Literary criticism

Pedagogy, Evaluation, and What We Look for in ‘the’ Novel

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(cross-posted to The Valve)

Recent threads at The Reading Experience (including this acrimonious one launched by Dan’s blunt denunciation of Dostoevsky’s “cheap tricks” and “unrelenting tedium”) have had me thinking (again, and see also these posts) about the problem of literary evaluation. In The Death of the Critic, Ronan McDonald declared that “The first step in reviving [the critic] is to bring the idea of artistic merit back to the heart of academic criticism. . . . [I]f criticism is to be valued, if it is to reach a wide public, it needs to be evaluative.” As I’ve said before, I’m skeptical about this idea that aesthetic evaluation is the obvious fix for whatever ails academic criticism at the present time:

Once you’ve acknowledged the ‘problematics’ of literary judgment, how then are you supposed to answer what [McDonald] 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).

This time around, I’m particularly thinking about whether, or how far, my work as a teacher has committed me, not to relativism (which is where some people assume my reservations about ‘literary merit’ lead me) but to a kind of pluralism by which it’s not comparative measures of ‘worth’ that matter but seeking out the measures that fit the particular case. 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.

Here’s another excerpt from a book I’m reviewing, itself written with a pedagogical purpose, that illustrates what I mean by “seeking the measures the fit the particular case.” The authors have just argued that the “complexity” in Jane Eyre is limited to Jane herself, and that as characters get further “removed from Jane’s immediate concerns,” they become increasingly “flat and stereotypical”; the extreme example is Bertha Mason, whose representation is marked by “familiar, and often virulent, national and racial stereotypes.” The authors note that the novel “has been justifiably criticized for its reliance on these stereotypes.” Though they acknowledge the grounds for these criticisms, they go on to rule them out of order:

Their use in the novel . . . is part of a larger pattern of flattening out the social world beyond the circle of Jane’s own immediate concerns. Jane Eyre, in other words, is simply not the place to look for compelling social portraiture or profound insight into social relations–any more than, say, Scott is the place to look for compelling psychological depth. (74)

In other words, objecting to Bronte’s ‘flattening out,’ even of Bertha, is a category mistake: it’s not the kind of novel in which Bertha gets her own ‘complexity,’ but rather is the kind of novel in which Jane’s complex interiority is (nearly) all that matters.

One thing I find thought-provoking about that particular example is that (quite deliberately, I think) it sets two approaches against each other, one that reads from the inside out (setting interpretive limits based on the work’s nature, as it were), the other that brings a template of expectations to the novel and applies it as a test (a great deal of recent academic criticism could be seen as pursuing this latter course). So far at least, in this book (again, one with an overt pedagogical mission), the former approach is promoted and, as it happens, the novels defended against detractors. In the chapter on Scott, for instance, the authors cite Henry James’s famous criticism that “the centre of the subject is empty and the development pushed off, all round, toward the frame.” The authors reject James’s metaphor, which prioritizes and thus seeks “the portrait of an individual”:

But what if the subject Scott wishes to paint is not an individual human being, but instead . . . the way individuals interface with society and history? What if he wishes to reveal human nature, not from the skin in [as, they reasonably imply, James prefers], but from the skin out? then what James calls the “frame” . . . might bge more important than the individual. (37)

James’s theory of the novel, in other words, results in an inappropriate reading. I haven’t reached the chapter on Trollope yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised (or it wouldn’t be out of place) to find a similar objection to James’s dislike of Trollope’s narrative intrusions. In his 1883 retrospective on Trollope, James protested against his “little slaps at credulity”:

As a narrator of fictitious events he is nowhere; to insert into his attempt a backbone of logic, he must relate events that are assumed to be real. This assumption permeates, animates all the work of the most solid story-tellers; we need only mention . . . the magnificent historical tone of Balzac, who would as soon have thought of admitting to the reader that he was deceiving him, as Garrick or John Kemble would have thought of pulling off his disguise in front of the footlights.

Here, James confidently asserts that there is a right and a wrong way to write fiction–and Trollope is simply making a mistake when he “winks at us and reminds us that he is telling us an arbitrary thing.” But what if Trollope is not trying to write a Jamesian (or Balzacian) novel and failing, but writing a Trollopian novel? (I objected to a similar habit in James Wood’s How Fiction Works, in which at times a teleological theory of the novel seems to me to short-circuit Wood’s readings of fiction that ‘works’ differently than his favourites: ‘”Progress!” he exclaims after a quotation from Proust: “In Fielding and Defoe, even in the much richer Cervantes, revelation of this altering kind occurs at the level of plot.” But were Fielding and Defoe trying to do what Proust did and failing?’) If we allow the author what James, in a more pluralistic moment, called his “donnee,” then we have to think about Trollope’s narrator quite differently, in terms of what it “animates.”

Now, I wouldn’t want to say that reading a novel on its own terms should always be the end point of criticism. I think it’s also important to consider that not all novels read on their own terms get more, rather than less, attractive and compelling. Further, there’s lots of room for debate when it comes to defining what those terms are–to return to the Jane Eyre example above, I can certainly imagine someone disagreeing with the dodge that makes Jane’s attitude to Bertha relatively insignificant in terms of the novel’s overall themes or literary strategies. The starting point for that discussion, though, would not be “great novels are of X kind; Jane Eyre is not of that kind; therefore Jane Eyre is not a great novel.” Not least because no two novels are the same (including among nineteenth-century “realist” novels, often the straw examples for ‘smug moderns’ in the blogosphere), that discussion seems, inevitably, to lead nowhere.

Suppose, however, that you take the attitude sometimes expressed by Dan Green in his posts, and certainly expressed by some of his commenters–that philosophizing, politics, or social commentary are unimportant (even undesirable) in the novel, or at least far less significant than aesthetic effects. Then suppose you read a novel in which philosophizing, politics, or social commentary are extremely important: Middlemarch, for instance, or to take an example in which the form and aesthetics are far less impressive, Mary Barton. (I think the assumption that we have aesthetic experiences that aren’t bound up in what, for shorthand, I’ll call the ideas of a novel is highly problematic, but I’ll set that aside for now.) A reader committed to McDonald’s “aesthetic evaluation” might well reject these novels as poor examples of the genre. But it could be argued that such a reader is simply making a category mistake (as James is with Scott or Trollope) and thus doing a bad job of reading (and thus evaluating) the books. As a teacher, I would not let such a mistake alone but would instruct the student who faulted Gaskell, for intance, for sentimentality, to consider the kind of book she’s writing–the purposes she has for her novel–and then how the form and artistic strategies of the novel serve those purposes. My purpose would not be to coerce the student into liking Mary Barton, but to help him or her achieve an appreciation of Gaskell’s accomplishment–an understanding of what the book is and does. That, to me, would be the basis of any responsible literary criticism. Even on aesthetic grounds, I would want to take into account the contingency of different standards, too, and to consider whether our affective response to something like John Barton’s death isn’t also a matter of art.

I’m not altogether sure where I am going with these ruminations. I guess I’m 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. How typical is this pluralistic approach, among teachers or among readers? Is there a way in which such an approach really does disable evaluation? Or is it the means for an informed evaluation? Does evaluation inevitably imply prescription about what “the” novel should do, or what readers should prefer? What are the limits of the kind of sympathetic, ‘from the inside out’ reading strategies promoted by Case and Shaw’s book (which I find wholly congenial)?

Critical Limitations

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I couldn’t have said this better myself. In fact, in the introduction I wrote for my forthcoming anthology of 19th-century novel criticism, I didn’t say it better myself, though this is pretty much what I was getting at:

In the early twentieth century, . . . [a] more “professional” and more self-consciously theorized discourse about novels arose, as part of the movement whereby authors of “modern” fiction (above all Henry James) attempted to break free from the line of fiction it is the purpose of the present book to illuminate. This more “professional” kind of criticism became, with the passage of time, the basis for criticism of the novel as it was presented to students in schools and universities. It was useful for many purposes, among them a focus on the craft of the novel, on how novels create their effects. But a criticism based on a set of aesthetic priorities that were developed as part of a rebellion against the nineteenth-century social novel would seem likely to have certain limitations for those who want to understand nineteenth-century novels, not leave them behind.

That, and the nineteenth-century critics who came before didn’t do such a bad job understanding “the nineteenth-century social novel” either.

Novel Readings are Good for You

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The Globe and Mail‘s books section this weekend includes an “endpaper” by Liam Durcan touching on some of the recent research into the benefits of reading fiction:

In a recent study conducted by University of Toronto psychologists, subjects who read a short story in The New Yorker had higher scores on social reasoning tests than those who had read an essay from the same magazine. The researchers concluded that there was something in the experience of reading fiction that made the subjects more empathetic (or at least take a test more empathetically). The study provided some proof for what has often been intuitively argued: Fiction is, in some very important ways, good for us. (read the rest here)

I’m reasonably confident that the “University of Toronto psychologists” involved would include the authors of the interesting blog On Fiction. Inquiring into the and why of these effects, Durcan also cites Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction, which explores literary reading in the context of developmental psychology, particularly “theory of mind”:

Zunshine, who is part of a growing school of cognitive literary theorists, goes so far as to describe the novel as a “sustained theory of mind exercise.” As we read the multilayered intentionalities of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce, we not only experience complex and contingent mental states, but we evaluate them as well, and as the narrative moves forward, we use our skills as mind readers, constantly testing our hypotheses about this fictional world and its experimental personalities.

Using Nabokov’s Pale Fire as an example, Zunshine relates how severely our theory-of-mind abilities can be tested and how ably we respond when she describes the creeping unease and perverse thrill, well known to any reader, that come with the unmasking of an unreliable narrator. The ambiguities and psychological nuances that characterize fiction provide an unrivalled training ground for our abilities as readers of mental states.

Durcan raises the inevitable and important point that, while “a taste for fiction” may contribute to the development of empathy and thus, we might hope, morality, it is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for either: “the list of highly cultured and well-read despots is depressingly long.” (Richard Posner emphasizes this problem in “Against Ethical Criticism,”responding to Wayne Booth and Martha Nussbaum, the latter of whom in particular has made strong claims, in works such as Poetic Justice, for the social and other goods that reading fiction might enhance.) Nonetheless, as Durcan concludes,

Fiction offers the transformative experience of getting out of our heads and into the head of “the other.” And from that privileged vantage point, anything is possible. Perhaps even the chance to see ourselves more clearly.

One of the strongest proponents of this theory is, of course, George Eliot:

The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded on generalizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moral sentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.

Her novels, which she called “experiments in life,” are also experiments in bringing about such “transformative” experiences by knocking her readers askew from their usual “vantage points” and into the heads of others.

I do think one of the challenges of these hopeful approaches to fiction is figuring out how it matters which fiction in particular people read. Even empathy, after all, is not a universal good; I’m reminded of Wayne Booth’s comments on Robbe-Grillet’s The Voyeur (in The Rhetoric of Fiction):

The book is a brilliant culmination of more than a hundred years of experimentation with inside views and the sympathetic identification they can yield. It does, indeed, lead us to experience intensely the sensations and emotions of a homicidal maniac. But is this really what we go to literature for?

A fair question! And presumably it also matters how we read what we read–an inquiry which might go some way towards explaining the “cultured despots” phenomenon.

“Ruined by the Academics”: More on the Decline of Criticism

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At The Guardian, John Sutherland adds to the chorus of lamentations about the death of literary criticism:

The UK has always had the world’s liveliest and most expansive lit-crit pages. A new book over here can hope for reviews in a dozen or more places in its first couple of weeks. It’s not just the (former) broadsheets, the nationals, the weeklies and the “heavies”. For my money, some of the fizziest reviews in London will be found in David Sexton’s Monday Evening Standard (always something pleasantly malicious), Private Eye’s “Bookworm” (where an anonymous DJ Taylor wields his assassin’s hatchet) and the Camden New Journal. (You don’t believe me? Pick up a copy next time you’re in NW1. It’s free.)

But this traditionally vibrant sector, with its myriad outlets, is on the wane. Terminally, it would seem. Pages are falling away, like leaves in autumn. They used, for example, to call the literary pages in the New Statesman “the back half”. Now it’s “the back sixth (in a good week)”. Why is lit-crit – as a main item in our cultural diet – going down the tubes?

Among the “hypothetical answers” he proposes to his own question, we get the familiar one, “blame the blogs” (“The most plausible explanation for hard-print lit-crit melting faster than the Arctic icecaps is flickering on the screen in front of you. . . .As literary pages have withered, literary blogs have bloomed”). And the “Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English LIterature at University College London”* also blames “academics”–but not, as is more usual, because of jargon-bloated prose, incessant politicization, or refusal of evaluation. Sutherland argues, rather, that academics were discovered by literary editors to be cheap sources of labour, “that would write for pennies, had oodles of spare time and could spell”:

At the TLS party a couple of weeks ago, I overheard this paper’s senior political correspondent, Michael White, in conversation with the TLS editor, Peter Stothard. Having recently done a couple of pieces for Stothard’s journal, White asked – in evident perplexity – “Can anyone actually live on reviewing?” No, Stothard conceded. Staff journalists can, but not freelance reviewers. For pointy-headed profs, it doesn’t matter. Many would sell their children into slavery to pay for the privilege of a lead piece in, say, the Saturday Guardian Review. Unfortunately, excellent value (ie dirt cheap) as they are, academic reviewers come with heavy baggage. They can be dull. Really dull.

How unfair–one of my children, at most, at least for the Guardian Review. (For the TLS, on the other hand . . .) And my head’s not really that pointy. And I’m not dull. Well, rarely. OK, define “dull.” Does going on and on about Trollope qualify?

Meanwhile, Chris Routledge at The Reader Online points out a recent Guardian feature that once again pits bloggers against critics:

It appears that consumers no longer feel the need to obtain their opinions from on high: the authority of the critic, derived from their paid position on a newspaper, is diminished. Opinion has been democratised. . . .The advent of the net has been described as a revolution. If so, one of its most heated battles is being fought over the right to claim expertise. In the US the ancien régime, in this case the salaried critic, appears to be in retreat. The question is what will happen here? We need only look at television criticism, a once-noble calling pursued for this newspaper by both Julian Barnes and Clive James, for clues. In May the Daily Telegraph decided it no longer needed a daily TV review. Regular TV reviews have also gone at the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday and London’s Evening Standard. Could the same happen to other arts?

The British critical tradition is long and rich and deep: from the pamphleteering of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in the early 18th century, through the literary criticism of Oscar Wilde in the 19th to Graham Greene’s film reviews and Kenneth Tynan’s first-night theatre notices in the 20th, we have never been short of confident people to tell us what is good and what is not and why.

‘We have a wonderful tradition of criticism in this country,’ says Brian Sewell, art critic of the Evening Standard for nearly 25 years, ‘and it would be a tragedy if we lost it. The onlooker sees most. We are the skilled onlookers.’

Such discussions have been going on for a while now; I think Chris is entirely right when he says,

I can’t help feeling that this is a non-argument. Either ‘old media’ will ‘get’ the Internet or it won’t (as it happens I think The Guardian/Observer does). It’s more likely to end up being about what the words are printed on than it is about who wrote them and why.

The problem is not one of form; it’s one of filtering. It takes time, patience, diligence, and discernment to distinguish among the vast number of blogs offering criticism and commentary of one kind or another; the challenge is that there’s no established review process to create evaluative hierarchies or provide qualitative guidance (no, Google Blog Search does not count). But, as many have pointed out, it’s not as if there aren’t trashy print publications too, some of which sell millions of copies. Sure, it is discouraging to read ignorant nonsense parading around as serious criticism, but the best response seems to me to encourage what Sewell, above, calls “skilled onlookers” to show the value of their expertise, not to encourage a seige mentality. And, of course, many print publications are in the blogging game now, including The New York Times and the TLS. It was never an either/or option.

*from the author blurb on How to Read a Novel

Weekend Miscellany: Feminist Lit Crit, New Age Libraries, Chick Lit

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Here are links to some things I’ve found interesting in recent hops, skips, and jumps around the web:

In Dissent, Judith Walzer on the pioneering feminist literary critics of the 1970s:

In the 1970s a number of books were written to reappraise women authors and the literature they produced. For the most part these books focused on nineteenth-century Britain (to a lesser extent on the United States and France) and they clearly “started something.” The work of women writers was taken far more seriously in this criticism than it had been before. Its sources and content were examined with the assumption that they had both literary and cultural value. After these critical works it was no longer possible to claim that women’s literary work was tangential to the “tradition” or marginal or derivative. At the same time, and even more important, it became impossible to maintain that you did not have to pay attention to the gender of an author to understand her work, that you could pretend that she had not had characteristic experiences as a writer and as a woman. It became harder and harder to sustain habitually dismissive and narrow responses. In effect, these critical works created a new field. The field asserted itself on the literary scene, and after that, work in this area grew so rapidly and with such vitality and scope that it seems unfair to focus on only a few books written at the start of this period.

But four books seized my attention—then and now—and seem of major importance. They were published from 1975 to 1979: Patricia Spacks’s The Female Imagination (1975), Ellen Moers’s Literary Women (1976) Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of Their Own (1977), and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979). Each of them respected the works and lives of women writers without question, describing the ways in which their circumstances affected their creativity and analyzing what they had accomplished. With differing definitions of their subject and different perspectives, they shared a conviction that much of the greatest literature of the nineteenth century—British, American, and French—could not be fully grasped without a consideration of the position of women and women writers in society, their views of the world, and their literary preferences and practices. Literary study had been missing a good deal of fundamental significance. There was more here than most of us—the common reader and the scholar—were seeing and acknowledging. Not only would this new perspective add to and deepen our views of these writers, but it might substantially change our understanding of the periods in which they wrote and of the structure of literature in general.

I’ve long believed myself to be a feminist, but I have never defined myself explicitly as a feminist critic. I also came to literary criticism just too late to appreciate first-hand the novelty and daring of these works. But I have always appreciated their fruits–they are, as Walzer says of The Madwoman in the Attic, “endlessly suggestive,” and I have demonstrated their influence in my own work in various ways and especially by always considering questions and constructions of gender in my reading and teaching. Indeed, perhaps my doing so without considering it a specifically “feminist” move is among the more significant changes in critical attitude they made possible. At the same time, I’ve realized that many students in this “post-feminist” age do not take such considerations for granted the way I do, and some certainly perceive politics or bias when confronted with them. Thus Walzer’s concluding reflections were of special interest to me:

ONE WONDERS if these books that “started something” are read anymore. If we find them basic, even foundational for the understanding of women’s writing and for a way of reading it, do they have any standing today? Sometimes a message has been so fully absorbed into the literary culture that the work of the messengers no longer exists as a separate resource. These books may be the ones that “started something,” but now we may take them for granted. A re-reading, however, can provide more reflections—that there really are perspectives through which we can give an equality of consideration to works by women and by men, that one can take gender seriously instead of pretending that it doesn’t exist, and at the same time that we don’t have to think of gender as a totalistic determinant of artistic achievement. This view in turn may direct us to a new thoughtfulness about how we conceive of what life and history have to do with the work of a writer, whether a woman or a man. What these four critics did was not simply to “start something”—create a new field—but to take a crucial step forward in the practice of criticism. In their work they reestablished the idea that the social environment surrounds us all—writers, too—and that it is different for genders, groups, and individuals. (read the rest here; thanks to Patrick Leary of the VICTORIA listserv for the tip)

In last week’s New York Review of Books, there’s a thought-provoking article by historian Robert Darnton on “The Library in the New Age”:

Each change in the technology has transformed the information landscape, and the speed-up has continued at such a rate as to seem both unstoppable and incomprehensible. In the long view—what French historians call la longue durée—the general picture looks quite clear—or, rather, dizzying. But by aligning the facts in this manner, I have made them lead to an excessively dramatic conclusion. Historians, American as well as French, often play such tricks. By rearranging the evidence, it is possible to arrive at a different picture, one that emphasizes continuity instead of change. The continuity I have in mind has to do with the nature of information itself or, to put it differently, the inherent instability of texts. In place of the long-term view of technological transformations, which underlies the common notion that we have just entered a new era, the information age, I want to argue that every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that information has always been unstable. . . .

Information has never been stable. That may be a truism, but it bears pondering. It could serve as a corrective to the belief that the speedup in technological change has catapulted us into a new age, in which information has spun completely out of control. I would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself. It should not be understood as if it took the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready to be quarried out of newspapers, archives, and libraries, but rather as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission. Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. By studying them skeptically on our computer screens, we can learn how to read our daily newspaper more effectively—and even how to appreciate old books. (read the rest here)

Darnton, who calls himself a “Google enthusiast,” intelligently avoids either utopianism or fear-mongering about the possibilities of the digital age for reading and libraries. He concludes with a compelling list of eight reasons for us not to abandon research libraries, including that “the totality of world literature—all the books in all the languages of the world—lies far beyond Google’s capacity to digitize,” “Google will make mistakes” (for an excellent supporting example, see here), and Google “will fail to capture crucial aspects of a book”–including its tactile and material features.

At the Guardian, Joanna Trollope makes a case for “chick-lit.” Appointed a judge for a new prize in “comedy romance,” Trollope describes the judging process as “a revelation”:

The thing is, it’s hard to write good romantic fiction, and it’s much, much harder to write funny good romantic fiction. One of the criteria we judges were given was that if we hadn’t laughed, or been really beguiled by the end of chapter one, we should hurl the book away from us (and yes, a lot of books deserve hurling, but that’s the fault of their quality and not their genre). . . . comedy romance works for readers because the jokes are underpinned by recognisably real people in recognisably real situations – disappointment, frustration, loneliness, anger, sadness and all the grim old daily human carry-on. In fact, without the gravitas, the jokes wouldn’t work. (read the rest here)

I read “chick-lit” myself sometimes, and I completely agree that it’s a genre that’s very hard to do well. So hard, in fact, that I’m not sure I’ve read any books falling squarely into that category that I’d be willing to give any kind of prize to. “Funny” and “beguiling” just don’t seem like very high standards do me: just by themselves, these terms encapsulate the limitations of the genre Trollope seeks to elevate. Most of the time my complaint is that those “recognisably real situations” are rendered too superficially, and with too little historical or other reflection, for them to offer any actual insights into those situations, at least any beyond the platitudinous. I’ve written about some of Trollope’s own books: I think that at her best, she is certainly capable of more than a superficial, beguiling charm.

The Reader

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A couple of weeks ago I posted about an article on Scott I found at The Reader Online. I’ve since spent quite a bit of time exploring the website for The Reader Organization, including learning more about the affiliated “Get Into Reading” program, the “Reading in Practice” MA at the University of Liverpool, and The Reader Magazine itself. Yesterday I also downloaded Issue 29, currently available for free from the website. I am fascinated and energized by what I have found, especially in the magazine, which includes, along with a range of new poetry and fiction, several examples of a genre of writing (or criticism) I have been trying to imagine for about 18 months, namely serious literary commentary written for (but not underestimating) a non-academic audience. For instance, Issue 29 includes a sort of round-table on Wordsworth’s The Prelude with contributors including Stephen Gill, Michael O’Neill and David Wilson; an essay by A. S. Byatt on “the ways that novelists have taken up the slack after the absconding of God. Post-Darwin, post-Freud, human identity is an arena of DNA and sex. Can science and our own biological reality offer a route away from our narcissism?”; essays on Conrad; book reviews; and much more, including features specifically designed to help “readers connect.” I highly recommend downloading it for yourself and taking a look at this publication, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. Perhaps you will find yourself surprised and frustrated, as I am, to be learning about it so belatedly. (Though maybe it is already widely known and I was just unaware of it. Do I blame myself–for having academic ostrich syndrome–or distance–as I am not aware that the magazine has distribution in Canada?) Perhaps you will also find yourself inspired, as I am, to see such a reconciliation between ‘readerly’ and academic approaches to literature–and grateful to the internet, for making connections and discoveries like this possible…I’m not aware of another publication (or organization) quite like this one, in its joint attention to contemporary and ‘classic’ texts–though I’d be happy to learn that there are such.

The Death of the Critic, Reprise

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Bill Benzon kindly pointed out this Salon piece to me:

Louis Bayard: The signs are ominous, Laura. Book reviews are closing shop or drastically scaling back inventory. Film critics at newspapers all over America are getting tossed on their ears. TV reviewers are heard no more in the land. All the indicators suggest that America’s critics are becoming an increasingly endangered species.

Or maybe something a little more than endangered, judging from the title that’s just come across our desks: “The Death of the Critic.” Ronan McDonald, the author, is a lecturer in English and American studies at Britain’s University of Reading, and he’s particularly exercised by what he sees as the loss of the “public critic,” someone with “the authority to shape public taste.” It’s only in the final chapter that the mystery behind the critic’s disappearance is solved. The culprit is none other than … cultural studies! (With a healthy assist from poststructuralism.) By treating literature as an impersonal text from which any manner of political meaning can be wrung, cultural studies professors have robbed criticism of its proper evaluative function — the right to say this is good, this isn’t, and here’s why.

So, Laura, it seems that, if we aren’t quite dead, we critics are on something like life support.

Laura Miller: I suppose it’s only natural that McDonald, being an academic himself, would blame the academy. He believes that substantive scholarly criticism acts as a foundation for serious non-scholarly criticism — such as reviews and essays in newspapers and magazines — lending credibility to the idea that criticism (specifically, literary criticism) is a job for trained experts. When academia falls down on the job of, as you put it, saying what’s good and what’s not, then all criticism starts to look arbitrary and dispensable. We don’t have celebrated “public critics” now because critics don’t care about the public, not because the public doesn’t care about critics. What do you think: Is criticism responsible for its own demise?

I didn’t see any great revelations in their discussion, but there are some good moments. Here’s one I liked:

 

Bayard: I like that phrase “go home with” because, when I think about the critics I love the most, they’re not necessarily the ones I agree with, they’re the ones I’d like to date. I argue with them, but when they’re gone, their music is still bopping around in my brain. Many years ago, Susan Sontag, in “Against Interpretation,” argued for “an erotics of art.” Is it time now for an erotics of criticism? Instead of bemoaning the decline of literature, should we be doing a better job of showing people what they’re missing: the excitement of unexpected insights, the thrill of new voices, the sex of ideas? That sounds like a lot more fun than figuring out which fiefdom we’re going to defend in the Theory Wars. (I’ve a hunch Ronan McDonald would be on our side.)

Miller: You’re right! Why pillory theory, when even the people who used to espouse it are saying it’s dead? Let’s talk about what makes for a good critic. I often think that there are two kinds: the ones whose taste I find simpatico — the ones I come to for recommendations on what to read — and the ones who are themselves terrific writers, irrespective of what they recommend. Sometimes there’s an overlap, but not often.

There are critics, like Wood, that I go out of my way to read, although I have no intention of ever opening the books they tout. That’s indicative of an additional aspect to criticism besides evaluation (which McDonald wants to bring back to academic criticism) and interpretation (that is, elucidating the work and its many meanings, which we could use more of in journalistic criticism). It’s the literary worth of the criticism in and of itself, and the chance to see a sophisticated reader at work.

Yes: “the chance to see a sophisticated reader at work”–that sums up a lot of the pleasure I too take in reading James Wood. And they also offer a couple of unusually reasonable remarks on the usual straw targets, bloggers and English professors:

 

Bayard: Yeah, the blogosphere is the elephant in the room that McDonald never really gets round to discussing, but to my mind, it’s a far more pressing issue for criticism than theory is. Why pay a professional critic to evaluate something when you have a gazillion volunteer evaluators ready to fire off at any given moment? . . . I myself don’t have any particular training or qualifications to be a reviewer, other than my own experience as a reader and writer, so I feel silly arguing that someone else isn’t qualified to deliver an opinion. And believe it or not, I’ve learned things from Amazon reviews, from letters pages, from literary blogs, from all sorts of non-traditional outlets. The quality of writing is certainly variable, but then so is the quality of traditional journalism. [that “believe it or not” seems gratuitous –why should it be hard to believe?]

and

Miller: . . . It hardly matters whether or not an English professor actually likes to read novels and poetry, does it? Books are the salt mine, and the academics are the miners. If anything, literary enthusiasm can be a detriment if your job is to prosecute books for their ideological crimes. When even English professors won’t stand up for literature, is it any wonder it’s failing? [Sigh!]

But in reply, Bayard: Well, it’s been a while since I was in college, but I do remember professors who loved English literature every bit as much as I do, so I don’t want to tar the whole profession out of hand. [Whew! Because I’m pretty sure some other people would be right there with feathers to finish the job!]

I wrote up some thoughts of my own about McDonald’s book here. McDonald and I share an interest in reviving the role of the “public critic,” but I can’t quite get on board with his emphasis on evaluation as the necessary method. I give some reasons for that here, in response to an inquiry from Nigel Beale–and, more facetiously, here!

Reading George Eliot Well

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

(cross-posted to The Valve)

I’ve been rereading Edward Dowden’s 1872 review essay on George Eliot and appreciating it very much. For no other reason than that, here are some excerpts (think of them as teasers for my forthcoming Broadview anthology).

When we have passed in review the works of that great writer who calls herself George Eliot, and given for a time our use of sight to her portraitures of men and women, what form, as we move away, persists on the field of vision, and remains the chief centre of interest for the imagination? The form not of Tito, or Maggie, or Dinah, or Silas, but of one who, if not the real George Eliot, is that “second self” who writes her books, and lives and speaks through them. Such a second self of an author is perhaps more substantial than any mere human personality; encumbered with the accidents of flesh and blood and daily living. It stands at some distance from the primary self, and differs considerably from its fellow. It presents its person to us with fewer reserves; it is independent of local and temporary motives of speech or of silence; it knows no man after the flesh; it is more than an individual; it utters secrets, but secrets which all men of all ages are to catch; while, behind it, lurks well pleased the veritable historical self secure from impertinent observation and criticism. With this second self of George Eliot it is, not with the actual historical person, that we have to do. And when, having closed her books, we gaze outward with the mind’s eye, the spectacle we see is that most impressive spectacle of a great nature, which has suffered and has now attained, which was perplexed and has grasped the clue–standing before us not without tokens on lip and brow of the strife and the suffering, but resolute, and henceforth possessed of something which makes self-mastery possible. The strife is not ended, the pain may still be resurgent; but we perceive on which side victory must lie.

This personal accent in the writings of George Eliot does not interfere with their dramatic truthfulness; it adds to the power with which they grasp the heart and conscience of the reader. We cannot say with confidence of any one of her creations that it is a projection of herself; the lines of their movement are not deflected by hidden powers of attraction or repulsion peculiar to the mind of the author; most noteworthy is her impartiality towards the several creatures of her imagination; she condemns but does not hate; she is cold or indifferent to none; each lives his own life, good or bad; but the author is present in the midst of them, indicating, interpreting; and we discern in the moral laws, the operation of which presides over the action of each story, those abstractions from the common fund of truth which the author has found most needful to her own deepest life. We feel in reading these books that we are in the presence of a soul, and a soul which has had a history.

At the same time the novels of George Eliot are not didactic treatises. They are primarily works of art, and George Eliot herself is artist as much as she is teacher. Many good things in particular passages of her writings are detachable; admirable sayings can be cleared from their surroundings, and presented by themselves, knocked out clean as we knock out fossils from a piece of limestone. But if we separate the moral soul of any complete work of hers from its artistic medium, if we murder to dissect, we lose far more than we gain. . . .

Of rights of man, or rights of woman, we never hear speech from George Eliot. But we hear of the duties of each. The claim asserted by the individual on behalf of this or that disappears, because the individual surrenders his independence to collective humanity, of which he is a part. And it is another consequence of this way of thinking that the leadings of duty are most often looked for, not within, in the promptings of the heart, but without, in the relations of external life, which connect us with our fellow-men. Our great English novelist does not preach as her favourite doctrine the indefeasible right of love to gratify itself at the expense of law; with the correlative right, equally indefeasible, to cast away the marriage bond as soon as it has become a painful incumbrance. She regards the formal contract, even when its spirit has long since died, as sacred and of binding force. Why? Because it is a formal contract. “The light abandonment of ties, whether inherited or voluntary, because they had ceased to be pleasant, would be the uprooting of social and personal virtue.” Law is sacred. Rebellion, it is true, may be sacred also. There are moments of life “when the soul must dare to act upon its own warrant, not only without external law to appeal to, but in the face of a law which is not unarmed with Divine lightnings–lightnings that may yet fall if the warrant has been false.” These moments, however, are of rare occurrence, and arise only in extreme necessity. When Maggie and Stephen Guest are together and alone in the Mudport Inn, and Maggie has announced her determination to accompany him no farther, Stephen pleads:–“‘We have proved that it was impossible to keep our resolutions. We have proved that the feeling which draws us to each other is too strong to be overcome: that natural law surmounts every other; we can’t help what it clashes with.’ ‘It is not so, Stephen. I’m quite sure that is wrong. I have tried to think it again and again; but I see, if we judged in that way, there would be a warrant for all treachery and cruelty. We should justify breaking the most sacred ties that can ever be formed on earth. If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.’” . . .

“If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie?” As the life of the race lying behind our individual life points out the direction in which alone it can move with dignity and strength, so our own past months and years lying behind the present hour and minute deliver over to these a heritage and a tradition which it is their wisdom joyfully to accept when that is possible. There are moments, indeed, which are the beginning of a new life; when, under a greater influence than that of the irreversible Past, the current of our life takes an unexpected course; when a single act transforms the whole aspect of the world in which we move; when contact with a higher nature than our own suddenly discovers to us some heroic quality of our heart of the existence of which we had not been aware. Such is the virtue of confession of evil deeds or desires to a fellow-man, it restores us to an attitude of noble simplicity; we are rescued from the necessity of joining hands with our baser self. But these moments of new birth do not come by intention or choice. . . .

. . . All that helps to hold our past and present together is therefore precious and sacred. It is well that our affections should twine tenderly about all material tokens and memorials of bygone days. Why should Tito keep his father’s ring? Why indulge a foolish sentiment, a piece of mere superstition, about an inanimate object? And so Tito sells the ring, and with it closes the bargain by which he sells his soul. There is, indeed, a noble pressing forward to things that are before, and forgetting of things that are behind. George Eliot is not attracted to represent a character in which such an ardour is predominant, and the base forgetting of things behind alarms and shocks her. It is noted, as characteristic of Hetty’s shallow nature, that in her dream of the future, the brilliant future of the Captain’s wife, there mingles no thought of her second parents, no thought of the children she had helped to tend, of any youthful companion, any pet animal, any relic of her own childhood. “Hetty could have cast all her past life behind her, and never cared to be reminded of it again. I think she had no feeling at all towards the old house, and did not like the Jacob’s ladder and the long row of hollyhocks in the garden better than any other flowers–perhaps not so well.” Jubal, after his ardent pursuit of song through the world, would return to Lamech’s home, “hoping to find the former things.” Silas Marner would see once more the town where he was born, and Lantern Yard, where the lots had declared him guilty. But Hetty is like a plant with hardly any roots; “lay it over your ornamental flower-pot and it blossoms none the worse.”

This is the life we mortals live. And beyond life lies death. Now it is not hard to face it. We have already given ourselves up to the large life of our race. We have already died as individual men and women. And we see how the short space of joy, of suffering, and of activity allotted to each of us urges to helpful toil, and makes impossible for us the “glad idlesse” of the immortal denizen of earth. . . .

I feel about this commentary the way I have felt about some of James Wood’s reviews: it offers a sympathetic, rather than a suspicious or symptomatic reading, one that helps us move into the artistic, intellectual, moral, and emotional world created by the author, clarifying, amplifying, and illustrating what’s on offer there. There is something to be gained by reading with the grain sometimes. And there are some real critical insights here, too: for instance, Dowden’s idea of the authorial ‘second self’ anticipates by nearly a century Wayne Booth’s concept of the ‘implied author.’ I like the way Dowden insists on the significance of Eliot’s dramatic and aesthetic form, even as he acknowledges and then dedicates much of his analysis to her ethics. He shows the stringency of the demands she makes, explicitly on her characters and implicitly on her readers, to let go their “baser self.” He also helps explain why Eliot’s novels are not easy fodder for Hollywood adaptations: love is too often not the answer, or not the right answer, or not the only answer.

Don’t Quit Your Day Job…

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

Some support for George Eliot’s view that, “among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous”:

We cannot think that he will live as an English classic. He deals too much in accidental manifestations and too little in universal principles. Before long his language will have passed away, and the manners he depicts will only be found in a Dictionary of Antiquities. And we do not all anticipate that he will be rescued from oblivion either by his artistic powers or by his political sagacity.

The author in question? Charles Dickens. (The source is an 1864 essay by Justin McCarthy.) Another potential lesson here? Evaluation is a risky critical mode.

Literary Criticism and/in the Public Sphere

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

I did, after all, recover my interest in the small metacritical project mentioned in my previous post; it has gone up at The Valve. It revises some earlier posts from this blog, particularly my account of Brian McRae’s Addison and Steele are Dead, touching especially on the gap between academic criticism and the interests or needs of a more general readership. It concludes by inquiring in a preliminary way into whether a return to aesthetic evaluation is, in fact, the direction required for academics to come back to life.