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PARTISAN REVIEW
over: the time for handbooks and codification had arrived. And as an
academic procedure, churning out new "readings," the New Criticism
could be as spiritually deadening as the old scholarship.
For all its formal sophistication, for all its attention to the stresses
and internal contradictions of the literary work, the New Criticism, by
objectifying and hypostatizing the text, never really broke with the
positivism of the philologists and the source-and-analogue hunters.
For the scholars the text was the sum of its traceable influences. Rene
Wellek recalled taking a seminar on Goethe's
Faust
which began so far
back it never reached Goethe. "All we ever established about
Faust,"
he
said, "was that it existed." For the New Critics, those inheritors and
exegetes of modernism, the text's existence was of more complex
concern than its ancestry. The New Critics heard the battle cry of
modernism,
Make
It
New,
and behaved as if this rupture had actually
been achieved, or desired, by every significant work, past and present.
Just as they tried to sever the practice of criticism from theory and
ideas, they failed to see that in a way the scholars were right: the text
was a living tissue of its manifold contexts. Everything that went into
it-the mind that composed it, the language that articulated it, the
literature that preceded it, the social moment that conditioned it, the
generations that had put their mark on it, the minds that received it–
was flickering, prismatic, and unstable. For all their lip service to a
Coleridgean idea of organic form, the practice of the New Critics
usually betrayed a surprisingly mechanical notion of form. Paradox
and ambiguity were there
in the object,
and they served moreover not as
elements of internal drama, diversity, and self-contradiction but as
elements of a higher unity, a conservative principle of order.
What finally signed the death warrant for the New Criticism was
not its conceptual weaknesses but its practical triumphs. Like all
successful movements, the New Criticism died when it was universally
assimilated. Its techniques of close reading, its vision of formal
coherence, its attention to patterns of metaphor and narrative personae,
were integrated into the useful equipment of every teacher and critic of
literature, and even affected the readers who had gone to school with
them, some of whom became editors, journalists, book reviewers, and
even authors. Few have ever suggested returning to the days of genteel
impressionism or dry factual scholarship. But by the late fifties and
sixties, many began to feel bored and constrained by the anatomical
approach of New Critical reading. They were eager to see the literary
work reconnected to the wider world of history and theory, politics and
psychology, from which the New Critics had amputated it. They
