THE STATE OF CRITICISM
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be reduced to ego food or to self-defeating puzzles, and his down to
earth recommendations about memory and commitment are welcome.
I feel, however, that he leaves much to be said about the way much of
recent criticism, by its scienticism or its penchant for pure theory, has
fallen away from the responsibility to help us deal with questions of
character and morality as they importune us in literary works.
NORMAN BIRNBAUM: We have a certain amount of time for discussion.
Donald Marshall will respond later, when he can also respond to
remarks from participants.
MORRIS DICKSTEIN : I'd like to speak to the point raised by Roger
Shattuck at the end. By what process of certification does the teacher
of literature set up shop to deal with questions of morals and the
formation of character without periods of prayer and so on? Now it
seems one could extend that to the question: By what process does
the novelist or the poet or the playwright set up shop as the purveyor
of morals, or character, or personality, or history, or anything else
with even less certification than the critic of literature? I pose that
question, and I also give my own answer and wait for your answer.
But this seems to me related to the whole question of authority,
which, of course, has been raised again and again by structuralists
and deconstructionists who attack privileged positions in criticism.
One reply to the question of the authority of the artist and the
authority of the critic, or the authority of the teacher, is that the act
itself has to be self-justified. Insofar as other people can acknowledge
and justify the value in what he has done, to that extent he has
created within himself, he has generated, his own authority. I don 't
see how any external form of certification, such as the doctor's degree
in divinity, really gives one the power or the experience or the proper
certification to deal with questions of faith and morals.
NORMAN BIRNBAUM:
If
I can intervene at this point, there is a striking
resemblance or ana logy with the teaching of the so-called social
sciences, which as you know are actually the deformed or bastard
offspring of moral philosophy. Very few social scientists, in what–
ever field-sociology, history, philosophy, politics, economics,
psychology-would seriously argue in the grand tradition of West–
ern social thought that they were teaching citizens, instructing
citizens to make, as it were, autonomous self-liberating or self–
developing political choices. At most they would argue that they
