Criticism and Tragedy

Extract

I should naturally wish to welcome Phil Beisly’s taking up of the standing invitation implicit in a volume of essays entitled Criticism as Dialogue. The notion of‘dialogue’, as used in my book, is intended to work on several levels, sometimes in senses specifically stressed in the book, but of course including just the sort of ordinary dialogue that Mr Beisly has entered into.

Or has he? Obviously, the sine qua non of ‘dialogue’—on any level —is a real meeting of minds; and, unfortunately, I don’t feel that there is much of this going on in Beisly’s article. To this, though, it must be added that, for all the recent drum-rolls for ‘dialogue’ (now increasingly relapsing into anathemas and ‘confrontation’) genuine dialogue is as rare as it is exacting; and most of what claim to be dialogues these days turn out to be either monologues by proxy or bandwaggoning unconditional surrenders.

Actually, Beisly does not pretend to have much use for ‘dialogue’ anyway—at any rate in the field of criticism; and is especially unkeen on ‘Stein’s argument that the demands which criticism faces are nothing less than metaphysical’. He is convinced that ‘metaphysical concepts are not enlargements of criticism but constrictions inimical to it’. And he recoils from the idea of a Christian criticism concerned to elicit or test or nourish such concepts. ‘To be a critic is enough’ (367; 379). Now (‘enough’?—enough for what?), such attitudes might well occasion a genuine encounter of fundamentally differing approaches to literature—i.e. might themselves give rise to a form of critical dialogue. But Beisly avoids such dialectical traps, by dispensing with any such encounter. My book has three—I hope, carefully argued—chapters (out of six) on these problems; and, whilst Beisly’s opening paragraphs, expressing his ‘sense of radical disagreement’ in these matters, raise the question ‘what do we say to the various stages of his’—(my)—‘argument?’, they could hardly be said to indicate these ‘various stages’, still less to ‘say’ anything about them, beyond the fact that he disagrees.