II
THE STATE OF CRITICISM
179
ing critic if he brings to bear upon it an amiable
skeptici~m.
We say, for
instance, that literature is not life, it is about life, but it is about life in a
very special way, rather more like a lamp than a mirror, yet insofar as it
is like a mirror that is likely to be a consequence of its being like a
lamp. Such rule of thumb recognitions derive no doubt from critical
theories far more elaborate in nature and they help
to
keep one in an
uneasy balance between the word and the world. Yet there is also the
check of practical criticism upon theory. One may, for instance, be
aware of the difficulties that can be marshalled with regard to theories
of imitation or mimesis, bu t--( don't know of one critic worth reading–
be he formalist or social,
Ne~or
New York-who doesn't finally, in
however modulated a fashion, fall back upon some version of the
theory of imitation. It cannot be helped.
If
you recall the passage I
quoted somewhat earlier from the strict formalist W.K. Wimsatt about
the way "explication " finally gives rise to "local judgment," you will
see, I think, that it makes no sense without some resort to a theory of
mimesis. When Warren and Wellek in their
Theory of Literature
offer
as the criteria for judgment of poems and novels "coherence" and
"complexity," they are, wittingly or not, proposing terms of cognition
and valuation that derive from and require a return
to
the world of
shared moral and social experience. William Empson, as complex in
negotiating with language as anyone need be, writes that when I.A.
Richards derides people who after reading Shakespeare say "How
true," Richards is making
"an
attack on what almost everyone had felt,
on what was most strikingly witnessed ... by Dr. Johnson, that in
spite of all their faults the plays are somehow inescapably 'like life.' I
do not think anyone can write any useful criticism of Shakespeare if
one has succeeded in repressing this sentiment." And not, it might be
added, of Shakespeare alone.
A light-fingered recognition of literary theory helps most of all
those who engage it through opposition.
If
you look back
to
the once
famous quarrel between the New and the New York critics, you will see
that it was we in New York who profited most from the insistence of
Ransom, Warren, and Tate that the literary text be treated, at least
provisionally, as autonomous , even though it might in some sense also
tell us things about morality, religion, and politics. We profited more
than the pliant disciples of the New Criticism because it was we who
most needed to learn its cautionary lessons, we who were most likely to
succumb to those "fallacies" and "heresies" against which they
warned. By the same token, our resistance to their more extreme
positions kept us from transforming improvisations into dogmas.
It
