THE STATE OF CRITICISM
185
proposes as an antidote to certain dismal practices of the moment. I
find him closer to the mark in observing that "if there is a method, it
generally uses the critic, rather than vice versa." That certainly rings
true
to
my own sense of things. What has crept into criticism these days
is a trick of ventriloquism; the critic's mouth works, words pour forth,
the performance of speech is carried off with greater or lesser art.
It
does
seem an art, as the critic gestures to a voice that is patently not his own.
One feels more and more, in the theoretical mood that presently grips
the academy, that the critic's voice has come loose from his heart, or
seeks
to
give the impression that the heart itself is wooden to the core.
Has Max Weber's nightmare of the future, of "mechanized petrifi–
cation, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance," been
realized at last in the very center of what used to be called "the
humanities"? Are our practitioners of the advanced technologies of
interpretation those very "specialists without spirit, sensualists with–
out heart" whom Weber foresaw as the masters of the last stage of
cultural development?
I take little comfort in reflecting that the current phase of the
avant-garde movement in literature and criticism, which has always
promoted a liberation of spirit, now gives us a certain chilled mechani–
calism of speech, a cold ritualization of gesture: mere routines of
freedom. What one sees in so many instances of the
nouvelle critique
in
American journals is the critic's surrender of the full range of his
responses in favor of a rigorous system of decoding, from which·
competing areas of inquiry are closed off. The critic who has taken
critical theory to heart prepares for his job of work by clearing away
that contaminating element in himself that experiences the world, in
order to work with its signs uninhibited by feeling, recollection, or
alien concepts.
I would concur with Irving Howe that to become a critic demands
that one first become a particular kind of human being: skeptical,
curious, demanding, and trusting of one's own "resources of tact,
sensitivity, hearing, and sympathy." And while I'm patently not being
very sympathetic at the moment, I would lay particular stress upon the
critic's resources of sympathy, his willingness to test new ideas and
ways of being-in-the-world and to suspend judgment before the
unknown and the unwelcome. To do this with any consistency
requires that critics trust experience more, not less, since the skills
demanded by criticism, as I understand it, are nothing less than those
demanded by life. Of what use to the reader is a critic's theory or
technique or methodology if he has no understanding of life, or holds
his understanding to a professional liability? To what end do we
