Written in 1932 Allan Tate said “We lack a tradition of criticism. There are no points of critical reference passed on to us from a preceding generation. I am not upholding here the so-called dead hand of tradition, but rather a rational insight into the meaning of the present in terms of some imaginable past implicit in our own lives: we need a body of ideas that can bear upon the course of the spirit and yet remain coherent as a rational  instrument. We ignore the present, which is momently translated into the past, and derive our standards from imaginative constructions of the future. The hard contingency of fact invariably breaks these standards down, leaving us in the intellectual chaos which is the sore distress of American criticism. Marxian criticism has become the lastest disguise of this heresy.”

Oh yes. What a pleasure to read. The hard contingency of fact… Imaginative constructions of the future…

Like all those theories of Emily’s imagined lover, no real evidence, just a disbelief that her passion wasn’t aimed at a specific man or woman.

And like Frank Kermode who, wonderful critic that he is, saw this narrative need of ours to live in the apocalyptic story, to define ourselves by something that isn’t amenable to reason or evidence.

There is so much more in that essay. As I process what he had to say, I will post.