THE STATE OF CRITICISM
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interests" such as truth, basic political rights, and the health of
institutions. He should temper his commitments with a William
Jamesian pluralism that will mediate between totality and fragmenta–
tion, between the authoritarian and the skeptical. And he should
develop a sense of the creative merging of cultures as an essential
element in our own American culture.
I am pleased to find that Donald Marshall expresses strong
convictions in temperate, common-sense language and that he remains
unconverted to recent critical methods insofar as they aspire to modify
the teaching of literature.
In
my opinion he could have pushed his first
four desiderata even harder and given himself space, for example, to
discriminate among different kinds of memory as Bergson and Proust
did, and to explain the specific benefits of writing stories as an
approach to reading fiction.
The principal weakness of the paper belongs to the occasion. This
is a conference on criticism, and Donald Marshall understandably felt
obliged to talk about it. But the firmly argued first half of his paper on
two critical approaches remains detachable from the second half
devoted to the announcement of his own convictions about teaching.
Reader-response theory and decomposition (to which he shou ld proba–
bly have added speech-act theory) p lay the role of straw men and then
disappear. They do not even return, as one wou ld expect, as an element
in the discouraging portrait of the profession near the end. By referring
back to them Donald Marshall cou ld have brought out that the
problems we face are intellectual as much as they are economic. For the
more we dismiss story, character, and unity from literature, the more
we will lose our constituency. The last sentence of this section, "What
would be lost in that scheme is history," dangles in front of us an
argument that is never fleshed out.
Because he g lances off them at several points, I feel justified in
bringing up two omissions in Donald Marshall's discussion of teach–
ing literature. Reader-response theory, he argues, subordinates litera–
ture to the wayward demands of our own enclosed self. Decomposition
takes literature as a demonstration of the hypnotic illusion or vacancy
of self. By examining these two variants of narcissism Donald Marshall
has opened the way toward the opposite view of reading. Yet he never
brings himself
to
affirm that the fundamental power and appeal of
literature consists, not in its confinement to one self-absorbf'd ego, but
in its power to convey a sense of
otherness,
to let us enter another
person's thought, to allow us to get out of our own skin . Thus, even
more powerfully than memory, literature can serve as an extension of
