Page 39 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

CULTURALISM

recognized the strength of part, at least, of the Marxist case against
individualism, Leavis’s thought came to take on a distinctly
“sociological” cast. Leavis’s socio-historical preoccupations led him,
further, to a quite deliberately this-worldly strategy for cultural
renovation, much more reminiscent of Marxism at its most intellectually
militant than of Eliot’s pained withdrawal from the world.
Leavis’s own organicism is at its most apparent in his sense of
literature itself “as essentially something more than an accumulation
of separate works: it has an organic form, or constitutes an organic
order in relation to which the individual writer has his [sic]
25
significance”. The centre of Leavis’s intellectual effort consists in an
attempt to map out the tradition of the English novel on the one
hand, the tradition of English poetry on the other, each imagined in
exactly such organicist terms, and imagined, moreover, as bearing
important moral truths—in particular, as bearers of the value of “life”,
by which Leavis means, in short, non-determined, spontaneous
26
creativity. For Leavis, as for Eliot, literary and non-literary culture
are thus inextricably connected: in a healthy culture, there is “behind
27
the literature, a social culture and an art of living”. And for Leavis,
again as for Eliot, such cultural health must entail some kind of unity
of sophisticated and popular cultures. But nonetheless Leavis privileges
élite culture, or “minority culture” to use his own phrase, much more
so than did Eliot. The essential value of a common culture for Leavis
devolves upon its capacity to sustain a culturally superior minority:
“In their keeping…is the language, the changing idiom, upon which
fine living depends, and without which distinction of spirit is thwarted
and incoherent. By ‘culture’ I mean the use of such a language”. 28
This stress on language is distinctively Leavisite: it explains the
peculiar significance for Leavis of literary culture (the equivalent rôle
in Eliot is very obviously that played by religion); and also the power
of his insistence on the need for a close reading of literary texts. It is
in the language itself, in its most literary moments of articulation,
that the truths of life are most clearly formed. Such a view runs directly
contrary to that characteristically structuralist view of the linguistic
sign as radically arbitrary, to which we shall turn in Chapter 4. The
contemporary intellectual climate allows little credence today to those,
such as Leavis, who have sought to establish non-contingent patterns
of relationship between the linguistic sign and its non-linguistic referent.
Structuralism typically dismisses even onomatopoeia as a matter of

30