THE STATE OF CRITICISM
177
Is it really enough to say that the critic, learning what he can from
predecessors through imitation and resistance, goes about his work
with a set of procedures, maybe habits that are more or less implicit and
even improvisatory? The novelist at least has the rationale that he is
doing a work of imagination; but the critic has very little, if any, right
to that rationale. He needs imagination, but he cannot invoke it in his
defense.
To examine whatever it is that critics actually do would be
extremely valuable, certainly interesting; but we know little about this
because few critics know how to tell us. They are about as good at
describing how they work as most people are at giving street directions.
Critics I've talked to, from Lionel Trilling to Austin Warren, become
oddly amused or embarrassed when such questions are asked. In
perhaps Americanized versions of Leavis's loose formulas, they speak
about "feeling their way into a work," "trying to make out a writer's
controlling vision," or at most, "reading carefully for indices of style."
But no critic that I know-perhaps I know the wrong ones-has ever
spoken about applying a method or a theory.
If
there is a method, it
generally uses the critic, rather than vice versa. Best of all, if a critic has
deeply, organically absorbed certain world views-whether of Marx or
Freud, Heidegger or Kierkegaard-they are likely to manifest them–
selves as tacit limits, points of response in his work. But theories and
methods, in general, are things that critics of criticism talk about, and
that is one reason most histories of criticism are bad. They catalogue
"approaches" and chart "schools" rather than looking at the work of
individual critics with something of the particularity critics are sup–
posed to apply to novels and poems.
The critic's job of work constitutes an act of supreme, indeed of
insufferable presumption: he makes the claim that his responses are of
value and interest to others, and he makes it not just on the ground of
knowledge, perhaps that least of all, but on the ground that within his
cultivated sophistication there survives a capacity for fresh wonder–
ment, a full and open responsiveness to works of art.
If
he is wrong in
making this claim, as he usually is, he will suffer quick neglect.
If
he is
merely dull and correct, he will publish.
If
he is a fool, he may even
serve a purpose. But even if he is very good-even if, say, as in reading
Virginia Woolf's essay on Jane Austen we experience a shock of
pleasure and recognition when coming upon her remark that Jane
Austen wrote like the Greek tragedians because "she, too, in her modest
everyday prose, chose the dangerous art where one slip means death"–
why, even then the life-span of a work of criticism is likely to be short.
