THE STATE OF CRITICISM
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so and it is with some shock that I think I realized and suggested that
my students might also realize that, for instance, Aristotle took for
granted that a work of literature, a tragedy, was founded on com–
monplaces which everybody understood. As for instance, to put it in
simple terms, that if a man by accident should, without knowing
what he had done, happen to kill his father and marry his mother,
and if it should then turn out that he discovers what he had done, he
would be unhappy. That's a kind of banal commonplace, but
Aristotle took it for granted that if you didn ' t know it, you weren 't
going to be able to understand the work of literature. I don't know
why we should not in the classroom also, even in teaching modern
literature, interrogate the assumption that the stance of modern
literature is necessarily hostile to society. Why should it be? Should it
be?
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: I'd like to make clear in advance that I thought the
papers delivered to the session were quite brilliant in their organiza–
tion and their force . I think what we're differing about might be
easily resolved. Obviously Denis Donoghue, for example, is right.
He's agreeing with Lionel Trilling, who says the force of modern
literature is corrosive and subversive and often perverse. Incidentally,
I'm not being a devil 's advocate because I'm one of the people
criticized in that essay by Lionel Trilling for the position I took in
defense of modern literature. I think the issue is this: you cannot
teach modern literature or nineteenth-century literature without
teaching all the various forces that went in to the making of any
given work-the political and moral forces that went into, let's say,
The Red and the Black,
into Dostoevsky's famous Grand Inquisitor.
You can't avoid that. The question is not whether you go into it or
not, but whether you take a position on it. That is what we seem to
be arguing about and I think that's what Peter Brooks meant. That's
where I think I would agree with him that, for example, when
Dostoevsky raises the question of whether it's worth taking the life of
a single child to improve the future society, we are not called upon as
teachers to tell the students it is or it isn 't worthwhile to take the life
of a child. That's not what we're there for. What we're there for is to
exp lain why Dostoevsky, one, raised this question , and two, how
that question was incorporated into the texture of his work.
NORMAN BIRNBAUM: Would you go a bit further and argue that
teachers are also there to point out that this is probably an unavoid–
able question given the nature of reality and that they had better
learn to think about it in one or another way.
