The Reading Experience

Premises

Readers of Morris Dickstein's newest book, Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, should find it an agreeable survey of the cultural expressions of the 1930s that reveals how the Depression years were portrayed and understood by those living through them. Readers of Dickstein's previous books will recognize its method, a fastidious interrogation of novels, films, and other works of art for their historical resonances and mutual assumptions, their ability to show how an entire culture at a particular time is "thinking." Readers less interested in Dickstein's signature critical approach or in the context his earlier books provide nevertheless could easily enough from Dancing in the Dark be made aware of "Depression culture" in a coherent and often insightful way. Dickstein's painstaking scrutiny of texts for their clues to cultural developments can occaionally get bogged down in some turgid writing, but that he can be an acute analyst of these texts within the framework of a consistentently applied historical criticism is undeniable.

While I don't find this sort of historical criticism invalid--there is ultimately nothing wrong with situating a work of art or literature in its period and cultural mileu, as long as the limits of this strategy as a way to "understand" the work are acknowledged--I do find Dickstein's relentless pursuit of the strategy frequently tedious and finally not much service to literature, although Dickstein often assures us it is. Since a great deal of his criticism has been focused on post-World War II American fiction, I think that Dickstein has especially done some misservice to contemporary fiction, my own critical bailiwick, distorting its achievement and finally reducing it to a function as barometer of the cultural and political changes that have taken place in the United States between 1945 and the present.

I make this criticism regretfully, as Dickstein's 1979 book, Gates of Eden, was probably more responsible for setting me on a path of study of contemporary fiction than any other critical book I read or any course I took. It introduced me to the work of experimental writers such as John Barth and Donald Barthelme, of whom I don't think I'd ever heard at the time, and although I could sense even when reading the book as a undiscriminating undergraduate that Dickstein didn't entirely approve of their fiction, especially the Barthleme of the late '60s and after, just the suggestion that Barthleme was "radical" (Dickstein meant to associate him with the decadent, Weatherman phase of 60s radicalism) was enough to make me want to read his books posthaste.

Actually, much of Dickstein's analysis of the fiction of the 1960s still holds up, as I disovered when I recently re-read the book, even if the tacit impatience with postmodernism seems more apparent to me now. (The term "postmodernism" is never used, however; Dickstein in 1979 preferred to identify writers like Barth and Barthelme as modernists, emphasizing the continuity between the formal experimentation of modernism and that which came to be called postmodernism. Dickstein thinks that late modernism radicalized itself beyond redemption in the work of writers such as Rudolph Wurlitzer, but while I can't agree that the experimental impulse inevitably leads to an aesthetic impasse, his implicit suggestion that the adventurous writing of the 1960s and 1970s was really a second flowering of modernism usefully emphasizes that "postmodernism" was first of all a phenomenon of literary history, not a reorientation of history itself.) Above all, his recognition that the fiction of the 1960s represents a significant achievement still seems audacious:

In a topsy-turvy age that often turned trash into art and art into trash, that gaily pursued topical fascination and ephemeral performances and showed a real genius for self-consuming artifacts--an age that sometimes valued art too little because it loved raw life too much--novels were written that are among the handful of art-works, few enough in any age, that are likely to endure. It's a bizzare prospect, but the sixties are as likely to be remembered through novels as through anything else they left behind.

Dickstein finds much that is praiseworthy in the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, and even Barth and Barthleme, despite his judgment that they ultimately take things too far. However ambivalent his reaction to the most adventurous of adventurous fiction, and however much attention he gives to writers whose work will not, in my opinion, "endure," such as Bellow and Mailer, Dickstein's consideration of the experimental fiction of the sixties inspired me at least to take this fiction seriously and to discover for myself whether it produced work "likely to endure."

Unfortunately, the very passage I have quoted, I now see, also signals the real limitations of Dickstein's approach, of the assumptions about fiction's utility as a clue to culture. The last sentence arguably implies that the novels of the era will endure because they are the best way to "remember" the sixties. For those who lived through the era, they will continue to evoke it; for those future readers who did not, they will still enable a cultural "remembering" that will likely allow us to get a glimpse of the kind of "topical" and "ephemeral" attractions Dickstein describes in the rest of the passage. These novels will be "left behind" for scholars and others interested in that "topsy-turvy age" to recreate it, either critically or imaginatively. Fiction is ultimately of value, especially fiction particularly attuned to the social wavelength of its period, as a window onto history. It perhaps enlivens history in a way that straight historical narrative or cultural criticism, cannot, but otherwise it remains an adjunct to the study of culture in its historical manifestations.

My own initial response to Gates of Eden demonstrates that it is possible to read the book as an illuminating appraisal of American fiction of the 1950s and 1960s, but turning to Dickstein's other writing on postwar fiction only confirms that ultimately his purpose seems to be to pin postwar writers down as specimens of their time and place, at best figures in a procession of "tendencies." In the essays "The Face in the Mirror: The Eclipse of Distance in Contemporary Fiction" and "Ordinary People: Carver, Ford and Blue-Collar Realism" (both reprinted in A Mirror in the Roadway, Dickstein's explicit defense of realism), he extends his survey of postwar fiction into the 1970s and 1980s. In the first, he notes a shift in the 1970s toward novels "built around characters who are the very self and voice of the author," exemplified by Philip Roth, William Styron, and John Irving. In the second he discusses the rise of minimalism in the work of Raymond Carver, as well as the subsequent move away from minimalism to "a more expansive, more full-bodied fiction" in the work of Richard Ford and Russell Banks. In the latter he predicts a further shift to "some transformed and heightened version of the social novel." Clearly Dickstein is most interested in contemporary fiction as an opportunity to chart developments in fiction's way of registering social realities. Chronicling the rise and fall of trends in fiction is not necessarily a trivial activity, but in Dickstein's case the single-minded manner in which he pursues the task does threaten to make criticism an intellectual version of fashion journalism.

Leopards in the Temple (2002) is probably Dickstein's summary statement of the historical progression of postwar American fiction. Subtitled "The Transformation of American Fiction 1945-1970," it again focuses on the 1950s and 1960s, this time treating only fiction but otherwise covering much of the same ground scrutinized in Gates of Eden. The biggest change in approach to the fiction of this period is a considerable narrowing of the the terrain on which Dickstein is willing to cast his critical eye, leaving experimental or postmodern fiction out of view almost completely. He instead devotes most of the book to discussions of well-publicized mainstream writers such as Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Mailer, James Jones, Jack Kerouac, James Baldwin, John Updike, Bellow, and Roth, although there are a few welcome considerations of Paul Bowles, Nabokov, Heller, and Vonnegut. Dickstein's implicit dismissal of experimental fiction is perhaps best exemplified in his discussion of John Barth's End of the Road, which Dickstein calls "Barth's best novel" and is included in Leopards in the Temple in the first place mainly because it illustrates the "road" theme Dickstein traces from Kerouac to other writers of the '50s and early '60s. His attitude toward Barth's later metafiction, truly his most important achievement, well beyond End of the Road, is surely encapsulated in his observation that "In Lost in the Funhouse and Chimera Barth's genial narrators soon grow as heartily sick of [their] self-consciousness as we do."

One can legitimately find the work of John Barth and other metafictionists not to one's liking without distorting the fact of its prominence during the period Dickstein is examining. It is hardly credible to suggest that the 1960s are most appropriately represented by Bellow, Malamud, and James Baldwin, which Dickstein does in his final chapter by highlighting their work rather than the postmodern writers, whose work rebelled against the quiescent realism preferred by the gatekeepers of literary culture, much as others rebelled against the constraints of conformity and established practice in other arts and in politics during this time. A survey of the "transformation" of American fiction after World War II that willfully excludes this work is finally hard to take seriously.

Leopards in the Temple posits a postwar literary history that begins with war novelists, proceeds  through the early fiction of certain writers who first came to public attention immediately after the war, such as Vidal and Capote, further through sensation-causing writers such as Kerouac and J.D Salinger, and, with some pauses along the way to acknowledge a few other noteworthy authors, winds up affirming the centrality of culturally sanctioned novelists such as Bellow, Baldwin, and Mailer. Another history of postwar fiction is possible, however, one that begins with, say, John Hawkes, emphasizes Nabokov's work beyond Lolita, carefully considers William Gaddis, includes James Purdy and Thomas Berger along with Joseph Heller, and takes as the apogee of the period the work of Pynchon, Barth, Robert Coover, and Donald Barthelme. Dickstein's history is a history of American culture as reflected in his chosen authors and books; the alternative history is more properly a literary history of the years 1945-60, one that focuses on the response of writers to the legacy and the challenges of modernism by extending that legacy through fiction that continued to challenge readers' expectations and that, in my opinion, more accurately encompasses the writers whose work will still likely be read once this period more firmly recedes into literal history.

What now alienates me the most from Dickstein's critical method, however, are the grand generalizations he makes about the practice of fiction, generalizations that interpose great distance between the critic and the texts he/she ostensibly tries to illuminate. He writes, for example, that for novelists of the 1940s and 1950s

They were obsessed more with Oedipal struggle than with class struggle, concerned about the limits of civilization rather than the conflicts within civilization. Their premises were more Freudian than Marxist. . .Auschwitz and Hiroshima had set them thinking about the nature and destiny of man, and relative affluence gave them the leisure to focus on spiritual confusions in their own lives.

How does Dickstein know what "they" were thinking? How can "they," as opposed to individual writers, be thinking anything except insofar as the critic has self-selected a few of "them," invested them with "premises" and speculated about "their" social standing ("relative affluence") and the state of their souls ("spiritual confusions")? Occasionally Dickstein does offer an interesting critical reading of a particular text, as when he observes of Catcher in the Rye that "Holden's adventures in New York are really a series of Jewish jokes, at once sad, funny, and self-accusing," but the overwhelmingly dominant impression left by Leopards in the Temple, and by Morris Dickstein's books as a whole, is that fiction is most worthwhile as a leading indicator not just of just of writers', but an entire culture's temporal obsessions. If I thought this was the foremost reason to read novels, I'd probably never read another one.

ADDENDUM Morris Dickstein has responded to this post in the comment thread below.

Only Change and No Urns?

While reflecting on the role of "innovation" in poetry, Ron Silliman pauses to offer this comment:

I have written before that any history of poetry is inevitably a history of change in poetry, and that an inevitable consequence is that the well-wrought urn is almost invariably a trivial accomplishment. Indeed, it’s a trivial goal.

The "Well-Wrought Urn" is of course the title of Cleanth Brooks's "Studies in the Structure of Poetry," as the book's subtitle has it. It is probably the most important critical work to emerge from the practice of "New Criticism," and it can still be read as a primer of sorts on that approach to literary criticism.  New Criticism was dislodged from its place as a dominant academic critical strategy long ago, but it continues to draw much abuse from those who associate it with an apolitical formalism or an almost religious reverence for the poem as "verbal icon" or, in Silliman's case, view it as a critical adjunct to the "school of quietude" in poetry.

It is true that in invoking the "well-wrought urn" Brooks was trying to call attention to poetry as a verbal equivalent, a poem as an art object sufficient unto itself. But the trope can be dismissed as a "trivial goal"--indeed, as a "goal" at all--only if you assume that the urn is well-wrought because it successfully attains a level of "beauty" that conforms to pre-established formal requirements. Literary history as a series of such skillfully-fashioned verbal objects reinforcing aesthetic norms would indeed be a tedious procession, and the goal of adding yet one more "fine" work would indeed be trivial.

But I don't see why "well-wrought urn" has to be taken in this way. A poem, or any other work of art, could be still be admirably made even if it departs from norms and conventions, although it might take some readers a little longer to recognize the "well-wrought" qualities of such a work. Time might be needed, or a perspicacious critic who can illuminate the aesthetic strategies employed, but surely there are too many "great" works of formal splendor that at one time were perceived as ugly or misshapen for us to accept that the notion of the well-wrought can only apply to conventionally beautiful art. Who now thinks Joyce's Ulysses is not carefully wrought, even though at the time of its publication it was perceived as chaotic? If a work carries out its own aesthetic assumptions in a deliberate and coherent way (and even apparent incoherence often has its own justifying logic), why should we not call this effort "well-wrought," even if the results are at first unfamiliar?

So, yes, the history of both poetry and fiction is a history of change, but that is not inconsistent with a literary history featuring "well-wrought" works that were also, in their time and, in some cases, are still, challenging and unorthodox. I agree with Ron Silliman that what is presented as new and innovative in art is often just "fashionism," although it seems to me that Ron's emphasis on the "evolution" of poetry, on literary history as only change and no urns, threatens to make poetry even more into fashionism. There has to be room for the recognition of aesthetic success that remains successful.

The Richest Experiences Possible

In a review for Rain Taxi of Noel Carroll's On Criticism, Nigel Beale paraphrases Carroll's description of the critic as

he or she who says what is good in a work, pinpoints what is valuable, bolsters observations with compelling reasons, and helps an audience to understand and get the richest experiences possible from those artworks under evaluation.

I can readily agree with the proposition that the useful critic "bolsters observations with compelling reasons, and helps an audience to understand and get the richest experiences possible from those artworks under evaluation," but it seems to me that the critic who accomplishes these things doesn't really need to focus so earnestly on declaring what's "good" or "valuable" about the work. He or she could easily settle for "observations" backed with details in an effort to "pinpoint" what the work has to offer and to do so in order to encourage the reader/viewer/listener to have "the richest experiences possible," while letting "what is valuable" remain implicit. At some point the critic has decided that the work in question is worth this sort of description and analysis, and that it is worth a potential audience's time, but to belabor the "evaluative" function of criticism beyond that point is really just superfluous.

On his blog, Nigel has frequently stressed the importance of the evaluative as the central mode of criticism, but both there and here I believe he is confusing "criticism" in the broadest sense with reviewing in the narrowest sense. The reviewer's job is, in part, to evaluate, although even the reviewer still has some obligation to describe or "observe." Criticism following on the work's initial reviews certainly doesn't need to fixate so intently on evaluation, although there are cases, when a critic is trying to bring attention to an unduly neglected book, for example, in which evaluation might still be emphasized. Works of literature need ongoing critical reading and competing interpretations, not perpetual reviewing and judgment. The latter, in my view, is in part an attempt to elevate the critic making the judgment over the work itself.

No doubt Nigel might say that critics can avoid this if they apply well-established criteria, if they make the judgment "based on the extent to which they implement the known purposes of their categories and meet accepted criteria of artistic excellence." But this is a recipe for aesthetic stagnation and critical orthodoxy. What if a work of fiction or poetry implements an unknown purpose of its category, one unknown until now, until its successful illustration in this particular text? What if this text alters the "accepted criteria of artistic excellence"? Perhaps one could say that the innovations of this work subsequently get folded inot the "accepted criteria" of judgment, but what is the point of collecting and hoarding these criteria in the first place if it has to be admitted that they change when an innovative poem or novel shows them to be inadequate? Careful description and a tolerance for disruptions of established standards are in my opinion more "valuable" characteristics of the literary critic than the willingness to make overweening pronouncements.

My initial contribution to Critical Distance is, I believe, a critical essay that illustrates the difference between description and evaluation. In my analysis of Russell Banks's Affliction, I don't assess the novel according to the full range of "accepted criteria of artistic excellence." I don't urge the reader to either read or not read Affliction as an effort to say "what is good in a work" and thus reinforce the accepted criteria. I assume the reader thinks I do consider it worthy of his/her attention or I wouldn't be devoting an extended analysis to it, but otherwise leave that as a (correct) assumption. My goal is to describe how the various devices Banks uses helps to "contextualize" the naturalist novel that is the model for Affliction. I may or may not succeed in the attempt to elucidate the "artfulness" of these devices, but I am trying to put Affliction itself in a context that will, I hope, provide the reader with a richer experience when reading this novel.

Knowing Lots of Other Writers

In his frequent posts on the goals of literary criticism, Nigel Beale often falls back on his core notion that criticism is essentially an evaluative act, an attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff in literature, to identify those works that are worth readers' further attention and those that are not. I have on several occasions responded to Nigel's assertions by emphasizing that criticism should be at least as much descriptive as evaluative, an effort to account for a work's effects as honestly and thoroughly as possible--and to do so on its own terms--before passing critical judgment. Indeed, I have argued, and continue to believe, that literary criticism in its most useful form more or less takes for granted the superior accomplishment of the work at hand and proceeds to illuminate the strategies by which the work has brought this off.

But then I am reminded when reading something like these remarks by J.R. Lennon at the blog Ward Six of the need for honest evaluation, at least in book reviewing:

. . .knowing lots of other writers is nearly inevitable, especially if you study or teach at a college, and for the most part it's desirable, too.

It becomes problematic, though, when you wish to perform the geuinely useful act of substantively criticizing other people's work. What if you end up on a panel with that writer someday, or have to deliver a reading together? What if that writer reviews books, as well, and yours falls onto her desk?. . .

Writers should criticize one another, respectfully and carefully. To offer only praise for the things you like doesn't quite constitute a useful dialogue--if something bugs you about a peer's work, and you can support your views, you ought to be able to express them, calmly, without the fear of making an enemy--and you should have the humility to accept similar criticism yourself. . . .

It's at first hard to disagree that a writer acting as critic would want "to perform the genuinely useful act of substantively criticizing other people's work," but unfortunately Lennon frames this discussion of "criticism" as a criticism useful mostly to the writer on whose work the critical comments focus. They shouldn't be so critical as to make the next panel discussion uncomfortable; they should be in the form of "useful dialogue" between colleagues; above all, presumably, they should be "respectful" and "careful," the sort of comments that can be supported with specific examples.

This is criticism as derived from writing program workshops. It's a "dialogue" among "peers" learning, and later practicing, the craft, but it doesn't take either the reader or the larger context of literature itself, within which the reader must approach the work, into account. The service it provides is a service to a fellow writer, who would no doubt benefit from the constructive criticism Lennon advocates, but it hardly acts as "substantive" criticism except as advice to fellow writers about ways to improve their practice. Surely it does not amount to the kind of substantive criticism one would hope to get from literary critics who conceive their first and primary commitment to be to literature as a whole, defined as an ongoing collective enterprise with an identifiable history to which current works inevitably have a meaningful relationship and among whose current exponents some equally meaningful connections can be made. Such critics must take works of fiction and poetry to be important (or not) beyond their origins in the effort of any one particular writer, certainly beyond their status as samples of "other people's work."

Not only, then, is Lennon mistaken to suggest that "the only people who are really qualified to review books are other writers," but to extent that these writers are unable to transcend the kind of "respectful" attitude their workshop training instills, they are probably the least qualified kind of book reviewers. Literary critics have to make judgments that leave behind concern for writers' self-esteem, even when this exposes one's own writerly self-esteem to similar injury. They have to accept being occasionally, perhaps always, unpopular. Probably they have to forego the opportunity to attend dinner parties with other writers.

Criteria for Literary Value

Lev Grossman has seen the future of fiction in the digital age and has come back to tell us about it:

Like fan fiction, it will be ravenously referential and intertextual in ways that will strain copyright law to the breaking point. Novels will get longer--electronic books aren't bound by physical constraints--and they'll be patchable and updatable, like software. We'll see more novels doled out episodically, on the model of TV series or, for that matter, the serial novels of the 19th century. We can expect a literary culture of pleasure and immediate gratification. Reading on a screen speeds you up: you don't linger on the language; you just click through. We'll see less modernist-style difficulty and more romance-novel-style sentiment and high-speed-narrative throughput. Novels will compete to hook you in the first paragraph and then hang on for dear life.

None of this is good or bad; it just is. The books of the future may not meet all the conventional criteria for literary value that we have today, or any of them. But if that sounds alarming or tragic, go back and sample the righteous zeal with which people despised novels when they first arose. They thought novels were vulgar and immoral. And in a way they were, and that was what was great about them: they shocked and seduced people into new ways of thinking. These books will too. Somewhere out there is the self-publishing world's answer to Defoe, and he's probably selling books out of his trunk. But he won't be for long.

There's much about Grossman's analysis that is self-contradictory: If reading quickly will be encouraged by electronic reading, why would novels get longer? If online "readers" are so averse to language, why won't they just eventually gravitate entirely to purely visual communication or entertainment, as has happened already in the transferal of interest from books to film and television? What's a more "high-speeed" narrative than one without words at all? And unless Grossman sees a new form emerging from the electronic maelstrom--not prose fiction but something else--then no Daniel Defoe will appear, since Defore helped create prose fiction itself, did much more than just call attention to himself. What Grossman describes is simply a continuation of "fiction" as we know it, only stupider. It isn't a new genre of literature, only the same one published in different ways.

Lev Grossman's abilities as seer aside, however, something like the transformed publishing environment he evokes is likely to obtain in the not-too-distant future. "Old-school" publishing will continue to fade from relevance, perhaps disappear altogether, to be replaced by less heirarchy-driven modes of publication. Most of the current gatekeepers will find their gates disassembled. The current of choices already confronting the reader of fiction will become a torrent.This new dispensation is likely to strike many of us as chaotic--Grossman is being disingenuous when he writes that "None of this is good or bad," since he surely knows most of his readers judge it to be bad indeed--especially those of us who want some of those "conventional criteria for literary value" to survive.

What Grossman apparently didn't take away from his glimpse into the future (perhaps because he fears his own place as a print-based critic will simply be washed away) is any sense of the role literary criticism might play in counteracting the New Chaos. I think it will have signficant influence on the development of democratized "literary culture," arguably even more influence than criticism now has on print-centered literary culture, since an infrastucture of critblogs already exists and already focuses its attention more widely on marginalized books and presses than print book reviews ever did. Cybercriticism will probably go a long way toward meliorating the chaos lurking beneath Lev Grossman's account, even if such criticism doesn't exactly duplicate the practices of newspaper book reviews, magazines, and the few remaining print journals. There will necessarily be a less uniform focus on the same few new titles, fewer exercises in biographical speculation masquerading as criticism, fewer critical essays that are more about the critic than the work ostensibly at issue. But otherwise there's no reason why web criticism can't carry out the sorting process in which criticism has always been engaged. The worthwhile will be separated from the worthless, the most challenging work will be identified while the jejune and the formula-riven will be duly ignored. Maybe there will be more books to keep track of, but most of them will be dispensable, anyway, and many more blogs and websites will be around to do the sorting than ever was the case with print criticism.

If I'm being overoptimistic and literary criticism fails to adapt itself effectively to these changed circumstances, the disarray implied in Grossman's speculations won't really register much, since fiction itself will no longer matter to anyone.

Separation Anxiety

In this comment thread on my recent post defending James Wood against William Deresiewicz's critique of his aestheticism, Richard Crary claims to be confused by my distinction between reading within an always-present context and reading "for aesthetic purposes."

. . .nearly every post you put up gives readers the impression that you do read entirely for aesthetic purposes, while strongly giving the impression that you see aesthetic issues as somehow easily distinguished from others (political, etc). I think readers might be forgiven for repeatedly coming to the conclusion that you think context can and ought to be ignored altogether!

This seems as good an opportunity as any to try to clear up this confusion, which perhaps can be reduced to a lack of clarity about uses of the word "reading." In one of my own responses to Richard, I maintained that while "Aesthetic 'issues' are easily distinguished from others," it is nevertheless impossible to read "absent any consideration of context," since it "plays a part whether I like it or not." In the latter case, I am "reading" in the common, most literal sense of the term: encountering the text for the first time, reading it as innocently as I'll ever be able to, as purely for the experience of reading the words on the page as will ever likely be possible. When I'm reading in this way, "context" refers to all of the ideas, emotions, and experiences I bring to the reading experience, which indeed I couldn't discard even if I wanted to. (Among those experiences would be my previous experiences with this author, or with this kind of fiction, etc.)

But I can also engage in a "reading" of the text following some reflection on the initial reading, after consulting critical commentary on the text, and perhaps after re-reading the text itself, wholly or in part. (This is not quite the same thing as interpretation, which generally narrows the text's possibilities in order to pin down its "meaning"; the kind of reading I am describing is an attempt to expand those possibilities, to open up the text in order to make its palpable qualities more accessible.) It does seem to me that at this stage it is entirely possible to separate aesthetic "issues" from other issues on which one might want to focus attention and that, depending on the specificity of one's definition of "aesthetic," such a separation is not difficult. Some people might think this separation is undesirable, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.

It's probably because I do often insist that the aesthetic qualities of a literary text ought to be at the forefront of the reader's initial encounter with it (notwithstanding the "context" within which this occurs, which nevertheless cannot be denied), and because my own preference as a critic is to concentrate on "aesthetic issues" that I am called an "asethete" and that I am accused of believing that reading can occur in a context-free zone. I don't mind the first, but the second assumes I am some sort of aesthetic ideologue willing to deny reality in order to keep my beliefs conceptually afloat.

I insist on this blog that we attend to the aesthetic prerogatives of literature because in today's literary culture, both academic and generalist, those prerogatives are so often denied in favor of sociological analysis or a concentration on what a writer has "to say." The formal and stylistic accomplishments of fiction especially are frequently dismissed as "merely literary." My perspective on literature has become a minority view, but just because this approach to literature and criticism has become unfashionable does not make it therefore wrong. I don't know if some form of aesthetic analysis will again become more acceptable, but even if it doesn't, I still intend to speak up as one of its proponents. Thus the sometimes emphatic manner in which I do often defend aesthetic criticism on this blog.

As an illustration of the way "aesthetic issues" can legitimately be trumped by "context," by political or cultural considerations, I would agree with Jacob Russell's comments on the subject of this previous post, James Wood: "It's the unexamined claim that the books he prefers more powerfully or more accurately represent "the real," the validity of which is not a matter that can be decided within the limits of aesthetics. It's that extra-aesthetic claim that generates economic, political and social implications." Although I think it is possible to have an aethetic preference for realism over its alternatives, and vice versa, James Wood unfortunately does not really support this preference "within" aesthetics, as Jacob puts it. It's at best a metaphysical preference for Wood, and his clinging to his metaphysical conception of the "real" as represented in fiction does make his criticism useful to the "status quo" for the "economic, political and social implications" to which Jacob alludes. I cannot myself overlook these implications in judging Wood's critical writing, however much I do admire his commitment to "close reading."

The Pedagogical Habit

In a recent post, Rohan Maitzen suggests that responsible criticism (she has academic criticism in mind, but the point would seem to apply to generalist criticism as well) should concentrate not on "comparative measures of ‘worth’" but on "seeking out the measures that fit the particular case." She continues:

One of the key features of this approach is working with a text on its own terms--trying to understand how to read it so that it best fulfills its own potential. This means not holding it up to a particular, preconceived standard of excellence ("good novels do this“), whether that standard is formal or ideological. Now, depending on the occasion, there may be a second phase in which you move back from internally-generated norms and question them against external ideas; often, in teaching, this kind of questioning arises just from moving to the next book on the syllabus and discovering that its norms differ widely from--and thus, implicitly or explicitly, challenge--the ones we’ve just left behind (reading North and South right after Hard Times, or Jane Eyre soon after Pride and Prejudice, for instance, will certainly have this effect). But it’s difficult to see either a method or a reason for evaluating, say, Pride and Prejudice, as better or worse than Jane Eyre. It’s only if you have a set notion of what makes good fiction in general that you could fault either one for not measuring up.

Rohan seems to assume that because in my posts both here and at my own blog I defend the view that "philosophizing, politics, or social commentary are unimportant (even undesirable) in the novel, or at least far less significant than aesthetic effects" (really more the latter than the former) I would not accept the approach to literary criticism she is describing. But in fact I wholeheartedly endorse Rohan's critical pragmatism; indeed, this kind of pragmatism is at the very core of my philosophy of criticism, along with John Dewey's insistence that it is the aesthetic experience of literature that is the immediate object of critical appreciation, an experience that can be satisfied in a multitude of ways. I do not agree with Ronan McDonald and others that "if [literary criticsm] is to reach a wide public, it needs to be evaluative" Even if I acknowledged that criticims needs "to reach a wide public" (which I emphatically do not), I could, I think, make a plausible argument that this "wide pubic" would be better served by a descriptive mode of criticism that seeks to carefully elucidate the manifest qualities of a given text than by an evaluative act that in effect disclaims the reader's own powers of judgment by rendering them unnecessary.

I would also agree that it isn't the case "that reading a novel on its own terms should always be the end point of criticism," although I do maintain--this is really what my allegiance to "aestheticism" finally amounts to--it is a indispensable and necessary beginning point. And I also assume that the act of writing a novel is inescapably an aesthetic endeavor. There would be no point, except in the crudest forms of propaganda, to write fiction in the first place if the primary goal was not to produce a work that succeeds most immediately as art. Since novels and short stories inherently equivocate, unavoidably qualify and make ambiguous anything that might be straightforwardly "said," anyone who wants to "comment" on social life or engage in philosophical speculation would be well advised to do so more directly than fiction allows.

Which is why I can't agree with Rohan that approaching "a novel in which philosophizing, politics, or social commentary are extremely important" is simply a matter of adjusting critical focus away from aesthetic considerations and toward the "something said," judging it by the non-aesthetic criteria it seems to propose for itself. At this point, the pragmatic impulse threatens to become an all-purpose excuse for whatever aesthetic lapses are deemed irrelevant to the larger goal of "philosophizing, politics," etc. It comes close to allowing that some novels don't need to offer "aesthetic effects" at all, if this means interfering with the "philosophizing, politics, or social commentary" with which they are principally concerned. Even if you emphasize "how the form and artistic strategies of the novel serve those [ulterior] purposes," as Rohan suggests, this is a pretty tepid measure of the work's literary value. If the primary requirement is not that the work engage us through "form and artistic strategies" above all, its ulterior purposes aside, it is hard for me to understand why fiction should be distinguished from other modes of discourse in the first place, why it should be included with poetry as part of "literature" at all.

Rohan says she's "wondering about the relationship between what I’m calling the 'pedagogical' habit of trying to find the best reading tools, the right measures, for any given example, and other critical strategies or purposes." I believe that by now the "pedagogical habit" has subsumed all other "critical strategies or purposes," to the extent that the need to adapt literature to the academic curriculum has become the overriding consideration in academic criticism. Periodization makes it necessary to find a "place" for texts "in which the form and aesthetics are far less impressive" than others and to accentuate "the contingency of different standards." The rise of theory made it necessary to situate the text in the framework of external schemes that supposedly broaden the context in which literary works can be studied. While it is true that a literary criticism not bound to academe might still give attention to "philosophizing," et.al., it is hard to imagine that such criticism would so willingly apologize for aesthetically inferior work as academic criticism in its current guise is forced to do. It's possible that literary criticism might one day free itself from the pedagogical imperatives with which the academy has burdened it. When that happens, "artistic merit" might not be as dispensable as many academic critics want to find it.

Potentials for Literature

Pacifist Viking (Costanza Book Club) frequently posts about the need to grant both reading and literature "multiple uses." In a recent post, PV writes:

I try to avoid [a] narrow, limiting definition of what literature is, what it can be used for, and how one ought to approach it, for two clear reasons. First, approaching literature is primarily an individual activity, and the great diversity of humanity must call for multiple subjective approaches to literature. And second, there are so many potentials for literature, it seems harmful to try and limit those uses.

Now, on the most fundamental level it is of course not true that "approaching literature is primarily an individual activity." Not only does the reading of works of literature involve at a minimum an interaction between writer and reader (and thus a kind of partnership), but "literature" is itself unavoidably a social/cultural/historical phenomenon to which the "individual" comes only through the mediation of cultural processes and of literary history.

Literature is "literature" because we have inherited this concept as a way of identifying a certain kind of imaginative writing deemed worthy of consideration in and of itself as something separate from ordinary discourse. The term has always been somewhat unstable (or at least so capacious in meaning that it can accomodate changing tastes and assumptions), but never has it been so completely relative as to mean whatever the "individual" reader wants it to mean, which is to in effect render it meaningless. If we want to hold on to "literature" as a category of writing acknowledged by everyone (or everyone interested in this kind of writing), then we have to also acknowledge that its contents can't be judged simply through "individual activity."

Previous readers and critics have inevitably left their traces on the books we now want to read "on our own." The very availability of these books for our reading pleasure has largely been determined by those previous readers' choices (many other books might have made their way to us, but haven't), and the urgency with which we want to read some books (the "classics") is also to a significant extent a consequence of critics' evauation and discussion of these books. This is not to say that works of literature must always be "historicized" in the manner now de rigueur in academic criticism, but simply to recognize that what we call "literature" is so as part of an ongoing historical process of reading and analysis.

Literary criticism as the act of sifting through what is offered as literature, of making discriminations and of judging works of fiction or poetry, is thus as integral a part of the literary enterprise as the creation and the "individual" reception of literary works. To suggest that a given poem, story, or novel is especially accomplished or disappointingly weak, according to articulatable standards, is not to rob the reader of his/her "subjective approach" but to provide a context against which the reader might measure his/her own response. To apply critical criteria derived from careful and extensive study of literary history and aesthetic precepts is not to belittle the reader's own standards but to encourage the reader to engage with that history and those precepts and apply them as well--an activity that will always have a "subjective" character to it.

I don't deny that "multiple" readers will ultimately find different "uses"--different elements of value--in the books they read. And I don't fully disagree with the notion that reading is at some point an "individual activity." The experience of reading poems and novels does indeed consist of the reader's fully attentive encounter with the text, but that encounter is first of all with the author's aesthetic methods, his/her "making" of the text, in the same way we encounter a painter's execution on the canvas or the composer's shaping of sound. Those methods are always themselves informed by the author's influences and familiarity with the past practices of the form, however, and thus we are returned to literature as a collective, and to that degree objective, endeavor.

What They Are After

On the one hand, Rohan Maitzen's comments about the nature of "academic criticism" seem to me unimpeachably correct:

. . .aesthetic judgment is not currently seen as a central (maybe even an appropriate) aim of academic criticism. We are too aware of the shifting nature of such judgments, for one thing, and of the many reasons besides aesthetic ones for finding a text worth studying. If asked whether a book is good, an academic is likely to reply 'good at what?' or 'good in relation to what?' or 'good for what?' It may be that this insistence on refining the question, or examining its implicit assumptions, is part of what makes academic criticism less appealing to the 'average intelligent reader,' if what they are after is actually a recommendation. . . .

On the other, that "aesthetic judgment is not currently seen as a central (maybe even an appropriate) aim of academic criticism" is probably the ultimate reason why "academic criticism" as specifically an act of literary criticism is not likely to survive much longer.

The only period in the history of academic criticism (which runs roughly from the 1920s to the present) in which "aesthetic judgment" was seen as the "central" goal of criticism was really the period dominated by New Criticism, which was in turn the critical method that solidified academic criticism's place in academe's disciplinary structure. Before the rise of New Criticism, those who opposed converting English departments from philology (the study of the etymology of words) to literary study proper (the study of texts as texts) did so precisely because something as nebulous as "aesthetic judgment"--or "appreciation"--was not considered an appropriate focus of academic inquiry. New Criticism provided a plausible method of quasi-rigorous scrutiny of texts that finally satisfied most criteria of what constitutes a properly "academic" field of study.

Yet even New Criticism did not really rest on "aesthetic judgment" as its foundation. New Criticism's strategy of "close reading" was not primarily used to make judgments about the objects of its scrutiny, to declare some texts "good" and others not. The New Critics generally assumed the value of the works they examined (in fact mostly poems), although in some cases their readings did seek to demonstrate to perhaps skeptical readers that the work at hand possessed the requisite degree of "complexity" that New Criticism most fundamentally valued. (And in some instances, such as Cleanth Brooks's reading of Wordsworth's Intimations Ode, they also attempted to show that even works less generally esteemed according to New Critical standards could still be worthy of serious attention.) But the New Critics would never have conceded to the notion of "the shifting nature" of value judgments. The point of New Criticism was to establish that it was the critical method applying authentic "literary" criteria to the reading of literary texts. Some readers might find value in such texts for extrinsic reasons--political, historical, cultural--but for the New Critics, readers assessing them through the rigors of close reading would hardly come to the kind of relativistic conclusions Rohan's comment entails.

Still, as the New Critics implicitly recognized, it's difficult to justify the study of literature as part of an academic curriculum if the primary purpose is to arrive at "value judgments." Something more tangible than "appreciation" has to be the fruit of literary study or it does indeed become such a "soft" discipline that few serious-minded students will want to pursue it and even fewer scholars from other disciplines will consider it a respectable practice. However, the very fact that New Criticism was able to establish itself as a suitable "approach" to the study of literature utlimately became the seed of its own undoing. If appreciation is not the only possible goal of literary study, then neither is form-oriented close reading. "Refining the question," or even changing it altogether, is not only possible but, given the academic imperative to create "new" knowledge, almost inevitable. More than anything else, I would say, this changing of the critical guard, the cycling through of formalism, structuralism, post-structuralism, historicism, cultural studies, is what makes academic criticism "less appealing" to non-academic readers. It is a disciplinary debate between academics the ramifications of which are of importance only to academics.

However, I also think it's a little unfair to say that the "average intelligent reader" is interested merely in a "recommendation." This only reinforces the divide between "criticism," which is perforce practiced primarily in the academy, and reviewing, the goal of which is presumably to provide a recommendation. It is the existence of this divide, whereby the academy is considered to be the place where genuine literary criticism is practiced, while general interest book discussion involves. . . something else, that has helped to make academic criticism seem so insular, so reluctant to make itself intelligible to "ordinary" readers (no relevant recognition from other "experts" will ensue) and that has made what passes for general interest criticism so pallid and formulaic. (Although certainly academic criticism follows it own kind of formulas as well.) As I have suggested several times on this blog, what both contemporary literature and literary criticism need is not for academic critics to become more "accessible" but for literary magazines and journals to publish more non-academic criticism that goes beyond book chat and conventional journalistic reviews but that also avoids the navel-gazing "refinements" of academic criticism.

And even though there are "many reasons besides aesthetic ones for finding a text worth studying," I further believe that most readers of poetry and fiction are drawn to them for the aesthetic reasons first of all. Some may later on take an interest in all those other things a text is "good for," but in my opinion most habitual readers of literary works want most immediately to have a fulfilling reading experience and, to the extent that criticism is pertinent to this goal, to use literary criticism as a way of enlarging and enhancing this experience. Thus, if "many non-academic readers would in fact like to think in more careful ways about their reading," as Rohan acknowledges, and if that's "where academic expertise presented in an accessible manner comes in," then the kind of "expertise" such readers might find helpful would be an ability to describe the aesthetic strategies and effects at work in a text, based ultimately on the ability to pay careful and focused attention to the text, in effect to let it reveal its own aesthetic nature. A knowledge of literary history and of the ways in which all poetry and fiction is finally implicated in that history could also be valuable, as long as that knowledge is put in the service of illuminating the work at hand, not of demonstrating the critic's own superior powers of discernment.

Suffice it to say that academic criticism has long abandoned this modest though still worthwhile mission. It has almost abandoned literature itself, except where it can still be used to illustrate the critic's particular theoretical construct or cultural diagnosis. Pretty clearly, "literary criticism" as practiced in the academy has shifted its emphasis to an analytical perspective more like philosophy for some, more like sociology for others. Since most "non-academic" readers read works of literature for their literary qualities (which, although they can't be defined precisely, at least not to everyone's satisfaction, are still readily enough apparent to those who are looking for them) and not as opportunities to do philosophy or study social patterns, academic criticism isn't going to become more accessible to these readers, only less so. The real question becomes whether a new kind of literary criticism will arise, one less concerned with being "rewarded professionally" by the academy and more concerned with the elucidation of literature, less concerned with providing consumer guidance (buy this, don't buy that) and more concerned with assisting the consumers of fiction or poetry to guide themselves.

What the Author Wishes To Do

Tony Christini observes of John Updike's first rule of reviewing ("Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt") that

Understanding what the author wished to do is necessary, of course, but just as enlightening is evaluating (not “blaming for”) the nature, quality, and context of the “wish,” and also evaluating the achievement and lack thereof. Updike would have reviewers close their eyes and zip their lips, where they should be keen of sight and articulate in illuminating the book and its context. . . .

By and large, I think Updike's rule is sound, although he mistakenly states it as a matter regarding what the author "intended," rather than as one involving what the work at hand actually does, what kind of text it finally is. The author may have intended this or may have intended that, but ulimately the critic can only report on the text itself, as it presents itself.

Tony magnifies Updike's misconception by agreeing that "Understanding what the author wished to do is necessary, of course." It isn't at all necessary to understand "what the author wished to do," unless this means simply the "intention" that can be gleaned from a careful reading of the text. ("The author clearly wished to challenge the conventions of plot by keeping all the important action offstage.") Tony suggests, however, that he doesn't intend "intention" to be confined to the implicit intentions revealed by the text when he notes further that evaluating the "wish" involves evaluating its "achievement." This makes it seem the author's "wish" is something stated prior to the "achievement" of the text (or at least made known at some point, through some kind of declaration), and the critic's task involves evaluating both the wish and its embodiment in the work under scrutiny.

I have no problem with the idea that criticism involves, at least in part, assessing a work of fiction or poetry for the way it carries out its inherent aesthetic intention. I have big problems with the idea that it involves bypassing the text and instead focusing on the "nature, quality, and context of the 'wish'" when that means identifying the author's ideas and beliefs as manifested in some direct statement of intent. (This could also amount to the critic him/herself taking the inherent "intention" and formulating it as an assertion of what the author clearly "meant to say.") I have especially big problems with this approach to criticism when it is devoted specifically to highlighting the political deficiencies of the "wish," which I assume, because of his straighforwardly announced commitment to political criticism, is the method of "illuminating the book and its context" Tony Christini has most in mind. At the very least, it is necessary from this perspective to be able to posit such a thing as the author's "intention," since otherwise only the most obviously polemical or otherwise inept fiction can be reduced to its putative political message.

A work of fiction either succeeds as a work of fiction, aesthetically compelling and free to insinuate "meaning" the author didn't intend but readers find apparent nevertheless, or it isn't. Appealing to the author's externally articulated "intention" can neither rescue a failed fiction from its flaws nor doom an otherwise rewarding work to the prison-house of the author's alleged ideological derelictions. Critics who refuse to "close their eyes and zip their lips" when it comes to such derelictions may or may not be advancing worthwhile political objectives, but they're not contributing anything of value to literature or to literary criticism. In most cases they're not even engaged in literary criticism. So I would amend Updike's rule: Try to perceive what the author's book has accomplished. Do not misperceive it as an artifact of the author's "intent." Judge it according to standards appropriate to the sort of thing it is, not to the sort of thing you'd like it to be.

Pay Attention

Eric Rosenfield underestimates the capacity of book reviewers and arts journalists for self-aggrandizement:

Now, granted that the Pulitzer is a prize given by journalists, and so they may have a stake in aggrandizing the newspaper reviewer, one of their own. But regardless, the fact that the Pulitzer committee could give a dyed-in-the-wool book reviewer like [Michiko] Kakutani an award for "criticism" indicates to me that a distinction between reviewing and criticism isn't quite a forgone conclusion, and that the NBCC might not be so much blurring the lines between book reviews and criticism as unaware of them.

That someone as critically cluesless as Michiko Kakutani once received a Pulizter for "criticism" is entirely a consequence of newspaper reviewers rewarding "one of their own." She works for the New York Times, she hadn't previously won the prize, and it was her time around. Anyone familiar with the history of literary criticism going back to Coleridge or Johnson surely would read Kakutani's hapless "criticism" as the palest kind of imitation (assuming Johnson's stentorian way of asserting his opinion but none of his intelligence), unworthy of serious consideration.

It may be that some in the NBCC are "unaware" of the distinction between book reviews and criticism. If so, this doesn't speak well for their own familiarity with literary criticism as the attempt to describe a deeper engagement with works of literature that goes beyond recounting a novel's plot and pronouncing a judgment on its attractions. They may think they're doing criticism, but this only makes them even less trustworthy as sources of illumination on the books they read. They think they're serving literature with their superficial observations, but they're really trivializing it.

If "[James] Wood is a critic and Kakutani is a reviewer, then why has only the latter won an award for 'criticism'?," Eric asks. "It would be tempting to call this yet another example of awards being meaningless and unimportant, but I'm not sure the problem can be written off so easily. Yes, Wood generally goes into greater depth than Kakutani, and Wood certainly has a keener sensibility than she does; he is capable of startling me with new interpretations of fiction in a way that Kakutani never has. In fact, he is simply a better, smarter writer. But these seem like statements of quality rather than of genre. On a basic level they seem to be performing the same task, that is evaluating fiction."

The essential task of criticism is not to evaluate fiction. It is an essential task of reviewing, but criticism can take place entirely outside the context of judgment and evaluation, or at least it can take place in a context that assumes evaluation and judgment have already taken place. Some of the best criticism attempts not to argue for the merits of a particular work but to describe and analyze a work the critic already values and wants to "read" more closely. Sometimes this results in convincing readers of the quality of the work, but doing that has not been the critic's primary task. James Wood is actually a good example of this. His more harshly evaluative essays, in which he's trying to disparage those texts that don't square with his own "sensibility," are his least convincing efforts. He's being a reviewer, and often not a very good one. On the other hand, he also writes about authors and books he already intensely admires, and his essays analyzing these works are often helpful and insightful. Here he's being a critic, focusing not on whether these books deserve high marks or low ones but on how they work and what readers should notice.

Eric writers further:

And the truth is "critic" and "criticism" are routinely used to mean reviewers and reviewing; heck, there once was a television show called The Critic about a movie reviewer whose catch phrase was "It Stinks!" "This is literary criticism and this is not" rubs me the wrong way for the same reason that "this is literary fiction and this is not" rubs me the wrong way. It's a form of snobbery.

Literary criticism is only a form of snobbery if you assume that it is ultimately a discourse about taste, a forum for affirming the elegance of one's own. But it isn't. It's a way of paying attention and of perhaps assisting others in the effort to pay closer attention. As far as I'm concerned, everyone can learn to pay attention more efficaciously. "It Stinks!" is a way of encouraging readers to pay less attention, since even bad books can be bad in instructive ways. If readers want to settle for this kind of petulant and reductive "evaluation," I suppose it's their right, but it isn't snobbery to suggest they could do better.

The Pleasure of Reading a Story

In my previous post, Christian Wiman is quoted as saying about poetry that "It's thought of as a subject to be taught instead of simply an art to be enjoyed." In a post called "Reading Like a Reader," Cam at her blog Cam's Commentary makes a related claim:

. . .I think that even an unschooled reader, that is one who hasn't been introduced (is indoctrinated too strong a word?) to literary studies, can certainly enjoy a work of literature without needing to be able to dissect the manner in which the writer developed the character. One can read a short story by Chekhov. . .and enjoy the pleasure of reading a story, perhaps connecting to it on an emotional level. On a different level, the same reader could reflect on how Chekhov crafted his story, analyzing the way in which it was built, the seemingly effortless technique used to develop his characters. This leads to a different appreciation of the story and a deeper understanding of Chekhov as a master craftsman of the short story, but does not necessarily reflect a closer -- or better -- reading of the text. This is just a different kind of reading of the text. . . .

I actually agree with the general proposition that reading fiction should be "enjoyable," certainly that it should be "pleasurable," although usually the assertion of enjoyment or entertainment as primary criteria for judging the value of works of fiction is a kind of defensive gesture meant to ward off the "snobs and professors" who want to take the pleasure out of reading for those not "indoctrinated" into the protocols of litcrit. That a novel or story is entertaining certainly does not disqualify it from being considered "literature," but neither does is it insure that it will be so considered. If, like poetry, fiction can be taken as "an art to be enjoyed," it first of all needs to measure up as "art." Simply holding a reader's attention through to the end is not finally an adequate measure, although surely a work of literary art does first of all need to do that. (And, regarding Wiman's remark specifically, simply to "enjoy" a poem surely cannot be the primary motivation for offering or taking a course in poetry, if it is to be regarded at all as "a subject to be taught." Directing everyone to take 50 minutes and "enjoy" cannot be very pedagogically sound.)

More to the point, readers who reject all approaches to fiction that go beyond its potential to entertain or provide pleasure are not thereby safeguarding the purity of reading, nor are readers who attempt to in one way or another to "dissect" works of fiction violating that purity. Reading includes re-reading, and it is in the act of re-reading that criticism really occurs. Indeed "re-reading" and "critical reading" might be considered synonymous terms, as it is almost impossible to resist in a subsequent encounter some degree of scrutiny of the way the text works, some examination of what exactly it was that captured one's attention in the first reading and makes it difficult to put that text out of mind. In Art as Experience, John Dewey describes the critical impulse in this way:

. . .after an absorbed enjoyment of the poem, one may reflect and analyze. One may consider how the choice of words, the meter and rhyme, the movement of the phrases, contribute to the aesthetic effect. Not only this, but such an analysis, performed with reference to a more definite apprehension of form, may enrich further direct experience.

In this chapter of Art as Experience, Dewey is concerned with the relation of "content" to "form." He believes that "The fact that form and matter are connected in a work of art does not mean they are identical. It signifies that in the work of art they do not offer themselves as two distinct things: the work is formed matter. But they are legitimately distinguished when reflection sets in, as it does in criticism and in theory." It is possible, and in no way objectionable, to settle for that initial experience of a work of art or literature in which form and content "do not offer themselves as two distinct things." Most people precisely do experience art in this way--including most critics. There is not one way of reading during which the reader allows the text to be itself and another in which the reader/critic is on the look-out from the beginning to analyze "the way it is built," at least no good reading adequate to what the text does indeed have to offer. Critics read for pleasure too, but most surely believe that a more "critical" re-reading only enhances the pleasure, producing a fuller, more expansive experience of the work.

In this way, I have to say that I do believe this sort of additional "appreciation" of fiction or poetry ultimately produces a "better" reading. It's not an alternative to "the pleasure of reading a story" in "absorbed enjoyment" but a supplement to such reading. It doesn't replace "absorbed" reading, but contributes something extra, something that, in Dewey's words, can contribute to "a more definite apprehension of form" which in turn "may enrich further direct experience." It is not a "different" kind of reading but a part of reading more amply defined. Not all readers will want to take advantage of the "extra" that critical reading can provide, but simply dismissing it as the possession of "snobs" does not really do justice to the full range of pleasure that literature might supply.

Mediation

Tom Lutz asserts that Harold Bloom (along with Francine Prose) believes the current generation of politicized literary scholars (what Bloom terms the "school of resentment") "are all looking at something besides the text itself, by which they mean a book that is read without theory, without reference to other values, and without mediation of any kind."

Lutz associates this view that we should return to "the text" with New Criticism, but nowhere in his essay does he reveal (if he knows) that Bloom was actually hostile to New Criticism. He considered its approach so limiting and so dismissive (in the practice of most of the New Critics, at least) of the Romantic poets, whose work Bloom so loves, that he deliberately designed his own theory of poetic influence as a corrective, if not an outright rejection, of New Critical biases. Lutz goes on to associate both Bloom and New Criticism with such disparate figures as Mortimer Adler, E.D. Hirsch, and John Sutherland, simply because they appear to endorse the idea that learning to appreciate the "text itself" is an important part of literary education.

In a move apparently intended to show that Bloom doesn't practice what he preaches (or doesn't understand the foundation of his own practice), Lutz cites H. L. Mencken's witless attacks on "The New Criticism" (as delineated by J. E. Springarn in 1911), which putatively show that academic criticism is inherently theoretical, "criticism of criticism of criticism." But again, since Bloom is/was not a New Critic, it's hard to see how this undermines Bloom's own approach to the "text itself." The New Critics did indeed have a "theory" of the literary text as something dynamic and inherently dramatic (and reading as the experience of the text's dynamism), but it is not Bloom's, however much he might accept the underlying emphasis on the integrity of the literary text, free of the demands made on it by those with their own personal and political investments.

But of course Bloom does have a theory. No one who remembers the scholarly debates of the 1970s and 1980s could think otherwise, as Bloom played a major role in these debates precisely as a theorist of literature, a proponent of the Freudian notion of the "anxiety of influence." Far from being considered a conventional formalist, someone who believed a text should be read "without mediation of any kind," Bloom was taken as a radical, even a postmodernist, a critic who was taking literary study away from its proper focus on the "text itself" into very a-textual speculations about the role of poetic influence and its rather violent Freudian implications. Anyone who's read and taken seriously books such as The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading, Kabbalah and Criticism, and Agon would know that the accusation Bloom is some kind of retrograde enemy of "theory" is ridiculous on its face.

Thus, at least as far as Bloom is concerned, Lutz's invocation of his name as one of those who demands a book be read "without theory, without reference to other values, and without mediation of any kind" is simply incorrect. This is not a matter of interpretation. Some investigation of Bloom's work, even of secondary explications of that work (a simple Google search, perhaps) would immediately reveal that Lutz's account is a caricature of the role Bloom has come to play in current literary discourse (the aging curmudgeon) but has nothing to do with what he's actually written. Even a book such as How to Read and Why, a deliberate simplification of Bloom's ideas about the value of literature, reveals that he does not hold the naive view of reading Lutz attributes to him.

Unfortunately, the caricature of Bloom is widely accepted. Just recently Sandra at Bookworld (otherwise a nice, thoughful litblog) opined that she had contracted "Bloom Syndrome," a "condition in which the sufferer is unable to read any work of literature unless it is deemed Significant by Harold Bloom and which often results in the reader losing the will to live/read, crushed under the weight of canonical imperatives." To the sin of thinking that the "text itself" is what literature is all about (and in Bloom's case looking to account for the text by emphasizing the writer's confrontation with his predecessors, an emphasis that highlights the continuity-through-conflict of literature) is added the annoying belief that the literary tradition is meaningful and worthwhile, that "some books are better than others." It's telling that in our culture someone who becomes associated with beliefs such as these is lampooned as a pathetic fogey who apparently thinks those old books are important or something.

The Various Rays of Culture

Although I agree with Barrett Hathcock's conclusion that the kind of "cultural criticism" represented by Greil Marcus's The Shape of Things to Come "too energetically [mines its] material for the cultural rather than the aesthetic," I can't agree with the critical typology that underlies his analysis:

. . .The first level is the most base, the easiest, and perhaps the most valuable--the thumb. A thumbs up or thumbs down? This is the criticism of a friendly recommendation; this is the criticism of year-end lists, whether they're constructed by some blog or by The New York Times.

The second, slightly higher level of criticism is that of specific, aesthetic analysis. How does this particular piece of art work? How does it function as a radically constructed whole? (Or how does it not, and why?) This is, I'll admit, rather undergraduate-heavy--art seen through a lit seminar, where students pop open the hood of a sonnet to see how it works.

The third and highest level of criticism, in my radically simplified piñata here, is criticism as cultural interpretation, where a piece of art is situated in a larger cultural context, both compared to other pieces of the culture, and prism-like, made to shine in the various rays of that culture. I think this third type of criticism is the most complex of the three, the one that rewards the most re-reading, the one that soars above mere book reviewing (this was about that, and it was good), and speaks to what it means to be alive right now in this crazy, kooky world we live in, etc.. . . .

"Specific, aesthetic analysis" is only "slightly higher" in its effect than list-making and crude value judgments? I understand that the "recommendation" function of book reviewing is important to many readers, who want to know whether a particular book is worth reading in the first place, but the kind of judgment that can be expressed through the thumb hardly qualifies as literary criticism. Indeed, I'm not likely to take anyone's recommendation seriously at all unless it's accompanied by some "specific, aesthetic analysis" that reveals to me just why how and why the reviewer reached his/her conclusion about a book's thumbworthiness in the first place.

Thus, I'm going to have to take issue with the notion that "aesthetic analysis" is an act of pulling apart a work of art "to see how it works." To my mind, "aesthetic analysis" and "literary criticism" are synonymous terms. A literary critic doesn't so much "pop open the hood"--although something like this is probably inevitable when the critic tries to illustrate his/her responses to the text: this is what worked on me the way it did--as report on the aesthetic experience the work has provided. This may require some re-reading of the text to clarify what prompted the particular experience it provoked, but ideally "aesthetic analysis" is not an end in itself, something that settles once and for all how a particular work "functions as a radically constructed whole," but the means to another critical end: to provide other readers with an informed account of what the work is like, perhaps to encourage the reader to approach it with a sharper critical eye and heighten his/her own experience of it.

My biggest problem with Barrett's schema, however, is the privileged place it gives to "criticism as cultural interpretation." In my view, this kind of "criticism," at least as it is applied to literature, isn't either literary or criticism. As soon as a work of literature "is situated in a larger cultural context," what follows isn't likely to be about the work at all--about what causes us to call it literary--but about the "context." It will be sociology, not literary criticism, intended to illuminate the "culture" that produced the art, not the art itself. This may or may not be more "complex" than actual criticism (I myself don't think it is; "situating" art in its cultural context may give such a piece of sociological analysis a patina of learnedness or the appearance of sounding out Important Issues, but it's finally much easier to make broad generalizations about "culture" based on superficial comparisons than it is to truly engage in "specific, aesthetic analysis"), but it isn't finallly about what makes art or literature worth our attention to begin with. It isn't the literary critic's job to tell us "what it means to be alive right now in this crazy, kooky world we live in," although perhaps it is part of the artist's job to do so. The critic focuses on how the artist goes about that job in a particular instance, how the artist's work encourages (or doesn't) a singular aesthetic experience.

Barrett says he would "like Marcus to pay more attention to the second type of criticism in an effort to bolster the strength of his higher cultural criticism," but Marcus is obviously not much interested in doing so because he's not much interested in his objects of analysis as art. (Which is one of the more disappointing things about Marcus's writing after he ceased being a regular rock critic. His reviews of individual albums were often quite good.) Whether Marcus himself thinks he's doing "higher cultural criticism" rather than mere aesthetic analysis is debatable, but I surely don't know what's "higher" about it. I wouldn't necessaily call it "lower" than aesthetic criticism, but unless you think it's more important to understand the cultural currents flowing through David Lynch's work than to appreciate the work itself, I can't see why we would place it on such a pedestal.

Addendum: I also agree with Barrett's assessment of Roth's American Pastoral. It does indeed "work more as notes toward a novel, notes toward a novel about the fall of American innocence" than as an aesthetically satisfying novel in its own right. This perhaps makes it just as useful for Marcus's kind of cultural criticism, but it doesn't make it a novel I'd want to read again.

Diving In

At her blog, The Palace at 2:00 a.m., Marly Youmans provides an excellent brief account of the benefits of rereading:

. . .it is in rereading that a story or poem reveals itself—and tells us the extent of its merit. Most reviewers know only the first cursory passage through a work when they pen a review; a reader can know more. Though life is short and art long, we ought to reread often, because it is there that we “dive,” as Melville would say.

Actually, I would say that Marly is describing not merely the difference between reading to review and truly reading--diving in, without concern for reporting on it afterward--but between the goals of reviewing in particular as opposed to the goals of literary criticism more generally.

The reviewer is charged with the task of immediately assessing a given work for its value to a "general audience" at least as interested in keeping up with the newest and the latest as in plunging deeply into any particular book (dawdling over the current book only prevents us from moving on to the next hot release). Good reviewers certainly do help us decide what books may reward a more careful and concentrated kind of reading, but the very nature of periodical book reviewing makes it necessary for the reviewer to assume the role of cultural quality inspector. It's the stage of literary life in which books are most conspicuously presented as commodities, another kind of "choice" to be made by the intelligent consumer.

But after this initial flurry in the literary marketplace and after most of the products offered by the "book business" have been consumed, ignored, or discarded, some books remain to be read and reread in the way Marly has described. They're books (or poems or stories) that call on us to immerse ourselves in the experience of reading them for reasons that go beyond the timely and the trendy. And I like to think that there is a kind of literary criticism that corresponds to this order of reading, that both reminds us what works these are and helps us to enhance the reading experience. Such criticism also attempts to "dive" in the Melvillean manner, providing "information" of a sort through patient description of the text's manifest (if not always immediately apparent) features (as experienced by the critic him/herself), but also drawing attention to the implications of the text's formal and stylistic qualities or putting the work in a relevant context, especially the context of literary history. "Interpretation" might be involved, but it is not the kind of interpretation that encloses the work in critical amber, telling us what it "means." It is interpretation meant to be supplemented, if not replaced, by additional informed interpretation.

At one time this sort of criticism was relatively abundant, in literary magazines and journals, although it was frequently labeled "academic." Unfortunately, academic criticism as now practiced bears little or no relation to the literary criticism I have described, criticism concerned first and foremost with the literary qualities of literature, with making the reading of works of literature a more satisfying experience for those who might be interested. In revolt against the mere "appreciation" of literature, academic critics now enage in its interrogation. Literature exists not as the effort to create compelling works of verbal art but as a category of artifacts to examined among others for its relevance to "cultural critique." "Reading" is the process of forcing the text to conform to one's pre-established critical paradigm, not the act of exploring its verbal complexities. Since no "diving" into works of literature is possible when they've been drained of all their vitality, what now passes for literary criticism in the learned journals does less than nothing to encourage active reading, much less rereading. It wades around in the shallow waters of ideology and second-hand social analysis, leaving serious readers of literature to swim for themselves.

As They Are

While I share with Steven Shaviro the inclination to "only write about books I like, letting the ones I don’t be passed over in silence," I can't share his belief that, even while writing about admired books (perhaps especially when writing about such books), it's appropriate to "make no pretense of describing them accurately, as they are — but rather [to] use them (or appropriate them) to come to some understanding for myself, which means that the author might just as well be upset by my (admitted) misinterpretation, as he/she might be pleased by the fact that I liked their book."

I'd be less concerned that I might have misintepreted a particular work than that I made no attempt to "describe [it] accurately." I'd go so far as to say I would consider any writing about literature (in particular a book review) that didn't make such an attempt to be something other than literary criticism in the strict sense of the term. (Perhaps Shaviro would as well; perhaps he doesn't regard his own work as ""criticism" per se. If so, he is assuredly following the practice of most of academic criticism, which for decades now has mostly abandoned what was once understood as "literary criticism" for more the more ethereal pleasures of Theory and other philosophy-inflected modes of discourse.) Thus, while I might wildly misinterpret a work because of my own flawed reading, if I have nevertheless made a good effort to account for the work--to describe poems and fictions "as they are"--I am still engaging in a
recognizable if ultimately error-ridden act of literary criticism.

You might think that, given my assent to John Dewey's conception of art and literature as modes of experience--which in one of its subsequent reformulations became Stanley Fish's version of "reader-response" theory--I might find the notion that I could properly use art "to come to some understanding for myself" entirely acceptable, even an immediate consequence of Dewey's own philosophy of art. But Dewey did not license an unrestrained, free-for-all approach to criticism and interpretation. (And ulitmately neither did Fish: in his schema, interpretation is limited by an "interpretive community" that can accept some some readings as accurate or persuasive while rejecting others as misguided.) For an aesthetic experience of literature to be as complete as possible, the reader must undergo "an ordering of the elements of the whole that is in form. . .the same as the process of organization the creator of the work consciously experienced." If this sort of "ordering" doesn't occur at all, if the reader is free, in effect, to create a different work than the one the artist has presented us with, aesthetic experience has been impeded, cut off. If criticism is, in part, one reader's attempt to communicate his/her own "experience" of the work at hand, some effort to put aside what I want "for myself" and to represent (re-present) the work on its own terms is required.

Certainly the reader or critic is then free to re-process what Dewey calls the "detail" for him/herself. This reprocessing is what we usually regard as "interpretation." We don't have to stop with what "the creator of the work consciously experienced." Much of what we value in some works of literature goes beyond what the artist "consciously" intended. That we are able to reassemble the details into a new synthesis of text-writer-reader only underscores the reader's contribution to aesthetic experience, and such a synthesis only enriches the text. Sometimes we might even think that what the writer intended is at odds with what the text actually does on a close reading of it. (Paradise Lost, for example.) Such an intepretation might be found compelling by other readers and subsequently become an accepted version of what the text "means." In some ways, the creator is thus left behind, the text itself taking on a life of its own, so to speak.

Still, to entirely forfeit the obligation to "describe" the object of one's reading experience does seem to me a critical dereliction. The work is there, and we should begin by acknowledging it.

What I Meant to Say

In "Questions of Intent," from his recent book Where the Southern Cross the Yellow Dog, Louis Rubin asserts:

It is all very well, when disputes about an author's intentions arise, to insist that it is the written-down story that should command our attention as readers, and that questions about what the author may have intended to do, what his literary models may have been, or what may have been going on in his personal life or that of his community at the time ought not make the least difference to us.

Why, however, go to hear novelists give readings and talk about their work? Why do they wish to know what kind of person it is who wrote the fiction? What can account for their interest in the creative process that produced it? Why are literary biographies written and published, and why do readers buy and read them? Is no more than idle curiosity involved?

I think not. Certainly the story itself is where everything begins (and, ultimately, ends) for the reader. What happens, however, is that readers of fiction, caught up in the telling of a tale, are drawn into the imaginative orbit of the teller. They become interested in how and why the author wrote what they have been reading. Assuredly the reader of a good novel is no purist. The literary theorist, like the passionate trout fisherman discoursing upon the presentation of artificial flies, may hold forth on what is and is not the proper way to go about reading a novel, yet the very nature of the fictional imagination itself invites complicated response. For just that reason, authorial intentions become of interest to us.

I am generally an admirer of Louis Rubin (especially for his book The Comic Imagination in American Literature and for his efforts as founding publisher of Algonquin Books), but this passage proceeds upon so many false assumptions and reaches so many flawed conclusions (in addition to raising many of the questions with which this blog has been especially preoccupied) that it's all but impossible for me to resist commenting on them. In the process, perhaps I will additionally clarify the underlying assumptions about literature that inform many of my own posts here at The Reading Experience.

First of all, I have never really understood why it is that "disputes about an author's intentions arise" in the first place. In some instances such disputes can indeed be easily resolved (ask the author, or read what he/she had to say on the subject), but no doubt Rubin has in mind those that can't be--the author is long dead and made no comments about intent in particular cases. Yet, in neither situation does it seem to me important to know the author's intentions, beyond knowing that he/she considered this compostion to be a poem, that one a work of fiction, etc. Once the work has gone out into the world as a poem, a novel, a play, how it is to be understood or interpreted is out of the author's hands, and that is a good thing, both for readers and, ultimately, for the work itself. It may be of interest to know that a writer hoped to accomplish a certain goal in composing this work, to treat an especially urgent theme or explore a specific idea, but if subsequent readers' interpretations are to be constrained by these intentions, held to account by their fidelity to them, the work in question no longer really invites close reading: Just tell me what the writer meant to say and save me the time and effort required to read it.

Rubin's phrasing is in addition rather peculiar: "It is all very well. . .to insist that it is the written-down story that should command our attention as readers". Written-down story? This seems to me a rather awkward attempt at minimizing the differences between literary texts and orally-related stories and thus to secure for the former some of the authority that does indeed belong to the oral storyteller. Because the latter remains present, and is able to exploit the resources of tone and gesture, he/she does have a firmer claim on "intention," while the writer has to settle for his disembodied words becoming fixed to the page. But precisely because they are disembodied, the writer's words are inevitably subject to the interpretive efforts of readers who do not regard themselves as the passive vessels of the author's intent, especially since that intent is usually only obscurely apparent in the first place. Writing down stories is what brings readers into existence, so why negate the significance of this act by dwelling on authorial intent?

In enumerating the possible areas of inquiry one might pursue "outside the text," Rubin unfortunately confuses some perfectly good ones with others that are of extremely dubious value. What a writer's "literary models may have been" is a potentially very useful thing to know, since this may have a very direct bearing on the text at hand, influencing both its form and its statement of theme, while "wondering what may have been going on in his personal life" takes us away from the text and focuses our attention instead on gossip, just as an "interest in the creative process" might enrich our appreciation of particular strategies or techniques as they manifest themselves in the work, while wishing "to know what kind of person it is who wrote the fiction" diverts us into hearsay and frivolous speculation that has more to do with tabloid journalism than with literature. Sometimes literary biographies are written by people with a genuine interest in such things as literary models and the creative process, who produce books that offer valuable insights into the literary work of the writers featured, but I'm afraid that most readers buy and read biographies as a way of avoiding deeper enagement with that work, at worst as a way of indulging our taste for gossip.

Rubin is half right when he claims that "readers of fiction, caught up in the telling of a tale, are drawn into the imaginative orbit of the teller." Surely we are caught up in what could be called an "imaginative orbit," a fictional world evoked by the writer, but if by "teller" Rubin means the biographical author him/herself, then I think he is encouraging an inattentive and oversimplified view of what reading fiction is like. The "teller" (in a 3rd person narrative--1st person narration makes Rubin's account seem only more inadequate) in a work of fiction is just as much a character--just as much a fiction--as any of the more obviously identified kind. It is a construct the author has created to get the story told, although more precisely it is a character evoked by the habits of language the author has given it. It is not the author. How could it be, since, again, a work of fiction is a text, an artificial arrangement of words on a page, not a recitation by an actual person fully present to his/her listeners? And, speaking for myself at least, I may ultimately become interested in "how and why the author wrote what [I] have been reading" (if by "how" is meant how the work itself is structured or how its story is related), but not while I am reading a work for the first time or if "why" means digging around into the author's purely personal circumstances.

It may indeed be true that most readers are not "purists" (and that I probably am), and it is certainly true that "the very nature of the fictional imagination itself invites complicated responses." But I would argue that many readers might find their enjoyment of fiction actually enhanced if they allowed the complexities of "the fictional imagination itself" to play themselves out as part of a reading experience more attuned to the more "pure" possibilities of fiction as an aesthetic medium rather than closing off those possibilities in favor of biographical or sociological speculation. The latter does not so much "complicate" our response as readers as divert our attention away from the exigencies of reading. Since Rubin himself goes on in this essay to warn against taking the author's projected image too seriously (in particular using Hemingway as an example), it is difficult to understand why he would lend respectability to a reading practice that continues to direct our attention to that image in the first place.

NOTE: Jonathan Mayhew has just posted on this subject as well, concluding that "the process of creating any work of art is too complex, involving too many levels of intentionalilty and the surrender of intentionality, for it to be meaningful to talk about the intention of a work as a single entity."

Harold Bloom

Since the publication of The Western Canon, Harold Bloom has become something of a caricature, derided on the one hand for the vehemence of his displeasure with the direction literary study has taken over the past quarter century, his opposition to the politicized, anti-aesthetic criticism he identifies collectively as the "school of resentment," while on the other he is frequently invoked as a kind of cultural mandarin dismissive of the pleasures ordinary people take in the products of popular culture and contemptuous of all books that can't be assigned to the canon of high literature. (Although James Wood accuses him of abandoning the role of critic for that of "populist appreciator," his populism surely extends no farther than to those who might conceivably be convinced of the greatness of what Bloom calls "strong poets," whose work certainly cannot be dumbed down in order to reach the masses.)

This image of Bloom as traditionalist curmudgeon is considerably at odds with the impression one might have gotten from his critical writings of the 1970s and 1980s, in which Bloom advances his own intricate (if ultimately rather private, even hermetic) theory of literary production and reception that does indeed focus on poetic greatness but hardly defends tradition for tradition's sake. Bloom makes elevated claims for the value of poetry, but these are not claims for the utility of poetry in the service of "culture" as moral critics would define it nor an Arnoldian attempt to construct a version of literary history that isolates works of literature as "the best" of their kind. Bloom's theory of literary influence certainly does assume a continuity of vision over the course of this history (although it also frequently alludes to writers and writing not necessarily considered to be "literary" per se), but the core principle of his theory--that great poetry is always a "misreading," sometimes radically so, of "precursor poets"--in essence holds that literary history is actually in a perpetual state of disruption and revision.

In my opinion, Bloom's 1982 book Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism provides the most complete and coherent account of his ideas about both literary history and the role of the literary critic, and thus will probably be the book of his that survives into the next generation of literary study (although Bloom's approach is idiosyncratic enough--deliberately so-- that a future cadre of neo-Bloomians is certainly an implausible notion). Indeed, this passage from the book's essay on John Ashbery is as succinct a statement of Bloom's prevailing assumptions as readers of his work are likely to find:

A strong poem, which alone can become canonical for more than a single generation, can be defined as a text that must engender strong misreadings, both as other poems and as literary criticism. Texts that have single, reductive, simplistic meanings are themselves already necessarily weak misreadings of anterior texts. When a strong misreading has demonstrated its fecundity by producing other strong misreadings across several generations, we can and must accept its canonical status.

Yet by "strong misreading" I mean "strong troping," and the strength of trope can be recognized by skilled readers in a way that anticipates the temporal progression of generations. A strong trope renders all merely trivial readings of it irrelevant. . .

There is a true law of canonization, and it works contrary to Gresham's law of currency. We may phrase it: in a strong reader's struggle to master a poet's trope, strong poetry will impose itself, because that imposition, that usurpation of mental space, is the proof of trope, the testing of power by power. . . .

"Misreading" (or "misprision," as Bloom would have it) is the motivating force, the ultimate inspiration, behind all poetry (which, in Bloom's critical universe, is synonymous with "literature" and is not to be attributed solely to self-identified poets). In the effort to emulate and finally surpass "anterior" texts, poems that fire the poet's passion for poetry in the first place, strong poets "misread" these texts in a psychoanalytically defensive gesture that allows the "something new" of literary creation to occur. Milton misreads Shakespeare, Blake misreads Milton, etc. Weak poets merely imitate their predecessors, fail to engage with the deeper and more unwieldy impulses that ultimately account for great poetry.

And it is these impulses that are ultimately responsible for all strong poetry. As Bloom writes elsewhere in Agon: "No one 'fathers' or 'mothers' his or her own poems, because poems are not 'created,' but are interpreted into existence, and by necessity they are interpreted from other poems. Whenever I suggest that there is a defensive element in all interpretation, as in all troping, the suggestions encounter a considerable quantity of very suggestive resistance. All that I would grant to this resistance is its indubitable idealism, its moving need of the mythology of the creative imagination, and of the related sub-mythology of an 'objective' scholarly criticism." Again the perception of Bloom as hidebound conservative does not fit well with assumptions like these. How far are they from the notion that there is "nothing outside the text," that language authors poems, not writers? (Although Bloom rejects this latter idea; to him this formulation reduces "language" to "the very odd trope of a demiurgical entity. . .acting like a Univac, and endlessly doing our writing for us.") "Creative imagination" and "objective scholarly criticism" are equally feeble concepts for describing what is really going on in the production and reception of poetry as Bloom understands it.

A "strong trope" is a use of language (whether in individual lines or phrases or the poem as a whole) so powerful in its implications that, as he puts it in another book, it creates meaning that "could not exist without" it and produces an "excess or overflow" that "brings about a condition of newness." Indeed, its force is so irresistable that it "will impose itself," although such a struggle with the text is carried out only by the "strong reader" who seeks to come to terms with it through an act of troping of his/her own. When he complains about the "school of resentment" or about the politicization of literary criticism more broadly, he is reacting against the establishment of a mode of academic criticism that validates weak reading, that diminishes the power of literature and the passion of reading. He is not lamenting the loss of "sweetness and light" as a goal of literary study, nor the rejection of New Critical formalism, which he considers a form of rhetorical criticism that equally fails to accentuate what is truly at stake in the "troping" of both poetry and criticism.

In what he apparently takes to be a telling criticism of Bloom's practice as a critic, Benjamin Balint remarks that "We might say that Harold Bloom is the Rashi of misreadings, a kind of contemporary sage who, due perhaps to the excesses of reading itself, himself misreads—sometimes forcefully, sometimes weakly." But of course Bloom already admits this, dismissing the notion that criticism involves something like accuracy of interpretation:

To read actively is to make a fiction as well as to receive one, and the kind of active reading we call "criticism" or the attempt to decide meaning, or perhaps to see whether meaning can be decided, always has a very large fictive meaning in it. I continue to be surprised that so many literary scholars refuse to see that every stance in regard to texts, however professedly humble or literaral or prosaic or 'scientific' or 'historical" or 'linguistic" is always a poetic stance, always part of the rhetoric of rhetoric. . . .

Balint further proposes that Bloom "turns out to be a reader par excellence, but also perhaps merely a reader," suggesting that he is finally unable to distinguish between his beloved texts and non-literary spiritual or religious "encounters." This surely fails to recognize that for Bloom "reading" is more than an "encounter" with words (although it begins there), just as " poetry" is more than a composition in verse. I would not go so far as to say that for Bloom reading is religion, but one might conclude from most of his books that the kind of experience to which reading works of literature gives access is for him about as close to what could be called a religious experience as is possible in a universe in which God probably does not exist.

This is perhaps where most readers depart company with Bloom, concluding that his kind of reading is finally an idiosyncratic and insular one, Bloom himself seated aloft in his own peculiar aesthetic empyrean. This is a mistaken impression, not least because it takes Bloom's very real passion for literature as a preoccupation with the aesthetic such as ordinary "rhetorical criticism" would describe it. James Wood asserts that whenever Bloom's commentary verges on becoming "openly evaluative, it becomes Freudian and biographical" and that "if he were just choosing one poet over another for purely aesthetic reasons, then he would have no need of his Freudian system of anxiety and repression." This assessment has validity, and aptly sums up the major weakness in Bloom's critical system. One reads Bloom for inspiration, for further amplification of the way in which his account of literary influence applies to specific writers or texts, for the occasional insight that reinforces the general claim of Freud's work on literary criticism, but not for sustained and careful explication of individual texts. That Bloom initially developed his theory of poetic influence to directly contest the New Critics' dismissal of subject-centered criticism and of Romanticism in general of course explains this absence, but I often wonder whether in his dismay at the direction literary study has taken he doesn't sometimes think he might have done more justice to New Criticism and its insistence that the aesthetic attributes of literature ought to be the proper focus of criticism.

Perhaps the most intriguing feature (to me) of Agon is Bloom's attempt to align his own approach to criticism with that of American pragmatism. Partly this is due to his admiration of Emerson as an American "seer," a fellow strong misreader whose habits of thought provided the true source of pragmatism. But pragmatic thinking also offers Bloom a touchstone that further vindicates his own self-reliant mode of reading:

. . .American pragmatism, as [Richard] Rorty advises, always asks of text: what is it good for, what can I do with it, what can it do for me, what can I make it mean? I confess that I like these questions, and they are what I think strong reading is all about, because strong misreading doesn't ever ask: Am I getting this poem right? Strong reading knows that what it does to the poem is right, because it knows what Emerson, its American inventor, taught it, which is that the true ship is the shipbuilder. If you don't believe in your reading, the don't bother anyone else with it, but if you do, then don't care also whether anyone else agrees with it or not. . . .

I must say this seems a fairly ordinary reading of Emerson (who surely does ask of poetry, "what can it do for me?") and a weak misreading of Rorty (as well as Dewey and James before him). Putting aside the fact that both Rorty and Dewey believe literature does serve some generalizable good (for Rorty, helping us to become "less cruel," for Dewey, clarifying the nature of experience), it is very convenient for Bloom to exploit this overly literal interpretation of pragmatism's goal-oriented analysis so that it winds up justifying critical eccentricity for its own sake. For me, a thoroughgoingly pragmatic literary criticism might indeed put aside the question "Am I getting this poem right?" but would still find the question "Am I getting literature right?" an appropriate one to ask. Does "literature" as a category exist primarily to allow Harold Bloom or other like-minded critics to misread, strongly or otherwise, in any way they want, or does it also carry out a useful purpose by identifying a kind of text upon which some agreed-upon constraints do apply? Couldn't we say that both writing and reading works of literature pragmatically involves observing these contraints so that the activities themselves might be sustained?

I always find reading Harold Bloom's books a bracing experience, but I don't think I'm prepared to regard them as contributions to the elucidation of pragmatism.

Deep Significance

Grumpy Old Bookman sums up his impatience with Serious Fiction and those who promote it:

The attitude in question takes the form of an assumption that this stuff is far superior, in every way, to books which just tell a story. It is held to be self-evident that a novel which concerns itself with Big Issues is, by definition, more worthy of attention, shelf space, and sales than is a book which contents itself with telling a story.

Later in the same post, he elaborates:

Finally, I want to return to my point that the novel which eschews all attempt at Deeper Significance, and just tells a story, is at least as valuable (actually rather more so) than one which seeks to weave in some message or other. . .A story, in my opinion, doesn't have to mean anything. But it does have to have an effect; otherwise both writer and reader are lost. And the story also has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

I agree with GOB that novels treating "Big Issues" are usually not worth reading and that critics who laud works of fiction for raising such issues are usually less interested in fiction than in advocating their own favored "ideas." But the alternative for the writer who doesn't pretend to dispense great Wisdom is not necessarily to produce "books which just tell a story."

GOB appears to reduce novels to only their narrative details. A coherent plot--"a beginning, a middle, and an end"--is not just necessay so that all parties concerned don't get "lost," but seems to be entirely sufficient. Simply "telling a story" discharges the author's duties, exhausts the possibilities of fiction as a literary medium. But this view of what is involved in writing fiction doesn't actually cede much room for "writing" itself. It doesn't seem to make any difference to GOB that fiction is made of words and that words can be made to perform many interesting tasks in addition to, or rather than, telling stories. Story is all. But to demand that writers confine themselves to storytelling of a sort that might be done just as well and just as readily in another medium seems arbitrary and short-sighted indeed.

What of the stylistic pleasures a work of fiction might provide? The pleasure of witnessing language used in novel and challenging ways (or even just moderately interesting ways), of experiencing the transformative power of written language (the power to transform perception as well as our understanding of what language itself can express) when it is wielded by a particularly venturesome imagination? Or the potential capacity of form to sustain the reader's interest, either by altering narrative convention in some dramatically compelling way, or by substituting its own kind of dramatic effect for narrative convention altogether. The way "story" is disclosed to the reader--not to mention the way point of view affects our response to narrated events--is surely just as important as the story itself, since story is really just a secondary quality that we habitually abstract from the immediacy of the work as a dynamic organization of words. Would GOB really say that a writer's attention to the formal and stylistic possibilities of fiction count for nothing compared to his/her obligation to "tell a story"?

GOB maintains that he doesn't so much begrudge writers with literary ambitions as "resent" readers and critics who use "Serious Fiction" for their own purposes: "it's the attitude of those who sell, review, and -- above all -- use the damn things as teaching material." He wants fiction to be allowed its "emotional" impact and literary critics to otherwise leave well enough alone. This is an entirely defensible position, except that he clearly does take out his frustrations on the overly ambitious writer--in this case Dara Horn and her novel The World to Come. He goes out of his way to point out flaws in the novel that, in his opinion, serve to diminish its emotional impact (all the while insisting he did like the book, sort of) and interprets any deviation from traditional narrative form as an example of putting on airs. I maintain, on the other hand, that truly serious writers deviate from the tried and true in order to enhance the reading experience, not to subvert it. "Emotion" is a feature of this experience, but not the only one. It is futile to demand that readers refrain from reflection on the nature of the reading experience, especially when we believe that what we've read has been paricularly rewarding. It's something we do. At its best, this is called criticism, and it doesn't have to go on a quest for "Deeper Significance" in order to be useful.

The Center of the Critic's Task

In his attempted take-down of Edmund Wilson, which is largely of the "he was a very bad man" variety, Joseph Epstein does say this about Wilson's literary criticism:

As a critic, Edmund Wilson was at his best explaining how literature worked; what seemed to interest him most was the mechanics of creation. He was able to demonstrate why the modernist writers were important by showing precisely how they went about doing things not hitherto done. He was less good, I think, at what Henri Bergson defined as the center of the critic’s task— namely, “developing in thought what artists wanted to suggest emotionally.”

I'm not familiar with the definition by Bergson he cites, but presumably Epstein agrees with it. In that case, the problem with Wilson as Epstein sees it is not a consequence of Wilson's limitations as a critic but with Epstein's own conception of what literary criticism is all about. (If Epstein does not agree with this notion that the critic primarily translates "emotion," then he's merely exploiting it for its value to his broader argument that Wilson was a cold fish, a drunken sot incapable of emotional responses in the first place.)

The literary critic's task is not to meditate on "what artists wanted to suggest emotionally." Insofar as the critic is first of all a reader, he/she does experience the same emotions in reading works of literature as any other reader, but the emotional effects are inevitably particular to, and not detachable from, the reading experience itself. How exactly is it possible to "develop in thought" an emotional suggestion? How could such a "thought" be anything but incomplete and lifeless in comparison to the actual emotion? And why would we need a critic to expatiate on his/her emotional reactions in this way?

If Wilson "was at his best explaining how literature worked," then he was indeed a very successful critic. (I tend to think he was good at this only fitfully, his interest in history otherwise overwhelming his skills as a close reader.) That "[h]e was able to demonstrate why the modernist writers were important by showing precisely how they went about doing things not hitherto done" is highly in his favor, and books like Axel's Castle and The Wound and the Bow remain valuable works of literary criticism precisely because they are descriptive and analytical rather than registers of emotion. So much so that it is puzzling why Epstein has concluded that Wilson's books and essays "no longer fortify me." The two books I have mentioned provide plenty of nutrients if what you are interesed in is literature and not some inchoate sense of "mystery," which, according to Epstein, characterizes the sort of writer--Conrad, Kafka--Wilson could never understand. (Epstein's description of these writers strikes me as willfully reductive.) Take "mystery" far enough and there's simply nothing a critic might say about such writers at all. Everything disappears into mysticism and, yes, "emotion."

Epstein further sketches his idea of the critic's role in the conclusion to this essay, in which he announces that "Critics are not permitted such large margins of stupidity [as are some artists]. It matters that they get things right; their opinions, which is all they chiefly have, are crucial. Wisdom, in a critic, is never excess baggage. . . ." Critics don't just have "opinions." They have informed opinions, which are supported by careful explication of the text at hand. Critics are "wise" if they restrict themselves to this task (recognizing that this is far as "getting things right" goes--there are always other opinions that are just as informed) and do not cast about for "Wisdom" of the more pompous kind. Joseph Epstein apparently wants the literary critics he admires to be sages (anti-Communist and anti-Freudian sages). I'll allow them to be ordinary humans and to direct their attention primarily to the "mechanics of creation."

A Few Ways of Looking at a Book Review

I'm pretty sure I would find much with which to disagree in Jane Smiley's new book, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. I found her argument a few years ago about the superiority of Uncle Tom's Cabin to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for example, to be wholly unconvincing. However, Ellen Heltzel's review of the book is a little hard to take.

Athough she allows that Thirteen Ways "is hardly without merits," Heltzel's ultimate judgment is that "in its long and discursive form, [it] lacks pep and the intellectual rigor that could have made it exceptional."

Huh? It lacks both "pep" and "intellectual rigor"? Isn't the presence of the former usually at the expense of the other? Is this just a careless way of dismissing a book the reviewer didn't like, or is she arguing that a book with "intellectual rigor" might also be peppy? It's hard to conclude that Heltzel really thinks the book lacks rigor, since elsewhere she calls it "dry," "a book that contains lots of information," and one that reflects "a highly refined taste, not a welcome to all comers." That it is "long and discursive" itself suggests that Heltzel's problem with the book is that it has too much "intellectual rigor" rather than otherwise.

A little later Heltzel paraphrases Smiley's argument that "novels themselves don't send readers to the ramparts. . .but they create the psychological conditions that do," and then comments that "her reasoning seems less convincing than insular. What of Beethoven and Wagner, not to mention Edward Albee and Arthur Miller? Has Smiley spent too much time at the English department water cooler?"

Once more: Huh? When did Beethoven or Edward Albee ever send people "to the ramparts"? How did I miss that? How is it insular to suggest that it is the role of serious fiction first to be art rather than rabble-rousing? And even though the work of Wagner has been used for (unforeseen) political purposes and Miller's plays are often politically engaged, how much real political change ensues from a performance of a Wagner opera or of The Crucible?

Heltzel voices what seems to be her true objection to Smiley's book at the very end of the review:

. . .Thoughtful and informed, her responses are studied, not impassioned.

Here again, the teacher in Smiley trumps the advocate. "Thirteen Ways" is definitely a book that appeals to the mind, not the heart.

One would think that Heltzel might have concluded simply from the book's title that this is precisely a book resulting from "study" rather than "passion." I can't really see that it is a flaw in the book she has actually written that "the teaher in Smiley trumps the advocate." There are times when a "teacherly" book--that is a work of serious literary criticism--is preferable to a polemic. (And vice-versa: Why can't we have both?) And what can it mean to admit that Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel is "thoughtful and informed," but to then condemn it because it "appeals to the mind, not the heart"? Is reading fiction only an exercise in emotional outpouring? Is there no room for contemplative literary criticism? Is there any other kind?

This is Not a Post About Cormac McCarthy

In one of his comments on this post below, James Wood writes:

I happen to think that the thriller genre is a limited, maimed, reduced thing, and unworthy of a writer of [Cormac] McCarthy's powers. So I think that however well he fulfilled his ambitions -- and it's a very sleek piece of work -- his ambitions deserve censure.

This is a view likely shared by many people who prefer their literary writers to avoid such disreputable genres as the thriller. To some extent, I probably share it myself, although if you categorize as "thriller" the sort of thing written by, say, James M. Cain or Jim Thompson, as opposed to the sort of thing written by Tom Clancy, I'd say that thrillers can be very good indeed.

But is it really the case that a talented writer such as Cormac McCarthy (and almost everyone seems to agree he is a talented writer) cannot write a thriller worthy of his talents? I'm prepared to believe that No Country for Old Men is not that book (although Wood now appears to concede that it's a "sleek piece of work" for a thriller), but isn't it conceivable that McCarthy could have written a successful thriller, one that both fulfills the expectations of the genre and can be admired simply for its superior literary qualities? I am at the very least uncomfortable with the idea that such an achievement is impossible because the underlying narrative and/or character conventions are too "maimed." Couldn't a good writer heal them?

And is it the critic's role to "censure" a writer's ambitions? Again, many other critics and their readers probably do consider this within the legitimate purview of literary criticism (especially of "literary fiction"), but what gives a critic (and I don't mean just James Wood--any critic) the moral authority to wag a finger at writers in this way? One might say that such a rebuke is being made on literary rather than moral grounds, but do literary critics have a better idea of what a novelist's ambition ought to be than the novelist him/herself? A critic is well-entitled to say "I didn't like that book" (for whatever specified experential reasons), but is he as entitled to say "You shouldn't have written that book"?

Something like this issue arose for me during the Litblog Co'op's consideration of the books nominated for our first Read This! selection. I felt that Case Histories, the ultimate selection, failed to satisfy as a detective novel, that it appropriated the form associated with detective/mystery fiction for purposes the form did not support very well because they were inessential to it. I thought the author had chosen the form for arbitrary reasons, and thus her novel couldn't be judged a successful novel of its kind. Could she have written a good detective novel, even one that satisfied both the criteria usually applied to detective fiction and those that should be applied to all fiction? I think so. I don't see why these need to be, a priori, mutuallly exclusive standards.

Thinking About Things

Amardeep Singh recently put up a very intelligent post on Lionel Trilling's notion of "complexity." Amardeep quotes from Trilling's essay, "The Function of the Little Magazine":

. . .The writer who defines his audience by its limitations is indulging in the unforgivable arrogance. The writer must define his audience by its abilities, by its perfections, so far as he is gifted to conceive them. He does well, if he cannot see his right audience within immediate reach of his voice, to direct his words to his spiritual ancestors, or to posterity, or even, if need be, to a coterie. The writer serves his daemon [creative spirit] and his subject. . . .

Amardeep's gloss on this passage:

In short, there should be a place where people write, freely assuming their audience knows way more than the average reader of USA Today. Serious writers and thinkers should feel free to take advantage of such an intellectually enlivened -- if rarefied -- space to work out complex ideas. And if that means a few thousand readers a day rather than a few million, then so be it. The circulation of your magazine (or today, your hitcount) is not everything; if it is, you're probably not doing your best thinking.

I agree with this entirely, but in further commenting on Trilling's analysis of Wordsworth's second thoughts about the French Revolution, Amardeep says that "what Wordsworth wanted to do was use art to think about things that are too complicated (which could also mean: too personal, too mysterious, too dynamic) to be represented via any available political or ideological system. Trilling would equally value the pursuit of complexity to anyone engaged in artistic creation or serious criticism of the arts." Perhaps at his weakest Wordsworth wanted to "use art to think about things," but I like to think that what Wordsworth finally wanted to do was write poems that were complex not in their "thinking" per se, but that were "complex" in their expressions of experience, a complexity that only poetry could embody because of its non-propositional nature.

I am not so much questioning Amardeep's interpretation of Trilling as identifying the inherent limitations of Trilling's own notion of "complexity," limitations suggested in one more passage that Amardeep quotes, from The Liberal Imagination:

It is one of the tendencies of liberalism to simplify, and this tendency is natural in view of the effort which liberalism makes to organize the elements of life in a rational way. And when we approach liberalism in a critical spirit, we shall fail in critical completeness if we do not take into account the value and necessity of its organizational impulse. . .The lively sense of contingency and possibility, and of those exceptions to the rule which may be the beginning of the end of the rule--this sense does not suit well with the impulse to organization. So that when we come to look at liberalism in a critical spirit, we have to expect that there will be a discrepancy between what I have called the primal imagination of liberalism and its present particular imagination. The job of criticism would seem to be, then, to recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty.

Trilling's hesitations over the bureaucratic "rationalism" of liberalsim are only superficially about "complexity" as the word might be understood by literary criticism. Trilling wants something like the consciousness of sin injected into liberalism, and the "job of criticism" is thus the moral critic's job of raising our awareness of humankind's fallen state, something for which Trilling finds literature eminently useful. "Complexity and difficulty" in Trilling's vocabulary have little do with their aesthetic manifestations. As Amardeep notes, it has more to do "with the connection between a kind of intellectual discipline to a humanist ethical imperative."

When Amardeep says "Trilling would equally value the pursuit of complexity to anyone engaged in artistic creation or serious criticism of the arts," I actually have my doubts. The pursuit of complexity in criticism is one thing, and it is certainly true all critics need not be generalists, hoping one day to reach even that reader of U.S.A. Today. But I don't really think that the sort of complexity one finds in literary works such as, say, Ulysses or The Recognitions or Gravity's Rainbow is what Trilling has in mind, except to the extent one can catch the authors of these books using them as a way "to think about things." In fact, one suspects such books are too complex for critics like Lionel Trilling. They only demonstrate, in their formal and thematic intricacies, that the kind of purely moral complexity he was looking for is itself way too simple.

Behind the Text

In a review of A. Alvarez's The Writer's Voice and James McConkey's The Telescope in the Parlor, Christine Thomas writes:

For though Alvarez and McConkey's criticisms are distinct, they both agree on a condemnation of New Criticism. Despite his spurning of the cult of personality, Alvarez sees that "the sin of the New Critics was [treating] writers as second-class citizens whose function was merely to provide the raw material that the critic then dignified with meaning and relevance." McConkey, likewise, believes it "impossible to interpret any text as a thing-in-itself, a work separate from the knowledge we bring to it through previous readings or anything else we carry in memory." For both, the text is ultimately more than just words, and they each seek to find its essence, which, as writers, is inevitably entwined with their own lives.

Now what in the world could it possibly mean to say that it is "impossible" to interpret a literary work as autonomous, a "thing-in-itself"? What makes it impossible? If I so choose to regard a poem or novel in this way, as something made, something embodied, something lying before me as indeed a "thing" waiting to be experienced, does this mean that in doing so I am performing something that literally can't be done? Has it been an illusion, something I didn't really do but only fooled myself into thinking I'd done? Is my reading per se to be dismissed out of hand because I shouldn't have done it in the first place? Have I violated the McConkey rule?

Even more bizarre, at least to me, is the notion that "the text is ultimately more than just words." What else is it then? Radio broadcasts? Chicken noodle soup? Is it something invisible, something being manipulated by Venusians who are too small for me to see? What could a text's "essence" be? Is this something like what Dr. Strangelove's Jack D. Ripper calls his "purity of essence" being polluted by flouride? Are the "words" just pollution, something obstructing or destroying the work's purity? Writing as flouride? I confess I always find this sort of talk about literature's presumably mystical qualities, so far out of the grasp of the mere literary critic, just plain loopy. It's the kind of thing that makes onlookers from other, non-literary perspectives think writers and critics aren't worth their time.

Although it's not, to say the least, phrased very felicitously, presumably what both Alvarez and McConkey are getting at is what Thomas suggests in describing this "essence" as "inevitably entwined with [these writers] own lives." (But really, does no one edit these things to eliminate the most obvious howlers?) This is probably some version of the idea, usually promulgated by those who don't really like reading anyway (too many words), that literature is just a way of representing the writer's own life, that biography is destiny. Steve Mitchelmore, at Splinters, has nicely formulated this notion as "a book is a person." Steve also provides the best response to this idea, so I won't try to improve on it: "The interesting question is: what is left over after a biographical reading? One might say any reading. The answer, I would say, is literature."

Finally, however, what probably annoys me the most about the above quoted passage, as well as other similarly know-nothing comments about the New Criticism, is the degree to which New Critical formalism continues to be regarded by some (whether, in this case, by the two critics at issue or by Christine Thomas--I have to rely on her characterization since I haven't read the books) as an over-intellectualized, reader-unfriendly method of interpretation. Actually, New Criticism was not "interpretation" at all, since the very enabling idea of the New Criticism was that great works of literature resisited unitary, theme-focused interpretation. New Criticism was an approach that encouraged a real reading of works of literature, reading that was alive to literature's inherently non-discursive nature. Ambiguity and complexity, both of which New Criticism urged readers to value rather than deplore, are hardly the sorts of things to appeal to the truly imperious literary critic. Far from treating readers as "second-class citizens," New Critics, at their best, sought to instruct such readers how to find "meaning and relevance" for themselves.

As for McConkey's admonition that we not try to approach a work of literature "separate from the knowledge we bring to it through previous readings or anything else we carry in memory": How trivial can you get? We can't do much of anything separate from our established knowledge and previous experiences. Why does this invalidate the observation that a text is a text and not a person? McConkey is working from a false premise. He is correct that "the imaginative participation of the reader" is required to complete what might be called the literary exchange. But the participation of the reader joins with the original creative act of the writer, which is embodied in the text. McConkey wants to skip the text altogether and go right to "knowledge of the author, her memory and experience" (Thomas). He wants to find the writer behind the text. Good luck.

Communication Skills

In one of the most recently published diatribes against unconventional literature (this time poetry), Joan Houlihan declares that

Like all other forms of writing, poetry is a communication. The evidence is in its release from the poet's brain onto a medium designed to be read. The fact that it was written down, made readable, makes it a communication even if its only reader turns out to be its creator at a later time. Furthermore, whatever one feels about the role of the reader, or author-as-reader, there's no dispute that there is a role—a poem without a reader is not a poem, but just an artifact of the imagination.

This is so profoundly wrong in so many ways that I have been unable to resist examining the passage for its more egregiously mistaken assumptions.

Neither poetry nor fiction is "a communication" in the way Houlihan clearly intends the term to be understood here. Poets and novelists do not "communicate" information or messages or ideas or propositions or wisdom or anything else by writing poetry or fiction. If these forms of writing are to be considered methods of communication, they are very poor ones indeed, since in most acccomplished poems or novels the best that can be said is that their messages or "points" are communicated in a very roundabout way, a strategy that would seem merely self-defeating if the goal of writing them is to satisfy readers looking for the points being made or the message communicated. Most of the great works of literature would surely by now have been judged failures by the communication test: if the value of those works from the past we still read were to be found in their clearly signalled meanings, their unambiguosly announced "themes," we probably would not still be reading them. Why bother? Just take the message and run.

That poetry is written down, "designed to be read," doesn't in itself demonstrate it's to be taken as communication, although most of us do admittedly have a harder time separating the medium in which the literary arts are created from the artistic effects of which that medium might be capable than we do with painting or sculpture or music. Since we do use language to communicate, we assume all language must be used for that purpose--or that all uses of language can't escape its origins in communication or discourse. We are much more willing to grant that music, say, (the scores of which are also "written down") is something other than communication, in most cases, in fact, would resist the idea that behind the music we like is primarily an effort to communicate ideas or messages. But why is it not possible simply to grant that when poets or novelists set to work they are using language for some purposes that can't be reduced to "communication?" A poem or novel is an artificial construction of words. You may not like what has been constructed in a specific instance, but it hardly seems useful to say that it didn't communicate with you.

All of this is just confirmed if we further consider Houlihan's own contention that a poem communicates "even if its only reader turns out to be its creator at a later time." This seems frankly bizarre. If a poet at some future date "reads" a poem she has written, is she really "communicating" with herself? Would this poet even be aware of what's being communicated? Wouldn't she be looking at the poem's formal qualities, the aptness of its word choice, etc.? Why couldn't other readers look primarily to such things as well? Did Emily Dickinson consider herself finally a failure because the vast majority of her poems didn't "communicate" with anyone? Might she have been satisfied simply that she had created hundreds of well-made poems?

Even more bizarre, at least to me, is the claim that "a poem without a reader is not a poem, but just an artifact of the imagination." I will agree that ultimately most writers want readers, but what's wrong with those readers considering a given work as "an artifact of the imagination"? Isn't this the very way to define all works of art? Perhaps the problem Houlihan sees here is not that poems are products of the human imagination, but that they might be regarded as "artifacts," something that has been made by "artificial" means. Presumably poetry ought to be "natural," indeed an effort at communication. This distinction is probably at the heart of most complaints against works of art and literature that go too far in their brazen use of artifice or that are pronounced "obscure." But anyone taking up the writing of poetry and fiction is committed to an endeavor that is inescapably artificial. Poetry is an inherently unnatural disruption of our ordinary sense of what language is for (just ask all those freshmen struggling through intro to lit), but if you really resent writers playing this kind of game with words (game-playing, however, being just as integral to human nature as the need to communicate), you probably shouldn't be reading (or writing) poetry in the first place.

I looked for evidence in Houlihan's essay that I was myself misreading her message, misconstruing her point, but was only reinforced in my analysis by her conclusion, in which she writes of "poets who betray what talent they may have for the approbation of peers, who engage in the worst self-delusion: that they have something to say that can only be said in a poem." Once again we are dealing with the assumption that literature is a forum for "saying something," even if it is something "that can only be said in a poem." I've never been clear exactly what things "can only be said in a poem." If you can reformulate the poem into what it "says," then obviously you have said it in another way. If you can't put what it says into words, then just as obviously it's not saying anything. The only other alternative is that a poem just is what it is, in most ways precisely avoiding saying anything in particular. If what we have in such a piece of writing is a failure to communicate, this failure is the poem's greatest success.

Dissecting Literature

Over at The Weblog, Adam Robinson wonders about the value of literary criticism. Although acknowledging that inferior works of literature can sometimes provoke instructive criticism, he's not so sure what criticism can actually say about great literature:

Literary criticism stretches the distance between life and art to a near breaking point. Scratch that--it completely severs any connection between our life and the beauty we can find in it. It contrives terms and categories that are natural to our instincts but not to our existence. For instance, when we apply the force of love between Romeo and Juliet to our own lives, when we derive our definition from their relationship, we've made love into something concrete, definable, and weird. Now we feel funny about having a crush, and we hope no one makes fun of our emotions or plagues our houses behind our backs.

This is nicely put, and, up to a point, I agree with it. Sometimes it is better to say of a book, play, or poem that has moved you or has enhanced your appreciation of what literature is capable of doing simply that it has moved you, enhanced your appreciation, etc. In other words, sometimes you just want to savor the reading experience. However, it is just as true to say that often criticism appropriately "stretches the distance between life and art to a near breaking point." Life isn't art, and it's probably Romeo and Juliet, not criticism of it, that encourages us to unfavorably compare our experiences of love to those of its protagonists. Criticism, at its best, would warn of us of the dangers of doing this: It's only a play, and look what happened to Romeo and Juliet, anyway.

Ultimately I think Adam's post carries some unexamined assumptions about "criticism." I do think criticism can perform a useful function on behalf of great, or even just good, works of literature, as long as we recognize that these assumptions are not inherent to literary criticism as it has been practiced by great critics or to criticism as it might be more efficaciously practiced in the future.

The first assumption is that literary criticism is essentially academic criticism, the kind of thing done by those belonging to a "profession" and according to the standards of that profession's "discipline." A literary critic is someone who works for a university and observes the conventions of what has become (or what once was) literary study. This is the kind of criticism engaged in, as Adam puts it elsewhere in his post, "vivisecting Ulysses. . .to try and make a relevant point." It is certainly true that for the better part of the last half-century literary criticism has essentially been subsumed to the prerogatives of the academy (for reasons that seemed good ones at the time), but must it remain there? The "advanced" forms of academic criticism at the moment--cultural studies, critical theory in its most politicized version--have almost nothing to do with literature, so this would be an especially good time to reclaim literature on behalf of a literary criticism that rejects both the conversion of criticism into sociology and the practice of "vivisection."

The second assumption is that criticism is primarily evaluative. Whereas Adam finds that it is with the lesser books, "those that you laugh at because they're so bad" that he "can find a compelling essay" to write, he is hard put to write about the books he loves because, by my reading of his remarks, he would simply want to describe them, better yet, just tell other people to read them. But a form of literary criticism could be developed to do both of these things. Describing a work of literature and what seem to be its aesthetic ambitions is not as straightforward as it might seem, and many good books and poems have suffered from the inability of critics and reviewers to fairly and accurately give readers an account of what reading them might be like. And criticism that ultimately convinces readers to give a particular book a try, but perhaps also provides perspective or information that makes reading it more rewarding, would be in my opinion criticism that redeems the very potential of literary criticism.

Unfortunately, there's very little criticism to be found these days that doesn't proceed according to at least one of these assumptions. Academic criticism has, to be sure, performed vivisection on a body of work that was still living, although now is indeed nearly dead. "General interest" criticism, even as practiced by intelligent and informed critics who don't accept the first assumption, is almost entirely evaluative, usually in ways that limit readers' ability to comprehend the range of possibilities available to writers of fiction and poetry and that foreground the critic's own superior sensibilities--not just superior to those of the larger mob of readers but to the writers whose work is being evaluated. Valuable criticism of worthwhile and accomplished works of literature could be written, but it would first of all have to arise from the conviction that literature itself is valuable, and would in addition have to be open to the myriad ways in which works of literature are and can be created.

Reading and Writing

I have previously written here about the "poet-critic," the creative writer of poetry or fiction who also takes literary criticism seriously enough to attempt it as well. As I said in that post, in some ways poets and fiction writers are in the best position to discuss what goes into the creation of works of literature in the first place, and a willingness among creative writers to also write serious literary criticism (including book reviews, but going beyond them as well) could only be welcome. (Even if it's Dale Peck.)

However, there has also undeniably always been an uneasy relationship between creative writing and literary criticism, sometimes verging on hostility, and I don't just mean the "snarkiness," as it's now called, that some creative writers justifiably resent vis-a-vis some book reviewers. At one extreme are poets and fiction writers (and some readers) who find criticism an unwanted imposition on works of creative writing, something that only impedes the direct appreciation of poetry or fiction on the part of their ideal readers. In some cases these writers (I've known a few) almost regard criticism as an affront to the practice of their art.

At the other extreme are critics who at least implicitly regard works of literature to be incomplete, untested, until criticism has been able to appropriately classify, dissect, and evaluate them. With some critics (I've known a few of these, as well), especially of the academic variety, works of literature are finally only "cases," grist for the critical and scholarly mills. Academic criticism ultimately became so suffused with this attitude toward literature that now there's barely any pretense to an interest in literature itself. It's finally just a convenient starting-point for advancing other agendas.

Most readers probably are, of course, somewhere between these two extremes in their attitudes toward the proper relationship between literature and literary criticism. Most would likely welcome constructive critical consideration of poetry and fiction, as long as such criticism seemed to acknowledge that ultimately it is the means to greater understanding and appreciation of literature, both in regard to individual books and poems and to a broader perspective about the nature and goals of literature. In my opinion, writers and critics, as well as those who simply consider themselves interested readers, ultimately spring from the same source: a rapt, transforming act of reading. The critic emerges from this experience saying "I want to know how this thing (poem, story, novel) works"; the writer emerges saying "I want to do something like that." What the critic and writer subsequently go on to pursue is divergent from this initial experience, but ideally both can be traced back to the common source.

Perhaps the very abandonment of real literary criticism by academic critics represents an opportunity to rediscover this common source. I've noticed lately that many literary weblogs are indeed trying out more ambitious ways of engaging with current books and writing--longer reviews, shorter but pithier reviews, well-conducted interviews with authors (Robert Birnbaum obviously, but Mark Sarvas's interview with Andrew Sean Greer could also serve as a model of the form), extended commentary of various sorts--but reattaching criticism to literature needn't take place only in blogs. Other kinds of online or print forums in which writing and the engaged appraisal and appreciation of writing were both encouraged would be most apropos. Certainly criticism can't exist at all without a flourishing literary culture of poets and fiction writers. But in the long run I'm not sure that serious poetry and fiction can themselves survive--at least in a wholly healthy form--without interested readers willing to convert their interest into intelligent criticism.

Originality

In the April 2 issue of TLS, Michael Marr conducts an extended analysis of the similarities between Nabokov's Lolita and the recently re-discovered 1916 short story of the same name by the German author Heinz von Lichberg (a pen name). This has become something of a mini-scandal, according to which, at least implicitly, Nabokov appropriated the early work as the basis of his own novel. If Nabokov has not exactly been accused of plagiarism, he has been charged with some kind of dishonesty.

I frankly don't understand why anyone would care about this supposed controversy, even if the worst were assumed and we concluded Nabokov just stole Lichberg's idea outright.

Who would deny that literary history is in many ways a grand procession of such theft, Nabokov's just the latest in a long line of literary larceny? Did Homer "invent" the Iliad and the Odyssey? Are the Greek tragedies to be judged by the "originality" of their plots? (Aristophanes is another story.) We all know Shakespeare pilfered his own plots (and many of his characters) from preexisting sources. Do we consider him less accomplished as a writer because of it? Did Milton "steal" Paradise Lost from the Bible?

It's hard to think of many writers who could be judged primarily on the evidence of originality in story, theme, or character, at least before the 19th century. As many scholars have established, "originality" is itself a concept that arises from the "individualism" of the Romantic movement of that century, although not all of the Romantic writers could be measured by it. Of the Romantic poets, Blake seems the most wholly original, Shelley perhaps the least; in my opinion, however, Shelley is a better writer. (It seems more appropriate to judge Blake as some kind of "visionary" rather than as a writer per se.) As F.O. Matthiessen points out in American Renaissance, Melville's Moby Dick is a rewriting of King Lear, Pierre of Hamlet.

It is really only with the rise of the novel as the predominant literary form that originality becomes a criterion by which it seems appropriate to assess a work of literature--or through the use of which one might say something useful about a particular work. Yet here again we all know that what seems original at first glance often enough isn't and that writers are frequently quite willing to foreground the sources of their inspiration. (And even when they're not, there's always Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence"--and if you actually bother to read Bloom, you discover that his analysis is overwhelmingly compelling.) Ulysses is a rewriting of the Odyssey; the Biblical echoes in Faulkner are deafening; some readers might think Henry James stole from himself and wrote the same few stories over and over again.

If we take the postmodern notion of "intertextuality" seriously (I actually do), we really only come back to T.S. Eliot's claim that "what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves. . . ." Eliot doesn't really mean that nothing new is ever seen under the sun, but that what he called the "really new" has a unseverable link to that which came before--at least as long as the artist is perpetuating an artistic form that emerged from the past.

The "literary" occurs entirely in the presentation of the work of literature, in its manipulation of form, in the details of character, in the manifestation of a distinctive style. Surely no one believes that in a comparison of the "original" story to Nabokov's novel the former would be judged superior simply because Lichberg's thought up a similar story and the same name. (And no one who has read the first "Lolita" has suggested this.) If Nabokov had appended an acknowledgment of Lichberg's story, would anyone now care?

Marr does a pretty good job of demonstrating why the similarities between "Lolita" and Lolita really don't much matter, but he comes up short of admitting that Nabokov did essentially steal from Lichberg. I'm willing to stipulate he might have. He might have read the story, judged it to be aesthetically inferior but also to be based on an interesting idea, one he (Nabokov) might come back to. In my opinion, Nabokov wrote some of the most exquisitely shaped and almost perfect prose in the history of the novel in English. (And he was Russian.) If, among other things, he had to steal from Heinz von Lichberg in order to give us this prose style, good for us!

The Poet-Critic

T.S. Eliot once wrote that in his view "Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labor of an author in composing his work is critical labor; the labor of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing: this frightful toil is as much critical as creative. I maintain even that the criticism employed by a trained and skilled writer on his own work is the most vital, the highest kind of criticism; and. . .that some creative writers are superior to others solely because their critical faculty is superior." (Eliot means not that such writers should be judged superior because they manifest this critical faculty, but that it is the possession of this faculty that has made them "superior" in the first place.)

Eliot is himself perhaps the most distinguished example, in the twentieth century at least, of the "poet-critic," the "creative" writer who also feels the need to write literary criticism, as if the creative act of writing poetry is not quite finished unless it is accompanied by some critical analysis that goes beyond the kind he ascribes here to the writer performing such analysis on his own work. (It should be said that Eliot has been accused, with some justification, of writing criticism that ultimately works to confirm the kind of poetry he wrote, even when ostensibly writing about other poets. This does not make his criticism less valuable to us now, however.) There have been many such poet-critics, especially in British literature: Dryden, Johnson, Pope, Coleridge, later Eliot, Empson, Auden, and others. In American literature such "poet-critics" have often enough been novelists: Henry James, Ralph Ellison, Mary McCarthy, among living writers Norman Mailer, Gilbert Sorrentino, John Updike, very recently writers like Jonatham Lethem and Michael Chabon.

Some think that "creative writers" ought to refrain from writing criticism, especially in the form of reviewing their colleagues and potential competitors. However, Eliots's statement explains why poet-critics ought to be encouraged to engage in literary criticism: they know best of all what is really required of poetry and fiction for it to be aesthetically and intellectually credible, "crafted" in all the best senses of the term. In fact, in today's literary climate, where few literary critics who both respect literature and wish to write about it in generally accessible terms are actually to be found (or have a forum in which to do it), the criticism of practicing writers might be the most important available source of sound critical judgment.

In my lifetime, the most distinguished "poet-critic" has been, in my view, William H. Gass. Although he has published at least two works of fiction, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and The Tunnel, that stand up to the work of any of his contemporaries, he has also produced half a dozen collections of critical essays that will surely endure as among the best criticism to appear in the second half of the twentieth century. The day his "Collected Essays" appears will be a notable one in American literary history.

Although he is a fiction writer and not a poet, his criticism may in fact be the best example to be found of criticism as poetry. In this he exemplifies Eliot's claim that the critical and the creative are, in the best writers, inextricable. This is the beginning of the first essay in Gass's first critical book:

So much of philosophy is fiction. Dreams, doubts, fears, ambitions, ecstasies. . .if philosophy were a stream, they would stock it like fishes. Although fiction, in the manner of its making, is pure philosophy, no novelist has created a more dashing hero than the handsome Absolute, or conceived more dramatic extractions--the soul's escape from the body, for instance, or the will's from cause. And how thin and unlaced the forms of Finnegans Wake are beside any of the Critiques, how sunlit Joyce's darkness, how few his parallels, how loose his correspondences. With what emotion do we watch the flight of the Alone to the Alone, or discover that "der Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist," or read that in a state of nature the life of man is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short' . . .

Novelist and philsopher are both obsessed with language, and make themselves up out of concepts. Both, in a way, create worlds. Worlds? But the worlds of the novelist, I hear you say, do not exist. Indeed. As for that--they exist more often than the philosophers'. Then, too--how seldom does it seem to matter. Who honestly cares? They are divine games. Both play at gods as others play at bowls; for there is frequently more reality in fairy tales than in these magical constructions of the mind, works equally of thought and energy and will, which rise up into sense and feeling, as to life, acts of pure abstraction, passes logical, and intuitions both securely empty and as fitted for passage as time.

Few writers of criticism are able to combine such a compelling and frankly "superior" prose with correspondingly apposite critical insights as does William Gass. To this extent, I would not hold him up as a model. Gass's example, as well as Eliot's, does illustrate, however, that the "poet" and the "critic" can coexist comfortably. More importantly, poets and novelists might learn from them to less reluctantly admit that the creative work to some extent requires the "frightful toil" of the critical. At the same time, critics, perhaps especially critics who are not themselves "creative" writers, ought more often to acknowledge that this toil is only compounded in the labor performed by poets and novelists. It is not a simple matter of unsightly "expression" being confronted with the "handsome Absolute" of critical judgment.

The Idiocy of Synopsis

The New Critics sometimes appealed to what they called the "heresy of paraphrase." As defined by Hugh Holman in A Handbook to Literature, this meant that " a work of art means what it means in the terms in which it delivers that meaning, so that paraphrase, summary, abridgement, expansion, or translation is bound to miss the point, usually by understating the complexity and misconstruing the uniqueness of the original statement." Pretty clearly, the word "synopsis" could be added to this list.

As usual, the New Critics needlessy phrased this idea in religious language, but the underlying principle is sound enough. And it was this New Critical dictum I immediately recalled when reading Robert McCrum's "The Curse of the Synopsis" in Sundays Guardian/Observer.

As I compose this post, both the Literary Saloon and Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind have already commented on this article, but while in both cases their comments are completely well-taken, I don't think they go nearly far enough in capturing the sheer idiocy of judging the quality of a given book--at least when it comes to fiction--on a "synopsis." Perhaps this practice works well enough for some works of non-fiction--those in which information and "content" clearly overshadow all other considerations--but only the most reductive, simplistic approach to fiction or creative nonfiction could settle for synopsis.

Put simply, what does a novel have to do with synopsis, or synopsis with a novel? A synopsis is usually a plot synopsis, and such an account of a work of fiction doesn't come close to describing what the reader will actually experience in reading the work, and with modern/contemporary fiction it's a total disaster. Even most forms of neorealism don't put much emphasis on plot--writers having sensibly concluded there's no point in competing with movies for the slam-bang scenario--and what would be the point of laboriously describing in a synopsis the details of character and setting that the reader simply has to encounter in the finished work?

Think of the great novels that would necessarily seem silly in synopisis: Catch-22? Gravitys Rainbow? JR? Even Rabbit, Run or The Assistant? All of these books have to be experienced in their unfolding on the page for their qualities of language, form, tone, the intangible elements creating a good novel's distinctive voice. If a novel's essential attributes can be presented in a synopsis, why not just save time and go with the synopsis?

Perhaps--perhaps--some genre fiction in which plot is clearly king could be adequately previewed in a synopsis. But even here, can we be certain that a really good genre novel is going to get published because of what is known about it through a synopsis? Do all the movies made recently from Philip K. Dick's novels (a film version being a kind of synopsis) really capture what Dick's fans love about his books?

Most likely publishing through synopsis is just a way of making the job easier for editors and publishers, allowing them to perpetuate the blockbuster syndrome. In my view, most editors and publishers at the "major" houses don't know what they're doing anyway--certainly they know little about literature--and the "curse of the synopsis" is actually a curse on literature itself.