174
PARTISAN REVIEW
inaccessible to me, as certain sounds are said to be beyond our hearing?
And if we do form a fit, either in harmony or friction , can I then
proceed to offer a description of his work that will serve the modest
purpose, as Randall Jarrell once put it, of "simply helping us with
works of art?"
Nothing could be more treacherous than this word "describe." To
describe a poem or novel is to place it in some line of tradition to which
it submits yet from which it also deviates; and in order to manage that I
must have-so T.S. Eliot tells me-"the historical sense .. . a feeling
that the whole of literature of Europe from Homer and within it the
whole of the literature of [my] own country has a simultaneous
existence...." This is intimidating enough, but there is more. To
describe a work is also to be alert to whatever margin of individuality,
whatever sliver of freshness in voice or vision, it may have. And to
describe that work is also to propose some approximation of value-by
myself, who supposedly has the whole of European literature from
Homer in my head-an approximation of value that is to be made
through placing it in relation to other works. Notoriously imprecise as
the language of criticism is, its language of valuation is simply
scandalous. Yet we have no choice. The very act of summoning
attention to this poem or that novel implies an assumption of value,
for as William Wimsatt writes, "explication in the neutral sense [can
be] so integrated with special and local value intimations that it rises
from neutrality gradually and convincingly to the point of local
judgment." And what can we do with local judgment but extend it?
All this is becoming rather discouraging, but I push on.
How in fact" does one become a literary critic? No one issues a
license, no one gives a test. You become a literary critic by declaring
yourself a literary critic, an act of high presumption that you must then
try to validate. You can also declare that you have a theory of
criticism-formalist, Marxist, structuralist, whatever-but no one will
really suppose this enough to make your criticism worth reading.
Whether the theory even enables you to become a good critic is a
question.
Writing criticism and theorizing about either literature or criti–
cism are both legitimate, sometimes valuable activities; but I want to
maintain that they are different activities, with concerns and talents
that do not often overlap. T.S. Eliot believed that the good critic
possesses not a set of theoretical premises by which to set things
straight but a mature and unified sensibility ripened through long
meditation on the literary tradition and perhaps on the human
