Vol. 47 No. 3 1980 - page 376

376
PARTISAN REVIEW
challeng ing, for their method did no t provide the mean s for judging
how good or bad a poem was, unless their description o f the na ture of
poe try could be taken as a source of judgment. Such an approach was
not onl y arbitrary a nd tautological, but a lso ques tion begging, as
some of the New Critics ac tua ll y believed tha t the bes t poems were
those containing a maximum of paradox, irony, and ambiguity.
(Brooks and Empson were quite explicit in making this connection.)
Several questions can be ra ised a bo u t a method tha t does not
contain within itse lf the mecha ni sm fo r making litera ry judgments.
Leavis once said tha t if judgment is not built into criticism and
teaching, one is teaching other peop le's judgments and experience,
no t one's own . Leavis meant tha t the language and tone of criticism
must be geared to the quality o f the text it is examining, a nd must
refl ect the values o f the cr itic. Otherw ise he is engaged in an
ana lytical exercise tha t can be applied equa ll y well to inferior works,
and the skillful cr itic can weave his pa ttern of interp reta tion and
ana lys is into any of them. Moreover, a purely ana lytica l o r di ssecting
criticism, Iike an autop sy, must ass ume tha t no one tex t, any more
tha n anyone body, is better tha n another.
In
the end , such surgica l
ana lys is leads to ega lita riani sm, tha t is to say, to the no ti on tha t all
works, especially new ones, are equa ll y interes ting - which, inciden–
ta lly, is a no tion tha t preva ils in many qua rters today where critica l
standa rds are no t in fas hion .
But there is a lso a methodo logica l difficulty in a form of criticism
tha t is no t an ex tension o f one's critical judgment. For formal theories
and textua l explica tions are ac tua ll y reductive- reducing the experi–
ence o f a literary work to its forma l components and structure, and to
its formal meanings.
T hi s type of reduc tion has some affinity, tho ugh it is at the
opposite po le, with tha t of mos t Ma rxist criticism, which , as we
know, reduces textual integrity and di stinc ti veness, and the id iosyn–
cra tic character o f a work, to its socia l orig ins and meanings.
It
is not
tha t all Marx ists, a t leas t the be ller ones, have igno red the qua li ty of a
work . But they have subordina ted its qua lity to its p lace in the
historic scheme- or equa ted the two. Georg Lukacs, for example,
wh o was one of the mos t inte lli gent and leas t fo rmula ridden of the
orthodox Marxists, saw the modern novel as an express ion of a dy ing
class. T hus he spoke o f T homas Mann as the las t grea t representa tive
of the bourgeois ie, the g rea t recorder of its tr iump hs and decays, who
was limited by his ina bility to move ahead into a socia list view of
ma n and soc iety. Even Walter Benj amin , the outstanding fi gure
among the unorthodox Marxist critics, was a t hi s bes t when he was
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