A Slough of Despond

   
    In his PMLA article “The Evolution of Literary Study, 1883-1983,” fittingly published in the centennial issue of the “industry” journal for the study of literature, Karl Kroeber attempts to describe changes in literary study since the university model brought about its systematization.  He distinguishes between scholarship in literature (the study of texts and their histories) and literary intellect (the “timeless” theory and criticism about texts), and discusses how these two approaches to literary study are somewhat at odds.  Criticism is the approach most valued by university hiring committees since the 1980s, despite its lack of practical value when compared with our ever-evolving, ever-improving scholarly tools.  Kroeber advocates placing a higher value on literary study such as textual studies and biographical studies, arguing that even the most robust theories may be passing fads, while excellent scholarship will always give us some ground to stand on, no matter our critical approach.

    From the start, Kroeber’s approach to his subject reveals his sense of humor, and he acknowledges that his attempt at painting the picture of the last hundred years of literary study will be mediocre at best.  As a teacher of mostly undergraduate courses who mostly writes about Wordsworth, he doesn’t consider himself a member of the higher echelons of the literary studies club, or of any trendy theory crowd.  He wonders why the MLA approached him to write such a history for their hundredth-year issue.  “I was appalled by the invitation to write this essay,” is how the essay begins (326).  He has set the tone.

     Kroeber prefaces his discussion of what goes on in literary study by calling the MLA (and the profession of studying literature) a bureaucracy, and he equates it with other types of bureaucracies, such as those found in the medical professions.  In order for the bureaucracy to function, it needs a hierarchy.  He spends a few paragraphs on unflattering descriptions and analogies (in PMLA no less!) about the functioning of this bureaucracy, and calls on members of it to recognize “how increasingly we function as a profession only bureaucratically” (327).  Specialized interests are commoditized by forums and panels, all exacting dues and hiring out for speakers in tangential topics.  Kroeber laments what the study of literature becomes under this bureaucratic system -- in the era of professionalization, “power, prestige, and professional virtuosity disguise the professional's persistent trivializing of human experience” (327).  All these things we do with literature (in 1984 anyway) are causing us to lose focus on the literature itself, and making the work we do less and less approachable by scholars or students of any other specialization.  Who wants to read PMLA?  Kroeber doesn’t. (Neither do I.)

    Next Kroeber makes his distinction (which is a pretty widely recognized distinction) between scholarship in literature and literary criticism.  The first, he says, is evolving all the time, always building upon past work, always discovering more about history, and always bringing about good revisions to the canon.  Because of literary scholarship we have Blake as one of our Romantic “big six,” and we have moved Swinburne to the margins.  As this scholarship piles up, we start to “take for granted a vast apparatus of bibliographies, compendia of criticism, checklists, catalogs of library holdings, reference works, and many scrupulously edited texts”(328)  that make continued scholarship much easier than it was a century ago.  As more and more is discovered, histories and biographies become more accurate, fueling new discoveries.  Textual scholarship (which “real” critics treat as “a slough of despond” [329]) keeps step with scholarship on literature, and studies of the book fuel debates on everything from editorial copy-text to authorial intention.  After expounding the virtues and successes of modern literary scholarship, Kroeber turns to the problem: “Young Ph.D.’s” as he calls them, are not trained to be scholars.  They are trained to be critics – specialized critics.  So despite scholarship’s steady march forward, “our discipline now decays intellectually.”  We have the mounds of scholarship, and no one wants to work with them. 

    Those young Ph.D.’s who do want to work with scholarly materials lack the skills, and instead write heaps of criticism without actually consulting much of anything literary except the primary texts themselves.  Kroeber claims that we have impoverished our critical vocabulary by reaching out to various only tangentially related disciplines – sociology, linguistics, psychology – and critics now borrow so much from the sciences, all the while claiming to be doing something “creative,” that the criticism (or, theory) they produce ultimately has little to do with “literary study.”  So, his practical concern about where literary study has ended up by 1984 is that there will soon be no jobs for the young Ph.D.’s.  They are either incompetent at actually studying literature, or if they have managed to focus on their literary scholarship, they will not get hired by the committee looking for the latest theory buzzwords (or, to update this, cultural criticism buzzwords) on the C.V.

    While Kroeber brings his argument about scholarship vs. criticism to bear on a very practical issue (and a vital one, if we all wish to continue to have jobs and a department of our own), he does so within a framework of discussing how literary study has gotten where it is today, even if part of the “study” is in a sad state.  That’s what PMLA wanted him to do – a history of literary study.  But Kroeber is limited by his own knowledge of the subject, his lack of involvement in any of the “new” types of literary study, and the time period the PMLA team wants him to cover – the hundred years that the MLA has existed!  It is telling that they did not ask him to delve further into literary history.  No literary study existed before it was sanctioned by the MLA?  This limitation is noted in the title of the article, and can’t be blamed on Kroeber.  He gives the dates he is covering: 1883-1983.  That is all that is required really.  Like any good bibliographer does, you have to put a cap on the thing somewhere, or it will not fit between the covers of a book, much less a journal.  The other limitations that stem from Kroeber’s lack of specialized knowledge about literary history are his own limitations, but for some reason the MLA chose him to write this. 

Perhaps Kroeber was chosen precisely because he is an outsider on the history of literary study.  He can give a broader picture of what it looks like from someone who does it in the way most professors do it: teaching undergraduates, and writing on a period of canonical literature. Kroeber does well to call attention to the limitations of the article, calling it an “amateurish foray” into literary study (336), and ultimately brings his argument home to advocate for teaching literature to small classes as the saving grace of the English department.  If we try not to “fret” about the bureaucracy in which we must teach and write, and if we try not to jump on every theoretical bandwagon, we will get back to teaching literature in that way that supposedly helps our students' critical thinking, and all those other brain functions that can be magically turned on by reading a book – the reason the other departments send all their majors over here for at least a class or two. 

    So while Kroeber ends up in a very specific place at the end of his essay, and fails to give a sweeping overview of, or a definite shape to, the century he is supposed to be describing, he at least gives the PMLA reader something to think about when it comes to dealing with the legacies of that century, and deciding whether to turn away from them, embrace them, or count them as irrelevant to the very practical work we do in classrooms, and as scholars of texts.


Work Cited
Kroeber, Karl. “The Evolution of Literary Study, 1883-1983.” PMLA 99.3 (1984): 326-39. Print.
   

McGann’s Roman Example

Jerome McGann’s The Beauty of Inflections is a collection of essays and readings that attempt to outline a program for the re-historicization of poems.  McGann’s readings of Keats, Coleridge, and other Romantic poets show how to historicize, while the broader essays give theoretical justifications for the program, or show how it might benefit literary study.  Toward the end of this program (the last chapter before the conclusion) McGann chooses to include an essay on “Rome and its Romantic Significance.”  In the introduction he had told us that these essays were carefully selected and ordered in the book, sometimes out of chronological sequence, to best make the argument for historicization. Why include an essay on a place and civilization that seems antithetical to anything Romantic? (Despite the obvious shared root in the city’s name, what is Romantic about the civic-life-loving Romans?) McGann uses Rome as one of his best examples of the poet’s ability to Romantically idealize almost anything, and discusses how Rome’s long and tumultuous history lends itself to embellishment and longing in the imagination of the Romantically-minded.

Romantics have a notorious aversion to cities and cities’ trappings, yet Rome was somehow the “one city that escaped the judgment of Romanticism” (313). McGann names Winckellmann the first Romantic to visit Rome, arriving when Rome had just come out of yet another fall of some “civilization.” It was a beautiful, empty place of ruins, ripe for the imagination’s taking, ripe for yet another birth. Winckelmann “presided over its birth” and saw to it that it was a Romantic one. It is because of Rome’s peculiar position as a city of rich history and a city of empty ruins that the Romantics, McGann argues, were able to “discover the limits of their ideological experience” (314).  The poets had found a blank canvas, but under the ruined surface were millennia of possibilities for what Rome could be.  No matter that none of these possibilities suited the poets, for it was the remembrance of Rome that could easily be Romanticized, painted with the imagery of the city in its beautiful desolation, desolation that was just waiting for melancholy and nostalgia to give it an afterlife. So, the ruins and their shadows inspired poetry, and even though Winckelmann’s Roman project was really a historical one (full of discoveries that somehow only fueled the nostalgia rather than grounding Rome’s new identity on the facts of its un-Romantic history), portrayals and conceptions of Rome going into the 19th century were those of the “Everlasting Rome, not the Rome which is replaced by another every decade” (Geothe as quoted in McGann 316). 

McGann’s example of a Romantic Rome shows how far the Romantic ideology can go in conceiving of a place, a time, or even a city as something that reflects the Romantic's inward turn, his longing for some imagined place of the past, and his veneration for creativity and the individual.  Rome is the least ideal place and possesses the least ideal histories for those particular kinds of daydreams.  (Those daydreams spawned some great poetry, for sure, but the Romans of antiquity or any time before Winckelmann would have called them daydreams.)  I don’t know if this essay proves any of the major tenets of McGann’s beliefs about historicizing literature, but it does provide some insight into how the Romantic mind works, and a great example of what we still mean when we talk about “Romanticizing” something.  The fact that a city such as Rome can fuel the same imagination that longs for pastoral solitude, freedom of expression, and freedom from religion and civic life, seems surprising, even if we already know that humans, Romantic or not, tend to envision “everlasting” places and cultures, usually picturing them in some conflated recollection of every iteration, glossing over the troubling bits, and conveniently forgetting (or valorizing anew, in a new language befitting the contemporary climate of nostalgia) the parts that don’t fit the ideology. Winckelmann, Goethe, Chateaubriand, and the rest, are interested in history – real, factual history, full of troubling events likes those happening in France – but that does not stop them from deeply Romanticizing Rome.

Only in Stendhal (who McGann comes to at the end of the essay) do we see the movement reach the “limits” McGann had promised to show us early on.  The other thinkers and poets “refused to part with their most cherished forms of Romantic illusion and displacement,” but Stendhal finds these ways of viewing history “finally wanting” (333). Stendhal exhibits the despair of losing Rome, or anyplace for that matter, but not the desperate nostalgia of his contemporaries (331).
 
Perhaps Stendhal is the example McGann wants to leave us with, even though much of the essay is spent on those most charmed by their illusions.  Stendhal’s Romanticism allows for a more realistic view of history and the loss of civilizations without imagining all of history as something preferable to the present day, something longed after through a misty veil of Romantic embellishments. Stendhal’s historical perception of Rome is one that teaches lessons (as McGann thinks history should), one that reminds us of what we should not forget, and allows us a rich poetic outlet, through its well-known histories and literary tropes.  Perhaps Stendhal’s view of Rome is in many ways like McGann’s view of literary study.  We learn from its losses (textual or otherwise), we lament the losses, and we do not forget the losses.  Instead we record them, we seek inspiration from them, and we look forward to the possibilities of variants, interpretations, and meanings that a future of continued losses surely holds.

Work Cited

McGann, Jerome J. The Beauty of Inflections. Oxford UP: Oxford, 1985.

Justifying Critical Outliers in the NATC

If we were to leaf through the second edition of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, we would not be surprised by many of the early entries.  Plato, Sydney, Wordsworth… In fact, the first two-thirds of the book include selections from poets, literary critics, philosophers, linguists, and other folks who are easily at least tangentially related to what we think of when we think of “theory.”  Most of these critics and theorists have at least one foot firmly planted in some humanities sort of discipline.  While the text does not claim to be a collection of “literary theories” per se, there is an expectation that the selections will somehow all come back to books, or philosophy, or something with which students who are interested in theory are comfortable.  Toward the end of the book, we might start to become more than a little disoriented as theorist’s names (and the related names their headnote writers drop) become less familiar, never heard of.  When we begin to read the headnote, and discover that this “theorist” doesn’t do what we thought was “theory” at all, but instead studies the behaviors of scientists in their labs, the befuddlement is complete.

Bruno Latour is one of these critical outliers. Situated between Barbara Johnson’s reading of Billy Budd and a bit of Martha Nussbaum’s philosophy that draws on poetry to make its claims, Latour the “science studies” guy seems out of place.  But while Latour himself is somewhat atypical of an NATC canonized theorist, his headnote does most of the things the typical headnotes do, and even stands as something of a model for how the editors typically deal with an outlier’s headnote.  Or how they typically deal with anything that might leave the reader wondering if they should ask for their $75 back.  The Norton rule:  Justify, justify, justify!

The introductory paragraph gives Latour’s overview, a thinker in “science studies” and “technoscience.”  The overview introduction is in the style of most headnotes, but in Latour’s overview the justifications begin almost immediately.  Headnotes in the NATC often contain justifications, even for critics long recognized as major voices.  These usually fall at the end of the headnote, after some critical objections are brought to light.  “Even though critic Y debunks everything critic X says, critic X is still important because…” is the typical formula.  (My prof calls this the “Newsweek ending.”) But with Latour the headnote writer can’t wait for the conclusion to get the justification, because we are already boggled by “technoscience.”  The writer assures us (we who are sweating and thinking "Oh shit, he's talking about science!?") that “the consequences go beyond disciplinary boundaries” and “illuminate several important concepts in cultural theory” (2277).  Key terms are dropped, that bring us back to literature and its tangents.  Phew.  While Latour’s brand of social constructivism can certainly be seen unfolding in gender studies and other lately recognized, literature-related schools of theory, the lengthy list of schools in the overview helps drive this point home.  Look at all the -isms he’s influenced!  He belongs in this book. (Or, You are not thinking that he does not belong in this book.  Norton mind-trick.)

The biography of Latour is typical of a headnote’s second paragraph.  No justification is given here, but a brief history of scholarship and positions held.  This holds true for some other entries, but a more literary scholar may have had more information his or her accomplishments and publications at each institution related in that paragraph.  The next section of the headnote explicates one of Latour’s major works, one that is not included in the volume.  Terms like "Actor Network Theory" come up, and the doubt may begin to seep back in to those of us who are still wondering what Bruno is doing here.  The justification is simple -- he weighs in on the nature/nurture dichotomy, along with other “monstrous” binaries that contemporary theory sometimes seeks to deconstruct.  This may be true, but it is doubtful whether most who use this book will go out and find a copy of Laboratory Life tomorrow, just to see those dichotomies meet their doom.  We have more “literary” sources to go to for that kind of reading.

The next paragraph begins with a list of Latour’s “eclectic and wide-ranging” influences.  Those adjectives are probably meant to keep us on our toes to spot the novelists and critics whom he has read, but the list consists of sociologists, analytical philosophers (that is, the kind who don’t typically write about literature), and linguists (so close!).  In order to get some kind of legacy out of Latour, the headnote author speculates on whom Latour is referring to in his critiques of contemporary social constructivism.  STANLEY FISH and MICHEL FOUCAULT (Latour never mentions either) make it into the note, as theorists who bear “some resemblance” (2278).  Two more all-caps names are listed, and these are his true legacies.  However, they are sociologists and science studies thinkers as well.  Influences and legacies are typical of the headnotes in this book, and reaching to make connections that may or may not be significant is not uncommon either.  An outlier’s headnote exemplifies how far the authors sometimes have to stretch.

The remaining two pages of Latour’s headnote are almost completely given over to explaining his positions as outlined in “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?”  Again the author stabs at naming a literary critic whom Latour may or may not be commenting on (Fish), and brings up the dichotomies which we are all supposed to be so appalled by.  If a scientist type can deconstruct them, we will welcome him in, is perhaps the thought there.  The last sentence of the summary of Latour’s theories makes another association for us, by talking about associations: “The work of science studies, and by extension of literary theory as well, is to study associations…” (2278).  What a dumb sentence.  How “by extension” works is not quite clear, but they sure want us to think that science somehow extends into literature, because Latour has made it so!

The final paragraph gives the typical brief NATC overview of critiques of the theorist’s work, ending on the style of justification that has become quite familiar by page 2279: “In spite of the polarized responses he evokes, Latour remains a significant presence in cultural theory for his ingenious attempts to bridge the two-cultures model that divides the humanities from the sciences.”  Perhaps the headnote author should have said that in the first place.  The “[i]n spite of” portion of that sentence is for once not even necessary.  We are not objecting to Latour.  The scientists are.  We just want to know what he’s doing here!  And explaining that Latour helps us with a bridging of scientific and humanities cultures puts him in league with fellows like C.P. Snow and Matthew Arnold.  To some of us, this might be the best kind of justification.  Pointing to a legacy of writers on cyborgs and trans-humans (science, science!) might just befuddle us even more.

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I've nothing against Bruno.  My goal here was to give a specific example of how Norton is always justifying things.

Here's a cool article and interview about We Have Never Been Modern.

Here's a blog all about Latour and company, co-authored by my friend Mike Johnduff at Princeton (who is a literature student...maybe Norton can use him as their justification in the 3rd edition of NATC!):

"We Have Never Been Blogging."

Cozying up to the NATC

 Don't be put off by the bloodstain on the cover.

When The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism appears on your book list for the first time, you may get a sinking feeling.  If you don’t already have that feeling, then by all means get to sinking.  This tome (guaranteed to be more tome-ly than any text you have purchased to date) is a ten pound, nearly 3000 page monolith that may be the most expensive thing you ever buy as a graduate student in the humanities.  (And if you aren’t a graduate student in the humanities, back away slowly.)  While the NATC may cost you half your monthly TA stipend, and it may endanger your life every time you leap onto the subway with that ponderous weight in your backpack, rest assured that it is a sound investment in your future as a critic and scholar.  I will endeavor to explain why.

First let’s talk about what this book isn’t.  (With all those pages, there will be plenty to say about what it is.)  The NATC is not an introduction to theory, and it is even less an introduction to literary theory.  Notice, “literary” is not even in the title.  And the only place you’ll find “introduction” is in the introduction, which only takes up thirty-some bible-thin pages of the thing.  Though you can’t expect to be prepared for what follows by reading these pages, if you really are new to this theory game then by all means read the introduction!  It is a very cursory discussion of “What is Theory?” and of theory’s current place in literary and cultural studies, followed by an even more cursory wham-bam list of schools and methods in theory.  The schools and methods are probably what you’ve heard of.  Feminists.  Deconstructors.  Cultural critics. Etc.  While these entries are in a sort of chronological order, the descriptions are short and the list format does not help the newbie to understand the relationships between all of these schools and methods.  If you have a true introductory text, the kind with schemas and charts and things, that might be a nice supplement as you wade through the issues and lists.  Donald Keesey’s Contexts for Criticism is a good place to start, and Jonathan Culler’s Very Short Introduction to Literary Theory is even better.  While, in the end, schemas don’t always make perfect sense or allow for the nuances that differentiate certain theories, they are handy when you are in the face of the NATC with no prior exposure to semioticians and linguists, New Critics and Formalists (“What’s the difference?!”)  and their ilk. 

One other feature of the book that could be considered introductory material is each critic’s or theorist’s headnote.  Again, some background is necessary to see how the critics fit together (because now you are dealing with individuals and their thoughts, not over-arching, sometimes nebulous schools), but each headnote can nearly stand alone because of the amount of biographical and critical information there.  Always read the headnote for any reading you have been assigned.  Your professor probably assigned the headnote along with the reading, but if not, read it anyway.  Be the teacher’s pet.  The headnotes do not give away the juicy bits of the selections themselves, but set nicely a reader up for what is to come. 

You will notice, especially at the beginnings and ends of headnotes, that some names appear in ALL CAPS.  This means the person referred to is somewhere in that book, and you should go look them up if you want to know more about the connection between, say, Hegel and Marx.  However, unlike the obvious Hegel-Marx connection, sometimes these associations are tenuous and even dubious.  JAQUES DERRIDA appears in Plato’s headnote, but we cannot learn much about Plato from Derrida.  Derrida deconstructs a Platonic dialog, so he made it in.  They even go so far as to include the relatively minor dialog in Plato’s section, to justify the nudging into the twentieth century (they want you to look in the back of the book!).  If they really wanted to throw in a responder to Plato, MARTIN HEIDEGGER would have been more apt.  But he’s not cool anymore.  So when you read these ALL CAPS names, just be sure to have a few grains of salt handy.

While NATC is by no means an introductory text, it is a hit parade of works that you may be assigned in your early years of advanced literary study.  All of the biggies are in there: Laugh of the Medusa, Poetics, Biographia Literaria, Of Grammatology, and so on.  You will have nearly everything you need.  They even put them in a sort of historical order for you, by year of the critic’s birth.  Also included, however, are some tidbits you’ve probably never heard of.  The newer stuff follows the current trends in literary theory as observed by the editors.  Some of it will get nixed from the next edition, and some will be immortalized either by its own merit or by simply having a place in the NATC.

Of course, every time a young upstart gets his or her gender theory article included, some hoary old fellow will be shaved off the other end of the book to make room.  The early criticism, therefore, is the choicest cuts.  You can think of the book as an open faced sandwich.  The aged meats are on top and the fresh pieces of bread are on the bottom.  It remains to be seen which breads will soak up the juices of history and remain edible, and which will turn to soggy mush.  While the quality of these later selections is mixed, with the latest edition you will at least stay on top of the trends in literary theory.  But if you are in a theory class just for fun (what?), or if you are a stalwart Classicist or Romantic or the like, don’t bother keeping up with editions.  The oldies but goodies are in every one, and you might have even more oldies in the older editions, as each new edition will land some of them on the chopping block to squeeze in new essays on buzzy new topics.  Anyway, with the savings on a used book, you will be able to buy a few more TV dinners at Aldi.  Or even a roast beef sandwich.

With such a huge volume, navigation is always an issue, and you may worry about getting lost at sea.  Luckily the crack Norton team has anticipated your seafaring reticence, and has given you multiple options for charting a course through the book.  The first table of contents is in historical order, just like the entirety of the book.  Thumb to the very first page with anything meaningful on it for the traditional “Contents” pages (although you can find all sorts of interesting things on the preceding pages if you’re into that sort of thing).  On page xix begins the “Alternative Table of Contents,” which gives you multiple useful options for digging up articles that may be of interest to you or useful for your projects.  Methods and schools are there, for sure, but also genres, historical periods (since they are in order but not periodized in the main text), and issues in theory.  The issues section is especially handy for many paper-writing tasks.  So even if you don’t read even a quarter of the book as assigned readings, you may find at least another quarter of it can be used as your bibliography on any literary topic.  (Hollow out the other half and use it to store your gin.)  Another way to navigate the book is by the indices, which again give you options.  You can look up authors and titles, or you can browse subjects.

Once you find a nice chunk of entries that work for the authors, titles, or subjects you are interested in, look at the bibliographies.  If you get nothing else out of this book, look at the bibliographies!  Everything in the NATC came from somewhere else, and it will tell you where to find the selection, along with more material than you could ever want to read.  What’s more, they evaluate the books for you, and annotate many of them.

So the NATC will not answer all your questions about theory, and it will not make you an instant expert (although the presence of the book on your desk may elicit many astonished "Holy SHIT you read THAT?!" looks).  If you need it for a class, then you need it.  Suck it up and buy the thing, and make it your own.  Put colorful post-it flags on the sections you love, write angry marginalia on the ones you hate, design your own alternative table of contents, paste color coded heuristics into the headnotes to help you put it all into perspective.  I won’t say you’ll never regret buying the thing.  But sometimes, you’ll be really glad you did.

The Vulgar Marxist

In Marxism and Literary Criticism, Terry Eagleton describes vulgar Marxism as a reduction of the complexities of Marxist analysis to that oversimplified notion that material condition either makes the man, or makes the resistant man. Eagleton calls for a more sophisticated Marxism that looks at how art (literature) is expressed in many aspects of the superstructure, and is not solely shaped by "means if production," or by an author's poverty or wealth, but by a host of economic influences coming from several contexts (author, the whole of literature, the real world, the implied reader...). In other words, Marxist readings should not merely attempt to show how a work supports its historical conditions, or assume that the work directly challenges those conditions. It's never that simple.

In the first chapter Eagleton clearly puts forth how art is a part of the superstructure that can either reinforce or undermine it, possibly effecting some change at the base. I won't go into it all here, but this was really helpful for me. I'd known all along that Marx, influenced as he was by an aesthetically vocal G. W. F. Hegel, and a cultured (if impoverished) chap himself, would have liked to pull art into his mix, but hadn't the time considering those thousand or so pages of capital-criticism he had to get out. I just couldn't put my finger on how art was such an important part of superstructure, having fallen into the vulgar Marxist mentality sometimes myself.

This was the first time I'd seen the "vulgar Marxist" called out this way. I've seen the term before and I think it's useful, but Eagleton was the first place I'd seen it described so well how when it comes to criticism of art, vulgar Marxism misses the point. But while Eagleton privileges his sophisticated Marxist critic, he does not call for an eradication or a re-education of vulgar Marxists. The word "vulgar" is key here, and I don't think it's pejorative. Vulgar is of the people. Vulgar is what the people understand. If a vulgar Marxism is as far as any proletariat group could be expected to get in their understanding of how economy shapes their consciousness (or, more simply, their "lot in life"), this is far enough to effect some kind of reaction. What good is Marxism if its first application, its praxis as Marx would call it, isn't to help the people see the way to doing something? Eagleton's sophisticated Marxism is the critic's window into the power structures of society as illuminated by art, a window he looks through so that he can critique those structures. Vulgar Marxism might serve the vulgar man just as well. Only he may choose to break the window, and bust some heads.

Workers of the world unite,
Critics of the world . . . untie.

The Critical Climax

The commercial with the fried egg should have said, "This is your brain... This is your brain on Deleuze." And so from my fried egg I give you this rhizome or plateau or something, concerning something completely different:

A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No movement has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees.

I just read some E. D. Hirsch on historical criticism, from Validity in Interpretation. Hirsch (I keep wanting to call him "Ed") compares two critiques of Wordsworth's "A slumber did my spirit seal." One is by Cleanth Brooks, a Formalist whom I like most dearly. The other is by F.W. Bateson, who I don't know much about except that he doesn't like historicists. So Hirsch is comparing two critics that are not from his camp, and he makes it a contest. Hirsch believes in determinate meaning, so one of these guys (or neither) has to be "right."

Hirsch chooses Bateson as the winner, not because of his optimistic interpretation, but because of the word "pantheistic." Hirsch sees that word as proof that Bateson is taking into consideration the life and times of Wordsworth, a Romantic poet who would have some pantheistic beliefs or motifs. Hirsch goes on to point out how the two critiques are irreconcilable and therefore one of them must be invalid. Pantheism seems like a silly way to determine a winner, but it would be silly for me to complain about his choice since I don't believe in determinate meaning anyway. The contest is the problem. If I ran a contest with these two, I would try to determine who was the better critic, not who gave the right interpretation. Here they are, first Bateson, then Brooks:

The final impression the poem leaves is not of two contrasting moods, but of a single mood mounting to a climax in the pantheistic magnificence of the last two lines . . . The vague living-Lucy of this poem is opposed to the grander dead-Lucy who has become involved in the sublime process of nature. We put the poem down satisfied, because its last two lines succeed in effecting a reconciliation between two philosophies or social attitudes. Lucy is actually more alive now than she is dead, because she is now a part of the life of Nature, and not just a human "thing."

[The poet] attempts to suggest something of the lover's agonized shock at the loved one's present lack of motion -- of his response to her utter and horrible inertness. . . Part of the effect, of course, resides in the fact that a dead lifelessness is suggested more sharply by an object's being whirled about by something else than by an image of the object in repose. But there are other matters which are at work here: the sense of the girl's falling back into the clutter of things, companioned by things chained like a tree to one particular spot, or by things completely inanimate like rocks and stones . . . [She] is caught up helplessly into the empty whirl of the earth which measures and makes time. She is touched and held by earthly time in its most powerful and horrible image.

I was so moved by Brooks and kind of grossed out by Bateson. For instance, the line "We put the poem down satisfied" really rubs me the wrong way. If we subscribe to Horace's miscuit utile dulci, maybe putting a poem down satisfied is what we should hope for? But satisfaction is not exactly the same as delight. Delight doesn't require any thinking. Bateson's satisfaction is not instant or aesthetic, but apparently based on his own interpretation which smooths out any conflict in the poem. On a "reconciliation between two philosophies or social attitudes." That's pretty vague, and it hardly sounds satisfying. Certainly not delightful. It's as if he's saying the poem has satisfied its requirement to come to a resolution (as if that is a requirement of good poetry).

Bateson's pantheism angle turns Lucy's resting place into an Elysium instead of a dead stone revolving in space, but besides creating some nicer imagery than Brooks' darker interpretation provides, I don't think the critique is very effective (or affective). The whole aim of it seems to be, like I said before, to smooth out conflicts, to reconcile differences, and to cancel out oppositions without a hitch. He talks of "two contrasting moods" that are actually "a single mood," without making anything out of how these moods were sublated or elevated. He talks of the dead-Lucy "opposed to" the living-Lucy but doesn't explain the opposition, ending on a bittersweet line, the equivalent of "she's in a better place now." It's almost mawkish.

Two moods becoming one, two people (who are really one) who oppose one another, two philosophies reconciled -- these things all seem pretty interesting, and like they might occur at some climactic hinging point in the text, but Bateson doesn't bring it out of the poem. He just explains it conceptually and we are supposed to accept it. The funny thing is he does mention something that sounds exciting, and even uses the word "climax" in the line at the front of the paragraph, where he claims that "a single mood mount[s] to a climax in the pantheistic magnificence of the last two lines." Sounds so exciting, and then he doesn't deliver on it.

My impression of Bateson's critique is sort of just that -- an impression. And he even calls his own critique an impression of the poem. But even if his prose style moves someone more than it moves me, even if his vague impressions of the poem are enough for someone else to sink their teeth into, there would still be that undeniable attempt to "solve" the poem there, to smooth it over, to get relief from its tensions. What that does is just turn the poem into its interpretation. We have the end result so there's no use in re-reading the text. I may not like Bateson's delivery of his critique, but more importantly I don't like his aim. It's anti-climactic.

Brook's critique may be slightly amiss in its pessimism (even if we're not going to be historical, let's be reasonable -- I would take into consideration that Wordsworth is not a poet of sad, dark poems, so me might avoid going down the "agonized" path), but its strength is that the conflict in the poem is not canceled out. It makes for a better critique when conflicts and tension are pointed out explicitly. And if a claim is made that a text has a climax, something climactic should be brought into focus by the critic. In fact, the critique itself should have a climax.

The first line of Brooks's paragraph has us picturing a cold dead body through this whole thing, a lover looking on in "agonized shock." The "shock" may be a little over the top, but it certainly gives us an image to hold onto while Brooks elaborates on what the text does with the dead girl, and the beautifully understated "present lack of motion" makes the lifeless body even more vivid. Brooks then uses the concrete language of the poem (rocks, trees, rolling...) and shows how the differences between alive and dead, still and moving, are depicted "sharply" by Wordsworth's chosen images. He also substitutes some of his own sharp, concrete words like "whirled about" contrasted with "object in repose."

Brooks drives his images home, perhaps a little more than a Wordsworth poem seems to require. The death in the poem sort of washes over us and leaves us drenched in the weight of Lucy's helplessness. It's not nearly as "horrible" a thing as Brooks makes it out to be. But even if Brooks gets carried away, the tension he points to, and even the sadness he alludes to, is real. Perhaps this contrast between Brooks's pointed prose (which can be quite poetic) and Wordsworth's fluid poetry makes that even more apparent. The poem is not merely translated into an interpretation and left for dead, but complemented and brought to life by a good critique.

In the second half of Brooks's paragraph, things are still "at work" in the poem, not reconciled. Brooks finds similar tensions to what Bateson found (although Brooks focuses on still vs. moving where Bateson focuses on life vs. death), and he magnifies them and explicates them with a close reading on rocks and trees and such. In the last two lines of the paragraph, Brooks combines the poem's concrete images with some abstract and more emotional language to create a critical climax: "She is touched and held by earthly time in its most powerful and horrible image." Wow. That is not a resolution, but a gorgeous predicament. And that makes the reader want to go back and pore over this poem for himself. Or, he can always go back to just drinking in the poem for what it is, the "impression" of it made a little more delightful by the critic's illuminations. Since the poem is never resolved, and it is always at work, it is always worth reading.

Brooks wins!

A Back Road to DFW

Got paper?

I had never really thought about David Foster Wallace until some ridiculous writing analyzer (IWriteLike) told me to post on my blog "I write like David Foster Wallace." I thought that was kind of fun at first, but then I noticed that it also said Sarah Palin writes like H.P. Lovecraft. No way, unless that just means they're both xenophobes. Right then I knew it was just a crappy sentence length, punctuation count, word length sort of analyzer with no real stylistic connection to the writers it pretended to "know." Bummer. But despite the bummer, I suddenly wanted to find out about ole DFW. Maybe we at least had parentheses in common. I knew he is something of a humorist, writes in a "postmodern style" (whatever that means these days), and that he's a little bit greasy (and quite dead). But I'd never read him.

So on one of those Saturday nights at Barnes & Noble ("the bookstore where they have trains" as my son calls it), I found myself sitting in a miniature Adirondack chair by the kids' train table and picking through DFW's books of essays. Nothing sounded too interesting from the tables of contents, and glances inside revealed the "postmodern style" of excessive footnotes and disjointedness. I couldn't just jump into reading anything because he was all over the place. Finally, on one back cover, some reviewer mentioned that somewhere within the mess of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again was a single essay on literary criticism. I decided to find that one. I found it to be only five or six pages long with absolutely no intrusive footnotes, and decided that essay, "Greatly Exaggerated," was my way into David Foster Wallace. Whether it was a good way in or not, it was the perfect length for a train table visit! I'd be done reading before any tank engines started flying across the room and before my not-quite-kid-sized ass could become permanently molded to the kid-sized chair.

I was immediately taken in by conversational, semi-outsider writing on the now age-old problem of the death of the author. I immediately wanted to take notes -- I didn't want to buy the whole jumbly book for a six page essay in the middle! Having just cleaned out my purse (it had had about ten pounds of paper in it), I could find no paper to write on. A crumpled Kohl's receipt for "LADIES SUNGLASS" would have to do. So here's my first take on DFW, as transcribed from boy-distracted, boyish handwriting on this poor receipt, and without the text in front of me.

In the essay DFW reviews H.L. Hix's 1990s published dissertation entitled Morte d'Author: An Autopsy. DFW starts out by explaining Barthes' (and basically all the poststructuralists') idea of the death of the author in layman's terms. He also notes how even if he's explaining it clearly, forgetting about authors altogether probably seems pretty ridiculous to the average reader. As a sort of outsider DFW looks into academic criticism from a unique place. He is an English professor, but holds no Ph.D. He earned an M.F.A. for his real passion, his creative writing, and was only convinced to enter academia by an enthusiastic friend. In other words, he's reviewing a kind of thing he would never attempt (or want) to write (i.e. a dissertation).

There are a couple of things going on in the review -- DFW is not only reviewing this particular work of Hix's, but making commentary on the current style of academic writing in general. He enjoys Hix's book, and he is glad that someone is seeking to resuscitate the author, but he is put off by Hix's critical style and wonders why academic writing has to be so inaccessible and boring.

Not being a "hardcore theory weenie" himself, Wallace never quite believed what he read in the author's obit. He lays out Hix's basic premise and objections about the "death," and even suggests that the things Hix will do with deconstruction might be "wicked fun," but soon starts to tell the reader not to bother with Mort d'Author unless the reader is a self-proclaimed "theory jockey." For Wallace, what looked like it would be a whole lot of fun turns out to be not nearly as fun or interesting as Hix's introduction makes it sound. The dissertation is representative of an academic's "obsession with anality that's so common [...] an obsession with the jots and tittles of making excruciatingly clear what he's saying and where he's going." The book runs long for Wallace too, and he wishes some kind-hearted, less academic editor would have snipped away at the published version, to "delete gestures that seem directed at thesis committees rather than paying customers." I don't think the point here is that hint at economy, but rather at how the paying customer is likely to be a more average reader, and once you've defended your dissertation to those in the know, perhaps you should open yourself up a little if you want your work to be at all useful or interesting to students and fans of literature.

What Wallace says about the death problem itself is less important than what he's saying in the review. He is on the fence, leaning toward anti-death. Hix is anti-death, but exposes how the problem is much more complex than just author or no author. I enjoyed Wallace's coining of the "pro-death" (mostly European) and "anti-death" (mostly American) labels, and waited for him to sneak in an abortion reference which he did just once, calling someone's anti-death work a "sneaky pro-life apology." Then lines like "before we whip out the spade or the defib paddles..." put the "death" into perspective. This essay is less humorous than the others in the collection (it was originally printed in a Harvard journal, so it probably wasn't permitted to cause too many grins), but it does put the death of the author into understandable and semi-enjoyable terms for regular reading folk, and explores some of the complexities that Hix brings to the death conundrum, while using humor and lightness as a way to make it all less daunting. I can't say that I understand all the stuff about "Derrida by way of Wittgenstein" (maybe something even Wallace himself should have cut from the "paying customer" version), but I think Wallace is talking about Hix's ability to look at both sides of the death problem by bringing together continental and analytic philosophy to try to solve (or at least better illuminate) it.

I would recommend this essay to someone who has yet to get into the big poststructuralist claims, as a way to prepare one's self for what's to come (or perhaps a way to get frightened away from that stuff if it's not for you!). Wallace shows the seeming absurdity of the theories of the mid-century, but also shows the importance of such jarring theories to the legacy of literary study. Most importantly (for me), Wallace makes it okay to be pissed off by having to read dry, unfun criticism, whether you like what it's saying or not. His ultimate take on Mort is a positive review, but a rather backhanded one considering those paying customers who read this essay will likely steer clear of Mort d'Author and guys like Hix. And students like me who may or may not decide search Hix out, will certainly be more aware of keeping "excruciating" writing out of our own work.