Clearance items

Passion leaves you no will to act, because it leaves you no strength to resist.

Elaboration murders wit (it explains the joke).

Television schools your hearing: you hear crashes as stage effects, laughter as on a track.

Satire. Being hard on people in fiction.

Form is how a writer gives permanence to his work. “To His Coy Mistress,” for example, is a seduction argument because the form of classical syllogism keeps it from changing into something else—a serenade, a testimonial of the poet’s love, a praisesong to his mistress’s beauty.

If critics find a new system to stamp on a poem—something they can call a “method,” like Marxism, but divorced from belief and conviction—they feel they have something new to say.

Nemerov defines good writing as getting something right in language, adding that the appropriate response to rightness is silence. Capote says something similar in his Paris Review interview. “The test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story,” he said, “is just this: After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final?” Which suggests that the first test of a great work is whether it leaves you with anything to say. The immediate experience of a great work of literature is akin to clarity of vision or understanding; there is nothing more to add. The comic role of the English professor is to find something to add anyhow.

Ideology, according to Orwell. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Oceania is the perfection of the ideological state, because it has managed to destroy any basis, to remove any corroboration, for a challenge to its set of beliefs. In Oceania there is no means for establishing any “truth” which is independent of the state’s continual account of itself. There the truth is ideological.

The critic forfeits his office if and when he becomes an accommodationist.

Criticism is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.

“Theoretical criticism” is a contradiction in terms; “practical criticism,” a redundancy.

Hawthorne’s remark in his journal regarding Concord is an apt description of the American university as it appears now: “Never was a poor little country village infested with such a variety of queer, strangely dressed, oddly behaved mortals, most of whom took upon themselves to be important agents of the world’s destiny, yet were simply bores of the first water.”