Literary Criticism and History

I HE MAN WHO thought up this Hydra-headed topic was a perverse genius; he knew it was interminable and thus the perfect topic for a symposium. Trying to make a beginning, one explores its possibilities and permutations; one thinks about one's own endeavors as a critic, about those of his contemporaries, and about those who have gone before him. One defines his terms, clarifies his concepts, and works out the critical continuum from the everyday practical business of criticism to the rare periodic endeavors at purely theoretical criticism. One triangulates this topic, as one must, and thinks about the critic, the poet, and history, or, more broadly, about criticism and literary criticism, poetry (in the inclusive sense), and history. One soon realizes that any attempt to think one's way into a historiography is to die into this topic before it is even born; any fool of a literary critic knows that much and so grabs onto working conceptions of history (or, more wisely, uses the term history as if it were defined and had a universally accepted meaning) and begins immediately to speak reasonably of literary criticism as a verbal action upon a historical scene; as the actions of the mind upon the grounds of being; as human action in and counter to history; as a critical action of the mind which begins in history, goes out of history, and then returns to and into it, thus engaging in a kind of perpetual dialectical relationship with history. But, one realizes, all of these bare statements avoid some fundamental issues and confuse the mind with simplicities. This is similar to the simpleminded notion that cutting off one of the Hydra's heads ends the matter. There is a disjunction of some kind because the topic is protean and polymorphous; it cannot easily (if ever) be brought under the control of a single human will. Encountering the Hydra

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