STEVEN MARCUS
83
tasks of criticism is
to
be normative,
to
make judgments as well as offer
analyses and descriptions (and I would go on to say th°at even if it tries
not to make explicit judgments, every analysis contains within itself
covert judgments and evaluations). This is, I take it, the central
insistence of Phillips's paper, and I agree with it. Yet Phillips goes
even further, for he proceeds to include literature itself within this
view. He assumes that literary works are not primarily texts to
be
studied or reconstructed, but are instead statements about human
existence. I did not think that I would see the day when Matthew
Arnold was so resurrected, and in such a context. For how far do we
have to move from William Phillips's assertion to the statement that
"at bottom literature is a criticism of life." Not very far, I think. And I
am not impressed by the vagrant thought that this similarity makes a
venerable contemporary appear to be an old fogy, or that Matthew
Arnold might on this reading seem like a young fogy. The question of
the normative is as difficult to separate from the idea of literary
criticism as is the question of the historical.
As a final illustration of the central role of the normative in
literary discussion, let me mount a brief comparison. One goal of the
Romantic poets and writers, it was often remarked, both by some of
them themselves and by others, was
to
restore a sense of wonder
to
the
world in which they lived. They meant by this that their writings were
to
reawaken in their readers a freshness of response that the writing of
the previous generation of poets had taken for granted and overlooked;
but they meant as well that these writings would also work through
their readers upon their consciousness in life outside of literature and
would have, they hoped, effects upon the conduct of life. I should like
to compare this truncatedly stated goal with the permutated appear–
ance that was one of the goals of the Russian formalists. For the
formalists art was never a familiar matter; its function was to estrange
us from familiarity, to "defamiliarize" the actual or the real. At the
same time, according to them, it was imprecise to speak about "the real
world," for they asked what indeed is reality? What new art defamiliar–
izes is prevailing aesthetic convention, a once vital but currently
moribund form of art.
It
says nothing about anything outside of that.
In
the formalists' statement the sense of wonder is returning, yet
the idiom that it returns in is the language of alienation-indeed it
appears to reinstate and reinforce that alienation even as it directs
attention to it. The difference between the two formulations is to be
found in part in the notion that according to the Romantics' view of
things it was possible to envisage a world in which alienation was
