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sprightliness, of one of Pope's dunces, "light-arm'd with Points, An–
titheses, and Puns ." It would unfortunately be easy to multiply in–
stances, but one will serve .
It is perhaps useless to enlarge the complaint. Larger questions
impose themselves. The passing of the bookman, we are often told,
will be followed by the passing of the book. At such a moment of
crisis, it must seem curious that the bookman's successor, the univer–
sity critic, should be so intent on establishing for himself a wholly
novel position of dignity and authority, and a new sort of isolation
from the larger literary public. The old style bookman was always
something else as well as a critic: a poet and critic, a writer and
critic. Now the wholly professional, single-skilled critic-who,
though often reluctantly, earns his bread as a teacher - makes the
claim that criticism
is
poetry, that he is the creator.
Structuralism, in its purer literary form (now extinct), abolished
history but also abolished "the subject," in this case the author. He
was repeatedly said to have died. But in the age of poststruc–
turalisms the author returns, the critic is major man. It is true that
earlier critics made comparable claims: Oscar Wilde did it with im–
pudent grandeur. But the argument now is different: the collapse of
the hierarchies of discourse means that all writers are the same sort
of writer; critics are poets, and so are dunces . Thus by an odd
change in the practice of criticism the critic, a mere fragment left
over from the broken figure of the man of letters, resumes all the
titles to which his ancestor, when intact, could lay claim.
Helen Vendler recently adverted to this state of things in an ad–
dress to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on "The Func–
tion of Criticism." She seemed to disapprove of the new claims,
holding that "ideally" the critic "is the artist himself; at second-best,
he is the artist
manque."
The suggestion that inspiration has a part in
the critical process was certainly right; and I daresay she might agree
that some of it ought to derive from, and in its turn contribute to, the
preservation, with all necessary alterations of perspective, of a
literary past, a tradition.
Of course this tradition can no longer be represented as given,
static, explicable without interference by the critical instrument. We
can no more return to the old notions of history, or of tradition, than
we can revive the bookman; yet criticism, if it is not to become a
sterile and purely autonomous activity, must put other notions in
their place. As an activity with some responsibility to society as a
