178
PARTISAN REVIEW
Its insights absorbed or filched, with or without anxiety, the critical
work falls into dust. That is why a serious continuity of dialectic, a
living interchange of opinion and sensibility, count far more in
criticism than the achievements of individual critics. Today, for
example, we have no lack of talented critics, yet the situation of
criticism is dreary.
In saying all this I don't mean at all to endorse a mere dilettantish
impressionism, the pretensions of the
arbiter elegantiorum,
against
high theory. Criticism is, or can be, a discipline; it is
very
hard to do; it
is, mostly, a matter of training and response, even of imitating at first.
But is no theory of any use whatever even for the working critic,
the drudge who writes reviews , the more ambitious chap who tries
to compose essays in his spare time? I think, yes, it is of use, but in
rather quirky ways and almost never through mere submission and
discipleship.
A light-fingered recognition of theory can prevent a surplus of
error. We all know that theories of genre are peculiarly susceptible to a
sterile multiplication of terms. But if somewhere in the back of our
minds we have an awareness of the idea of genres, it can enable us to
avoid false expectations-which is already, I would guess, to reduce
critical error by half. A kindergarten example: we must not expect
complex plots in sonnets. Yet, as we read Shakespeare's sonnets and
Robert Lowell's sonnet-like poems about American politics in the
sixties we can make out the lineaments of a complex plot behind, de–
cidedly behind, the language-we can make out all that has been kept
out of the work but which somehow exerts a pressure upon it. The bad
critic proceeds to write an extended "study" of these background plots,
as if to forget that what he really has before him are very brief poems.
The better critic, who usually works on the tacit premise that what
counts most in literature is the foreground, will easily, almost as a
matter of course, keep the backgrounds where they belong: in the
background. Or, now, a second grade example: A critic who has
thought through the subgenre we call the "antiutopian " novel, will
not complain, as Raymond Williams has, that the characters in
Orwell's 1984 are insufficiently complex, for he will understand that a
major point of this subgenre is to summon-by a single step beyond
the probable-a society in which complex character has, so to say, been
forbidden. At the least, then, theories of genre can check our natural
rush to stupidity.
A light-fingered recognition of literary theory can help the work-
