Page 232 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

LITERATURE/SOCIETY: MAPPING THE FIELD 221

scheme of history the critic should see literature as, like a science, unified,
coherent, and autonomous created form, historically conditioned but
shaping its own history, not determined by external historical process.

In this argument the ‘social context’ of the literary text is both acknowledged and
at the same time reinserted into the framework of ‘literary activity’, which is
‘autonomous’.
Leavis has always affirmed that the critical act of reading, interpretation
and judgement is, fundamentally, a social act—while limiting the kinds of
people, the sorts of mind, equipped to engage in this critical dialogue. His
famous prescription for this dialogue—‘This is so, is it not?’—is one to which
only an embattled civilizing minority can profitably subscribe. Perry Anderson
has pointed out that his interrogative statement demands one crucial precondition:
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‘a shared, stable system of beliefs and values’. The less evident the existence of
this morally and culturally unified set of uncommon ‘common readers’, the more
relative this universalized practice of criticism becomes and the more explicitly
elitist his prescription, the more one-dimensional his lament for the loss of an
‘organic reading public’. But Leavis, too, acknowledges that ‘if the Marxist
approach to literature seems to me unprofitable, that is not because I think of
literature as a matter of isolated works of art, belonging to a realm of pure
literary values’. He never aims for the degree of ‘closure’, the squaring of the
circle, which satisfies Frye: indeed, it is Leavis’s ability to hold, at one and the
same moment, to the specific quality of the ‘words on the pag while using the ‘felt
experience’ organized in language as a representative index of the ‘quality of life’
of a whole culture, which makes his work so pivotal to the whole argument.
Leavis always tries to ‘go through’ from the close response to the text to the
‘qualities’ which lie behind its specific organization.

Without the sensitizing familiarity with the subtleties of language, and the
insight into the relations between abstract or generalising thought and the
concrete of human experience that the trained frequentation of literature
alone can bring, the thinking that attends social and political studies will
not have the edge and force it should.

We find here the sources of the paradox that those critics within the Anglo-
Saxon tradition who have tried to think the literature/society problem in a
rigorous way have usually taken their point of departure from Leavis,
while at the same time breaking from the way he has formulated the
problem.

The ‘break’ with traditional literary-critical practice
The most significant ‘break’ within traditional literary criticism to a new way of
formulating the literature society problem is to be found in the work of Raymond