The Institution of Criticism

4 The Task of Contemporary Literary Criticism After the “Death” of Literary Criticism (1974) Everything is back to normal: literature is being produced—to judge by the statistics, more abundantly than ever—and books on the market are finding reviewers. The situation is no different from ten, twenty, or fifty years ago. The predicted demise of literature and literary criticism never did happen. Or so it would seem. Only occasionally do we recall 1968 and the horror with which one viewed the prophets predicting the destruction of the literature industry and the birth of a new and better literature. Gone are the New Left’s dreams of restructuring advanced capitalist society through cultural revolution. Also forgotten, it seems, are the critical assaults on the institution of literary criticism. Was the so-called crisis of criticism nothing but a momentary collapse? A number of the more recent statements on the subject suggest as much. Joachim Günther asserts: “Books are being written and printed, and, despite all the crises of authors and publishing houses, of a satiated public and overfilled libraries, it looks as though this unending process in the underground of the psyche and society, in the depths of the economy, culture, history and human life were not to be deterred or blocked, much less ever eliminated.1 The appeal to the eternally human, so familiar to us from pronouncements of the 1950s, finds its place once more in the arsenal of this “surviving” criticism, and already they are saying that criticism is indeed as necessary as sun and rain. “A newspaper would simply not be able to compete financially if it let itself think that it could discard its literature and review section as antiquated and irrelevant.”2 It is safe to say that this professional self-assurance will probably not be deterred by indications that American newspapers by no means sell fewer copies simply because they do not review books regularly; nor would they be bothered by the fact that even in West Germany the public demand for literary criticism is not all that great: the literary section of large newspapers is, on the average, read by only 9 percent of their readers. Some commentators even regard it as success that peace and quiet prevail at present, as though the arguments against the institution of literary criticism had somehow lost validity because ideological struggle has abated. All that can be concluded from such a view is that those critics have never really understood the meaning and consequences of this much discussed crisis of criticism; that they view objections to literary criticism as minor disturbances that have fortunately been eliminated once and for all. And yet, if we distinguish between immediate cause and deeper structural grounds of the crisis, there is no reason to assume that the pressing problems of a few years ago have been solved. For the most part, efforts of the New Left to destroy traditional criticism through a comprehensive cultural revolution have failed. The institution of literary criticism today is not much different from what it was ten years ago. The eloquent pleas for a new kind of literary criticism have brought about no change, precisely because they appealed to the subjective consciousness instead of transforming the institutional basis. In truth, the self-help measures of literary intellectuals have only scratched the surface. Thus traditionalists have had an easy time pointing out to the prophets of the new criticism that except for few name changes all has stayed the same. Of course, it should be remembered that this is the bad old, and not the sudden renascence of, literature and criticism. Any reassessment of the future of literary criticism will have to begin with the unsolved problems of the past. Contrary to the prevailing tendency to repress such things, the only hope for their resolution lies in recognizing these problems as having accumulated over a period of time, as the product of a given social situation, and not as something that can be done away with exclusively within the realm of literature. Short-term solutions will accomplish nothing. This was one of the failings of the early New Left (1967–70), which in attempting to provide remedies through change of consciousness and by challenging rigid attitudes, failed to see that the business interests sustained by the literary criticism were not to be swayed by verbal appeals. Nor were they to be disarmed by daring violent actions. In fact, to a certain extent the demand for...