THE STATE OF CRITICISM
423
PETER BROOKS: Well, I would say it's not interpretive criticism; it's
poetics.
CLEMENT GREENBERG: Oh, no, poetics is not criticism; poetics is
descrip tion.
PETER BROOKS: Poetics is a branch of literary criticism, without which
literary criticism can't very well do....
CLEMENT GREENBERG: What is necessary is not sufficient. This may be
necessary, but it's not sufficient. Aristotle's poetics are a criticism, by
the way. But his poetics are mostly descriptive, and description, as
such, especially the description of structures, is not criticism. Now
I'm not quibbling about a word. I'm quibbling about an activity.
If
it is a quibble.
PETER BROOKS: You're defining an activity in what I would see as one
of its branches, a very fruitful branch, but one which perhaps
threatened to take over the whole of criticism. We were inundated,
we still are in the universities, with interpretive criticisms, readings
of texts. The one thing we need is some way to order that, and to
understand on what basis it is going forward.
CLEMENT GREENBERG: Well and true, but it's still not criticism. I insist
on that. It becomes linguistics; it becomes rhetoric; it becomes
quintillian; that's what it becomes. But it's not criticism. And I am
mystified when I read the structuralists as to where the foundation
blocks are really being placed. Where can you set foot? I haven't been
enlightened.
PETER BROOKS:
If
you conceive of criticism without those foundation
activities, it seems that criticism quickly renders itself invalid.
CLEMENT GREENBERG: Let's say Dr. johnson's criticism.
PETER BROOKS: He was precisely interested in questions of poetics and
rhetoric.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS: To pick up Peter Brooks's phrase about the
maximizing of confusion, I think there might be some questions as
to what the sources of confusion are. And obviously we have some
differences of opinion as
to
where the sources of confusion are.
There's a central question here, which is being evaded. The central
question is the relation of what is referred to as structuralism–
regardless of how we define it-to what used to be considered
criticism. I don't think that we gain anything by becoming plural–
ists, by becoming permissive, in effect by saying anything that
anybody does is criticism. There has been a traditional idea of
criticism which happens to include Dr. Johnson too as one of the
first and early practitioners.
It
was an activity that had the following
characteristics: one evaluated a book-I'm going to try to avoid the
