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PARTISAN REVIEW
is the harshest criticism that can be made of much contemporary lit–
erature; even the attested horrors of Naziland may not always stay
"news." A radical feminist poet, already notorious for excluding men
from her lectures and readings, publishes a bitter attack on Beetho–
ven's Ninth Symphony- now
there
was human solidarity for you!–
as nothing but the noise put out by an impotent man.
There are more and more local examples. At a time of increas–
ing social pain, especially for people out of sight, I am struck by the
principled coldness and rejection on the part of so many social theor–
ists. At least in the Great Depression there was desperate cam–
araderie and mutual aid. A leading theorist of the New Right, Pro–
fessor Irving Kristol, recently protested that to discuss school lunches
"is to make politics squalid." Of course Professor Kristol grew up
under the intellectual influence of Trotsky's grand, sweeping histori–
cal equations. The great man told the Russian democratic Left in
1917, "Now you belong to the dustbin of history!" It is exactly such
suicidal as well as homicidal grandiloquence that left Trotsky in the
dustbin of history. But there is a moral poison in so much contempt
for losers that affects twentieth-century intellectual as well as politi–
cal life.
And what has all this to do with literature- especially with
criticism, literary thinking and judgment? One essential fact of our
age is the steady destruction of the past in our relentlessly revolu–
tionary epoch- of man's real memory, his unconscious loyalty and
belief. This is violated when we refuse our sympathy, our curiosity,
to certain subjects and people. A more obvious danger is the lack of
common values. Of course literature is no longer expected to change
very much. Criticism, which is inherently an educative activity, a
way of establishing standards and correcting taste, has become a
form of grandstand play, an exercise in personal assertion. The Yale
critic Geoffrey Hartman, who obviously believes that if he says often
enough that criticism is "creative" he will be taken for another Nietz–
sche, is contemptuous of the English Department's "service activity."
I have never in years of teaching literature and writing
criticism been so conscious of the gap between the educated and the
non-educated- between genuine interest and knowledge on the one
hand and the yawning contempt for literature, as a body of knowl–
edge and a criticism of life, that is now concealed behind academic
trivia as well as by professionalism in law, medicine, computer
science, and the like. Of course intellectual and anti-intellectual
groups are traditional adversaries in middle-class society. But until
