There is no inherent reason why what is called "academic criticism" cannot be of interest to non-academic readers. Certainly the formalist approach of New Criticism, which offers the reader a more focused perspective on the way a work of literature produces its effects, as well as an older-style historical criticism, which offers a view of the work's affiliations with other writing of the period and with the ideas and assumptions characteristic of the period itself, could be of interest to the general reader, although even when these critical methods were ascendant, academic critics were often enough perceived as too far removed from ordinary readers's concerns. Whether or not this perception was in some cases justified, certainly the strategy of "close reading" associated with the New Critics has persisted as a valid critical principle even among general-interest book reviewers, and if current literary culture can't be called rigorous in its adherence to shared critical standards, it does retain at least some residual allegiance to the idea that works of literature, including new works, deserve, and can withstand, some degree of conscientious explication and analysis.
On the other hand, academic criticism in its current form, the form dominant in most academic journals and the most prestigious academic presses, is not likely to be of interest or use to readers interested in how criticism might help to sharpen the reading experience. While academic critics still often profess to be offering a "close reading" of a text, it is usually not a reading intended to illuminate the work in such a way that readers might approach it more fruitfully. Not only is the interest the critic takes in the work likely to be from a narrow perspective centered on politics, history, or social context, but the political considerations won't simply concern the political background of the author or subject, and the historical and social analysis won't primarily situate the work in its time to assist understanding or clarify themes and implicit assumptions, all of which could still contribute to a more informed reading experience. Instead, the political agenda will the critic's own, as a part of which critical analysis is intended, while historical, social, and cultural forces will themselves be the critic's ultimate focus, not the way these forces shape the aesthetic character of a poem, a novel, or a writer's work as a whole. "Literary theory" may be offered, but there won't be much that's literary about it.
Of course, very little that is actually offered to general readers in book reviews, magazines, or trade publishing could be called academic criticism. Via the latter, the only attention given to literature is through biographies of writers, which in turn become the prompt for what passes as literary criticism in periodicals such as the New York Review of Books, noodling essays in which the reviewer makes sweeping statements about a writer's work, often simply repeating the conventional wisdom, while otherwise mostly recapitulating whatever biography is under review. In this context, Michael Gorra's Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Massterpiece is a welcome and potentially important book. The title suggests the book will be a work of criticism elucidating the first of James's "major" novels, Portrait of a Lady, but in elucidating the novel Gorra draws on James's life experiences as well, so that the book could be described as criticism informed by biography or as the rare kind of biography that is also credible as literary criticism.
For the most part, Gorra focuses on the years during which James is working on Portrait, but he also ranges throughout James's life, considering episodes and events that informed the development of James's sense of himself as a writer, culminating in Portrait of a Lady, the book most critics and scholars have long identified as the first truly "Jamesian" of his novels, as well as the direction of James's life and work following Portrait, including discussions of his final novels, which in many ways show the techniques and concerns found in the earlier novel extended even more radically and exhaustively. Gorra also chronicles James's relationships with important people in his life, such as brother William and friend Constance Fenimore Woolson, whose romantic feelings for James went unrequited. Gorra judiciously handles the question of James's sexuality, allowing that circumstantial evidence suggests James's sexual desires were likely homoerotic, while also acknowledging there is no actual evidence that he ever acted on those desires (or that he ever acted on any sexual desires at all).
Readers interested in a biography of James should get enough emphasis on the life to satisfy their curiosity, perhaps thus making Gorra's exposition of the genesis of Portrait of a Lady and extended analysis of the text itself more palatable, especially as Gorra does about as good a job as it's possible to do in showing how biography can help us at times to appreciate a writer's work. James's experiences as a voluntary exile in Europe can clarify his development of the "international theme," the portrayal of Americans encountering the "old world" of Europe, while learning that Portrait of a Lady's protagonist, Isabel Archer, is in part based on James's "favorite" cousin, Minny Temple, might help explain why he chose to focus on a female protagonist in this first really complex treatment of the theme and perhaps provide insight into the perceived authorial attitude toward Isabel.
Still, Gorra implicitly recognizes the limitations of biographical criticism in making his book not about Henry James but his novel, one which Gorra believes is among the best and most significant novels in American literature. Ultimately his goal is to enhance our appreciation of this novel (and indirectly of Henry James as a fiction writer), in the most old-fashioned sense to account for its greatness. What Gorra has really produced in Portrait of a Novel is a work of critical eclecticism. He borrows from a number of critical approaches, including some of those currently ascendant in academic criticism, as well as more traditional "scholarly" concerns, and in the process demonstrates how criticism can draw on a variety of ways of thinking about literature as a phenomenon of human expression and culture in order to satisfy the ultimate goal of providing a clarifying perspective on a morally and aesthetically complex work of literature.
In this way, Portrait of a Novel is at least as important for what it represents as a work of criticism as it as a specific commentary on Henry James's novel. Which is not say the commentary on the novel Gorra provides isn't insightful, in some ways definitive, offering a reading of Portrait of a Lady that situates it in its time and place and in it's author's body of work, and that explicates its formal and thematic particulars in a style that does justice to the novel's complexity and could appeal to dedicated Jamesians, while also making the analysis accessible to more casual readers of James. In a typically pellucid passage, Gorra considers Isabel's decision to turn down the marriage proposal offered by Lord Warburton:
When Warburton proposes, Isabel recognizes that she has stepped into a scene she has read too many times before. She may not yet understand just what she wants, but she does recognize that this scene's very familiarity stands in itself as a reason to say no. She rejects the plot that other people might write for her, and insists instead that she must be free to choose, free to make her own mistakes. Her choice here may even be the right one, though that doesn't mean it will lead to happiness. For Isabel cannot escape the fate she seems to crave, the fate that waits to test her in the book's 500 remaining pages. Nor can we. However much we may want to live on in the world of green lawns, we have to recognize that James has made a different and less comfortable plot around this particular woman. . . .
If this account provides insight into Isabel's character, and thus into the "500 remaining pages" of the novel for which she serves as protagonist, it also exemplifies a certain kind of critical discourse, focused on "the text itself," which it is intended to illuminate, but free of acadamese and external agenda, accessible to any serious reader while foregoing the effort to popularize Henry James for a "broader" audience that probably doesn't exist. James is indisputably a sometimes difficult writer (Portrait of a Lady somewhat less so than, say, The Golden Bowl), and it is a difficulty that astute criticism can help to ameliorate, but James is never going to appeal to all readers, nor does criticism to be worthwhile need to make works of literature equally valuable to all.
Gorra also abstains from personalizing his consideration of Portrait of a Lady, from providing "more Gorra" as this reviewer bizarrely wanted him to do. If biography has replaced criticism as the most widely available form of engagement with literature and literary history, the aimlessly subjective focus on the critic's random thoughts and vague impressions has become increasingly more conspicuous in the only remaining form of periodical criticism, the book review. While the emphasis on subjective response is consistent enough with an egocentric American culture, it reduces criticism to the means of recording the critic's idiosyncratic (and often opaque) expressions of "feeling." That Michael Gorra admires Portrait of Lady greatly, that it has had a profound effect on the way he thinks about both life and literature, is perfectly evident, but he translates his personal admiration into a critical language that is descriptive rather than emotional, that registers the novel's palpable effects, not his own intangible fancies.
Our current literary culture could certainly benefit from more books like Portrait of Novel, books that avoid both the intellectual trendiness and abstraction of academic criticism and the undisciplined impressionism of popular criticism. We need popular criticism to be more than biographies overstuffed with trivial details of writers' lives at the expense of greater understanding of their work, an understanding conventional biographies simply can't provide. We need the sort of "in-between" criticism Gorra provides in this book, which could serve as a model for critics who are willing to indulge some of our apparent need for biographical context while keeping the focus on the art the writer made from his/her life. One innovative book does not a trend make, but anyone following up on Gorra's lead would be taking another step toward reviving literary criticism.
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