Literary criticism

More on the Purpose of Criticism

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Some time ago I posted some thoughts on Cynthia Ozick’s Harper’s essay “Literary Entrails” (see “Academic Criticism Criticized”). Belatedly, I notice that there was a good posting in response to it at Scott Esposito’s Conversational Reading which concludes that “Ozick’s better criticism . . . would add another reason to read, a further way to engage a book once it had been closed and to continually re-think and re-evaluate books that have been around for a while. This might not bring any new readers into the fold, but it might make better readers out of those who already do so. Over time, I think that would make books better for everyone.” I like the idea that the critic’s role is to keep us engaged and to encourage us to “re-think and re-evaluate” what we have read; as both this author and Ozick emphasize, the pace of reviewing can be too hasty to allow for a “slower, more contemplative critical approach to literature.” For myself, I have been finding it exhausting trying to keep pace at all with the texts and topics addressed in litblogs and literary journals: I’m starting to look forward to the start of the teaching term in September because I will be back to worrying obsessively over a small handful of books, and to feel grateful for “the canon,” however unstable or elastic its definition, if only because the very idea of a canon implies that there is no obligation to pay attention to everything!

Meanwhile, at The Reading Experience, Dan Green has some good things to say about the distinction between reviewing and criticism: “The essential task of criticism is not to evaluate fiction. It is an essential task of reviewing, but criticism can take place entirely outside the context of judgment and evaluation, or at least it can take place in a context that assumes evaluation and judgment have already taken place. Some of the best criticism attempts not to argue for the merits of a particular work but to describe and analyze a work the critic already values and wants to “read” more closely. Sometimes this results in convincing readers of the quality of the work, but doing that has not been the critic’s primary task.” I like to think in terms of appreciation rather than evaluation, because it sidelines the issue of taste. I can appreciate a work of fiction for being artful, well-crafted, original, historically significant, etc. without actually liking it (Pamela, anyone?). Yet I am unlikely to devote a lot of critical time (or classroom time) to any text that I am not personally convinced has value, whether artistic, intellectual, social, or some combination. We value different books for different reasons, after all. I’m not sure I’d want to convince anyone of the quality of, say, Gaskell’s Mary Barton, though I enjoy reading and teaching it and consider it an important example of Victorian social problem fiction. On the other hand, I find I am prepared to expend a great deal of energy convincing people of the value of Bleak House or Middlemarch! Of course, when past works are the ones at issue, there’s presumably no longer any question of reviewing them–or is there? Actually, that’s an interesting question, and one linked to my ongoing musings about the potential role of something like a blog in my own work. How or why could writing about a ‘classic’ be relevant, useful, desirable to a contemporary audience? I still hold to the fairly simple distinction that reviewing is a form of literary journalism that requires a specific occasion as an incentive, while criticism has more abstract (longitudinal?) interests. In any case, I like Green’s comment that criticism is “a way of paying attention and of perhaps assisting others in the effort to pay closer attention.” Like the comments at Conversational Reading, this one reminds me of Booth’s idea of “coduction,” which seems to me an excellent model of the way our judgments of literature are in fact formed and reformed.

Kermode, The Art of Telling

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Today again, I have time only to post a couple of short excerpts from my current reading:

Their [‘licensed practitioners’] right to practise is indicated by arbitrary signs, not only certificates, robes, and titles, but also professional jargons. The activities of such persons, whether diagnostic or exegetical, are privileged, and they have access to senses that do not declare themselves to the laity. Moreover they are subject, in professional matters, to no censure but that of other licensed practitioners acting as a body; the opinion of the laity is of no consequence whatever, a state of affairs which did not exist before the institution now under consideration firmly established itself–as anyone may see by looking with a layman’s eye on the prose its members habitually write, and comparing it with the prose of critics who still thought of themselves as writing for an educated general public, for la cour et la ville. (170)

We wean candidates from the habit of literal reading. Like the masters who reserved secret senses in the second century, we are in the business of conducting readers out of the sphere of the manifest. Our institutional readings are not those of the outsiders, so much is self-evident; though it is only when we see some intelligent non-professional confronted by a critical essay from our side of the fence that we see how esoteric we are. (182)

Literature and/as Faith

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Excerpts from my recent reading in James Wood’s The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief and Christopher Hitchens’s god is Not Great:

Nervously aware that they have killed off Christianity as a faith, [Arnold and Renan] must reinstate it as a religion, as a guide to life, as a poetry … the poeticizing of nondivine religion was a characteristically nineteenth-century gesture. (Wood 246)

We [atheists] are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books. (Hitchens 5)

The study of literature and poetry, both for its own sake and for the eternal ethical questions with which it deals, can now easily depose the scrutiny of sacred texts that have been found to be corrupt and confected. (Hitchens 283)

The Hitchens comments would make provocative epigraphs for a seminar on literature and morality; Wood points to the genealogy of claims such as Hitchens’s.

The Occasion for Blogging

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There has been a lot of public discussion recently about blogs in the context of the decline of book sections and book reviews in newspapers; much of it has consisted of attacks on literary blogs from more traditional writers and sources and defensive responses from bloggers (see, for instance, this response on The Reading Experience to an LA Times column that promised contemptuously to write “in language even a busy blogger can understand”). I have sympathies on both sides of this fence, as I agree that while anyone can write a book review or literary commentary, not anyone can write one that has interest and merit. In general, my position is simply the more people out there reading books and writing about them, the better all round. The more specific issue I’ve been wondering about is whether blogging is really only suited to be a form of literary journalism, focused on new releases and current authors in the way that book reviews are, or whether it is possible or useful for blogs also to write more in the spirit of literary scholarship or criticism of past literature. I’m also thinking more about the nature of literary blogs more generally, while well aware that so far I have still become aware of only a fraction of the options and styles out there.

One typical feature of successful blogging is apparently that it is incessant: unless they are constantly updated, it seems blogs lose their currency, their momentum and, presumably, their readers. I have already found that, at least for someone with other work to do, the rapidity of thinking and writing required to put up new posts even once or twice a week makes drafting and polishing impossible, which inevitably affects the kind and quality of writing you can do. This situation would differ, of course, for someone working full-time on a blog. It could also be overcome, or ameliorated, by writing off-line and not posting anything until it has been tidied up, though this too assumes that blogging is not a sideline to a “real” job. It may be as well that depending on the kind of site and voice you are trying to establish, you can take your time and post longer, more thoughtful pieces. It’s not as if there are deadlines, after all, and besides, who’s really reading most blogs all that frequently anyway, much less one like mine that hardly anyone even knows about? I started quite deliberately writing without a lot of second thoughts, to free myself up from academic hyper-self-consciousness, but all those first impressions are starting to seem inadequate, especially when the book at issue (The Map of Love, for instance) is quite complex, formally and thematically. I’m reaching a point at which I need to consider what I hope to accomplish by writing my posts in the first place and maybe experiment with some more in-depth analyses. But to do that, I would have to take the time and justify it professionally.

Another notable feature of the blogs I am most familiar with so far is their focus on fairly new releases and on the state of the current book and literary worlds. A next step for me will be looking around for people who write about the literature of the past. Literary journalism differs from literary criticism, it is usually assumed, in being prompted by an occasion needing a fairly prompt response to give it relevance. Criticism takes more of a long view. But without that occasion, that immediacy, what appeal does criticism have for the non-academic reader, especially in a medium like the internet? Is there an audience online for writing about Dickens or George Eliot? And what could be said that would matter, or appeal? The kind of stuff that gets written for academic audiences apparently (unsurprisingly) alienates almost everyone else, while the kind of stuff that gets written for popular audiences often seems trivial or redundant to those who read the academic stuff. And yet…books such as John Sutherland’s How to Read a Novel or Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer do get published, so there is presumably some interest out there in enhancing one’s experience of reading “the classics.” One approach might be to look for the contemporary relevance in past authors, as I attempted to do with my paper on George Eliot as “Moralist for the 21st Century.” But that means only highlighting authors and texts that lend themselves to modern purposes, which gets pretty tendentious and unsatisfactory pretty fast.

A number of my posts have been in the spirit of “work in progress” notes, thinking aloud though (maybe oddly) in public–partly in the hopes, of course, of eventually getting some input (a fading hope). At this point, especially with my sabbatical coming to an end, I need to start putting my thoughts together about what I’ve been learning by reading and (in this modest way) writing outside the academic box.

James Wood, Selected Criticism

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Some years ago philosopher Martha Nussbaum lamented the state of contemporary literary (academic) criticism, observing that it does not communicate “the sense that we are social beings puzzling out, in times of great moral difficulty, what might be, for us, the best way to live.” She hungers for “writing about literature that talks of human lives and choices as if they matter to us all.” (Both quotations are from her essay “Perceptive Equlibrium: Literary Theory and Ethical Theory,” included in Love’s Knowledge.) A similar dissatisfaction with the nature of academic criticism motivates my own current efforts to find other ways and other examples of writing about literature. In the essays and reviews I have just read by James Wood, I have found what I was looking for. Wood draws on a rich knowledge of literary traditions and is not afraid to be erudite, or to use technical vocabulary to explicate literary styles and devices; anyone who can (so aptly, too) describe Isabel Archer and Fanny Price as “highly literate hermeneuts of the material that we, too, are reading” (in his essay “The Unwinding Stair“) is not writing “Lit Lite” or “Classics for Dummies.” But–or do I mean “And”?–he combines this kind of unabashedly intellectual analysis with reflections at once personal and philosophical, dispassionate and fully engaged with the conversations the books seem to him to get started. Though I have gathered up some examples of Wood’s comments on literary criticism and theory more generally, I am most interested in how he deals with specific examples, and of these, I was most impressed with his reviews of McEwan’s Saturday and Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. I thought these would make good test cases, as I have read the novels recently and thought about them a fair amount.

I’ll give just a one long example, from the conclusion of his Ishiguro review. After a thoughtful discussion of the novel’s story, its narration, and Ishiguro’s “studied husbanding of affect” in this chillingly quiet account of clones raised, we gradually realize, to serve as organ donors for “normals,” Wood asks, “what if we are more like Tommy and Kathy than we at first imagined?”

Everything they do is dipped in futility, because the great pool of death awaits them. They possess individuality, and seem to enjoy it (they fall in love, they have sex, they read George Eliot), but that individuality is a mirage, a parody of liberty. Their lives have been written in advance … Their freedom is a tiny hemmed thing, their lives a vast stitch-up.

We begin the novel horrified by their difference from us and end it thoughtful about their similarity to us. After all, heredity writes a great deal of our destiny for us; and death soon enough makes us orphans. … To be assured of death at twenty-five or so, as [these cloned] children are, seems to rob life of all its savor and purpose. But why do we persist in the idea that to be assured of death at seventy or eighty or ninety returns to life all its savor and purpose?

And from that he can return to Kafka, and Beckett, and Hardy (“When Dead”: “This fleeting life-brief blight / Will have gone past / When I resume my old and right / Place in the Vast”). From the uncanny ordinariness of the narrator’s voice, so seemingly unsuited to the extraordinary nature of her story, Ishiguro and Wood together make us look again at the whole idea of the ordinary, and in particular the most certain, “normal” thing of all, death. While the experience and the focus is explicitly textual, the meaning is intensely human. Something very similar happens in the end of Wood’s review of Saturday: “At the last, the novel’s literalist hero delicately gathers his very literal Saturday, and makes it metaphorical, emblematic; all our Saturdays will become Sundays, as all our yesterdays have lit the way to dusty death.”

But what is Wood’s contribution here? Why is anything further than Ishiguro’s original telling (as Wood says, “curious, surprisingly suggestive and tender”) necessary? Wood and Ishiguro meditate on the purpose of life, but what, on this example, is the purpose of criticism? (As my students sometimes ask, rather querulously, “if that’s what the author meant, why didn’t he just say so?”) One thing I think Wood does is model a thoughtful, sensitive, well-informed reading, in the spirit of “did you notice this? what about this?” He also takes Ishiguro’s offering and gives it a different kind of life: the conversation is not over when the book ends, and Ishiguro’s is not the final word. Now we see something that Ishiguro has shown us, or as he has perceived it, and we can talk about it too. Ishiguro has described the novelist’s work as a way of saying “It’s like this, isn’t it? Don’t you see it this way too?” (I’m paraphrasing)–and so when he’s done talking, we see what we think, or say something back. But Wood is also interested in the novel as an art form, in how and why specific kinds of narration, for instance, create certain effects, or generate (or control) affect and emotion. The trained eye sees better, understands the alternatives better. In the mini-series “From the Earth to the Moon,” there’s a wonderful episode in which a geologist is assigned to train the astronauts to collect rock samples from the moon. The crucial step is getting them to see, not just undifferentiated rocks, but specific kinds of rocks that tell their own stories and accrue meaning and significance through their shapes, composition, and location. Critics (any experts, really) help less experienced readers in the same way, telling them some of the things they can look for and why they might be interesting. They train you in appreciation and make you excited about the aesthetic and intellectual experience of reading attentively.

In an earlier post I quoted Denis Donoghue remarking that contemporary critics do not allow writers their own themes. Clearly, Wood takes a different approach. One way I might describe it is that he is thinking through the literature he is reading–not against it. One effect is that his own writing comes to sound like those he writes about (as in the example above from his Saturday review, which in turns has–fittingly and I’m sure deliberately–the beautiful cadences of the ending of Joyce’s “The Dead”). It is a sympathetic, rather than symptomatic, reading, though this is not to say there is no room for criticism in the narrower sense of disagreement or evaluation. For instance, he thinks parts of Never Let Me Go lapse “from picture to diagram” (as GE put it).

I’m interested to see what a bad review from him looks like [update: I’ve seen one now, with his review of Updike’s Terrorist–ouch], and I’m also very interested in reading more of his comments on the relationship between his work and that of academic critics.

The Company We Keep as Readers

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Following through on the thread I outlined in my last post, I have been reading Jonathan Franzen’s very interesting and thought-provoking 1996 Harper’s essay. I actually feel that in some ways this piece (and the Marcus and Ozick that follow) are having a conversation that’s not really for me, mostly because they are novelists, for one thing, and focusing on very contemporary texts and contexts about which, except as an ordinary citizen, I have no expertise and no vantage point from which I am comfortable making pronouncements. What I’m getting a better sense of, though, is how literature matters and how it is discussed outside the academic contexts these writers are so uniformly dismissive of. (Taking his turn at bat, Franzen, recalling his experience teaching creative writing, reports that some of his best students, “repelled by the violence done to their personal experience of reading, had vowed never to take a literature class again”–as far as I can tell, he is depressed, not by their solipsistic retreat in defense of their “personal experience,” but by their having had to suffer such “violence.” “Come to my classes,” I am tempted to protest, and yet how can I be sure that my own efforts will not also offend against this amorphous personal standard? Other students make fun of the “patently awful utopian-feminist novel they were being forced to read for an honors seminar in Women and Fiction,” but isn’t there value in testing your ideas of what counts as “patently awful,” even if in the end you don’t change your mind? Isn’t one reason to go to literature classes that you will read and learn about books beyond those that conform to your personal prejudices, including aesthetic ones? If they were being forced, not only to read it, but also to applaud it, that’s a somewhat different problem, of course.)

I’m still thinking and learning about the larger issues at stake in all of these pieces. For now, I ll note that I found his report of the findings of linguistic anthropologist Shirley Brice Heath on “serious readers” fascinating. In particular, she talks (by his report) about the way in which books provide a community for their readers, especially for those who being their lives as “social isolates”–willing but not entirely able to share your perceptions and experiences and interests with those around you. What do the readers she studied find in, or feel they gain from, their books? Substance, she says: “Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive–my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity… Reading that book gives me substance.” And their reading provides “a sense of having company in this great human enterprise, in the continuity, in the persistence, of the great conflicts.” This is something like what moral philosophers like Martha Nussbaum theorize reading complex fiction does for us, so it is interesting to find readers recognizing it for themselves.

I’m not sure how any of this material helps me see why anyone would read literary criticism, academic or otherwise, or how the kind of expertise someone like me possesses might be put in the service of these serious readers. To hear these non-academic writers talk, you’d think nobody wants academics at all…

Academic Criticism Criticized (and Defended)

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Recently, Daniel Green wrote a response on his blog to a piece by Cynthia Ozick in the April 2007 issue of Harper’s. The Ozick essay, called “Literary Entrails,” is itself a follow-up to two earlier discussions of the fate of the novel in the modern era: one by Jonathan Franzen (Harper’s, April 1996) and a reply to Franzen by Ben Marcus (Harper’s, this time in October 2005). So far I’ve read the Ozick and rounded up the Franzen piece, to be read soon. I’ve also been prompted, mostly by things Ozick says about him, to look up the work of James Wood, about which I expect I will be posting soon.

My main interest in this thread is that both Green and Ozick are roundly dismissive of academic criticism (as distinguished from literary criticism or reviewing). As noted in previous posts, I’m rounding up discussions and evaluations of these different modes of writing about literature. Also as noted in previous posts, despite my own dissatisfaction with much academic criticism, I bristle (and also wonder) at the harsh tone taken towards literary academics. Here’s Ozick, after a paragraph on book clubs (she finds them sort of sweet, it seems, innocent amateurs) and then one on Amazon’s anyone-can-do-it method of customer reviews (“a fetid sea, where both praise and blame are leveled by tsunamis of incapacity”):

(Academic theorists equipped with advanced degrees, who make up yet another species of limited reviewers, are worthy only of a parenthesis. Their confining ideologies, heavily politicized and rendered in a kind of multi-syllabic pidgin, have for decades marinated literature in dogma. Of these inflated dons and doctors it is futile to speak, since, unlike the hardier customer reviewers, they are destined to vanish like the fog they evoke.)

Green considers this desciption “accurate” and hopes her prediction (of our immanent dissipation) will be fulfilled.

There are many different possible responses to such sweeping polemical condemnations, as well as to the many other arguments and observations made in both essays. My own recent article in English Studies in Canada makes some related points, too–and also works a little with a fog metaphor. For now, though, I want to point out a contribution that at least some of the “dons and doctors” make to a project Ozick and Green support: the development of a thoughtful reading audience for literature, of readers (not just critics or reviewers) capable of engaging with literature responsibly and substantially, at the level of form (what I take Green to mean, more or less, when he asks for more attention to “aesthetics”) as well as theme and plot. Ozick in particular talks at length about the decline of readers–and she quotes a passage from a recent essay by Denis Donoghue that I think would ring true for most English professors, as it certainly did for me:

When I started teaching … many years ago, I urged students to believe that the merit of reading a great poem, play, or novel consisted in the pleasure of gaining access to deeply imagined lives other than their own. Over the years, that opinion … seems to have lost much of its persuasive force. Students seem to be convinced that their own lives are the primary and sufficient incentive. … they want to talk either about themselves or about large-scale public themes, independent of the books they are supposedly reading.

Franzen, Ozick says, believes the new generation of students “will never evolve into discriminating readers.” Yet, though teaching can include this kind of dispiriting encounter with “egotism and moralizing politicized self-righteousness,” literature classes also provide a great opportunity to challenge these limitations, to bring students into contact with not just “deeply imagined lives” but crafted forms that can startle them into looking again, at themselves, at their world, at language. I too find much recent published criticism pretty unappealing, and many aspects of professional academic discourse alienating, for a range of reasons. But I don’t think what goes on in my classroom, or in the classrooms of a great many “dons and doctors,” deserves to be so sweepingly ignored or distorted.

Here’s a similar bit from the “statement of purpose” with which Green launched his blog: “the academy, once entrusted with the job of engaging with works of literature, has mostly abandoned it altogether in favor of ‘cultural studies’ and other forms of political posturing.” Again, however accurate this may be as a description of academic criticism (and that’s surely arguable), “the academy” (not, of course, monolithic in the way Green implies) does a lot of other things too, much of which involves exposing students to a variety of writers and styles, thinking about literary history and the history of genres, learning a vocabulary to talk about how writers get different kinds of things done and to what ends–aesthetically, ethically, and yes, also (but not exclusively) politically. One thing those of us in “the academy” do is send at least some of our students out into the “real” world excited and inquring and serious about literature, and equipped with some knowledge and some expertise as readers. I like to point out to my students that they will be assigned “required” reading for only a small fraction of their reading lives–after that, the choices will be theirs, the engagement and the satisfaction only as deep as they choose to make it. It’s my goal to give them some tools and strategies to go deeper if they want to, as well as to broaden their textual horizons. Ozick (rightly, I think) laments that “Amazon encourages naive and unqualified readers…to expose their insipidities to a mass audience.” You don’t need an English degree to be insightful about books–but some education as a reader is surely one way to become the kind of reader novelists such as Ozick (or, for that matter, critics such as Green) hope to have.

 

 

Philosophy and Literature; or, Proof that Everything Old is New Again…

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…even in literary criticism. Reading unsuspectingly along in David Masson’s 1859 British Novelists and Their Styles, I came across this interesting bit:

Before novels or poems can stand the inspection of that higher criticism which every literary work must be able to pass ere it can rank in the first class, their authors must be at least abreast of the best speculation of their time. Not that what we want from novelists and poets is further matter of speculation. What we want from them is matter of imagination; but the imagination of a well furnished mind is one thing, and that of a vacuum is another. [RM: hear hear!] … That a writer may be fitted to frame imaginary histories illustrating the deeper problems of human education, and to be a sound casuist in the most difficult questions of human experience, it is necessary that he should bring to his task not only an average acquaintance with the body of good current doctrine, but also an original speculative faculty. In such cases, the desirable arrangement might be either that our novelists were philosophers, or that philosophers were our novelists.

This is the first such explicitly “interdisciplinary” assertion of this kind I have come across in the 19th-century material I’ve been reading around in, although of course George Eliot’s ideas as well as her novels (most of them later than Masson’s book) work out just such an integration of speculation and aesthetics.

Trying to imagine more precisely what Masson (or anyone) might mean by (or how he might justify) putting such demands on a novelist raises what has always been a niggling question for me when I consider the whole project of literary analysis or criticism–just who do we think novelists are that we care so much about what they say about all kinds of big important issues? We put a lot of weight–or pressure–on the novels we study when we inquire into problems such as “does Charlotte Bronte advocate women’s rights in Jane Eyre at the expense of racial justice?” or “can a middle-class novelist like Elizabeth Gaskell depict working-class grievances without being patronising?” (to give hasty examples of fairly typical approaches in my own field these days). We seem to have high expectations that what Bronte or Gaskell says or does will be significant and thus is worth explicating, and that these explications or interpretations are worth arguing over (and over and over). Is the working assumption that theirs are the offerings of “well-furnished minds”? How can we tell? Is that part of what we’re trying to find out when we study them? What if we end up thinking otherwise? Can aesthetic judgments survive such a discovery? (My preliminary answer accords with what I think Masson would say too, which is, sure they can, but we have to then consider the writer below the first rank–for me, this would be what happens with Hardy, say, whose philosophy I find confused, or at least confusing, but whose novels move and interest me very much.)

In any case, I find I am quite sympathetic to Masson’s emphasis on intellectual requirements for novelistic value. Earlier in British Novelists he remarks,

the measure of the value of any work of fiction, ultimately and on the whole, is the worth of the speculation, the philosophy, on which it rests, and which has entered into the conception of it. . . . No artist, I believe, will, in the end, be found to be greater as an artist than he was as a thinker.

He goes on to explain that the resulting novel need not be explicitly philosophical or speculative, and that the philosophy may express itself indirectly “through the medium and in the language of his art” (as we would say, through its form, not necessarily through its content) and that the artist need not be self-consciously laying out a theory (as GE would say, all the better, in fact, if the novelist does not “lapse from the picture to the diagram”). But that thought, that ideas, (and not just feeling or sound or colour or other aspects) should be granted priority seems to me an admirable standard for deciding which novels really are the most valuable.

What does a novelist do for us?

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Partly prompted by a recent debate in the comments section of Bookninja over Yann Martel’s recent challenge to the Prime Minister (which led some contributors to the site to debate the importance of literature)–and partly just by my own interest in the question, here’s an excerpt from an essay by Leslie Stephen called “The Moral Element in Literature” that I have been editing for the anthology I’m working on. Stephen is considering, among other things, why (in his opinion) novelists fail aesthetically when they write too much “with a purpose.” Such efforts as, to use his example, Dickens’s attack on government bureaucracy by way of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit “implies a confusion of function,” he suggests. And yet “if a poet should not have the same purpose as the politician or the economist,” the conclusion is “certainly not that he should have no purpose. To have no purpose is simply not to be a reasoning being.” So if poets or novelists should have no direct practical aim or purpose, or not seek to prove particular theories about the world, what can they do for us? Here’s part of Stephen’s answer:

He shows us certain facts as they appear to him. If we are so constituted as to be unable to see what he sees, he can go no further. He cannot proceed to argue and analyse, and apply an elaborate logical apparatus. There is the truth, and we must make what we can of it. But, on the other hand, so far as we are in sympathy with him, the proof–if it be a proof–has all the cogency of direct vision. He has couched our dull eyes, drawn back the veil which hid from us the certain aspect of the world, and henceforward our views of life and the world will be more or less changed, because the bare scaffolding of fact which we previously saw will now be seen in the light of keener perceptions than our own.

Elegantly put. But how close is Stephen coming here to James’s idea of being “one of those on whom nothing is lost”? The emphasis on perception over action (currently very trendy in ethical/philosophical approaches to literature) leaves me dissatisfied, for reasons I have discussed in some of my academic writing. Still, Stephen does suggest a role for the novel in the world, albeit an indirect one. After all, if we never changed our views of life, we would never seek to change our, or others’, experience of it.

A Reader’s Responsibilities

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Ian McEwan’s recent letter in The Guardian points to an aspect of criticism that is perhaps underestimated by those advocating a turn away from academic approaches towards more ‘aesthetic’ or ‘literary’ responses. In reply to a reviewer who attributed one of his character’s views to him, McEwan writes,

As for Saturday – a character in a novel who expresses hostility towards novels in general should not be seen as an entirely trustworthy mouthpiece of his novelist creator. For example, the pro-Iraq war views Henry Perowne expresses in an argument with his daughter are not mine and nor, for that matter, are her anti-war opinions. On the other hand, I would agree with Perowne that some – not all – peace protesters are naive. Who can forget those daft and earnest English folk parading through central London last summer with placards that read, “We are all Hizbullah now”?

I sometimes wonder whether these common critical confusions arise unconsciously from a prevailing atmosphere of empowering consumerism – the exaltation of the subjective, the “not in my name” syndrome. It certainly seems odd to me that such simple precepts need pointing up: your not “liking” the characters is not the same as your not liking the book; you don’t have to think the central character is nice; the views of the characters don’t have to be yours, and are not necessarily those of the author; a novel is not always all about you.

The complaint that readers too readily conflate characters or narrators with biographical authors is a familiar one to students of the novel (Jane Eyre, anyone?); in part McEwan is asking that his artistic freedom be respected. But he is also demanding that his work be read properly, with due attention to its technical complexities, so that, to use his own example, it is not assumed that because his protagonist in Saturday is (cautiously) in favour of invading Iraq, either the author or the novel takes the same position. Particularly if a reader is going to make public pronouncements about a novel (as in a review), the reader should be skilled enough–knowledgeable enough–to avoid misreading. And it is possible to misread: a reader’s response can be wrong, misguided, confused. All opinions are not equal: some represent a fuller, more careful, better-informed engagement with all the elements of the work. Henry Perowne, to stick with the Saturday example, is a compelling but flawed character: his world view has limits not shared by the novel overall, which, among other things, self-evidently values literature more highly than the neurosurgeon does. One of the things the novel is about is the limitations of Perowne’s materialist view of the world–though at the same time, the novel is filled with respect for the “grandeur” in that view of things (a Darwinian phrase with rich implications for McEwan’s novel). In some of the anti-academic discussions, the reader’s responsibility to the text and author in question gets sidelined because of the emphasis on responding to, rather than analyzing, a text. A responsible (rather than just responsive) reading requires, just to give one example, attention to point of view, which can include recognizing when a thought or opinion not in quotation marks nonetheless represents the views of a character (“she was only Anne,” we read in Austen’s Persuasion, but a reasonably alert reader will promptly understand that this dismissive attitude belongs to Anne’s foolish family, and one of the novel’s main points is that their inability to appreciate her signals their broader moral disabilities). Unreliable narration is another technical issue that must be rightly understood for a good reading of many books: Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, for instance, would be radically misrepresented by a reader who accepted the narrator’s deference for authority as the novel’s own. While these days nearly anybody can read a novel, that does not mean everybody reads it equally well. Academic scholarship may be of questionable public value in its more erudite forms (though it may also be of intrinsic interest and therefore arguably worthwhile nonetheless), but in my own experience at any rate, English professors spend a lot of time trying to equip their students, not with politics or Theory but with the knowledge and tools to be better readers. If we do value literature, than this kind of expertise is surely worth promoting, even demanding.

Recent discussions about Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books That You Haven’t Read prompt some of the same thoughts. While I can see many occasions on which you might be in a conversation about a book you have not read, I don’t accept that there is any value in your pronouncing on it in any way. For example, I have not read Bayard’s book myself, only reviews and commentaries on it, such as Leah McLaren’s in this week’s Globe and Mail. So I can talk about it in a limited way, and I might even get passionate about what I take to be some of its claims. But I can’t responsibly judge or review the book without reading it for myself. I think it’s outrageous if it is true, as McLaren’s column states, that Bayard “admits to giving lectures on books he hasn’t bothered to open”–unless (and you see, I can’t know this without reading more) he lectures solely on context, literary relations, historical significance, or other issues that do not depend on specific textual evidence or close reading. If he talks about the specifics or the qualities of the books themselves, he is a fraud. As McLaren points out, we live in an “era of crib culture” in which people seem ready to accept “intellectual shortcuts” whenever possible. But substituting someone’s report about a book for your own reading of it is shoddy as well as risky, and our readiness to give up on “heavy reading” is not necessarily something to be complacent about. Required reading lists have the merit of motivating students to struggle on with things they find uncomfortable, unfamiliar, even boring. As McEwan says, “a novel is not always all about you,” and in that respect education differs substantially from other ‘consumer’ products. To consider my own experience again, it’s remarkable how many students are capable of learning to like a novel, or (since ‘converting’ them to like things is not really the point of teaching them) learning to appreciate the merits, qualities, or significance of a novel, as a work of art and a contribution to pertinent cultural, social, aesthetic, or political discussions, even if their first response was boredom or confusion. Again, some expertise is required, some technical terms useful, some precision in analysis as important as visceral responses. And again I think that as readers, or as serious and responsible readers, we have an obligation to the texts and authors to study our primary source carefully before we arrive at (much less publish) our conclusions.