382
PARTISAN REVIEW
Brooks's essay on narrative. Brooks is not a structuralist, but he has
taken too much, I think, from the structuralists, and his essay strikes
me as an elaborate metaphor built on the parallels between the
structures of narrative and Freud's conception of the life-cycle. But the
thesis is well argued, and the writing, except when too heavily
structuralist, is that of a writer, not someone dispensing concepts,
categories, and newly invented technical terms as though obscuring
were part of the process of clarifying.
Much structuralist writing-like that of a good deal of textual
analysis-has the quality of an intellectual game, pursued so ardently
and skillfully that the object is often lost sight of. And some struc–
turalis t wri tings, particu lar! y those of Lacan and Derrida, appear to me
to be very agile exercises in free association, which is the latest
intellectual game. The actual text-or subject-is left far behind as one
sentence often does not follow the preceding one and the whole thing
becomes incomprehensible. But while free association might be the
clue to the unconscious, it is not to be recommended for the use of the
conscious mind in philosophical or critical writing. After all, one is
only a reader of Derrida or Lacan, not their analyst.
I referred earlier to the effect on criticism of the institutionaliza–
tion of literature and literary studies. Harry Levin once suggested in a
famous piece, that literature has become an institution. And in a recent
essay, Frank Kermode discussed, not entirely disapprovingly, the
process by which critical opinion becomes solidified and transmitted to
young students and teachers in the universities. This process is the
institutionalization of criticism. Kermode's point, which seems to me
well taken , was that a consensus of critical thinking emerged from this
activity. But there is a negative side, too. Literary studies, conducted
mainly in the universities, have reinforced the notion that literary
works were created in order to be analyzed in the classroom. And,
indeed, their origin and
raison d'etre
was to be found in the necessity of
teaching literature not only to graduate sLUdents, but to vast numbers
of undergraduates, many of whom are neither serious students nor
readers of literature.
In
order not to teach simply an appreciation of
good books, which in the past put teachers in an evangelical role and
reinforced popular misconceptions about literature, and in order
to
(
solidify the profession, it was necessary to devise a complex system of
critical theory, complete with methods of reading and interpretation,
codification of genres, styles, subjects, and the other paraphernalia of
teaching and understanding that all of us here have had to learn. The
target and presumed beneficiary of this professionalized study of
