THE STA fE OF CRITICISM
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have been placed by modern literature itself in a position of interro–
gating society, interrogating morals, interrogating religions, interro–
gating myths.
It
is in that sense that I think we can bring together
some of the considerations we have been talking about all day .
PETER BROOKS: William Phillips wanted me to talk because I find I'm
in total agreement with him. I find what he says very right and very
moving. I was interested by what Roger Shattuck said, but I was
troubled by it. I think if we set ourselves up in the position of
teaching character and morality, not only are we on spurious
grounds, we are also playing into the hands of what the worst of our
students want from us. They're all interested in questions of charac–
ter and morality and want us to claim that literature is simply
confirming their views on the subject. I find a great deal of education
in the classroom becomes a matter of resistance to this, resistance to
what students get out of texts at first reading, and an attempt to
formalize it.
One of the more extreme cases came to me last year. When I was
teaching in a summer program I had a student who, to be sure, came
from the communications school, who wrote a paper in which he
said Julian Sorel was not a hero but a villain and therefore is to be
rejected, and along with him the whole of
The Red and the Black.
I
think the discipline of the classroom is a discipline of formalization
which takes us through the linguistic process and precisely through
all that we can learn and exchange in a disciplined way about
language. I think part of the answer to Lionel Trilling's famous
question, too, is that the damned questions of Ivan Karamazov have
immediate ethical reference. Nonetheless they are couched in lan–
guage and they come within a fictional universe. It's in this process
of mediation that we must learn to deal with them. And I am more
and more convinced in a very literal sense that all I can teach in a
classroom is reading. And I sense a very great continuity between my
task and the task that starts in first grade.
It
simply is operating with
overcoating rather than with the basic coat.
EUGENE GOODHEART: I would like to pursue the line that Peter Brooks
is taking. I find that he has oddly abdicated his role as a teacher in
response to the statement of a student that Julian Sorel is a villain.
How do you respond to that statement simply by addressing the
novel in a formalistic way? It seems to me the student is challenging
you to make the opposite statement or another kind of statement,
that he's a hero or that he's a certain kind of hero in which villainy is
somehow an inappropriate or inadequate way of seeing him. So
