STEVEN MARCUS
79
relation between the sense of crisis, loss, general betrayal, and desertion
to
be found in and among the traditional humanistic disciplines and
their adherents, and some of the more aggressive-and delighted–
statements that there is no such thing as determinate knowledge, there
is only the pleasant awareness that one is standing upon nothing. To
respond to the harsh statement made by modern social reality that
humanists have lost their traditional privileges with the statement that
there are no pri vileged discourses, does not, to be sure, shut reality up
let alone change it-but it can yield a measure of satisfaction.
In addition, one wants to take into account that it has been some
time now since the major figures of the literary wing of the modernist
movement have passed from the scene. These major figures have
almost all been assimilated through interpretation and analysis into
the academic sensibility and curriculum. They no longer represent the
challenge to at least immediate understanding that they once did.
There are at present no major creative figures of similar stature about.
Were such figures about, I suggest, they would tend
to
direct, as they
did in the past, the course of study and the terms of inquiry of much,
though not all, of critical activity. That is to say they would themselves
be the principal sources of new means of
expression,
and therefore of
new modes of perceiving and organizing the human world. In the
prolonged absence of such figures (unless one wants to think of Beckett
and Genet as the functional contemporary equivalents of Joyce or D.H.
Lawrence), criticism sooner or later was bound to move in the direc–
tions it has-once more I am proposing a partial determinant and not a
global or even full explanatory suggestion.
William Phillips correctly reminds us that one of the most
important similarities between the New Criticism and the structuralists
is the heavy emphasis that both place on the idea of the text, and the
emphasis that both put on linguistics, although they use the term in
different senses and refer to different things. In this connection one can
sense a split that was latent in the New Criticism coming closer to the
surface in the structuralists. This split is to be found among different
adherents of the various tendencies, although at times one finds it
alternatively within a single writer or a related group of critics. On the
one hand, there are those who maintain, at least in part, that the goal of
criticism is to become systematic and scientific (although the notion of
both system and science vary enormously among different critics as
well). The goal of criticism is hence a formal system of some kind,
wherein warranted statements may be made about literature in the
sense that warranted statements are made in linguistics, Anglo-
