Fb2 The Living Principle: English as a Discipline of Thought ePub

I bought this book as a companying reading to <Lives of the Poets> by Michael Schmidt. (Schmidt quotes Leavis here and there.) Leavis' describes his angles of interception with the horizon of language and rhetorics; the description is as interesting as his thoughts.

Excelent!.

This is the fourth of Leavis's books that I have read, the first three being _Revaluation_, _New Bearings in English Poetry_, and _English Literature in Our Time and the University_. _The Living Principle_ is substantially different from those other three. Because of it I give it three stars: in small part for the quality of the book itself, but mostly for that comparison to his other books, as something of an alert to readers who are unfamiliar with Leavis and wanting to explore his writings.

The book is written from a far more philosophical stance than the other books of his that I have read. It is frequently quite abstract in its discussion, even when it is engaging literary texts. Indeed, I would argue it is so abstract that he loses his grasp on his own arguments, even loses his connection to his subject. As such, accepting -- if not following -- his argument sometimes becomes more a matter of faith than of intellect and evidence.

But I don't mean this review to be a condemnation of the book (even though, my judgment of the book is not that high). I mean it simply to be a warning. This book is very unlike others of his books, and I would not recommend it to someone who does know what they are buying. Reading _The Living Principle_, even the famous discussion of Eliot's _Four Quartets_ is a labor, not the pleasure that I got from his other books.

If you are interested in exploring Leavis's writings, I strongly advise starting somewhere else (_New Bearings_ or _Revaluation_ would both be excellent choices). In, truth, if this was the first book of Leavis's that I had picked up, it would also have been the last.

F. R. Leavis said of T. S. Eliot that he was that rare thing: a first-rate intelligence in literary criticism. The compliment is truer of Leavis himself. But first-rate intelligence in literary criticism being a rare thing, it isn't always recognised as such. Now that literary criticism itself is an increasingly rare thing, superseded by the second-hand clich?s of "Theory", misrepresentations of and hostility to Leavis's work have, since his death in 1978, become routine.
Leavis could certainly be clear, even forceful, in his judgements; but the notion that he regarded his views as unarguably true conflicts with both his "theory" and his practice: he knew that intellectual and cultural life was a collaborative enterprise which involved "the creative play of differences" and even "strong disagreements". He set out to present his own judgements clearly - and, crucially, to support them with argument and analysis - so that informed critical debate was enabled. It was a more intellectually honest procedure than the kind of sweeping assertions that often pass for criticism of his work from people who show little sign of having actually read him.

The claim that Leavis refused to defend his critical standards is refuted by ample evidence in his writings, and no-one familiar with his life and work could suppose that he was "never courageous enough" to do so. He was more interested in discussing the specifics of actual works of literature than in "literary theory"; nevertheless he often sought to clarify in more abstract terms what he took the business of criticism to be. That slippery term "ideological" is sometimes used as a club with which to beat him, as if he either didn't know or tried to conceal the values and assumptions implicit in his work; but it's easy to see what kind of values informed his criticism. The real difficulty his opponents have is in accepting that those values might be as worthy of serious consideration as their own ideological preconceptions.
'The Living Principle' is one of Leavis's best books but, as a late work, is maybe not one for first-time readers of Leavis to begin with (they should try Revaluation, The Great Tradition and The Common Pursuit). However, the essays on "Judgement and Analysis" in Chapter 2 ought to be essential reading for any student of literature as a demonstration of what the "close reading" of literary texts can achieve. The discursive opening chapter explores Leavis's view of the nature and importance of literary criticism, revealing some of the informing principles of his own critical practice. It's not an easy discourse - he's not an easy writer - but it repays careful reading and reflection. Particularly important is his central argument that creative literature is important as a form of thought, with the challenging corollary that it is different from and superior to philosophy as a form of "thought about life".
The two subsequent chapters reinforce this argument by analysing the particulars of actual literary texts. "Judgement and Analysis", referred to above, is an admirable demonstration of the kind of attentive reading he wanted to encourage in students. The value judgements of the texts under consideration are not offered as "unarguably true", but they are persuasively made precisely because his analyses give the reader a clear idea of why and how he arrives at those judgements. It's not that he expected his readers to accept all of his judgements (he always insisted that a judgement is of its nature personal) but that he wanted them to benefit from the critical process. And this process was never for Leavis a mere technical exercise. He disliked being associated with "Practical Criticism", believing that practical criticism should be "criticism in practice": the discussions of the texts in this book are primarily concerned with the degree of "reality and sincerity" with which the author's writing presents human experience and emotions.
The last chapter is a long and closely argued study of Eliot's 'Four Quartets'. Leavis pays tribute to the originality of the poetry and to Eliot's status as a "major" poet; but argues that the work is radically flawed because it implicitly denies human creativity. It's beyond the scope of this review to describe how he establishes that judgement. But it's characteristic of his quality as a critic that, even when dealing with a text he admired as a major 20th Century work, he brings to it fundamental criticisms based on profound ethical as well as literary criteria. It is something which, as a first rate intelligence in literary criticism, he had the capacity as well as the courage to do.