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PARTISAN REVIEW
never seems
to
come to the surface, and that is the problem of mass
education. Many of the problems arise because we are asked
to
teach
things that we are not equipped to teach in a system of mass
education, in large undergraduate courses, to students who come in
not to learn literature as professionals understand it, but who come
in for other reasons. And we are breaking our necks trying to adapt
our professional knowledge and our professional experience to the
different needs of a classroom. In a sense, the classroom creates
different needs because of the condition of mass education. I'm really
trying to open up a number of questions rather than quarrel with
anyone specific formulation.
DENIS DONOGHUE: I would just suggest one qualification of what
William Phillips has just said. I don't think that it is a question of
our being trained as moralists, because one of the fundamental facts,
especially about modern literature, is that for at least one hundred
years there has been a relation between literature and society. But
that relation has been interrogative, critical, and perhaps indeed on
the whole, subversive. Now critics tend temperamentally to be on the
side of the high literature, perhaps most especially when its relation
to society has been subversive. We could pick up on what Trilling
said in his famous essay, but we could also supply less tendentious
texts, such as a statement by Richard Blackmur that says the function
of literature is to remind the powers that be, simple and corrupt as
they are, of the forces they have to control. That seems
to
me a very
intelligent, helpful statement. Put it beside an equally intelligent
and helpful statement by Kenneth Burke who said, "The law of the
imagination is: when in Rome do as the Greeks." Both of these
provide us with a kind of program for teaching.
It
is a program
which forces us into the position of being on the side of the high,
subtle, sinuous values which Morris Dickstein invoked in relation to
high literature, as against the sloppy, vulgar, obtuse values such as
they are, which our corrupt society knows and endorses.
This raises a very particular problem in relation to teachers.
That is, we may not have been specifically trained as critics of society
any more than we have been trained as moralists or philosophers.
But it is not open to us really
to
choose if we are concerned with high
literature at all.
It
is not a matter of free choice, whether we engage in
the interrogation which arises from literature, literature itself being
interrogative in its chief character. Now it is in that sense-I am not
suggesting for a moment that we should then be trained to negotiate
the position of being social critics-that I am suggesting that we
