THE STATE OF CRITICISM:
THEORY AND PRACTICE·
Irving Howe
Literary criticism resembles the Jews: easy to recognize but
hard
to
define. Making demands upon the imagination, literary
criticism falls short, as it should, of the creative. Nothing if not a mode
of discursive writing, it is yet something more and other than discur–
sive writing. Forever dependent upon imaginative texts, it nevertheless
strains, like an indulged colony, to gain complete independence; but
let it so much as approach independence and it loses its ground for
being, dissolves into a mist of pretension and prose poetry. Literary
criticism always keeps asking itself-I am not sure anyone else cares–
what it is and what it does, and, oddly, it thrives most when not too
sure of the answer.
The ideal critic, a monster to be avoided, knows everything, since
he knows that nothing need be irrelevant to his text. The actual critic,
poor battered creature, tries simply to bring
to
bear upon a work or
group of works whatever personal resources of knowledge and sensibil–
ity he has trained himself to have. A critic might profit from knowing
philosophy, science, history, linguistics, Freudianism, Marxism, and
semiotics; when doing his job of work, he is wise if he restrains his
erudition. Good critics are kept on short leashes.
No one has yet established fixed boundaries
to
literary criticism,
though almost everyone agrees it should have them. The lack of
boundaries is a source of the large potential interest criticism can have,
as also of its large probable disaster. Criticism is one of the last
disciplines-and not very disciplined at that-which makes a claim for
the solitary speaker, the defenseless writer, engaged in a wide-ranging
discourse.
It
is a very risky business to get into. Everything becomes a
matter of fit or, as an earlier age would say, of decorum. How well do
my capacities of response match up with a given writer? Is his thought
beyond my range, his experience out of my reach, his sensibility
·This discussion took place at the ew School for Social Research in the summer of
1980.
