THE STATE OF CRITICISM
189
their youth and ease their way into a new and vastly more complex age.
A striking case in point was the ease with which the New York
intellectuals made their peace with the New Critics in the 1940s, when
so typical an urban Jewish writer as Delmore Schwartz went whoring
after strange gods-Eliot and Pound-in the pages of
The Kenyon
Review
and
The Southern Review
as regularly as ambivalent Agrarians
like Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, ignoring for the moment a
long history of crop failure in Manhattan, appeared in
Partisan
Review.
Both retreating Trotskyists and wilting Agrarians turned out
to be pragmatic dogmatists who recognized in each other formidable
allies in the battle
to
rescue literature from more corrosive doctrines.
If
the sons of the ghetto c;:ould join forces with the sons of the plantation
in defense of the "autonomy" of the literary text, was not everything
possible?
How is it, then, that a critical tradition with such habits of
pragmatism and ingenuity should now command so little attention in
the academy and should seem, on the face of it, a backwater? For one
thing, critical realism is no longer a movement.
It
no longer advances
any new ideas about literature or conceptions of society.
It
arose and
flourished in a period of growth and stress in America, when political
and economic pressures demanded a sharpening of perception and an
expansion of the frame of social ideas. Compared with its role in
documenting and protesting the conditions of life early in this century,
critical realism now seems played out as a social force. Of course the
critic can work admirably without a movement; some of the best
critical writing just now is done by book reviewers (such as Michael
Wood, Marvin Mudrick, Robert Towers, and Roger Sale) whose
observations can be penetrating and vivid and who are, after their
apolitical fashion, heirs to the realist tradition. But at a time when
there is little to advocate and little will to do so, such critics cannot
speak for anything larger than themselves: a program, a movement, a
new horizon of thought. Only feminists and aggrieved minorities are
exempt from this predicament.
In
criticism now the sense of movement
belongs entirely to the grand theorists, and though the bulk of what
passes for structuralist or deconstructionist or Freudian or Marxist
analysis is thin in both conception and style, it grows fat on the
illusion of breaking new ground and rolling back, with great vigor, the
frontiers of consciousness.
Moreover, as energy has passed from the independent journals and
little magazines to the universities and academic journals, there has
been a marked shrinking of the available space for views of literature
