FRANK KERMODE
205
their pupils, their epigoni, to use a more loaded word, will be fit or
willing to attend to the more routine pastoral duties, by the perfor–
mance of which some sort of literary public is maintained and
renewed. For we know the opinion of Paul de Man , which favors the
diminution of classes, so that literature departments would be reduced
to cells in which an elite studied rhetoric and poetics .
You may ask what this has to do with people outside the
English departments. The answer is, a great deal. Those who study
literature at less refined levels, in the colleges and universities, must,
as I've suggested, now form the greater part of the reading public .
We should think hard before we say we wish it otherwise. And if we
want to retain such a public we need, among other things, to rethink
the question of the relation of the educated reader to the literary
past. Literary history is nowadays often said to be a most problem–
atic undertaking; yet some transformation of it seems necessary. We
have grown accustomed to having students who know nothing of the
classical languages and very little of the modern, except their own.
We have acquiesced in this change; should it not strike us that we
have too casually concurred also in the neglect of that past to which
Bennett was delighted to pay his respects? It is at any rate an inter–
esting reflection that in a period when more people study (rather
than simply read) literature than ever before, the sense of a literary
past has grown ever more faint.
And what of the public that remains outside the classroom? In
general its expert advisers are university teachers moonlighting in
the newspapers . I have long been one of them. Mostly we try to use
simpler language, but except when we are writing for papers which
have a high proportion of university or university-educated readers,
papers such as the
London Review of Books
or the
New York Review of
Books,
we rarely seem certain of our audience, rarely seem to care
much whether the mass of readers can be interested in our notices or
indeed in the books we review. One notes a sort of offhandedness, a
frivolity - uneasy demonstrations of a vaguely sensed obligation to
amuse. In the London
Sunday Times
there was recently a review of
the first volume of the Oxford edition of Tennyson's letters. Its
author, a distinguished Tennysonian, began thus, "'What a
hog
that
Alfred is and what can you expect from a pig but a grunt.' Alfred
Tennyson's disgruntled relation Edwin Tennyson d'Eyncourt could
hardly have been rasher." To whom is the reader's attention
directed? Not to Tennyson but to the clever reviewer. Here is an odd
recrudescence of Grub Street; it reminds us, for all its cleverness or
