Volume 7, Number 3 · September 8, 1966
Devaluations
By D.J. Enright
Refractions
by Harry Levin
Oxford, 359 pp., $7.50
Trials of the Word
by R.W.B. Lewis
Yale, 239 pp., $6.50
Writers and Politics
by Conor Cruise O'Brien
Pantheon, 259 pp., $4.95
In two of these recent collections of essays, and very occasionally in the third, we watch their authors performing with impressive learning, at times with elegance and charm, an activity which one is hard pressed to describe or account for. One knows of course what it is called: for one reads it, one reviews it, and alas one writes it. It is called literary criticism. But literary criticism used to be supposed to serve the humble purpose of helping people to read with greater understanding the sort of writing which used to be called 'creative.' Most of what today is still called literary criticism should be given another name. Literification? Literatics? Or, better perhaps, literastics? It is an activity in which, with the help of reading, without too much bleeding and sweating, the critic constructs sets of variations on themes which he draws or claims to draw from a poem or a novel, or from some other critic. The activity is rapidly approaching the condition of absolute autonomy. The erstwhile mediators, in their overwhelming respect for literature (make it hard!), have achieved something quite remarkable. They have made themselves indispensable. They are on the way to making literature dispensable. As a pupil of mine, by no means abnormally lazy, corrupt, intelligent, or witty, said recently: 'I have followed your lectures on Macbeth and I have read the criticism. Do I have to read the play as well?'
Review, 2176 words
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