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PARTISAN REVIEW
demand less of criticism than we do of literature, that we permit the
arts of discrimination an inferior grasp of experience than those of
creation? Gore Vidal says somewhere that the novel is the art of the
middle-aged, meaning that nobody under thirty-five knows enough or
has acquired enough humility to write a decent novel. The same holds
true for criticism, where theory breaks out wherever there is an
insufficiency of experience.
This is not a new problem, as may be surmised from Alfred Kazin's
ringing complaint in his preface
to
On Native Grounds
in 1942: "We
have seen the life taken out of criticism, the human grace, the simple
all-enveloping knowledge that there are no separate 'uses' in literature,
but only its relevance to the whole life of man." The situation in which
Kazin had to work was, if anything, more dangerous than our own.
Criticism then was flanked by " the twin fanaticisms " that had sought
to dominate it since the early 1930s: the sociological and the textual.
Our present situation resembles that one to the extent that narrow
technologies of interpretation have missionary designs on literature to
an unprecedented degree. The graduate student in an advanced English
department (or, more commonly a comparative literature department)
is under pressure to take up structuralism or post-structuralism,
psychoanalysis (which now comes in more flavors than the quark),
French Freud (and its particularly hypnotic shadow, Lacanianism), or
Marxism as alternatives to the traditional historical field. And while it
is still possible to become, say, an eighteenth century man, it is just not
very exciting to do so. Yet this situation on the whole is more tractable
than the one Kazin complained of, if only because competing claims
are no longer issued with the stridency and moral fervor they once
were. Critics of every sort are now fed and clothed by the same academy
as part of a "well-rounded" curriculum of literary studies; we all
conduct our careers by the same rules of tenure and advancement, and
while that does not always take the edge off our disagreements, it does
render them comical in the long view, since we have little but
impersonal questions of value or our own self-esteem
to
fight over.
Each new ideology is now little more than a fresh and temporarily
exciting addition
to
the pluralist academy, and is quickly disarmed
to
the same degree as all the rest.
Indeed, certain criticisms of the moment, deconstruction in parti–
cular, would appear at first glance to suggest grounds for a general
reconciliation of all ideologies through a universal undermining of all
brands of self-assurance. The idea that there exists an ineluctable gap
between a word and the images or feelings it purports to express and
