THE STATE OF CRITICISM
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literature has been the student reader, who has not much interes t and
less need for a type of criticism that has been abstracted from literature
and has little relation to his own experience. As we all know, as soon as
he or she graduates, this student reader returns to his amateur status, a
graduated non-reader.
In the 1950s, I did a stint at the University of Minnesota that
revealed to me the usefulness of the New Criticism as a didactic tool. I
soon discovered that it was difficult
to
teach modern writing to
students who had no experience, no values, no judgment to bring to
the reading of figures like Kafka, Mann, Beckett. They were bright but
unsophisticated, and it dawned on me that the New Criticism provided
a marve lous means of teaching books
to
students who could not
comprehend texts but could be gotten to interpret them. Later, I
realized that this device is even more useful as a method of training
future teachers-that is. as vocational training.
Perhaps I should make explicit what has been implicit in the
picture I have drawn of modern criticism, namely , my belief that its
main task is normative, though it does take on descriptive and
analytic functions. In my opinion, criticism must promote values and
make judgments. Usually the best criticism does so by allying itself
with contemporary modes of thinking and writing and taking posi–
tions on issues involving the direction of literature and its relation to
other forces in the culture. In such a role, criticism cannot be
separated from judgment, and judgment becomes natural and organic
to
criticism. Just as every new work of literature is a criticism of
earlier works, so every work of criticism should have some bearing on
the direction of fiction and poetry. In short, what I am suggesting is
that the main function of criticism is not philosophical or exegetical.
As Baudelaire put it: " ...
to
justify its existence, criticism should be
partial, passionate, political, that is to say, written from an exclusive
point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons."
(It will be recalled that Eliot characterized intense exegesis as "the
lemon squeezer school of criticism.") My view is, of course, based on a
different conception of the nature of literature from that assumed by
many textual critics, who appear to assume it is made up of texts
to
be
studied or reconstructed.
If
I may paraphrase a famous formulation, it
seems to me that critics should be more concerned with changing
literature than with interpreting it-that is, with literary values rather
than with hermeneutics.
In questioning interpretation, or textual criticism, I am obvi–
ously going against the grain of contemporary criticism-and against
