10
PARTISAN REVIEW
ago, while I was looking for a thesis topic, a gust of inspiration picked
me up and whispered in my ear "Conrad. " I went to t.he Cambridge
University library to case the terrain, but soon gave way to an almost
physical nausea at the sheer quantity of what had
alre~dy
been done,
enough to weigh down and bury all inspiration forever.
·Problems of-quantity are quickly translated into problems of
quality. Our understanding of both James and Conrad has benefited
greatly from what Roger Gard describes as " the absolutely unprece–
dented increase in this century of 'professional' students of literature. "
But as the amateur Gentleman of Letters, who remains anonymous to
protect his social status, has given way to the academic busywork of
practical criticism, our increase of knowledge threatens us with a
bureaucratization of the imaginative, while artists, out of an instinct
for self-preservation, stop paying attention. It's easy to see why this
quantitative explosion of criticism doesn't contribute to the march of
mind. Scholastic work generally remains within the parameters already
established in the "field"; the existing literature, with its prevailing
categories and methodologies, the whole discipline, with its hierarchi–
cal channels of certification and advancement, are so much dead
weight on the shoulders of the living. New views are encouraged to
differ, but only minutely, from the academic consensus; when such
views gain acceptance, they too become part of the conservatizing
inertia of that body of received opinion.
In the secondary world of literary criticism, where everything is
commentary, new views are not even required, only new "readings,"
only texts that can be "read" and re- "read " without going too
obviously dead on you. Was it for this that my mother and father saved
their pennies to send me to college? The specter that has been haunting
practical criticism for decades is the plague of numbers, the prolifera–
tion of mediocrity. Of what earthly use, outside the classroom, the
certification rituals of the academy, is yet another reading of a poem or
play that has been continually understood and intuitively enjoyed for
at least three centuries, or even three decades? The New Criticism
provided excellent tools for pedagogy, but it also bound criticism over
to the pedagogic spirit, while severing it from the free play of mind that
gives intellectual life its excitement and its value. This is what drew
many of us to literature and criticism in college. The study of literature
demanded a sheer love of language and storytelling for their own sake,
yes, but the great writers also had something to say; the cognitive
mysteries and affective intensities of the work of art lay before the
young would-be critic like a land of dreams.
