The Question of Literary Criticism -- Prof. T.V.Subba Rao

 

            “What is Literary Criticism?” is a general question tempting one to answer it in general ideas.  Even while answering it in general ideas, we still have to remember what particular literary critics have done, and make generalisations according to our ability in grasping their work and its nature.  The better we know their work, the more sensible will be our statements.  But often we fail to make sensible statements through over-confidence that we know enough about the critics’ work.  Here over-confidence outweighs our mastery of it and we think we are talking sense without actually making a point.  That is to say, we make statements with the illusion that we know what is a point and what is not.   Well, of course, we do make what appears to be a point, and we might revise what we say, being concerned with the sentences rather than with the point.  To say something thinking that we are making a point is usually our habit, but it is rarely possible to change it entirely on rethinking and realising that it isn’t a point.  It is very hard to recognise the nature of what we are saying with such an illusion, as we believe that, by saying so, we are doing literary criticism.  The danger with any statement is that it could be general, plausible, appealing and very effective.  The danger with a critic is that conditions could be unfavourable to make him intelligent, and that he might carry out his work unconscionably.  There is a great deal to be said about literary criticism, and by our habit of defining it, we might get it wrong, even if the definition as such is strikingly impressive.  Ideas on literary criticism could be most unhelpful, if not positively harmful, since they will fix it at an abstract level, inviting compromises on standards.  They are very attractive to the academic mind, because they are the attractive fare to offer, and because the academic mind can elicit the response which will serve its purpose.  It is most important to avoid talking impressively and meaninglessly on literary criticism, but it is very difficult to avoid talking so, when we aren’t clear-sighted about its purpose, the standards applicable to it, and the character of the critic.  There is a positive line of enquiry for exposing what is erroneous in our ideas about literary criticism, and what is sham; and I believe it leads to clarity in our sense of literary criticism – the clarity which comes after becoming conscious of our confusions and removing them.  But why we have to suffer from our confusions is because we hold ideas without being able to resolve them into thought.  We catch ideas and believe in them.  There is a false way of living, and it has become habitual to us.  And so the false spirit in us directs our learning.  One can be a scholar, keeping the same spirit as that of the philistine or a shopkeeper.  Or one is a scholar with the ruling condition of pressures which falsify learning.  To be a scholar and to reach a true point of thought is quite impossible under such pressures.  Or what happens now is that one attempts to be known as a scholar.  I am thinking of the conditions of living which bear on the learning we acquire now and which fail us in reaching a true point of thought.  Obviously, by the route of ideas we will have to make generalisations or statements on literary criticism which we may believe to be true, but which must be most inept.  Our present spirit allows us to rise to the level of ideas only, conditioning our learning, being utterly incapable of reaching thought.  The line of inquiry appropriate for literary criticism must begin with the condition that ideas commercialise the mind, and that for one reason or another, the mind could not contemplate profound changes by the force of thought.

           

            When I say the character of the critic, I mean, the character of his mind.  It is very crucial that we should know the character of the critic’s mind in order to know his worth.  Here is a speculative element.  That is, we can speculate on the possibilities which determine this character.  One can feel sure, for instance, about the kind of critic possible in the India of the present age, because one can sense the adverse conditions for good criticism.  Here, speculation takes place because of thought which depends upon perception.  We take those things that tell us what kind of critic is possible under such and such conditions, but we can only have access to them through perception and thought.  This speculative sense of how a critic is determined will be baffling to any mind below the level of perception and thought, which entertains ideas.  As to how a critic is determined can be understood by the deterministic and sociological concept of relation in which A determines B as in the relation of cause and effect.  But a mind at the level of perception and thought will see a relation quite differently from the other mind below that level.  Those who partake of the latter are a threat to literary criticism since they cannot perceive the content of the relations which a perceptive and thinking mind possesses.  There is more to say on the character of the critic’s mind, after we resolve the question of the purpose of literary criticism and of standards applicable to it.

 

            Literary criticism must justify itself by what it can say on literature and by acquiring its own independent force through the profundity of its statements.  Its relation to literature doesn’t offer any point for discussion, being an indivisible one.  It is difficult not to be silly or academic if one attempts to define the relation and enlarge on it.  The need for literary criticism is the need to be intelligent about human achievements and their claims.  Since it cannot be perceived as necessary by the witness of any clamour for its value or use, we usually find non-engagement in it on the one hand, and academic involvement only, on the other.  When there is no engagement in it with the recognition of its purpose (and it has no explicit purpose to be stated) the thought which literary criticism produces on literary achievements and their value might be slighted or ignored.  To recognise this thought, it requires a mind of cultural level – a mind concerned with living in the sense of asking what secures finer and richer living.  The noise of academicians’ criticism might create in us a mistaken view of literary criticism, but that happens only if we are unguarded; because we are unable to discount their works by holding on firmly to a conviction on the purpose of literary criticism, we rarely identify literary criticism, and let academic criticism take hold on our mind.  Academic spirit substitutes its work for literary criticism which produces thought on literature and its value through intelligence with direct interest in living.  Literary criticism has a defined purpose, which must be perceived with interests which could make one perceptive.  If we have a sense of the purpose, we needn’t lapse into talking as we try to do to appear plausible, about literary criticism, with reliance on logicality in discourse.  If we carry ideas with us to literary criticism, we will find ourselves with an ill-defined purpose of it or with self-pleasing illusions.  There is literary criticism, if we can identify it, that could tell us what its purpose is; but we need a mind to identify it.  One ought to have derived a benefit from it – as a permanent possession of ability in understanding and reaching a thought-level sense of living, to form a conviction on its value.  Its purpose is related to its value.  If you master literary criticism as such, you will have a trained intelligence capable of recognising it and realising its value.  Literary criticism identified as such is rather opposed to academic spirit, as it meets us as a human achievement of value to mind.  It has a content of its own with thought peculiar to it – with thought indispensable for a sense of living.  Wherever being subtle and discriminating is crucial, no other discipline but literary criticism could educate us to it.

 

            There cannot be literary criticism without standards; standards which it applies to literature might be distinguished from standards applicable to it.  However, in the larger context, this distinction isn’t very useful, though it might be kept for clarity’s sake.  We apply standards of organisation special to achievement to literature, and these include the standards of perception and thought which we apply to literary criticism.  It might be difficult for us to admit that there is very little good criticism and that as academic professors what we write has to go without claim to the merit of literary criticism.  Good academic writing is not without value, but even good academic writing is too rare.  It has the value of discipline.  But it will never have the force of passionate intelligence which has its perception, its thought, in the interests of life.  It is this force which marks off literary criticism from good academic work.  But a disturbing point must be brought home to us.  There is plenty of bad academic writing with us now, and it is so bad that we would be thankful to it if doesn’t corrupt the mind.  What sends one to despair is that the bad writing continues and that there is little chance of its being perceived as bad.  To sense the conditions for the absence of any intelligent resistance to it is certainly depressing.  If it is pointed out, one accepts its poorness, but one isn’t equipped to fare better.  We suffer from the duality of accepting the poorness of academic writing when pointed out, and of not being able to write anything but poor stuff.  We may conclude that we have no mind to learn and improve.  It is a conclusion pointing up what is common to us, namely, that we can talk about standards but that we don’t know what they are.  That is why we use the word ‘standards’ self-righteously.  The implications in the proper use of it are elusive to us.

 

            Standard is the power of mind in a statement exhibiting itself in the perception and thought in what is stated.  The power of mind is there when trained intelligence combines itself with active interest in living.  Mind in relation to learning and in relation to living acquires its power: it knows what a great achievement is and it thinks of life.  It knows the one and thinks of the other at the same time, getting this strange power for perception and thought.  The test of this power lies in the stating of perception and thought.  A mind of power is a mind that can apply standards.  If we possess standards, we conceive of an achievement, and at the same time, we conceive of finer life too.  To possess a standard for conceiving of both is to be a literary critic capable of perception and thought about the value of a literary work.  And a literary critic cannot have intelligence separately for commenting on literary texts.  His intelligence must be directed by the interests of life so that it can evaluate the worth of a literary work.  He cannot evaluate a literary work if he cannot see its value by perception and thought in the interests of life.  Before he can express his judgement, he must struggle to achieve a sense of life’s interests and a sense of the value of literature.  What I mean is that, when the emphasis on ‘I’ is so insistent in bourgeois life, he must struggle not to be misled by his own interests and misconceptions, and that he must find a positive line of enquiry by which he can speak sense in defence of the value of literature and of life’s interests.

 

            To have standards of perception and thought the critic’s mind must be sensitive to the force of achievements and their value, and to the impact of finer life.  He must have the conviction that finer life and human achievements are indivisible; there cannot be conceptions about them and their relation, and conceptions about them are ideas that would, as I said earlier, commercialise the mind.  With ideas about them, the critic cannot have standards but can talk impressively on them.  He must be judged by the possession of the content underlying both the content of choices in living and the content of thought directing them.  We must be clear about the critic’s qualifications for possessing standards.  If he doesn’t have standards, he gives himself away in his statements, but if he makes statements possessing standards, they have a power with independent value.  The critic’s credentials are his abilities, but lest the word ‘abilities’ should mislead us, let me assure you that by abilities I don’t mean something like those of a technologist but resilient character in holding by the interests of life and trained intelligence, advancing by a procedure of enquiry that leads to a line of demarcation between achievement and non-achievement.  Literary criticism must set itself the task of protecting life from cruder forms of existence and of saving the mind from severance with the past and with achievements.  The interests of life are at stake when cruder forms of existence attract the mind, and the mind is in danger of changing its essential character and disintegrating when it is threatened with severance with the past and with human achievements, and swamped by non-achievements.  Literary criticism is a struggle against the forces of anti-life, and against the disintegration of mind.  Its statements must come from the spirit of struggle.  But they are not statements, having proof in observations; no, they aren’t inductions drawn consciously from observable evidence.  On the other hand, they are in the nature of a subtle point which is not accessible to observation, being the upshot of perception, but to the spirit noticing things by its struggle to preserve life.  Literary criticism is a discipline to preserve life; it is very different from the disciplines which answer the demands of logicality, observation, experiment, and theory-building.  It makes subtle points, waging a war on life-destroying forces; one has to be trained to perceive them, but if cruder understanding of other disciplines mistakes them as usually happens, degrading them to the level of ideas, or assimilating them to the ideas it has cherished as ideals, it should be warned that they do not promote consumers’ standards.  Well, it tries to alter the mind, to enable it to notice the deeper things of life; it suggests, because its task is to preserve life, a line of enquiry very different in level from the line of enquiry adopted by the other disciplines.  If the critic’s sensibility is enriched or his mind’s power increased by the reading of the subject matter in other disciplines, it is altogether a different matter, but if he consciously applies to his discipline ideas belonging to others, even if it is philosophy or psychology or anthropology, it doesn’t matter which, he may be counted as a fashion-monger and his criticism would meet us as a sham.  Literary criticism has the distinction of producing “Culture and Anarchy” which is impossible for any other discipline; let us remember it as a book that offers the discipline of preserving life.  What experimental method, what sociological methodology, and what academic research, in English studies, could have made any one sense its rich life! We cannot think and talk of literary criticism without the discipline it presupposes, and the power of discipline producing perception and thought proves its worth.  Without the inward sense of the best literary criticism, one can only make impressive and academic statements on literary criticism, which could be convincing, sounding as if true.  Even to escape from their impact, one has to acquire the discipline of perception and thought.  When learning gathers into a power for perception and thought, it claims to be the discipline for the critic.  More than anyone else, the critic senses things of danger to the mind and life; and establishes the basis of standards for living well as writing and secures a point of importance for his statement.  I think he is a rare human being who works more to improve his mind than to produce his opinions, and his improvement leads him to know things which by ratiocination it isn’t possible to know.  However, even in the remotest possible sense I won’t suggest that there are mystical things or some other obscure things to know by intuition.  I mean that he is bound to be harsh on the rationalistic spirit of experiment, observation and induction, which by over-confidence becomes blind to the perceptions about life, and fails to see that there is a rich life of truth in thought.  In order to improve his mind he has to fight with the spirit of temptation and mesmerism from the bourgeois existence of democracy, science, technology, commerce, wealth, possessions, luxuries and social status, all of which are anti-life.

 

            As far as the Indian is concerned he is so much attracted towards the bourgeois West that he is either silly or insane.  I think he is an imbecile under the Western impact.  There are exceptional Indians in whom you find a recoil from the attractions of the West but there is more of sentiment and emotion than of thought.  So, they cannot produce a force of resistance.  Any Indian who wants to say something sane must wrestle with the Western impact, - with the changes in thought and feeling and in expression and in the very structure of the mind itself, which happened on account of it.  He cannot possess any standard unless he can say something sane, but usually under the changes produced by the Western impact, his head is full of ideas without any ability to state, and with the knack of making facile appeals to sentiments and ideas; with him the habit of lapsing into confused talk or of flying into a temper, and of soothing himself by slogans gets its strength from the over-confidence that he is a superior being with superior gifts.  We are too close to one of the greatest events in Indian history to have the mental power to deal with it.  There is not even a genuine attempt to establish a clear line of thinking.  So far, we have nothing but confused ideas, taking unstable positions and making assertive or sentimental inanities.  Following the changes due to the Western impact the mode of speech and writing among the educated Indians is, barring exceptions, that of making assertive or sentimental inanities.

 

            I seem to be unfair to the Indian by ruling out any possibility of his being disciplined to be a critic.  But remember his spirit, his temper, his ideas and his disposition, they announce his possibilities.  What I say regarding him is not in my head as a fanciful idea, but it is there to be perceived in the governing condition of his preference and drives.  Why he cannot be intelligent enough, disciplined enough, and perceptive enough to be a critic is difficult to explain, but here I offer a simplification as a reason, though being aware of its danger; following the Western impact, a crude form of existence with the novelty of Westernisation encouraging individualism, a menagerie of pseudo-scientific as well as liberal ideas flattering to reformistic zeal, and a crude form of education, which by its value for career, is spirit-forming, have conditioned him, changing his mind in level itself.  And now with the level of mind with which he works, there is no chance for him to recover, as though he is controlled by an all-powerful force against intelligence. He is changed with this sense of change in him that it is enlightenment.  So, he is essentially conditioned by his self-deception; nothing can rouse him to a consciousness of his self-deception.  In his progress the mesmerism of American achievements in technology has turned him an Americanist, and it has made it much more difficult for him to recognise what has happened to him.  It is no use expecting him to understand his position in his change as dangerous.  He is like a man who is mad in making money, while, in consequence growing richer and richer, and so who cannot stop making money till something very fateful stops him.

 

            That the case with the Englishman and the American is different is obvious.  There are great possibilities for the Englishman to be a literary critic; only he has to realise them.  But he might fail.  He might fail because there are difficulties which could prove insurmountable.  In England the division between the general mind and the cultivated mind is sharp and clear, and it creates problems either too overwhelming or too complex for the cultivated.  There aren’t any serious difficulties which the general mind faces on account of the cultivated.  What is peculiar to the twentieth century is the unstable relation of indifference or a stable relation of compromise between the two.  In the 19^th century Arnold opposed the general mind of philistinism, barbarism and materialism by profound thought, but without standing aloof as a superior being.  He is concerned with it, and has something positive to offer – to enrich itself.  There is no compromise in his relation to the general mind of liberal democracy, commerce, individualism, politics, catch phrases, scienticism, and self-elevating sentiments, which threatened the interests of life and the intelligence of mind.  Although there are more disinterested authors in the Victorian age than in the 20^th century, Arnold alone of all of them opposed the general mind resolutely, and provided rich expression of life and intelligence in his opposition to it.  Arnold’s distinction is his thinking consciousness of his age, and its content in language is a great strength for anyone wrestling with the deep problems of his own age.  It may be mentioned here that the cultivated mind wasn’t cowed then by the general mind.  It was then capable of perception and thought in the interests of life.  But the conditions for the Englishman of the cultivated mind are different now.  There are two powerful things against which he might find it very difficult to guard himself.  Journalism which caters for the general mind could be irresistible to him.  Why it is so may be explained by showing that there aren’t enough members with the cultivated mind supporting an author, who is an author and not a journalist.  In England there still is a chance for anyone to reject journalism and in opposition to it to pursue the line of enquiry leading to perception and thought, as there is so much good work of achievement as a resource of the mind’s perfection to condition the mind for such a line of enquiry.  My fear is that one could be misled by various motives.  Journalism, being the greatest danger for this line of enquiry to get over might easily win the mind, tempting it with reward.  Many able authors aren’t worth their while just because they are journalists.  For example, in his critical work John Wain writes worse than a good academician in England, and the names of several authors like him are on the tip of my tongue.  But then the conditions created by the general mind of this century with a craze for psychedelic effects are those that could weaken the mind, almost changing it ideologically.  To resist the general mind and remain as the cultivated mind pursuing a line of enquiry with the object of producing perception and thought is becoming a hopeless task.  It appears that one does not set oneself such a task, since, to address the general mind by ideas and appeals, and provide satisfaction of its stimulus has come to be normative practice in the profession of writing. The general mind of consumer standards, of the public that participates in politics by franchise only, of the people industrialised up to the neck, with nothing but the newspaper ideas and a desire for stimulating entertainment – they must see or read only to be mind-blown – with nothing but a poor education of skills engaging their interests mechanically, and of the spirit to possess and enjoy selfishly, - yes, this general mind strongly appeals to be exploited in writing and compels any ambitious young man hoping to be an author to turn ideological, though unself-consciously, and to write to satisfy its cravings.  Soon such a young author evolves into a professional adept, rousing in the general mind cravings such as demand his writings, and makes a success of his writing.  The general mind corrupts and breaks down the human spirit.  One may escape the vulgar things it indulges in, but cannot avoid yielding to its subtler pressures.  Very few disciplines can find anything wrong with this general mind, and in fact, they cannot by any means perceive what literary criticism perceives by its concern with the interests of life.  In England the critic and the author are not resistant enough to the general mind and won’t take a stand against it, rejecting journalism; and thereby they live in a false relation to human achievements and to the interests of life.  We have a very crucial, historically complex, human condition of the interests of life being opposed by the general mind with its psychological character of cravings and drives.

 

            India is different from England.  India suffers from the West.  England suffers from its general mind carried to its present stage by inexorable development of the technologico-Benthamite civilisation.  India suffers without the division that is in England and goes without the work of great achievements England has produced in the last four hundred years.  India suffers from a single type of self-blind and self-destructive mind, the upshot of the Western impact on India.  There isn’t any evidence in India of the cultivated mind capable of resisting this type-mind, corresponding to the general mind in England by the content of perception and thought.  Literature and literary criticism are carried out in India at the level of quarrelsome generalisations, sentimental slogans and emotional scenes – actually, there is no worthwhile critical work, I mean, there cannot be, and literary works are produced in general, as spectacles for social reformistic zeal.  Any literary work here is an arsenal of progressive views.  But there is a change for the worse – in the direction of art embracing sex, and psychological and pathological elements of sordid and perverse life.  Here I won’t enlarge on the brief statements I have made on the Indian condition in comparison with England.  For as much as I can, I wish to focus on the adverse conditions for a true literary criticism and to suggest how a sense of life’s interests is closely bound up with the power of thought and perception.  Let us keep to this:  we cannot live well without the power of the cultivated mind.  How hostile is the general mind to living well!  In England the conditions of the general mind are hostile to the cultivated mind, which finds itself crippled to pursue the line of enquiry leading to perception and thought, and they affect literature and literary criticism adversely.  But in India the type-mind which prevails in the office, in the university, in politics, in commerce, and most potently in social questions, with reformistic zeal and progressive views, Westernising and Americanising India, is destructive of intelligence and cannot promote critical perception and thought.

 

            What the Englishman has to guard himself against is, in the second place, the academic spirit or academism.  What is produced for the general mind is journalism, which must be ideological – ‘ideological’ is the twentieth century word for Arnold’s ‘partisan’ – and what is produced by the academic spirit is academic journalism, which purports to be knowledge, but I think it is, as far as literary criticism is concerned, knowledge of a kind, carrying not much of a value, and it could be very harmful.  In England we have excellent academic writing which is unimaginable in India and not possible in America.  I have always held up this writing, having learnt a great deal from it.  But it isn’t literary criticism of the first order.  It lacks the pulse of life and the striking pointedness of great insight or perception.  As I said earlier, it is a discipline that is valuable and it is necessary.  The more we have it, the better.  No one can expect of a university professor to do more than that.  The most interesting thing is that there are conditions in England for a university teacher to do more than that.  We recall the names of I.A.Richards and F.R.Leavis, and I am not sure of anybody else.  Nevertheless, I can name a dozen professors who did excellent academic writing which could be read always with profit.  Some of the Shakespearean editors write remarkably well, and they have apt ideas, clarity and incisiveness, which I don’t find in writers like John Wain, Kingsley Amis and so forth.  They do not write academic journalism; hence we must read them to acquire consistency, relevance, and clarity in expression.  They are well aware, at the same time, of the academic spirit responsible for academic journalism.  The credit for their work goes to the historical development in the institution of education in England.  In India there is nothing comparable with this institution; and conditions which exist in England for good academic writing are impossible in India; the Indian education was never intended to be a discipline for the mind, and nowhere else in the world has education done so much harm to the human mind as in India.  Academic writing in India is sleazy and moffusil, or pompous and lofty, or pretentious and imitative when it invites our attention:  there is no such thing as literary criticism in English studies in India, though a few English professors are well-known for their ridiculous attempts.  India has to learn its lessons the hard way before it can produce the mind that could be passionate, intelligent and perceptive.  No one in India is concerned for the intelligent and perceptive work that the mind can do.

 

            Academism in England is becoming more and more prevalent as the conditions for excellent academic writing are disappearing.  I am not sure I can explain why they are disappearing, but I am disturbed by the academic journalism of the pot-boiler and of the review in the Sunday papers.  Academic journalism can become the normal practice, I am afraid, by the pressures from the general mind.  I believe that the general life in England is hostile to quality writing so that authors would adjust themselves to this condition in their own interests.  This condition for compromise is the subtlest, but nonetheless, the strongest influence that could break down anyone’s resistance.  Its power is seen in the fact that one’s response is conditioned by it and that one becomes convinced of its claims.  Steiner couldn’t have been a better academic journalist, because academic journalism established itself with a vengeance in England.  Academic journalism trades on anything, if it is profitable; it can simulate profound writing and succeed in appealing to the vanity of the general mind; by this simulation one can achieve rank also in academic circles.  We know it to be simulation only, for we know that it has no direction in relation to the interests of life.  It is a prose of the clever and dubious mind and a threat to life.  The academic journalist has to be ideological without admitting it, and he relies on the effect of being recognised.  Even to deny that one is ideological is effective in drawing the sympathy of the general mind, which loves the simulation of good things.  Academic journalism is as harmful as newspaper journalism, but it has a better make-up.  It is so tempting to anyone that he gets its spirit, feeling the success of participating in it and improving his skills for further advance.  It is extremely improbable for anyone to leave it off and rise to a sense of great achievements and of the interests of life, writing with standards and under the pressure of perception and thought.  Academic journalism promotes talent and skill up to a point but saves one from the struggle for self-improvement.  When the general mind lives without standards, it wants writing too without standards.  Truly speaking, why should there be a journalist if the life the general mind prefers is not false, but vital?  Vital life can tolerate only intelligent and passionate writing but would give no quarter to journalism.  The deep foundations of life cracked, there is nothing but the shallow life by the choice of the general mind, and it has no power of intelligence to promote anything but journalism.  One no longer struggles to learn, and to form one’s mind by learning profoundly from history and from the great achievements; now one becomes a writer with tricks and tactics, walking straight into journalism.  Academic journalism has triumphantly smoothened intelligent discourse.  I read some years ago in T.L.S. the writings of several academicians taking differing sides over structuralist controversy but I was so shocked to see that, not only was their prose that of academic journalism, but also their spirit was that of the quack.

 

            Such are the conditions of academic journalism that one grows adjusting to them for success, and cares little for one’s condition when so grown up: there isn’t even a possibility of self reflection on what one is driven to do in one’s interests.  In the case of England you can wait before you despair.  Even now you can expect excellent academic work from England, but there are reasons to be alarmed about the prevailing conditions.  The survival in England of the cultivated mind backed up by living force is at stake.  I don’t care for the cultivated mind which aims at self-enjoyment in isolation.  I am thinking of the cultivated mind which is indispensable for living well, because it can produce the spirit for finer life.  We have to have the cultivated mind conditioning the general mind in such a way that they both participate in a unitary culture of the heritage.  The industrial advance has so changed the social circumstances that the general mind has become individualistic and powerful, choosing its life according to the industrial conditions and conditioning the cultivated mind.  Conditioned by this general mind, the cultivated mind ceases to be cultivated.  If I put it crudely, the relation between the two has become a commodity-relation now, instead of the value-relation, which existed before.  I want by the general mind to be understood as representing the force of the life in general and its movement, and by the cultivated mind as representing the force of living in which values are realised.

            I am afraid I seem to have made such statements as appear abstract and require proof.  Actually, at this point I have read over again what I have written so far, and felt that but for the fear that I might be disagreeable, I haven’t made a statement without content which is relevant to my purpose of showing as to what literary criticism of the first order must be and what conditions of life and what character of mind determine its quality.  I am interested in identifying it as a discipline, which is essential, for I see the great critics’ work as offering the discipline of perception and thought, a discipline opposed to the discipline of social sciences which parades its scientific procedures and claims enormous utility for its data.  I insist all the more on the discipline of literary criticism as an essential value, while I think of what a mind one comes to have by reading social sciences and being impressed by their importance.  The world in which science, technology, commerce and social sciences are pursued with academic spirit to fit in with industrial requirements and for the sake of individual success – this world needs very much the discipline of perception and thought.  A world in which the psyche is a dynamite with its drives and desires and with its psychological force of emotions which have absolutely no content of the feelings which give power and meaningfulness to the life lived in vital continuity with the past and in vital contact with great achievements, and in which this psyche is maddened by its own reflections and agitations, lacking the substance of support in human relations – yes, this world needs very much the discipline of perception and thought.  To know this world at all Lawrence is a must for any critic, and from no other author’s work can one have so profound a sense of the Western civilisation as from his.  For any critic the standards of living must come from him.  He is so great an author.  How much there is in Lawrence that is so indispensable for us and that is so much opposed to the discipline of social science!  Read the best book in sociology or anthropology, you will, at best, be left with notes of ideas plus self-importance.  Read ‘The Plumed Serpent’, - it can change the structure of your mind, and you become capable of a greater range of interests and a greater range of feelings; you feel the vitality of having rejected yourself and acquired a different self.  But then, Lawrence must be read with the discipline of perception and thought.  Literary criticism is essential in the case of Lawrence, not because it is concerned with comparison and analysis, but because it will sensitise the mind to Lawrence’s perception and thought.  The discipline of sensitising the mind to perception and thought about the deepest matters of life expressed in great literature is the discipline of literary criticism.  Literary criticism is sensitive to every thing that concerns life vitally, and it can strip the mind of its illusions, crude ideas and images, and stupid sentiments and change its level, enabling it to recognise perception and thought and to learn from them.  It puts you in a condition to change under the impact of a great work.  That is, I think, a great contribution to life, since it can prepare you for change.

            If anyone doesn’t know that the most formidable influence in English studies as elsewhere in India is the American influence he must be scored for his ignorance.  One could write a good volume on this influence as one could on the British Raj.  For to be clear it may be said that the educated Indian before the Independence was an Anglophile but Americanist afterwards.  All this happened as if it was ineluctable.  One might see the hand of history in it.  Two things here must be stated for further thought, whether they are agreeable or not: wherever you find American influence you will perceive that neither does it promote intelligence nor does it enrich life.  In fact it would not be far-fetched to say that when an Indian comes under American influence, he behaves as if he is touched.  Indian women under this influence would be more entertaining and dangerous.

           

America matters so much that it is a danger to misunderstand it.  Every Indian knows America without understanding it.  And the condition in India now is whether he can be made to understand.  The Indian usually stands on prestige with the question of understanding America, because he is full of America and has many incredible assumptions, which are self-flattering and commonplace.  If the Indian has spent some time in America or has been its citizen he is a hell of self-satisfied and self-assured American personality.  In relation to America India is very unfortunate.  The Indian mind by its character embraces Americanism too uncritically.  This Americanism is so popular and so blindly supported that it has closed any possibility of intelligent discourse in English studies.

           

            Let it be stated that in America there is no literary criticism of the first order.  But yet America influences India and even England as if it has such literary criticism.  America has many attractions.  We have to be careful about them.  I am here mainly concerned with the University discourse in English studies in America, and with its being recognised as a model.  In my view it has neither thought nor perception to recommend itself.  I am far from thinking low of the work done by American professors.  Yet, I contend that this work goes by the name of literary criticism, but it is not literary criticism by standards of perception and thought.

 

            The American mind cannot overcome its difficulties in rising to a true consciousness of the American life.  By flattering the American middle class, and being unable to be related to the interests of life, Prof. Lionel Trilling cut himself off from the discipline of perception and thought.  What he could have perceived in order to produce critical thought, is the antagonism between the interests of life and the interests of the American middle class.  The mind of this class must be representative, by its interests, of the whole American mind.  That is the point, the whole American mind in its representative force of its individualism, of its psychological drives, of its craze for consumer’s standards, and its ideological propensities alienates itself from the discipline of perception and thought – really, from the vital contact with achievements.  It is the mind of such interests as are opposed to the interests of life, depriving itself of the perception and thought in a sense of life and in a sense of literature.  Standards in life and standards in literature appear strange and undemocratic to it.  With such a mind no one masters any work of achievement to live better, and no one lives in order to improve the mind.  Literature or the study of it is not an affair of life, and life is not an affair of living passionately and humanely.  What literature can do to the American mind can be drawn from what it has done to literature.  What is done to literature is to study it passively or enthusiastically to write about it in terms of theories or ideas.  In the hand of any American professor there cannot be a literary text but that it should unfold some philosophical or psychological or anthropological crotchet.  We have to realise that there is this American level of studying literature.  The most anti-life form of studying literature is that of research with its machinery of collecting materials and writing theses.  Nothing more than a busy schedule of mucking up the subject is involved in research.  The only result is that one becomes professorial and emptier than before.  You can do anything in literature now because there is Freud, there is Jung, there are anthropologists and psychologists, and of course, there is existentialism and phenomenology.  You can import any idea, any theory into literature because democracy and individualism are the finer things of human life allowing every thing on its own merits – these finer things cannot stomach any evaluative principle, as it is prescriptive and classifying.  Life is lived for the sake of satisfying drives, and literature is studied for no real purpose at all.  There can then only be academic journalism stylising itself as literary criticism.  This American disease has spread everywhere in India within the last three decades.  The Indian mind has Americanised the English studies, leaving no doubt about what is happening now.  Whether the American would see what I mean by the American disease, it doesn’t matter; it refers to what the Indians do following the American trends.

 

            There is no force in American life for the health of mind, and the American mind has no power for sane life.  I fully agree that there are admirable Americans, and that an average American proves so much better in manners, in particular, than an average Indian.  All that, all this about America, yes, but what is the movement of total life represented in the specific drives that the American mind cannot do anything about?  There is no sense in being rhetorical on America.  Let us see if what is produced can measure up to what is best in literary criticism.  It is only being impoverished to talk about our subject academically.  We have established its link with life by its relation to literature and by its discipline.  One has to say that the American mind is not under control and not guided by perception and thought in the interests of life, but that it is the instrument to the interests of the American middle class.  Very surprising, all classes in America are opposed to the interests of life – since all classes are ideological in the same vein.

 

            Obviously, the interests of life have no decisive influence on English studies in America.  In such a context, mastery of the text would not appeal to the mind as important but instead, one will know it by ideas on account of which one can write a thesis.  What purpose, then, directs the study of literature?  Academic writing in America is far better than in India, but it does have value very much only for University students attending courses in literature.  The ‘stating’ part of it leaves much to be desired.  It exists, it seems, to serve the purpose of professionalism and it answers only to poor conceptual standards.

 

            I spent so much time on the University studies of English, and didn’t ever bother to mention some major writers and their critical contributions in America.  I don’t hold myself to be competent to say anything authoritatively on American literature, but it seems to me that the so called major writers in America in this century after Mark Twain didn’t produce any major works, and I know that they are starved of critical intelligence.

 

            I am talking as a University teacher to other teachers in English literature, and I think it is necessary for us to be clear as to what is literary criticism and what is not.  But it is just as well that I make clear the conditions existing in India and England and America, for India isn’t related to any other two countries in the world as it is related to these two.  What happens in India is very much related as a sequel to what happens in England, and more so now, to what happens in America.  The more conscious India becomes of this relation, the more it can save itself from self-destruction.  There is no urge here that there shouldn’t be any relation.  The point is, what could be learnt from the existing relation?  A real thought of what should be the right relation is what helps us most. 

 

            This is what literary criticism does: it thinks about literature as much as about life; it thinks in order to produce perception and thought.  It is evaluative, and its terms are always evaluative terms.  There aren’t different kinds of literary criticism (to remind ourselves how that book of “Five Approaches” is the Indian teachers’ delight); there is only one kind – it is intelligent criticism.  On the other hand, it is the academic spirit which postulates different kinds of literary criticism, as psychological, moral, anthropological and so forth.  It is a classification, totally false and misleading, however satisfying to one’s academic spirit.

 

            The main part of training for literary criticism is to settle accounts with review writings under the conditions peculiar to their quality and with academic spirit as it is, in its nature, determined by the special circumstances favouring its activities.  A literary critic must receive his training, not in any programmed course, but through self-education to be able to show what reading of a text is most profitable and what work is worth reading.  I hold on to the belief that what he can say about life determines what he can say as a literary critic – I think his hold on life is as important as his hold on literature for his criticism to be sane and useful to us.  What makes him a sensible critic is his ability to see his job as most complex and too difficult to do, and as a work for which he has no handbook to learn from; but he must get along improving his mind by toiling with books, and by refusing to take shelter in the knowledge of description and in the knowledge of inductions, and in saying things easily, adopting the manner of those who said so.  There are too many, and too subtle points he has to learn by his sensibility and by his practice in thinking.  I think he must be most sensitive to life-points in stating – whatever is offered as a deserving statement of an idea.  Surely no critic can offer intelligent commentary if, by lack of training, he isn’t sensitive to the stating in the text, and he won’t be sensitive unless he holds standards by conviction, being able to discriminate the best from other grades of work.  You know a critic’s level by knowing what point he takes up and how he states it for his purpose.  I am sure he cannot be too careful about whatever tempts him – to write for effect and what attracts him to speak out of calculation.  There cannot be a worthwhile critic but proves his existence as such by his discipline – he must acquire that discipline to which review journalism and academic spirit cannot aspire, being hostile to its regime of self-education.

 

Renaissance scholars failed to realise, moreover, that Aristotle was a practical critic whose judgements are relevant to Sophocles rather than to the whole of Greek drama (there is no unity of time, for instance, in the Euminides).  Nevertheless, the ideas of Sidney and ambitions of Jonson convey insight into the fact that the tragic imagination owes to the Greek precedent a debt of recognition.  Time and again, this insight has mastered the sensibility of Western poets.

 

The ‘sense’ of this passage doesn’t represent what is true nor is the author concerned to represent it, for he has an idea or ideas to manage his readers.  Literary criticism is impossible in this idiom of Steiner.  Unmistakably it is the academic journalism of one who courts popularity and one who isn’t self-disciplined because he has enjoyed the success of being a reputation.  Whether ‘practical’ and even ‘judgements’ are used for their sense is doubtful.  By a complaint against the Renaissance scholars, he, I mean Steiner, gives himself the tone of being unquestionable though any undergraduate would have been told in his first year about the mistake they made in their interpretation of Aristotle.  They had a mistaken idea of Aristotle (for I remember that they had only the text of the ‘poetics’ from Arabic scholars) but Steiner is self-important, if not empty, by having no point in this sentence.  He, Mr.Steiner, chooses high-toned sentences, having no relevant argument to offer.  Look at the next sentence, what an insight is conveyed “into the fact” by the genius of academic journalism!  He doesn’t convey it, but he says that “the ideals of Sidney and ambitions of Ben Jonson” convey it.  Yes, the “tragic imagination owes to the Greek precedent a debt of recognition”.  The last sentence is profound looking but senseless.  What the idiom of academic journalism does is that it appears to say so much while offering nothing.  I don’t intend to be a classroom teacher here, but I have wasted my time if you cannot notice that the sentences used by Steiner are unlike sentences which have important sense.  What is defective in such an idiom is that there is no content determining the sentence – here, the sentences have only the journalists’ ideas, which could be read as profound by the readers which his, Steiner’s publisher had in mind.

 

Elsewhere Steiner is not different and writes as admirably as an unself-reflecting journalist.  He pays this compliment to Dr.Leavis, in his idiom:

 

Leavis is difficult to quote from because the progress of response is so continuous and dense-woven. Yet certain moments do stand out for sheer brilliance and propriety of gathered insight.

 

            The idiom reminds us of the public school tone and gesturing (notice the accentuated “sheer brilliance”).  Interest in life could not have tolerated such an idiom.  It is certainly a corrupting idiom.  Later he says but in surly tone: Leavis accused snow of using clichés; his own performance was nothing else.  Steiner has as much skill as any in using language without content but for effect.  He could be excused for his inconsistency in statement on the ground that he might have been offended by Leavis whose remarks are elusive to his fraternity with Snow.  Let me highlight his journalism by one more sentence – I think, very characteristic of his calibre.

 

Like so much in Marx and Freud, the achievement of Levi-Strauss may endure, to use a term from La Pensee Sauvage, as part of the ‘mythology of our time’.

 

            It is facetious to say the obvious, but I cannot refrain from saying that it is a scholarly sentence (name-dropping) without a point.  Academic journalism is easier to detect than newspaper journalism – there is also a class difference between the readers of the one and the other – because it stimulates anything really meaningful.  An author who writes the kind of language that I pointed out could say this too, once again in false idiom.  I won’t enlarge on this.

 

Everything forgets.  But not language.  When it has been injected with falsehood, only the most drastic cure can cleanse it.

 

            I don’t know if Steiner comes under any label, - for all I know he might refuse one, but here is a structuralist whom I read with some excitement.  With Steiner we enter the world of academic journalism, and in this world we find different authors with difference in décor only.

 

This is a vindication of the structuralist paradox that it is not so much man that speaks language as language that speaks man; not so much the writer who writes narrative as narrative that writes the writer.  Secondly, it seems to me, the exercise vindicates Roman Jakobson’s assertion that literariness – that which makes a text literary – is the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.  Stated less abstractly, this means that literary discourse is characterised by symmetry, parallelism, repetition of every kind on every level.

 

            And he goes on in the same essay to say that

 

These parallels would seem to support Northrop Frye’s contention that all literary texts, however modern and realistic, are always displaced variations on certain mythical archetypes.

 

I must congratulate Prof. David lodge on the publication of his structuralist writings.  Lest I should be misunderstood, let me say straightaway that I cannot be induced to have faith in any kind of structuralism.  In the olden days, professors invited ridicule by being pompous and self-importantly lofty.  Modern professors are quite different.  These invite ridicule by carrying theories and ideas on their backs and expecting us to learn from them, if only with approval.  If every faculty is flooded with as much writing like this as the faculty of English literature, I believe the world will be too insane to live in.  I really wish that the English professors should write far less than they do now and spend more of their time in reading repeatedly some great works in order to remain sane.  Reading books and writing a thesis (calling it sometimes a project) with the application of any handy theory will make literary studies anywhere a mockery of learning.  It is unbearable that writing should be conceived from theories of any sort for promotion or professional status and in a self-important spirit.  Why cannot a professor wait till he has something formed into a content to offer after a prolonged intensive study?  Why should he write as soon as he thinks he can write?  Writing should be conceived from the interests of life and from the finer points that suggest themselves to the mind when it has mastered the work and contemplated on it.  Nothing is lost if the English professor doesn’t rush to make his contribution in writing for the sake of a false end.  The purpose of literature is never to expect of a professor to write nonsense; it is more sensible to think that the purpose is to keep him sane.  If anybody flings in my face the question why one shouldn’t write as one pleases, I have no logical point to make.  But I ask, what does one carry from such and such writing?  And I ask of a critic: what do you perceive there in that kind of writing?  I don’t expect him to defend logically what he says but I expect him to say something which is informed by standards.  We must take care not to be confused between a discourse at the logical level, which isn’t ours, and a discourse at the level of standards which is our concern.  Importance makes use of logic but wisdom of standards.  The way to be free from theories and ideas is to work hard to get mental power realising the importance of standards.  We must make a special effort to have standards and write in accordance with them.  The way the critic comments on a text betrays him.  If he has standards he will be commenting on the principles of organisation involved in the work and its effects, and on the art of stating of the author that gives value to his work.  But a critic who ignores standards will be discussing a work in terms of theories and concepts, using jargon and borrowing from others.  When does a critic ignore standards?  Anyone who hasn’t made sacrifices to make real advance in his mastery of literature cannot possess standards, he will have to talk about them, while ignoring them, or he will attack one who applies standards.  Standards expose his shaky position in his knowledge of literature.  He can bear any kind of opposition but not opposition from intelligence.  On the other hand, if he has standards, he might sense the danger to his official position, because the authorities cannot stand his comments with standards opposing the received opinion.  Of course, one ignores standards to write a successful book.  Conditions are such that one can do well without caring for standards.  They are the conditions which prevent the mind from becoming powerful through vital contact with achievements.

 

There is a complete divorce between living and achievements – this divorce is the most falsifying condition for the mind.  Living is carried out without the impact of achievements, which are now a matter of formal study.  It is carried out at the psychological level of mind because of the industrial conditions.  So, the general mind is very much a conditioned mind, without a chance to rise to a higher level of desiring different things.  It is ideological and forceful.  Its power makes the cultivated mind impotent to criticise this living at the psychological and ideological level.  It has nearly destroyed the style of living at the cultural and humane level.  The industrial conditions of adult franchise, democratic government, individualism, private enterprise, technology, commercialism, and newspapers create different systems of ideological power which express themselves in the general mind and which change the very nature of the cultivated mind.  The cultivated mind has no courage and freedom to think boldly; it is content to be scholarly and to be rewarded; it does become, either unconsciously or consciously, an instrument of service to the general mind.  One pathetic character of this mind is its loss of spirit for thought, change, and advance.  This cultivated mind now takes to cheap innovations and brings into existence simulations of thought.  I do admit that I am not sound in my argument, but that is my explanation why an English professor has to take up structuralism. He has no mental power to evaluate it, because he has no mental power to criticise the contemporary life of the psychological and ideological level.  He is conceptually arrested.  Therefore he has adopted theories and concepts.  If one has a true sense of literature, one will have no use for structuralism.  Surprisingly, he has nothing to say on the nature of this life while he tortures literature by structuralist analysis.  Concepts are formed without gaining a living point; here the mind is not interested in living but in securing self-interests. 

Prof. Lodge refers approvingly of the archetypal criticism of Frye, but he cannot see, rather cannot perceive, that the very idea of archetypes, is at the expense of the mastery of the details of the text, that a discussion of the text in terms of the similarity of archetypal patterns, ignoring the special and differentiating features of a work, which make its organisation distinct, could be an academic red herring and that Frye cannot make a perceptive statement on the status of a work.  I read Prof. Lodge’s criticism with some excitement because he has written so much without a living point as a centre and without an evaluative principle for his judgement.  His eye is never on the deepest things of life in great art, and he seems to have never suffered himself to learn from the organisation of a great achievement in literature to feel the sharp difference that marks it off from lower grades of achievement.  How can one know and admire a work without perceiving its standing and feeling its distinction?  He is only playing the role of an academic professor rather than being a fine, discriminating, intelligent reader of literary works.  For any thing to be done there must be a force, and the force in him for forming concepts or applying them is not the force of life and thought.  The force of life and thought is always in a point that our mastery of the work suggests, and not in a structuralist analysis of the work.  Let us remember that structuralist analysis doesn’t improve the work analysed, nor is the idea true, that it can light up something of the poem, which we cannot know by other means.  Make any analysis of Frost’s poetry – let it be, if you like, a phenomenological or existential or structuralist analysis, but you can never feel the power of

 

From Heaven if this belief be sent

If such be Nature’s holy plan,

Have I not reason to lament

What man has made of man?

            Frost is not a poet by the side of Wordsworth.  To feel the power of Wordsworth’s poetry you must be trained in reading poetry in a given tradition.  If you feel it, you make intelligent reflections on it, and not an analysis of it.  With regard to poetry analysis is a pretentious affair.  Let me see who can analyse those above lines!  But a trained mind can communicate an evaluative point on its nature; even by reading aloud the right way, it can be communicated.  What must be communicated about poetry cannot be communicated successfully through analysis.  Trained minds, shared experience and habitual interest in poetry are essential for the communication of subtler points in a poem, but modern life, whose character is announced in the general mind, is very hostile to them. We have now academic experts, who rarely move us with the real force of literature by their lessons.

 

            Let us now turn to an American expert in literature.  I was reading a book by him, when I was at first impressed by this passage.

 

But the New Critics reject the distinction of form and content, they believe in the organicity of poetry and, in practice, constantly examine the attitudes, tones, tensions, irony, and paradox, all psychological concepts partly derived from Richards.  The concept of irony and paradox is used in Brooks very broadly.  It is not the opposite of an overstatement ‘but a general term for the kind of qualification which the various elements in a context receive from the context’.  It indicates the incongruities, the union of opposites that Brooks finds in all good, that is complex, inclusive poetry.  Brooks has most consistently held a strictly organic point of view.  Other critics abandon it.  Thus Ransom draws a distinction between structure and texture which reverts to the old dichotomy of content and form.  A poem, he says, strikingly, is much more like a Christmas tree than an organism, with metaphors thought of as ornaments.  Winters comes to a similar conclusion with a different emphasis.  A poem is for him ‘a statement in words about a human experience’.

 

            I am impressed at first by it, but I reread it, coming out with a shudder at its lifelessness.  It is without life, and the effect of it is got by the shine of concepts and phrases.  According to Rene Wellek, the New Critics have something to say, but according to my sense of criticism, there is nothing but a lot of verbiage and dreariness in their statements.  To make a point against them, they seem to have no worthwhile preoccupations – no preoccupations such as make their interest in literature vital.  One great expert, Prof. Rene Wellek, however couldn’t sense any specific point in them to offer us.  What real human purpose does this academism of Prof. Rene Wellek serve?  The reference to I.A.Richards is symptomatic, for it betrays the professor’s want of understanding Richards.  Let me explain one or two points in this context in case I am to be accused of high-handedness.  The work of I.A.Richards is a milestone in literary criticism; surely, it is indispensable for any one desiring not to talk nonsense on literature and not to be glib and academic in commenting on a work.  One must prove one’s mastery of it before one claims to be a literary critic.  Prof. Wellek’s reference to what the New Critics claim to have derived partly from I.A.Richards is glib and academic.  The reference is a total misrepresentation of Richards’s argument and spirit in the ‘Principles’.  It may be interesting to note here that Richards being too difficult to understand for any Indian Professor, Rene Wellek or some other American critics become popular in our English departments.  One professor of M.K.University, Madurai, trades on American critics like Wellek, and exhibits his salesmanship repeating this sentence as a spell like African magician.  “The American critics have gone far ahead of the English.  Nowadays only undergraduates care for Arnold and Dr. Leavis”.  Of course he has his own ‘attainments’ to brag about.  My purpose here is to remind ourselves of the miserable spirit Indian professors like him cherish.  It is as hopeless to try to communicate with them, as to make an appeal to highway robbers for mercy.  I see no hope at all for any Indian in rising from the level of English studies here to understanding Arnold and Dr. Leavis.  I said that an Indian is an imbecile under the Western impact, and here are the Indian professors whom I offer for my illustration without any room for doubt.

 

            I am not a specialist in American literature, certainly not in the work of the so-called New Critics.  But I claim to be a general reader of both with a concern for standards.  I read Henry James far more than any other American author.  I have little knowledge of American poets except that I read them in anthologies and textbooks.   I need not be taken seriously if anyone thinks that I make statements for which I have no proof or authority.  I can be wrong, but I am not ideological.  I am not disposed to say anything for any reason but in the interests of life.  After Mark Twain, no American I read convinced me, either a critic or an author, that he has a creative force of the great achievements of the past, the spirit to look at life passionately, perceptively and thoughtfully and the mind which could refuse to have anything to do with professionalism and journalism.  To make myself clear, let me ask, could any American author write Beatrice Webb’s My Apprenticeship or Yeats’s Autobiographies or even Mark Rutherford’s Autobiography.  I don’t know but I feel that the tone of any of the three authors is impossible for the American mind.  The American authors don’t seem to have an idiom in which I can feel at home.  Their way of stating, which may have virtues for others, isn’t, for me, close to the deepest things of life.  It cannot represent stirring feelings and perceptions about life.  In their modern fiction the characters don’t seem to have a background of real life.  The American novelists seem to be more interested in writing novels only for engaging the general mind, and therefore, there is no life in their works of fiction.  After the II world war, the American mind is abominably ideological, as its emotions and ideas are too closely related to individualism, private enterprise, and democracy; their emotions and ideas are so much bound them up that they are intolerant of different emotions and ideas.  Almost any author I know shows his solidarity with this American order, if only indirectly.  American genius is killed by this order.  There have been only postures of resistance against this order, or cases of perversity and bohemianism, but I haven’t known any intelligent creative struggle against it in America.  This American order is a great threat to the expression of human feelings and thought, and as much a threat to the interests of life.  An author is conditioned by the ideology of this order; either he is grown up in it or he will be careful about it.  In any case his expression suffers from false idiom, it being an expression to attract the general mind.  If he wants to survive, he must show that he is not a threat to this order.  I don’t find in the American language the racy, taut, virile, idiom of feeling, perception and thought.  They seem to write without a profound point or a profound line of enquiry.  Barring the great prose of the nineteenth century fiction in America, it is surprising that there is no great prose of thought there.  I am afraid that I cannot read a paragraph in an American author without suspecting that his expression is unconvincing and false.  Once, someone who was hostile to my view of American writing told me in a red-hot excitement that the speech Faulkner delivered at the Swedish academy at the time of receiving the Nobel prize was great prose.  But I retorted saying that there was nothing in it but false ideas, false sentiments and false exhortation.  I felt it to be so, having read it.  But I won’t dispute with anyone who thinks that he is right and that I am wrong.  I am least interested in attacking American authors, but I must say what my mind could perceive in them.  I claim that there is no major creative work and no literary criticism of the first order in modern America.  If we treat Pound as an American poet and critic, he is an exception, and I leave him out here.

            How false does Kenneth Burke sound talking of poetry in his “Philosophy of Literary Form”!  I compelled myself to be sympathetic to his work, but something in me protests against him.

 

But my position is this; that if we try to discover what the poem is doing for the poet, we may discover a set of generalisations as to what poems do for everybody.  With these in mind we have cues for analysing the sort of eventfulness that the poem contains.  And in analysing this eventfulness, we shall make basic discoveries about the structure of the work itself.

 

            Obviously it is not a statement about anything of importance.  There is no particular preoccupation making, as I put it earlier, his interest in poetry vital.  He writes like a student who doesn’t know the answer to a question, but attempts to answer it, - we say such writing is wool gathering.  It is astonishing how this is praised as literary criticism.  And how pretentious this ‘Philosophy of Form’ is!  It is difficult to bypass what the passage suggests, for something sinister comes to your mind.  Burke pays a handsome compliment to Empson.

 

William Empson’s ‘Some Versions of Pastoral” is unquestionably one of the keenest, most independent and most imaginative books of criticism that have come out of contemporary England.

 

            Empson doesn’t deserve it.  His book is little better than a potboiler.  His “Seven Types” deserves some attention; even then to make much of it is to be wanting in a sense of criticism.  Be that as it may, Burke’s praise is an insincere knowing gesture, and it is intended to show that he has known Empson’s book.  Leave out ‘imaginative’ – it is too general and anyone can use it.  But consider how apt can ‘keenest’ and ‘independent’ be for telling us something particular in Empson’s critical look!

 

            To have confusions is very natural, and the efforts of any good training are directed towards removing them.  Certain confusions might require a revolution to be rid of.  And the Indian confusions on America cannot easily be removed.  They have a life of their own, resisting any attempt to clear the air.  If there is a great technological advance, it is admirable but it does not make everything admirable.  No doubt, what we must get at are its conditions so that we can have a fair estimate of it.  But if any so called achievement in literature is offered for our attention, we have to admire it not on the same basis – mostly of impression, as on that which we tend to admire technological advance.  Here, to judge a literary work is too complex, and an Indian is most unfit for this function, for which one has to be trained in literary judgement, and one has to be habitual in sensitive appraisal of literary works by the conditions for living requiring him to be so habitual.  There must be a sensitive memory of literary works combined by its affiliation with the conditions of living to be capable of literary appraisal.  Literary judgement isn’t a single item like logical judgment, but it is deeply rooted in the conditions of living and training.  There must be a preparation for it, but first there must be an urge for preparation.  Literary judgement stimulates life because it springs from a finer life lived.  If the nature of literary judgement were clear, it would be clear for us to know how to secure a sound judgement.  So, with regard to setting value on any American work, it is most helpful to be sensitive to the American conditions of living as they determine the real qualities of statement.  You mustn’t have an idea of this determination, you must feel it and refrain from any formulation to avoid degrading your feeling.  Whether you can feel it, sense a threat from the American conditions of living to the interests of life, and a chance of being misled by the writing determined by those conditions or not is the real question.  A sense of correlation between the American conditions of living and American writing determined by them is a fine possession of learning in this century, provided you don’t corrupt it by sociological or other ideas.  Direct formulation, let me say, of this sense isn’t really possible.  You can communicate it by indirect references only.

 

            One of the points which I feel strongly is that academic research as carried out now is harmful to literary criticism.  Its conditions are the conditions of the institution and of personal ambition, agreeing with the general mind.  Many of the American professors are research-oriented, if that is the right word.  There is a lack of vital preoccupations in the interests of life stamping their work.  Cheap innovations and self-important postures go with strong personalities of academic spirit. Winters is a strong personality of academic spirit but with little difference from weak personalities of the same spirit.  At times he carries originality with him, which is a sparkling evidence to Indian professors of his gifts.  Here I quote him with the same feeling of agony about America as I express quoting others:

 

Many others have done such work, it goes without saying, these are the men who have influenced our time more than any others (Tate, Brooks, Blackmur).  Eliot is an extremely contradictory theorist, but he appears to see literature as the expression of emotion and emotion as determined by the period:  he is therefore a determinist as far as literature is concerned, and what one might call historical relativist, inspite of the fact that he doesn’t really like the literature of the nineteenth century.

 

It is a great offence to misrepresent Eliot in that cheap manner.  The ordinary-level mind might of course delight in Winters’s stand on Eliot.  Years ago somebody drew my attention to Winters’s attack on Eliot, particularly, on his ‘Tradition and the Individual talent’.  I could see that he did not understand the essay; well, I could perceive that Winters didn’t have those pre-occupations which could enable him to learn something profound in the essay, whatever its defects.   Any one who draws power from literature and communicates it, which is so invaluable to our mind’s growth, could see that Winters is an academic journalist and not a critic; but there doesn’t seem to be a tribunal in the world of democracy to penalise the offence of misrepresenting such an author as Eliot.  Authors like Eliot and I.A.Richards are the victims of the American professors who exercise their individualism having no vital preoccupations in life.  Again, there is the shine of concepts and phrases (here, labels also) and what is surprising is that Winters could be so unself-conscious in his posture.  He seems to be without a body of sound knowledge in the subject to make him check up what he writes.  I quote Blackmur on Eliot again for showing that he too sails in the same boat.  How remarkably similar are the American professors in their characteristic idiom and in their characteristic misrepresentation of authors!

 

 

In short, Eliot as critic is in pretty full and pretty specific relation with all the things a critic ought to be in relation with: the conventional elements of traditions he supports.  With us the type is less common than we believe it used to be. (The Lion and the Honeycomb).

 

            The senselessness of generality of the first part of the first sentence is as obvious as the misrepresentation of Eliot in the second part.  Blackmur falls in line with other critics in writing most disappointingly.  I ask, what interest in life could make you see any point in Eliot?  Blackmur has nothing other than academic interest, and that leaves us with sinister associations about academic chaffering.

 

            Cleanth Brooks is so popular that we should regard him as very important.  One academician of Madras University said to me once that she was head over heels in love with him after meeting him at Harvard.  Respecting her sentiments, I said, ‘without any consequences!’  I notice that she could love without any consequences.  Her adoration of Cleanth Brooks could not be surprising to me, for she has produced nothing by it.  She is representative of the University insanity in India.  I listen to Brooks with alarm:

 

I.A.Richards, some thirty years ago argued that for the sake of the health of literature, we need a spell of purer poetry and of purer criticism.

 

            This kind of corrupting representation, which appeals to his readers, is part of the American idiom.  The question is why doesn’t Brooks get hold of a right point in Richards?  If he could, himself being a well-known critic, I would have different things to say on America.  It seems apparent what these critics have partly drawn from I.A.Richards.  Let me quote him again to have a firm sense of his solidarity with his compeers in America: “Poetry has a characteristic structure and yields characteristic knowledge”.  Yes, it is passable, if only emphasis is meant, and if the next sentence offers us something particular.  Here is the next one, equally general but more pretentious: “It doesn’t compete with, but exists along side, and complements scientific knowledge and historical knowledge”.

            Yes, agreed that poetic knowledge doesn’t come into conflict with any other knowledge.  Isn’t there any particular point for you, Professor Brooks, to pitch on in this poetic knowledge and in that other knowledge?  Let us advance; his third sentence is a winding stair in American idiom of the academic journalism; something novel is introduced – but this novelty is shrouded in empty generality.

 

Since poetic knowledge is made available through poetic form, the attempt to assimilate poetic knowledge too directly and abruptly to other kinds of knowledge has its risks.

 

            Can poetic knowledge be available through any other form than ‘poetic form’?  Who attempts to assimilate this to other kinds of knowledge?  And what are the risks in the event of such a mix-up.  Oh! Come off it, Professor.  The fourth sentence is a pleasant modification of empty sound.        “We lose the value of poetic knowledge in losing the perspective that poetic form gives.”  How do we lose the value of poetic knowledge if we really have it?  By the way, what is this perspective (can’t you say something about it)?  Why do we lose it?  Perhaps, you are warning us to be guarded against losing this important perspective, important, because it gives us poetic form.  It is really amazing how each sentence is contentless but impressive, I should say, dazzling, at times.  He has something concrete in the fifth sentence, but it has only the impressive appearance of being particular as well as concrete.  It will have an effect on anyone with a job in the university.  “It is surely quite proper to deal with Milton’s Paradise Lost, for instance, as a reflection of Puritan ethic”.  What does it come to?  This assertion on Paradise Lost is perhaps legitimate: Paradise Lost is a reflection of the ethic of Round-heads.  So much is said so economically by our American professor!  But his last sentence is far from being simple and empty.  It is, on the other hand, complex and empty.  It is another winding stair in American University discourse.

 

But we may learn more about its ethical content if we respect its own characteristic mode of statement as a poem, and do not, in our anxiety to extract the ethical content, violate that mode.

 

Well, I get mad reading it.

 

            The real critics in the 20^th century are Eliot, I.A.Richards and Dr.Leavis.  They are also popular, whether one understands them or not.  Vulgar understanding in academic circles makes a mess of their work in India.  All three are difficult, and require some maturity of training and a habit of reading serious books to grasp their work.  They are all of them non-academic, not only being very different from the professors we have dealt with, but they have preoccupations also, and not academic interest, characterising their statements, and giving them the value that they have for us.  They do not have a false relation to the general mind, as the academic professors have.  They know and estimate the general mind with a sense of civilisation, and the interests of life are vital in their work.  In so far as they are different from the academic professors, they have a common ground.  It can be said of them that they are Arnoldian: as for them literary achievement is very important for the organisation of finer life, and literary criticism isn’t concerned with concepts but with the evaluation of literary achievement by setting up standards.  Training is essential for benefiting from literature.  They have convictions on what is harmful or not to human life and mind.  All three have a finer mind capable of sensing the relevant position of any literary work to the interests of life.  Their work answers to our sense of the cultivated mind so essential for the interests of life.  They have the power of mind to estimate ideas and to evaluate human experiences and they can sense a subtle and vital point in a writing and in the choice one exercises in living.  They are eminent, being critics of literature as well as of life with abilities in stating perception and thought.  They discriminate and state always from a point of view; their statements have value for us since they can communicate power to our mind.  Their importance cannot be exaggerated because their writing, promoting intelligence and a sense of values, is a bulwark against the corrupting and superficial writing of the academic journalism and the newspaper journalism.  Thought and perception in their work are powerful enough to save us from the crude conditions of the life the general mind prefers and imposes on us, having acquired its disturbing might through industrial conditions.

 

            Their discourse is a discourse of standards.  They are all the more admirable for this point.  By this ability to write with standards, they could assess the status of the enlightenment spirit, the claims of science and democracy and resist the attraction of theories and ideas, which are irresistible to the second-rate mind.  Some reservations have to be made on the position of I.A.Richards and I will make them later.  Their great achievement is the content of thought and perception in this discourse of standards; its impact on the mind of any reader will be remarkable, for its chief merit is the true assessment of the common enthusiasm for science and progress, of the ideas of the Enlightenment, of the language of commonplace ideas, of metaphysical or philosophical or psychological concepts, of false reputations, and of social change.  It is a discourse with a definite opposition to arbitrary opinions, and impressive but pointless talk on literature.  It possesses the energy of resistance to anything popular, scientific and cheap and to partisan assertiveness.  For Indians the most interesting point of this discourse is its definite hostility to the progressive views so dear to the Indian mind, and to the American bent of adopting preposterous ideas.  It is worth remembering that they have positive doubts about the many new disciplines introduced in the university education.  They are critics of life and critics of literature at the same time.  What they could say about a work presupposes what they could say about life.  It is something totally absent in the New Critics.  They do not make a point unless it is regarding life or mind; and get their effect by focussing on the detail.  They are fine masters of discrimination, nuance and subtlety.

 

            Their work is an achievement, but it is related to the contrast between the general mind and the cultivated mind.  They represent the cultivated mind which could be opposed to the general mind.  The sense of how the general mind could be a threat to culture and to the interests of life is the Arnoldian perception.  We have seen that in America there is no contrast, for the general mind there is too powerful to allow for the existence of the cultivated mind, and that in India, the Western impact has made many crucial characteristics common to both, such that a distinction between the two here does not serve any important purpose.  To fight against the general mind, being concerned with its nature, as a cultivated mind is one thing, which is admirable, and which is what they did without taking any false position.  You must understand them within the relation; then, their work acquires a special importance for training in understanding.  Here, I cannot recommend anything else which could offer so much of training for the mind as their work.  But to work in the interests of total life overcoming the historical distinction between the cultivated and the general mind is something different, which they cannot but suspect as falsifying.  Thought and feeling are not as perfect as perception in them.  They thought and felt closing their eyes to the great movement of socialist thought of the 19^th century.  It is rather disturbing how they chose to ignore this great human achievement.  It is surprising that they are least struck by the originality of the thought itself in socialism, in its best work especially.  This omission is something which deserves serious consideration, though their work is none the less very valuable.  It will be in bad taste and crude judgement to understand and assess them by popular ideas of thought.  They are as literary critics most relevant and admirable, surpassing every one else in the 20^th century.  In fact, I know only their work as valid literary criticism, and I contend that there cannot be a socialist literary criticism, for there are socialist ideas, yes, but I know no one with a socialist sensibility who could make a point of perception and thought on literary works

 

From my reading of the writings of the so called Marxist literary criticism, I wish to say that it is too crude for notice and that it suffers from the naïve application of Marxist ideas.  The first thing to know here is that Marx didn’t engage in literary criticism.  Not ideas but standards alone are relevant to literary criticism, let us never forget this.  If there can be Marxist standards, there could be Marxist literary criticism.  But there aren’t Marxist standards as such.  You cannot decide a sentence to be good or bad by Marxist ideas, if you do, you are partisan and not critical.  When the thought of Marx changes your sensibility and when you say something to the point, you have made a Marxian point.  Whether it is a critical point or not, it has to be decided by standards.

 

The French of Montaigne is a mature language, and the English of Florios living translation is not.  Montaigne could be translated into the English of his time, but a similar work couldn’t have been written in it.

 

Eliot’s supreme point is his intelligence which has great power of discriminating ability.  In that above comment what is implicitly said is penetrating: it is only possible for one who can deeply think and feel the conditions of life and speech.  Eliot is a great example of a genius in learning and in changing his learning into the power of mind.  There is no logic involved in such a remark; one must train oneself to be perceptive to be able to make it.  It is being perceptive in the interests of life that makes him say so.  It is far from being academic or scholarly; it is pregnant with the critic’s rich sense of the speech-idiom and the conditions of life which make one side of speech possible rather than the other.  You can always notice another point in Eliot, that he doesn’t allow any conscious formulations in his criticism.  A comment of his comes from pressures and with implication.  So, the richness of his criticism is very striking.  After Arnold there was no criticism till Eliot published his ‘The Sacred Wood’.  Pater could be read now as a boring journalist.  But Eliot is refreshing with the power of mind he brought to bear upon criticism.  His earlier work is great literary criticism.  The power of his perception and insights makes us return to his work often.  One can go on living endless illustrations from his work.  And he has become famous for so many pregnant remarks he made in his general essays.  I shall not take up any of the controversial statements, as I have no space for them.  Let me give one more example of his writing this time about criticism itself.

 

On the contrary, the true generalisation is not something superposed upon an accumulation of perceptions; the perceptions do not, in a really appreciative mind, accumulate as a mass, but form themselves as a structure; and criticism is the statement in language of this structure; it is a development of sensibility.  The bad criticism, on the other hand, is that which is nothing but an expression of emotion.

 

            Nothing better can be said on the function of criticism.  However, I find his essay, ‘The Function of Criticism’ much less engaging than that of Arnold’s with a similar title.  I get this feeling often that Eliot’s interests in life are not as vital as Arnold’s.  For instance, there is more of energy in Arnold’s essay than in Eliot’s, more of intelligent engagement in the contemporary life in the former than in the latter.  How vibrant is Culture and Anarchy compared with Notes towards a definition of Culture.  Eliot could spoil his work in his later criticism by social response – that is to say, by recognising the importance of the response elicited.  He would never say ‘Perissons en protestant’.  Yet, he is as important as Arnold in literary criticism.  His influence is far greater than that of any other critic in the last four decades.  I am hard up for space, but still I must mention the magnificent achievement of his essays on Elizabethan dramatists and on the Metaphysicals.  No one has done as much as Eliot to make us sensitive to the idiom of language in poetry.  He is a fine reader of poetry and a perceptive critic, being able to feel the life of language in a work.

 

            I.A. Richards is the theoretician of the three, with the distinction of drawing on psychology and making his theoretical and strategic propositions sound and convincing.  He has achieved success because his tone of enquiry is original.  He is scientific in the sense that he made use of what science has to say against the metaphysical nonsense of the earlier theoreticians who have written on the value of arts, and certainly not scientific in the sense that the defenders of science put science above arts.  His starting point is the consideration of the effect of arts on human character; next he considered how important is this effect in the development of civilisation, and thirdly how to secure it.  Scientific as he is, he defended arts by a clear-sighted sense of their value for life.

            He has no concepts, mystifying or not, which cannot be defended in defence of arts.  He is addressing himself to those who would defend arts but have no real argument in their defence except some abstract on nonsensical concepts.  He deserves the name of great contributor in literary criticism, since so much of misleading and stupid ideas on arts are swept away in his work, and he established unquestionable points of reference for the importance of arts.

 

Human conditions and possibilities have altered more in a hundred years than they had in the previous ten thousand, and the next fifty may overwhelm us, unless we can devise a more adaptable morality.  The view that what we need in the tempestuous turmoil of change is a rock to shelter under or to cling to, rather than an efficient aeroplane in which to ride is comprehensible but mistaken.

 

Here is a limitation of Richards from which the other two do not suffer.  He is, being scientific, thinking in the line of the Enlightenment, and he lacks taste in that sentence.  He is a Benthamite, but he is not one-sided.  He has worked out his theory – how much it is necessary for us for the sake of giving us a reliable defence of arts and for the best means of securing their right effects!  This point is what we should not forget.  To say that his criticism is psychological criticism is barbarous.  The main point is, rightly speaking, that he has to reject what is worse than psychology regarding arts.  Psychology provided only a point for the body of his theory; it has helped him to know what he is rejecting and what he is talking.  Any way no psychologist could have written the Principles.  He is profound, even if he is scientific; surprisingly many people still say silly things or take up false theories, either not having read him or having misunderstood him.

 

We pass as a rule from a chaotic to a better-organised state by ways which we know nothing about.  Typically through the influence of other minds.  Literature and the arts are the chief means by which these influences are diffused.  It should be unnecessary to insist upon the degree to which high civilisation, in other words, free, varied, and unwasteful life, depends upon them in a numerous society.

 

            The passage may betray Richards’s interest in psychology, but the idiom is that of fine intelligence, perception, and interest in life.  It is true that he established a general point about literature and its value, but let us note that he did it with a structure of argument which does so much to clear our confusions and offers the most convincing idea of language, of the value of literature, of how we should read a literary work and of the inner threads of connection between living well and the effect of literature and arts on the mind.

 

            Dr. Leavis is an extraordinary man, a genius of a teacher and a great critic.  He is difficult to understand, but it seems easy for anyone to quarrel with him.  That explains why he is not popular though well known.  The worth of his work is recognised, but it could not be accepted, as in the case of the work of Eliot and Richards.  He is a threat to any self-satisfied English teacher.  He is uncompromising on the question of standards, and very much intolerant of sloppy or fashionable academic writings.  His criticism extends to the contemporary affairs unlike the criticism of the other two.  For him there is always a moral question to answer.  I know the danger of using the ‘moral’, which can invoke disapproval.  It is the only word by which I can give emphasis to the sense of responsibility that pervades his work without any exaggeration.  He is less acceptable than Eliot and Richards to their contemporaries because he is more formidable than they in insisting on standards.  His criticism is the upshot of a struggle; compared with him, Eliot and Richards are less heroic, and they may be pleasing by graces which Dr. Leavis would find to be favouring compromise.  His struggle, of which many of us are ignorant, had been against the optimism and the brute power of what he terms rightly the ‘technologico-Benthamite civilisation’.  In this civilisation, the standards of living and the standards of expression are both appalling and one meets everywhere either with self-satisfaction, or, if at all, only with verbal formulations of attack on this civilisation implying compromise.  There has been an intelligent and critical stand against it, which is uncompromising.  Dr. Leavis did take such a stand, but Eliot and Richards wouldn’t be so far committed.  In this sense, they wouldn’t have done the work which Dr. Leavis did.  There are points of influence which Eliot and Richards exercised over Leavis, but then there is an important critical strain in his work of not sparing them, whenever they are found to be compromising.  His stand is very right, but it is very disturbing also unfortunately.

 

He resents the generality of discussion on a work, and insists on the interpretation of the detail by standards.  To discuss a work in general terms is the habit of the academic spirit, which betrays its irresponsibility.  A literary work is a matter of life; irresponsibility in discussing it is an irresponsibility towards life.  Here he is far more Arnoldian than his other two contemporaries. His intolerance of irresponsibility made many feel guilty and turn revengeful against him.  He braved all opposition heroically, and never solicited recognition.  In his standards of life he drew his characteristic strength from Lawrence and from a profound sense of the past agricultural life of England and of the art-speech promoted by its vitality.  His position is that of separating the great achievement with its complex organisation from non-achievement and defending its value for a finer living.  He holds that where life is uninformed by the value of literature, there you have the crude existence of personal ambition and psychological drives, which we see in the technologico-Benthamite civilisation.  In his sense of what life the values of literature promote he is different from Richards and Eliot.  Richards’s ‘science’ and Eliot’s ‘Anglicism’ have no use for Dr. Leavis.  Intelligence and discriminating ability one ought to acquire for literary judgement by training are what are essential for living too.  The emphasis on the intelligent study of literature is one important character of his struggle against technologico-Benthamite civilisation.  Let me quote from his The Great Tradition to demonstrate, though not satisfactorily, that it is a work not to be expected of either Eliot or of Richards but only of Dr. Leavis.

 

… It is well to start by distinguishing the really great – the major novelists who count in the same way as the major poets, in the sense that they not only change the possibilities of art for practitioners and readers, but they are significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.

 

            The Great Tradition is one of the rarest critical works in literature.  Its standards are rigorous; its language vigorous; its interpretation creative, and it is an education for living and discrimination in taste.

 

            The purpose of this paper is to show what criticism is good for, where you are mistaken and where you can find real literary criticism.

 

 

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