of its allusions, but its special pressures
upon private existence. These are not natural facts we have to deal
with, but cultural facts: not crystals for analysis but formed interpreta–
tions of being which lend themselves to, which demand, further
interpretation-not only of themselves but of our own beings through
them.
Talking about literature in the classroom should, then, enhance
classroom into a model of world: should transform its abstract freedom
into a concrete autonomy of speculation and criticism. But the testi–
mony of teachers tells that this enhancement rarely occurs, that
classroom in its own social particularity remains resistant, intransi–
gent. Why this should be so is hardly baffling. Donald Marshall refers
to typical displays of "deficiency in thinking" that reflect "previous
education and mental lives." As he suggests, the classroom represents
not simply an engagement between lesser and greater knowledge, but
between cultural outlooks in many cases hardly cognizant of each other
except as antagonists. As a form classroom always implies difference
between instructor and class, a difference that initiates discourse. But
the difference that stands as barrier-either of misunderstanding, or (in
the instance Trilling represents) too facile understanding-more com-