Author: Rohan Maitzen

The Dead (Critics, That Is)

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Dan Green alerts us to William Deresiewicz’s essay “Professing Literature in 2008” in The Nation, in which the author draws some dire conclusions about the profession of English literature from the evidence of this year’s MLA job listings:

This year’s Job List confirms the picture of a profession suffering from an epochal loss of confidence. It’s not just the fear you can smell in the postings. It’s the fact that no major theoretical school has emerged in the eighteen years since Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble revolutionized gender studies. As Harvard professor Louis Menand said three years ago, our graduate students are writing the same dissertations, with the same tools, as they were in 1990. Nor has any major new star–a Butler, an Edward Said, a Harold Bloom–emerged since then to provide intellectual leadership, or even a sense of intellectual adventure. The job market’s long-term depression has deepened the mood. Most professors I know discourage even their best students from going to graduate school; one actually refuses to talk to them about it. This is a profession that is losing its will to live.

Twenty years after Professing Literature, the “conflicts” still exist, but given the larger context in which they’re taking place, they scarcely matter anymore. The real story of academic literary criticism today is that the profession is, however slowly, dying.

I’ve also just finished reading Ronan McDonald’s The Death of the Critic–hmm, suddenly I don’t feel so well! Both authors present their material in what strikes me as an unfortunately tendentious way. Deresiewicz, for instance, in arguing that the “profession’s intellectual agenda is being set by teenagers,” apparently does not entertain the possibility that departments might be genuinely embracing the priorities he sees reflected in the latest wave of job ads, rather than cravenly appeasing their undergraduates. McDonald similarly attributes most changes in critical practice to everything but the conviction that the method in question might have intrinsic merit, as when, discussing the establishment of English “as a university discipline” in the early 20th century, he says that the critics of the time “sought to imbue [English] with some procedural and disciplinary muscle” (89). No doubt showing that English could have “procedural and disciplinary muscle” was crucial to proving its academic credibility, but McDonald repeatedly implies the primacy of self-interest over scholarly commitment–a move which in turn bespeaks a hermeneutics of suspicion on his part to match any he might point to in ‘cultural studies.’ Both of these writers, in other words, seem to consider their colleagues and peers singularly unprincipled and opportunistic–or (a bit more generously, as they might prefer to be interpreted) they see them as particularly susceptible to fads because they lack foundational commitments (Deresiewicz) or have tried too hard for too long to appear what they are not, namely scientists (McDonald).

Still, both Deresiewicz and McDonald are describing features of this profession (historically and currently) recognizable to anyone working within it, even if we might quarrel over how they are characterized or explained. That priorities in teaching and scholarship have changed often, sometimes dramatically, is not news; neither is it a revelation that English as a discipline seems particularly prone to self-doubt, internal convulsions, and obsessive self-scrutiny and meta-criticism. Is it on its death-bed, though? In my own department we are going through yet another round of curriculum reform–the third or fourth since I was hired just over a decade ago. I have come to see we aren’t actually moving towards any final goal but that each such round is part of an ongoing, probably never-ending process driven by many things, from our own changing research interests and strengths to the ever-mutating condition of the ‘canon’ of material and methods we feel responsible for presenting and the fluctuating needs and interests of an evolving student population. How far is this instability a symptom of disease, and how far is it a healthy process, warding off stagnation and sustaining our connection with a wider (and itself endlessly evolving) life outside the academy? To be honest, at different times I have felt both ways about it myself, depending on just what’s on the table and how closely I am involved! Overall, though, surely it does not make sense to expect talk about literature to be the same now as it was 10, 20, or 50 years ago. Neither Deresiewicz nor McDonald provides particularly convincing evidence for the conclusion that criticism (as either a practice or a profession) is in a far worse state right now that at other times, and the pressure they both apparently feel towards polemical generalization means they obscure all kinds of qualifications and nuances as well as many potential signs of life.

That said, there are certainly some features of McDonald’s argument with which I do find myself in sympathy, or which ring changes on themes that have preoccupied me for some time. Key among these is his interest in closing, or at least bridging, the gap between “the academic critic and a wider public audience” (ix). Though every history of criticism notes the same phenomenon and agrees with McDonald that it dates more or less from the early 20th century, with the professionalization of literary study and the bifurcation between criticism and literary journalism / reviewing, I think McDonald’s specific diagnosis is distinct: he blames critics’ abandonment of evaluation for the alienation of the wider public:

The question in which the reading public would have taken a primary interest – ‘Is this book / artwork worth my attention and time? Is it of any merit?’ – was not one that exercised the cultural theoretician. (23)

“If criticism forsakes evaluation, it also loses its connections with a wider public” (134): this loss and its roots in the history of criticism are the book’s major focus, though McDonald also considers other phenemona that have contributed to the diminished relevance of academic critics, particularly the democratization (or relativization) of criticism, or attitudes towards critical expertise, enabled by new media such as blogs or Amazon-style customer reviews. His focus on evaluation is reiterated in his prescriptive closing section, which calls for a renewed aestheticism and concludes,

Perhaps the critic is not dead, but simply sidelined and slumbering. The first step in reviving him or her is to bring the idea of artistic merit back to the heart of academic criticism. ‘Judgement’ is the first meaning of kritos. If criticism is to be valued, if it is to reach a wide public, it needs to be evaluative. (149)

There seem to be some internal inconsistencies in McDonald’s analysis of criticism’s decline in public significance. His chief grievance with the movements he groups together as ‘cultural studies’ is that they treat literature instrumentally, as a means to other (usually political) ends. On his own account, though, most major critical movements have done some version of this, from promoting or sustaining civil society to “fill[ing] the breach left in religion’s absence” (69), and in fact the whole idea of ‘evaluation’ always has to be grounded in a set of extrinsic standards which (again on McDonald’s own account) have almost never been strictly aesthetic (if such a thing is even possible). Though McDonald believes that emphasizing aestheticism will bring about a “rapprochement between academic and non-academic criticism,” and thus, apparently, between critics and general readers, aesthetic evaluation is surely as problematic as any other kind. Further, McDonald actually praises Virginia Woolf precisely for “enrich[ing] aesthetic formalism with political and gender consciousness” (86)–so Paterian obsession with the immediacy of the aesthetic encounter is presumably not his ideal. So what is it, exactly, that he means to invoke with his mantra of ‘evaluation’? He objects to the levelling effects of considering every cultural artefact equally worthy of critical attention (“To be concerned with everything is, ultimately, to be concerned with nothing” [127]), but he resists the notion of an unchanging canon (“Who would not welcome the rediscovery of unjustly forgotten women writers, or the efforts to hear the voices of the marginalized and disempowered . . . ?” [21]; “the criteria for admission [to the ‘canon’] needed to be renovated . . . ‘quality’ is not an eternal and unchanging facility, but rather one that mutates along with the cultural evolution of a society” [23]). Once you’ve acknowledged the ‘problematics’ of literary judgment, how then are you supposed to answer what he proposes is the common reader’s key question (“Is this book … worth my attention and my time?”)? For what it’s worth, I think most academic critics would in fact be quite happy to answer that question about any book, but first we would all want to develop the question further (along the lines I laid out here, for instance).

Still, I share McDonald’s concern about the isolation of academic expertise from today’s reading culture more generally. I was struck particularly by his note that “Vintage are launching a new series of classical novels to rival Penguin, but they have decided to use journalists and novelists, not academics, to write the ‘Introductions'” (25). If true, this certainly marks a change and a lost opportunity for scholars interested in demonstrating the interest and value of their work to a wider readership. (Journalists and creative writers certainly dominate the book review section of Canada’s “national” newspaper, The Globe and Mail.) I think, too, that he is right to be looking at questions of judgment and how they are understood and articulated as one of the flashpoints for misunderstanding or resentment between academics and other readers. I just don’t see how his prescription to be more evaluative is an adequate response, unless (at the minimum) it is accompanied by a commitment to showing why the question “Is it of any merit?” requires substantial complication before a worthwhile answer is possible. The responsibility here is not all ours: ideally, readers would want, not to be dictated to, but to be engaged in debate worthy of the books they are considering. Imagine a reader who takes this position, for example:

[Great thinkers can] rouse, excite, and elevate our whole natures—set us thinking, and therefore enable us to escape from the fetters of ancient prejudice and worn-out platitude, or make us perceive beauty in external nature, or set before us new ideals of life, to which we should otherwise have been indifferent. But we have to co-operate in the result, if it is to be of any real value. We are not passive buckets to be pumped into . . . mere receptacles for ready-made ideas, but fellow-creatures capable of being roused into independent activity.

Such a reader wants, not to be told whether a book has “any merit” (McDonald’s formulation), but to collaborate in forming a judgment–and accepts responsibility for his or her own “independent activity.” Now there’s a hope to get even the most moribund critic up off her sickbed! (The quotation, by the way, is from Leslie Stephen’s 1881 essay “The Moral Element in Literature.”)

One final note: McDonald points to James Wood as an example of a new wave in critical possibilities, “an avowed evaluative critic of the novel” who has “moved not from academia to journalism . . . but rather from journalism to the university” (147). (In my text, he notes that this is not “the usual root” [sic]–one of many egregious editing errors in the volume, including missing words and faulty punctuation.) Wood is certainly an interesting example of someone who approaches criticism as a serious public task requiring both insight and erudition, judgment and learning. Is the highest standard of criticism, though, to be someone with strong opinions and the erudition to explain them well? Is Wood’s evaluation of novels really what makes his criticism important, or is it his ability to analyze literary particularities while taking into account (as McDonald argues Woolf does) the situatedness of the work in history and life? I would say the latter; even Wood has trouble articulating his standards (such as his foundational assumption that everything valuable in the modern novel begins with Flaubert) without their seeming like prejudices that ultimately add little to our ability to understand and appreciate other kinds (as the exceptions he often admits to in How Fiction Works seems to confirm–oops, for instance, but then there’s Dickens!).

Update: I just noticed John Mullan weighing in (favorably) on McDonald in the TLS here: “there has been something comical about the eagerness of academics to scorn the notion that some books are better than others…” Honestly, (setting aside objections to the incessant pretense that all ‘academics’ speak with one voice), surely these smart, literate people know that “better” is a meaningless measure unless we can explain better at what? You just can’t take the next step in the conversation without refining the question (and simply revising it to “better written” will not do). Shouldn’t readers and critics alike have to scrutinize, articulate, and defend the grounds of their evaluations? And isn’t the conversation itself, as much as (maybe even more than) the conclusion what will be exciting, revealing, instructive? Finally, is it so terrible to take time for something that is interesting or important, even if on some measures you might conclude it is not the best, even of its kind?

Some Notes on How Fiction Works

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I got my copy of Wood’s How Fiction Works from the Book Depository a couple of days ago and in between finishing He Knew He Was Right and The Maltese Falcon and starting Middlemarch and An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, I have managed to read the whole thing–not nearly as hard as it might have been, given how brief and, ultimately, shallow a text it is (hence the title of this post, meant to imply that Wood does not really deserve his title!). Full review to come as part of my ‘series’ on “books about books.” The short version is: I’m underwhelmed, and also disappointed, given how smart and even moving I have found some of Wood’s more careful criticism (yes, moving, and how often can we say that about literary criticism?).

This Week in My Classes (March 10, 2008)

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First, a momet to vent. On Friday of last week I handed back homework assignments in Mystery and Detective Fiction and took up the entire class meeting on the topic “how to do better next time.” Although I usually address common problems when returning work, this time seemed different because of the relatively low level of problem–to give just one example, although for one part of the assignment students were clearly (and I mean clearly) instructed to write one coherent paragraph, large numbers of them wrote anywhere from two to six paragraphs, sometimes simply setting off each new sentence. It’s the kind of marking experience that leaves me wondering if somehow it’s my confusion: has the definition of ‘paragraph’ changed, maybe? As I hope I made clear to them, that instruction was not just an arbitrary limit on their creativity but a deliberate direction meant, among other things, to improve the odds that they would put forward a coherent idea supported through argumentation and evidence–rather than, say, a string of basically unconnected observations. So ignoring it had other consequences for the quality of both their thinking and their writing. Then there were the many, many students who just as cavalierly disregarded the word limits I had set for another part of the assignment, thus, again, undermining my effort to encourage pointed commentary rather than plot summary. As I demonstrated with examples drawn from this round of assignments, the task could certainly be done well within the set limits, but it’s true that editing is hard work, and I couldn’t help concluding that some of them had imagined they would be fine just tossing off their first thoughts and turning them in. The vast array of typos (ah, that well known detective Sherlock Homes!) was also discouraging. But as I told them, a flurry of red ink is really a compliment, as it indicates my conviction that they can in fact get it right if they take time and pay attention!

OK. So. Hoping to turn Friday’s negative energy into something more positive, today we did an editing worksheet giving them some hands-on practice at writing more concise, focused prose and then at developing observations about their reading into the kind of unifying interpretive idea called for in their paragraph assignment. For the latter we worked with Sara Paretsky‘s clever story “Dealer’s Choice,” in which she takes on the voice of Christopher Marlowe and offers up her own ‘take’ on the hard-boiled detective story. For our exercise we compared her ‘femme fatale,’ “Naomi Felstein” (a.k.a, Kathleen Akiko Moloney) to Brigid O’Shaughnessy, exploring how Paretsky uses now-familiar hard-boiled elements to do something rather different. Is the story an homage, a parody, a sincere re-visitation, or a subversion of the hard-boiled genre? I opened with some brief comments Paretsky has made about trying to do a straight gender role-reversal in this genre, and her conclusion that too much simply changes when you put a woman behind the desk. The issues she raises will become particularly relevant for us when we move on to Sue Grafton‘s ‘A’ is for Alibi in a couple of weeks. But first, starting Wednesday, we’re studying P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. Sadly, the Smithsonian lecture I was hoping to play for them appears to be non-functioning!

In The Victorian ‘Woman Question,‘ it’s Middlemarch time (right in the middle of March, too, as they pointed out–clever, eh?). I wrote a fair amount about how I approach teaching Middlemarch when I worked on it in my 19th-century fiction class in the fall. This round will be different for at least a couple of reasons, though. First of all, as this is a seminar class, inevitably our discussions will take new and unexpected directions as we are guided by the students’ opening questions rather than my lesson plans. Second, we are coming at it after reading several novels focusing very prominently on marriage and (of course) the ‘woman question,’ and these are not actually the angles I play up the most in my lecture classes. To me (and, I hope, to the students who were also in my fall class) it will be interesting to see which aspects of the novel take on increased significance as a result. I’m expecting, for instance, that the Lydgate/Rosamond plot will be more prominent this time, and we may take more time on Fred and Mary than I usually manage. Having just finished He Knew He Was Right, the students may find Dorothea’s struggle to submit to Casaubon–her idealization of renunciation–more problematic than they otherwise would; in fact, I am quite interested in comparing Eliot’s emphasis on duty with Trollope’s interest in rights and principles. I will also be tempted to return us to the questions of literary merit we kicked around when we were studying East Lynne, and which came back in a more muted form with Trollope, whose readability (as Friday’s presenters emphasized) has as often cost him as earned him credibility. And, speaking of Friday’s presentation, our class activity was a mock tea party in which we were all assigned parts from the novel–fun, appropriate given how much we talked about the importance of characters and characterization in the novel, and also effective in stimulating informed contributions from pretty much every member of the seminar. I was assigned the part of Wallachia Petrie, proving, of course, that they were casting against type! (Ha.)

This Week in My Classes (March 3, 2008)

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We’re back from our ‘break’ and, if this year is like years past, the time from now until the end of term will seem to go by in a crazy rush. Here’s what’s in the works for this week:

In Mystery and Detective Fiction, we’re finishing up The Maltese Falcon. Today we talked about Flitcraft, as mentioned here. Next time we’ll watch a clip from the film version, probably the concluding scene between Sam and Brigid as preparation for a class debate about the morality or other implications of Sam’s choice to turn her in. I must say I find this novel one of the most depressing I teach–not because its elements are, strictly speaking, sad in themselves. The Remains of the Day, for instance, is much sadder. But Ishiguro’s novel, while also showing the costs of life without love, shows us (indirectly, implicitly) the alternative, suggesting it is attainable, worth aiming for even if in the end you miss. Hammett emphasizes the costs as well (note Effie’s revulsion in the final chapter, and Sam’s shiver), but only Effie seems to strive for something better, warmer, more human, and we can tell that she persists in her kinder, gentler world view only by being (willfully?) oblivious to the realities of the world she lives in. Can love and hope be sustained only through ignorance? Sigh.

And in The Victorian ‘Woman Question’ we’re reaching the end of He Knew He Was Right. What a great read. Once you’re about 500 pages into it, surely you’re hooked. Before the break I took some time in class to inquire how the students were feeling about the novel. Admittedly, those who are hating it are not likely to ‘fess up to their professor–or perhaps they would, given an opening, since they seem a pretty candid bunch, and have expressed some blunt opinions before. Anyway, I was interested in how appreciative several of them seemed. One said that she turned to Trollope with relief after doing the reading for other classes, partly because of the directness of his narration and project, and partly because she felt she could care for so many of the characters. Several have praised the novel’s humour and are clearly taking pleasure in the twists and turns of the subplots; a few particularly emphasized the appeal of the ‘secondary’ characters, who strike them as lively and distinct. I’m feeling pleased about my gamble in assigning it (my brooding over which is recorded here and here especially). Mind you, there will be some culture shock when we move to Middlemarch next week: I think they will find it much slower going, though perhaps now they won’t be intimidated by its length!

Why I Teach Literature” (with some thoughts about James Wood appended)

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Not long ago there was a ‘meme’ going around on the question “Why Do I Teach Literature?” (Joseph Kugelmass’s comments on this topic at The Valve include links to further contributors). Reading around in my files today (where I am in search of an organizing pattern for future research–but that’s another post for another day) I came across this passage and it struck me as nicely encapsulating both the central problem of teaching literature (that it is, paradoxically, always about feeling as well as knowing) and its greatest lure:

Critics, before and after Northrop Frye, have distinguished between literature and experience and literature and knowledge. The distinction, though plausible in some theoretical contexts, blurs nearly every day, in nearly every classroom. I am content that it blurs. Unlike physicists, who teach not nature but physics, we teach both literature (how it feels, how it thinks, to have read a literary work) and the rules and facts about reading literature. As Gertrude Stein once said to an obtuse interviewer: “But after all you must enjoy my writing and if you enjoy it you understand it. If you did not enjoy it, why do you make a fuss about it?” That is why I finally became a teacher of literature, to live in the vicinity of that joy.

This is from Ihab Hassan’s essay “Confessions of a Reluctant Critic or, The Resistance to Literature” (New Literary History 24, 1993). Other critics have also written eloquently about the experience of following that lure of joy into a professional life that does not–perhaps cannot–reinforce or reward it, and may even work actively against it. John McGowan, for instance, in his book Democracy’s Children (2002), notes,

[T]here remains a tension between the experience of reading literature and the paths followed in studying. . . . To give one’s allegiance to the academic forms through which literature is discussed and taught is to withdraw (at least partly) allegiance to literature itself” (65).

25 Years after Hassan’s remarks, I think it remains true that it is in the classroom rather than in their scholarship that many academic literary critics feel and communicate their love of their subject. One of the reasons I shifted research directions altogether a few years ago (significantly, after achieving the professional security of tenure) was that I wanted my research activities to give me, or be driven by, the same kind of intellectual and affective immediacy I find in teaching, and I couldn’t see how that would happen if, among other things, much of my work continued to be on second-rate material, no matter how historically revealing it was–or how useful for generating publishable, if niche, material of my own. To a large extent I succeeded, and as an unanticipated bonus, I think I became a better teacher because of the synergy that developed between my class preparation and my other work. It’s interesting, actually, that it seems to be widely taken for granted (or is it?) that undergraduate teaching and scholarly research leading to publication are very different kinds of things, and overwhelmingly the professional priority is with the latter–even though (or, perhaps, because) its tendency is to drive all joy away!

Follow-Up (to be developed later): Also as part of sorting through my files, I’ve been re-reading some of the James Wood essays I’ve gathered up, and (aside from being overwhelmed with envy at his erudition, elegant style, and intelligent craftsmanship as an essayist), I’m struck by how much closer they are to the kind of criticism we–or at least I–do in the classroom than anything that ordinarily passes for academic or professional criticism (and here I think it’s important to distinguish, as mainstream writers often don’t, between criticism and reviewing). It’s not that I think I’m as smart, articulate, or insightful as Wood,or as well-read either, though I hope I have my good moments! My point is really about the genre of criticism he works in, which seems to me to lie somewhere in between the poles of academic scholarship (which he clearly knows about, but relies on more implicitly than explicitly most of the time) and popular book reviews (which would rarely seek the kind of broad perspective or level of sophisticated analysis he deploys). I’ve ordered How Fiction works from The Book Depository, along with The Irresponsible Self, and I’ve got The Broken Estate from the library. I sense a Wood-fest coming on, perhaps as a way to draw together some of the scattered elements of my recent browsing and brooding about the function of criticism at the present time. Conveniently, as a motivator, there’s a conference panel on Victorian criticism for which I’m hoping to submit an abstract. One of the questions in the CFP is about what the relationships envisaged by the Victorians between “different forms of cultural production and the work of the critic” might tell us “about how criticism was imagined during the Victorian era, and what they might tell us about the more professionalized forms of criticism practiced today.” If this isn’t an opportunity (and a challenge) for me to make something of my work on the Broadview anthology along with the ‘work’ I’ve been doing on this blog, I don’t know what is! Whether anyone would want to hear it is, of course, another matter altogether.

Hammett Time

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Here’s something to file under ‘coincidences.’ I was just revising my notes for Monday’s meeting of Mystery and Detective Fiction, for a lecture and discussion section focusing primarily on the story Sam Spade tells Brigid O’Shaughnessy in Chapter 7 of The Maltese Falcon about “a man named Flitcraft.” Feeling restless with work, though (it’s still Reading Week, after all), I flipped around to a few of my usual bloggy haunts and almost immediately landed at this post over at the Guardian‘s book blog:

Like most readers, I often wonder what it is that makes some books more appealing than others. It’s an impossible problem to solve definitively, but the explanation I’m finding most persuasive this week is that part of it – possibly the greater part – is in the digressions. Digression in writing is risky: nobody wants to read 500 pages when 250 will do. But in the right hands it’s exhilarating.

This is especially true in the kind of writing that otherwise gets right to the point. In fact one of the most remarkable and arresting digressions I’ve ever come across is the “Flitcraft parable”, which appears about a third of the way into Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon. (read the rest here)

I think the author of the post is entirely right that the seemingly gratuitous character of this story, which comes just when we think the action of the plot is really heating up, is precisely what makes it so significant and effective; we are driven to ask why it is there at all, forced, as it were, into being critics and interpreters instead of ‘just’ a passive audience. And, as the post suggests, its relevance is not limited to The Maltese Falcon; rather, the story stands as a pointed, if elliptical, primer on an entire worldview. (One major work of criticism about Hammett is actually called Beams Falling.) In my class discussion, we will think about how someone would (or could or should) act who sees the world in that way, as governed entirely by “blind chance.” What, for instance, is the place of love in that world? Where do you find your guiding principles, to combat or survive the randomness? Sam, of course, defines himself through his work, choosing an ethos of professional loyalty over sentiment: “When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it.” After detailing his reasons for turning Brigid in, he points out that all they’ve got on the other side of the argument “is the fact that maybe you love me and maybe I love you.” It’s possible that he never does in fact love her, but my reading of the novel has been that he does, as much as he can, but that he rates that feeling as less important than the code he lives by. It’s a rational response but a chilling one, which is presumably why Effie asks him not to touch her once she knows and he himself ends the novel shivering.

P. D. James, Time to Be in Earnest

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It’s Reading Week here, which means a slight break from the day-to-day pressures of the term. Still, one’s pedagogical conscience is never easy, so I’ve been balancing work and relaxation by reviewing P. D. James’s memoir, Time to Be in Earnest, with an eye to teaching An Unsuitable Job for a Woman again in a week or two. James’s subtitle is “A Fragment of an Autobiography,” which rightly suggests a work that is neither tightly crafted nor expansive; it is an uneven but ultimately, I think, engaging mix of simple diary entries (her success has made her a very busy woman, we learn), recollections of her earlier life, and reflections on subjects of interest to her, from the history of crime fiction (of course) to current events such as the death of Princess Diana (the memoir begins in August 1997) or her experience serving on the jury for the Booker Prize, about which she is certainly frank (“Our final choice of Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger was only arrived at after a long argument which nearly made us late for the Guildhall dinner, and the choice was not unanimous”). (For what it’s worth, Moon Tiger is one of my favourite books, and would probably have gotten my vote!) Throughout, her strong, if slightly crotchety, personality provides the unifying thread; she is opinionated and decisive, especially in her literary judgments (on The God of Small Things, for instance, she remarks that “it seems to me somewhat lush and overwritten, a beginner’s attempt at a Naipaul or a Rushdie”), impatient with pretense and show, and unapologetic about her own chosen form:

I love structure in a novel and the detective story is probably the most structured of popular fiction. Some would say that it is the most artificial, but then all fiction is artificial, a careful rearrangement by selection of the writer’s internal life in a form designed to make it accessible and attractive to a reader. The construction of a detective story might be formulaic; the writing need not be. And I was setting out, I remember, with high artistic ambitions. I didn’t expect to make a fortune, but I did hope one day to be regarded as a good and serious novelist. It seemed to me, as it has to others, that there can be no better apprenticeship for an aspiring novelist than a classical detective story with its technical problems of balancing a credible mystery with believable characters and a setting which both complements and integrates the action. And I may have needed to write detective fiction for the same reasons as aficionados enjoy the genre: the catharsis of carefully controlled terror, the bringing of order out of disorder, the reassurance that we live in a comprehensible and moral universe and that, although we may not achieve justice, we can at least achieve an explanation and a solution. (12-13)

She talks often, actually, about the particular importance of setting in her novels; this is a topic we will address at length in class as we work on Unsuitable Job, in which the beauty of Cambridge provides a particularly poignant (as well as thematically significant) backdrop for the horrors of the story. An expert on the history of her own genre, James is also widely read in Victorian and contemporary fiction, though she is generally more enthusiastic about the former than the latter. Here, in a passage that exemplifies the bookish, even erudite, yet somewhat meandering or incidental quality of the book, she quotes one of my own favourite lines about the novel, Henry James writing on Trollope (an unlikely alliance, perhaps?) then finds herself meditating on the changing role of fiction in society:

One quotation I would most like to see in any revised edition [of the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Quotations, which she was reviewing for the Sunday Times] are the words of Henry James, writing of Anthony Trollope, “We trust to novels to maintain us in the practice of great indignations and great generosities.” It is an elevanted ideal of fiction, but, thinking it over, I am not sure that it is any longer true. Dickens could write a novel which would move his readers to pity or outrage and act as a spur to action, but surely today it is television which, sometimes powerfully, sometimes superficially, examines for us the dilemmas and concerns of our age, reflects our lives and opens us to the lives of others. . . .

In particular, the so-called literary novel too often seems removed from the day-to-day concerns of ordinary people. The very description ‘literary novel’ is, for many readers, an indication that the work is not intended for them. With some notable exceptions–David Lodge is one–the worlds of industry and commerce, the very means by which society gains the wealth which supports our art and literature, are alien to the modern novelist, perhaps because they are worlds few of us have experienced. Have we a responsibility to break free from our cabined preoccupations, our fascination with history and our literary exploitations of the evils of the past and address ourselves to more contemporary themes? Is there a novelist today who could write–or would try to write–War and Peace or Trollope’s The Way We Live Now with its brilliant portrayal of the financier Melmotte, the nineteenth-century Robert Maxwell?

Unless the novel, particularly the so-called literary novel, can reach the hearts and minds of ordinary people, reading will increasingly become a minority interest. . . It would be futile, and indeed silly, to suggest that novelists today can recover the hierarchical and moral certainties of Victorian England. Some writers would argue that we can no longer comfortably write in the tradition of social realism because we no longer know what we mean by reality. I suppose the extremes of literary experimentation are some novelists’ ways of explaining the arbitrariness and chaos of human existence, an attempt to express the inexpressible. Thomas Hardy wrote that the secret of fiction lies in the adjustment of things uneven to things eternal and universal. But what adjustment can a writer make if, in a world governed for him by chance and chaos, he is no longer able to believe in things eternal and universal? (77-78)

On that note, it’s interesting to note that James herself is a devoted, but not pious, Anglican, meaning she appreciates and participates in religious ritual but finds that compatible with what seems a fairly loose commitment to specific doctrines.

There’s much more of interest in the book, especially for fans of her novels or of detective fiction more generally. I’ll end here with some of the rules she provides, first for reviewers, and second for those adapting books for television. First, from her advice for reviewers:

  1. Always read the whole of the book before you write your review.
  2. Don’t undertake to review a book if it is written in a genre you particularly dislike.
  3. Review the book the author has written, not the one you think he/she should have written.
  4. If you have prejudices–and you’re entitled to them–face them frankly and, if appropriate, acknowledge them.

And some sage words for TV people:

  1. [her #6] Must we always have a car chase? Men may like them (although I can’t think why); most women find them boring in the extreme. And if you must have a car chase, must it go on for so long? It need last only as long as it takes us to go and make the tea.

The book itself ends with her engaging address to the Jane Austen Society of North America on “Emma Considered as a Detective Story,” well worth reading. Finally, if you want to listen to James speak for herself, try this excellent lecture on “The Craft of the Mystery Story,” which she gave at the Smithsonian in 1995.

The Function of Criticism, in Brief

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I just came across this quotation in my notebook and was struck, again, by how well it suits my own sense of the central purpose, or best possible outcome, of criticism:

The goal is not to pack into our traveling bag only the best that has been thought and said but to find forms of critical talk that will improve the range or depth or precision of our appreciations.

This formulation seems to me at once stringent and flexible. (It’s from Wayne Booth’s The Company We Keep.)

Recent Reading (and a little Recent Watching, too)

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Despite He Knew He Was Right (currently on the table in my Victorian ‘Woman Question’ seminar), graduate admissions, and the ordinary middle-of-term business (incoming assignments, class preparation, committee meetings, and so on), I have been able to do a little ‘pleasure’ reading lately. Here are some ‘thumbnail’ responses.

Reginald Hill, Death Comes for the Fat Man. I find this series reliable: literate, well plotted, with its main characters well enough developed that the prospect of Dalziel’s demise had some poignancy. This particular novel did not blow me away, though (for those who have read it, sorry for the pun). Although I appreciate Hill’s attempt to engage with big issues and international conflicts as they register on a local scale, his Knights Templar seemed like foolish medieval joust re-enactors rather than a genuine force of menace worthy of their intended opposition. On the other hand, I wondered as I was reading whether that was Hill’s point: that secret societies, blood vengeance, beheadings, and so forth are relics of medieval concepts of justice, religion, and warfare–that the Islamicist movements the Knights imitate represent anachronistic, regressive forces that are incongruous with contemporary mores.

Benjamin Black, Christine Falls. I expected more from this much-touted ‘crossover’ work by Booker-Prize winner John Banville. It is elegantly written, and some of the characters–especially his dour protagonist, the pathologist Quirke–are compellingly portrayed, but I didn’t find that was true of all of them (Rose and Josh Crawford, for instance, or even Phoebe, who seems to be supposed to carry a pretty heavy thematic burden). Quirke’s love for Sarah seemed based on nothing in particular (maybe I just miss fuller exposition?). The central ‘crime’ had few surprises for a novel set in 1950s Ireland (corruption in the Catholic church? unwanted babies? no kidding!). Atmospheric, I guess, but a thin atmosphere unless the people live in it intensely, and Banville’s spare style did not establish that kind of intensity for me. I suppose I would sum up the novel’s theme as ‘being orphaned’ (literally, but also emotionally and metaphysically). It did not bring home to me what the costs of such a condition are, maybe because on closer inspection pretty much all of the characters are in it together–which in itself is a potentially powerful (poignant, frightening) vision. I’ll probably re-read it, as I admit my immersion in baggy Victorian novels that tell me everything (sometimes over and over) does not always make me the best reader of novels that leave more out.

On Friday I rented The Jane Austen Book Club. I found the book OK, if a bit gimmicky, but I thought it would make a decent movie. It did, but also an odd one: I can’t imagine anyone getting much out of it, for instance, who doesn’t know all six of Austen’s novels pretty well–well enough to take an interest in watching other people debate, say, Fanny Price’s character, or Emma’s marriage to Mr Knightly. Superficial as the movie’s book club discussions are (in fact, maybe because they are so superficial and rapid), non-Janeites seem likely to tune out, and then the plot that surrounds these scenes is itself not particularly rich. It’s striking that only rarely did the book club scenes turn on issues of construction or literary technique: they were pretty much all about the characters all the time, generally in the spirit of “these people seem real to us, so let’s debate their motives and choices.” I have almost no personal experience of book clubs, but my sense is that this is indeed typical. Of course, this is also precisely the kind of conversation I think most English professors eventually shut down in class. And yet working my way through He Knew He Was Right with my students, I have been finding that it seems like the most natural and appropriate approach, because Trollope’s most notable literary technique is precisely characterization, and his primary concern is what his characters do, with what motives, to what ends, and with what consequences. Also, as my students have pointed out, in many crucial cases he does not take sides, or if so, only equivocally, so that we are poised ourselves on the cusp of decisions or moral judgements and prompted to keep weighing the pros and cons of actions, the honesty, self-knowledge, or self-deceptions of his people, and so on. Who is right, Emily or Louis? Is Priscilla right to want Emily and Nora to leave the Clock House? Should Dorothy accept Mr Gibson? We spend so much time thinking about these questions with the characters that backing off into other kinds of interpretive questions sometimes seems like missing the point. In Middlemarch we know Dorothea’s first marriage is an awful mistake. We are pressed to understand it, even to sympathize with it, nonetheless, and we may perhaps acknowledge the beauty of such an error: there’s plenty of room for nuance and ambivalence. But somehow in that case a spirited discussion on the relative merits of Sir James and Mr Casaubon seems out of place, because clearly there are larger philosophical and historical and moral issues being brought into focus by Dorothea’s choice. In Trollope, the choices seem more literal, more ordinary, and no less important–perhaps even more so in a way, because you have no confidence that the wise narrator will resolve or even analyze the full significance of the options for you. As many of the characters keep discovering, you may have to rely on your own judgment.

He had a bad day!

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Turns out, before Daniel Powter, there was…Herbert Spencer!? Over at Acephalous, Spencer scholar Scott Eric Kaufman has convincingly documented the importance of his research subject with evidence straight from the ‘paper of record’: “Herbert Spencer, who has been ill for some time, passed a bad day today.” As SEK says, “He was the Britney Spears of his time! Except instead of being a useless pop singer, he was an Intellectual Titan!” Read the whole story here. George Eliot enthusiasts may feel little sympathy for the man, who gave our heroine many bad days by refusing to love her (in his own words, “the lack of physical attraction was fatal”).