December 1967
From Contemporary Literature, 9 (Summer 1968): 311–18. Reprinted in Criticism: Speculative and Analytical Essays, ed. L.S. Dembo (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 37–44, and with minor changes as “Contexts of Literary Evaluation” in Problems of Literary Evaluation, ed. Joseph P. Strelka (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969), 14–21. Frye revised the paper slightly for StS, 66–73, removing two personal references to Murray Kreiger. Also translated into German (1986).
Frye and Krieger both presented papers on evaluation in criticism to the Poetics and Literary Theory Group of the MLA after Christmas 1967. The summer 1968 issue of Contemporary Literature included the two papers (Krieger’s revised and considerably enlarged) and also essays on the same topic by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., and Wayne Schumaker. In his talk Krieger had argued that it is impossible to eliminate taste and evaluation, since the critic uses his own limiting categories of perception or judgments to define the field; he felt Frye bypassed the discreteness of our encounter with a work.
I should warn you at once that I have nothing new to say on this question, nor can I discuss it on Mr. Krieger’s level. I must bring it down to the context of our own professional routine, and though I might rationalize this context as being existential, committed, and the like, even here all I can offer1 is an analogy that seems to me pedagogically instructive. The pursuit of values in criticism is like the pursuit of happiness in the American Constitution: one may have some sympathy with the stated aim, but one deplores the grammar. One cannot pursue happiness, because happiness is not a possible goal of activity: it is rather an emotional reaction to activity, a feeling we get from pursuing something else. The more genuine that something else is, the greater the chance of happiness: the more energetically we pursue happiness, the sooner we arrive at frustration. The more one says he is happy, the more quickly we get out of his way to prevent him from making us miserable.
So with the sense of value in the study of literature. One cannot pursue that study with the object of arriving at value judgments, because the only possible goal of study is knowledge. The sense of value is an individual, unpredictable, variable, incommunicable, indemonstrable, and mainly intuitive reaction to knowledge. In knowledge the context of the work of literature is literature; in value judgment, the context of the work of literature is the reader’s experience. When knowledge is limited, the sense of value is naive; when knowledge improves, the sense of value improves too, but it must wait upon knowledge for its improvement. When two value judgments conflict, nothing can resolve the conflict except greater knowledge.
The sense of value develops out of the struggle with one’s cultural environment, and consists largely of getting an instinct for the different conventions of verbal expression. All verbal expression is conventionalized, but we quickly realize that some conventions are more acceptable to the social group we are associated with than others. In some societies, including our own until quite recent times, the different conventions were linked to different social classes, and high and low speech were at least symbolic of the conventions of lord and peasant respectively. Today we still have, despite the linguists, distinctions between standard and substandard speech, and a corresponding distinction, though one quite different in its application, between standard and substandard writing. The critic who fights his way through to some kind of intuitive feeling for what literary conventions are accepted in his society becomes a representative of the good taste of his age.
Thus value judgments carry with them, as part of their penumbra, so to speak, a sense of social acceptance. One of the first papers I heard at an MLA conference was a paper on Yeats by W.H. Auden, given at Detroit in 1947. He referred to Yeats’s spiritualism in terms of its social overtones of lower-middle-class credulity and drawn blinds in dingy suburban streets, and remarked that A.E. Housman’s Stoicism, while it may have been no less nonsense, was at any rate nonsense that a gentleman could believe.2 There was of course an intentional touch of parody here, but actually Auden was putting an evaluating criticism into its proper, and its only proper, context. Every attempt to exalt taste over knowledge has behind it the feeling that the possessor of taste is certainly a gentleman, while the possessor of knowledge may be only a pedant.
The task of the evaluating critics, who review contemporary books and plays, is partly to prevent us from trying to read all the books or see all the plays. Their work is quite distinct from that of the literary scholar who is trying to organize our knowledge of our past culture, even though it is called by the same name and engaged in by many of the same people. The literary scholar has nothing to do with sifting out what it will be less rewarding to experience. He has value judgments of selectivity, just as any scholar in any field would have, but his canons of greater and less importance are related to the conditions of his specific research, not directly to the literary qualities of his material.
There is a vague notion that historical criticism is a scholarly establishment, and that all critical methods which are not simply branches of historical study, whether explicatory or archetypal, are antihistorical, and ought to be applauded or denounced as such. But of course every great writer who lived in a different time or cultural orbit from ourselves is a challenge to the assumptions on which our evaluative statements are made, and knowledge of his assumptions makes our own more flexible. The fundamental critical act, I have said elsewhere, is the act of recognition, seeing what is there,3 as distinct from merely seeing a Narcissus mirror of our own experience and social and moral prejudice. Recognition includes a good many things, including commentary and interpretation. It may be said—in fact it has been said by Mr. Krieger, and said very well—that it is not really possible4 to draw a line between interpretation and evaluation, and that the latter will always remain in criticism as a part of the general messiness of the human situation. This may often be true as regards the individual critic. Nevertheless there is a boundary line which in the course of time inexorably separates interpreting from evaluating. When a critic interprets, he is talking about his poet; when he evaluates, he is talking about himself, or, at most, about himself as a representative of his age.
Every age, left to itself, is incredibly narrow in its cultural range, and the critic, unless he is a greater genius than the world has yet seen, shares that narrowness in proportion to his confidence in his taste. Suppose we were to read something like this in an essay published, say, in the 1820s: “In reading Shakespeare we often feel how lofty and genuine are the touches of nature by which he refines our perceptions of the heroic and virtuous, and yet how ignobly he condescends to the grovelling passions of the lowest among his audience. We are particularly struck with this in reading the excellent edition by Doctor Bowdler, which for the first time has enabled us to distinguish what is immortal in our great poet from what the taste of his time compelled him to acquiesce in.”5 End of false quote. We should see at once that that was not a statement about Shakespeare, but a statement about the anxieties of the 1820s.
Now let us suppose that an evaluating critic of our own age goes to work on Dickens. He will discover that melodrama, sentimentality, and humour bulk very large in Dickens. He feels that a critic of our time can accept the humour, but that the melodrama and sentimentality are an embarrassment. He has to pretend that melodrama and sentimentality are not as important as they seem, or that Dickens has a vitality which carries him along in spite of them. He will also realize that his own age sets a high value on irony, and disapproves of coincidence or manipulated happy endings in plots and of exaggerated purity in characters. So he will bring out everything in Dickens, real or fancied, that is darkly and ambiguously ironic, or hostile to Victorian social standards, and the coincidences and the pure heroines and the rest of it will be passed over—in short, bowdlerized. To interpret Dickens is first of all to accept Dickens’s own terms as the conditions of the study: to evaluate Dickens is to set up our own terms, producing a hideous caricature of Dickens which soon becomes a most revealing and accurate caricature of ourselves, and of the anxieties of the 1960s.
As long as criticize means evaluate, the answer to the question, “Whom does the critic criticize?” seems at first a very easy one. The person the critic criticizes is, of course, the poet, whom the critic, in the traditional metaphor, judges. The drama critic attends a play and then writes a review judging it; if he is a literary scholar, then he reads the great poets in order to judge them too. Who would bother to be a critic unless one could be in the position of judging the greatest poets of the past? Alas, this carryover from studying to judging does not work, and the literary scholar, many bitter and frustrating years later, discovers that he is not judging the great poets at all. They judge him: every aspect of past culture shows up his ignorance, his blind spots, his provinciality, and his naiveté. When criticize means evaluate, the answer to the question, “Whom does the critic criticize?” turns out to be, in scholarship, “The critic himself.” The only value judgment which is consistently and invariably useful to the scholarly critic is the judgment that his own writings, like the morals of a whore, are no better than they should be.
Of course literature, as an object of study, is a limitless reservoir of potential values. Think of how largely American nineteenth-century writers bulk in our cultural imaginations today, and of how impoverished those imaginations would be if they did not include such figures as Ethan Brand or Billy Budd or Huckleberry Finn.6 Yet it is not so long ago that the question was frequently and seriously asked, “What on earth could you find to say about American literature?” There is in fact nothing in past literature that cannot become a source of imaginative illumination. One would say that few subjects could be duller or less rewarding than the handbooks studied by Miss Frances Yates in The Art of Memory, yet her study has all the mental exhilaration of the discovery of a fine new poet.7 But when value is totally generalized in this way, it becomes a superfluous conception. Or rather, it is changed into the principle that there is value in the study of literature, which is an unobjectionable way of stating the relationship.
The experience of literature is not criticism, just as religious experience is not theology, and mental experience not psychology. In the experience of literature a great many things are felt, and can be said, which have no functional role to play in criticism. A student of literature may be aware of many things that he need not say as a critic, such as the fact that the poem he is discussing is a good poem. If he does say so, the statement forms part of his own personal rhetoric, and may be legitimate enough in that context. Naturally a reader of a work of criticism likes to feel that his author is a man of taste too, that he enjoys literature and is capable of the same kind of sensitivity and expertise that we demand from a good reviewer. But a writer’s value-sense can never be logically a part of a critical discussion: it can only be psychologically and rhetorically related to that discussion. The value-sense is, as the phenomenological people say, pre-predicative.
The study of literature, then, produces a sense of the values of that study incidentally. The attempt to make criticism either begin or end in value judgments turns the subject wrong side out, and the frequency of these attempts accounts for the fact that more nonsense is written in literary criticism, especially on matters of theory, than in any other scholarly discipline, not excluding education. Fortunately, its practice is considerably better than its theory, even when its practice includes MLA papers and doctoral theses on the birthday odes of Colley Cibber.8 No one deplores more than I do the purblind perspectives of scholarly critics, or the fact that so much criticism is produced with so little intellectual energy that it has all to be done over again. Still, it is better not to adopt a critical approach which makes the writing of sense impossible, however lugubrious the result of better premises may often be. With the enormous increase of personnel required in the humanities, I foresee a time when demands that every scholar be productive may be reversed into efforts at scholarly contraception. This may lead to a growing awareness of the difference between the criticism which expands our understanding of literature and the criticism which merely reflects and repeats it.
In the meantime, the effort to reverse the critical machinery continues to be made, usually in some such terms as these: Is not a value judgment implied in, say, choosing Chaucer rather than Lydgate for an undergraduate course? Surely if we were to elaborate a theory explaining why some writer is of the first magnitude, and another only of the tenth, we should be doing something far more significant than just carefully studying them both, because we should also be proving that it was less important to study the smaller man. I do not know of anybody who claims that a valid theory of this sort exists, but I have often been reproached for not devoting my energies to trying to work one out. The argument reminds one a little of that of Sir Thomas Browne that a theory of final causes, working through universal principles of design like the quincunx, would give us a master key to all the sciences.9
It is also part of the great Northwest-Passage fallacy of criticism which always gets stuck in the ice of tautology. The greatest writers are—let me see—imaginative rather than fanciful, or possessed of high seriousness, or illustrative of the sharpest possible tension between id and superego. The critic invariably discovers these qualities in the writers he considers best, overlooking the fact that they are merely synonyms for his preferences. The circumambulation of this prickly pear can go on for centuries, as long as the terms are brought up to date in each generation. Or one may draw up a list of categories that appeal to the sensibilities of the critic because they are fashionable in his age, and call them characteristic of all great literature of all periods. The effect of this is to canonize the taste of that age, and make it into a dogma binding on future generations. I.A. Richards made a parenthetical suggestion about such universal categories in Practical Criticism, but obviously soon realized, not only that the procedure involved was a circular one, but that, once again, such phrases as the “inexplicable oddity” of birth and death merely echoed the anxieties of the 1920s.10 For those who wish to persist with this or similar methods, a certain degree of paranoia will be found most helpful, if not essential.
It is because I believe in the value of literary scholarship that I doubt that value judgments have a genuine function in acquiring it. Those who try to subordinate knowledge to value judgments are similarly led, with similar consistency, to doubt that genuine knowledge of literature is possible, or, if possible, desirable. There are many ways of expressing this doubt, or disapproval. One is the chorus that has for its refrain: “But literature is alive, and you’re anatomizing a corpse.” Such metaphors take us back to the vitalism that has long since disappeared from biology, and the scholarly critic is constantly being told that he is leaving out whatever the objector regards as the seat of the author’s soul, whether his heart, his blood, his guts, or his testicles. The basis of this response is a fixation derived from adolescence, when the sense of social approval is so highly developed, and when it seems so utterly obvious that the end of reading is to assimilate everything into the two great dialectical categories of value judgment, which in my own adolescence were “swell” and “lousy.” But it seems to me (if we must use these metaphors) that there is only one thing that can “kill” literature, and that is the stock response. The attempt of genuine criticism is to bring literature to “life” by annihilating stock responses, which of course are always value judgments, and regularly confuse literature with life.
On the next level there is the notion that university deans and chairmen demand a certain amount of historical research from new recruits as part of a kind of hazing process, before one is allowed to start on one’s proper evaluating work. This research is assumed to exist all on one level, and to be nearly exhausted, so that one is now forced to look for something like the Latin exercise books of Thomas Flatman or the washing bills of Shackerley Marmion. The appearance of every genuine work of literary scholarship knocks the bottom out of this notion, but it revives in each generation of graduate students. More sophisticated versions of the rejection of knowledge are, first, the helpless historical relativism which says that as Samuel Johnson or Coleridge made some of the mistakes likely to be made in their day, so we can only go on making a fresh set of mistakes, and can learn nothing from our predecessors. Second is the assumption that most interpretation, if at all subtle or difficult, is something that the author could not have understood, and hence has simply been imposed on him by the critic, a pretext for an activity begun in self-hypnosis and sustained by group hysteria. If anyone doubts that such a reaction exists, he has probably never written a book on Blake’s Prophecies.
In short, the more consistently one conceives of criticism as the pursuit of values, the more firmly one becomes attached to that great sect of anti-intellectualism. At present it seems to be fashionable to take an aggressive stand in the undergraduate classroom, and demand to know what, after all, we are really trying to teach. It appears that we are concerned, as teachers, with the uniqueness of human beings, or with the fullness of humanity, or with the freedom to be aware, or with life itself, or with the committed ironies of consciousness, or with learning to be at home in the world, or in fact with anything at all, so long as it sounds vaguely impressive and is not reducible to treating literature as something to be taught and studied like anything else. Seek ye first the shadow, we are urged, and the mere substance will be added unto you, if for some reason you should want it. It seems to be in literature that the teacher is most strongly tempted to cooperate with the student’s innate resistance to the learning process, make himself into an opaque substitute for his subject instead of a transparent medium of it, and thereby develop his charisma, which is Greek for ham. But as values cannot be demonstrated, the possession of them is realized only by their possessors, hence the more evangelical the sales pitch, the more esoteric the product. I would of course not deny that teaching is a different activity from scholarship, and that many assertions of value are relevant to the classroom that are not relevant to the learned journal. But I think that in literature, as in other subjects, the best students are those who respond to intellectual honesty, who distrust the high a priori road, and who sense that there may be some connection between limited claims and unlimited rewards.