“It was long ago observed by Burke that it is the
understanding alone which distinguishes good from bad taste. The presence of
criticism as a body of knowledge democratizes literature: it provides for literature
an educational discipline, something that can be taught and learned; it makes literature accesible to any student with good will, and prevents it from stagnating among
groups of mutually unintelligible élites.
This structure of knowledge is all the more essential in
criticism, because direct experience, and the intuitions of value it brings,
cannot be directly communicated. The kind of “dialogue”, as it is now
fashionable to call it, that can be established between teacher and student on
a basis of experience and value-judgement alone is not helpful. Thus: (Teacher)
Yeats’s Among School Children is one of the great poems of the twentieth
century. (Student) But I don’t like it; it seems to me a lot of clap-trap; I
get a lot more out of The Cremation of Sam McGee. (Teacher) The answer is
simple: your taste is inferior to mine. (Student) But how do you know it’s
inferior? (Teacher) I just know, that’s all. All teaching of literature is based
on the indefinite postponing of this dialogue until the student learns enough
about literature, as an ordered body of knowledge, to sing a more harmonious
antiphony. For the values we want the student to acquire from us cannot be
taught: only knowledge of literature can be taught. Without the possibility of
criticism as a structure of knowledge, culture, and society with it, would be
forever condemned to a morbid antagonism between the supercilious refined and
the resentful unrefined”.
Northrop Frye, The well-tempred critic
