Beyond the Blurb

On Critics and Criticism

Daniel K. Green

• Publisher: Cow Eye Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780990915058
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Beyond the Blurb is a selection of essays that identifies the most important principles of literary criticism and considers the relevance of those principles in the work of specific literary critics, including James Wood, Harold Bloom, and Susan Sontag. Intended for academic and general readers alike, this insightful collection of essays takes a contrarian attitude toward current orthodoxies—its assessment of the flawed strategies used by prominent critics is especially revealing—and offers a critical philosophy that reaffirms the value not just of criticism but of literature itself.

PART 1

CRITICAL ISSUES

While certain core principles inform almost everything I write about literature and literary criticism, the essays included here seem to distil the “critical issues” in a particularly direct and relevant way. Some of them could be called reviews, while others are simply responses to something I had read, responses that I managed to shape into essays in which I endeavored to both describe the source’s argument and make a coherent argument of my own. I’m not sure I would have ever attempted to write such essays as these were it not for the existence of The Reading Experience, of the “literary blog” in general.

The essays explore, sometimes more, sometimes less explicitly, the concerns that unify my approach to criticism, especially the practice of close reading, the nature of literature as an aesthetic form, and the role of criticism itself. While I do not argue explicitly in these essays that reflection on such issues might be especially important in the critical discussion of current/contemporary literature, nevertheless this is a necessary and underlying assumption. To the extent that the kind of focus on the “literary” qualities of poetry and fiction, that is, on those qualities that make them first of all works of art, for which I advocate has been dismissed as old-fashioned or superficial, new books are in danger of receiving only the most cursory notice, the most uncritical celebration or “takedown,” otherwise left to fade into future obscurity.

Close Reading

In “A Critic’s Manifesto” (The New Yorker, Aug 28, 2012), Daniel Mendelsohn contends that to be a critic requires “expertise, authority, and taste.” He leaves out the most important attribute a critic should have: the ability to pay attention. In fact, without this one, the others Mendelsohn mentions are superfluous.

Any defensible judgment about a work of literature must arise from observable features on which the judgment is based and to which the critic can return. This is where the distinction between having an “opinion” about a text and being able to support that opinion is real. An opinion is only a provisional conclusion until it can be allied with and clarified by specific illustration from the work, until the critic can point to those particulars of the work that prompted the opinion. An unsupported opinion may or may not contain implicit but unstated illustration of this kind, but as long as it’s unstated, it is not itself “criticism.” Not everyone wants to be a critic, of course, but a book review, for example, can’t really be taken seriously as criticism unless some text-based “evidence” is provided.

Providing such evidence requires that the critic pay attention. Close attention. This would involve, at minimum, noting, in fiction, such conventional elements as narrative structure (especially variations in narrative structure), character development (especially the writer’s strategies for influencing our attitude toward characters), point of view, etc., but since fiction as a genre of literature is at its core the creation of illusions of such things as “character,” “story,” or “setting” through skillful manipulation of language, a critic needs ultimately to be able to focus on the writer’s invocation of language, on the text as an artificial arrangement of words. Attempting to explicate a work of fiction by leaping first of all to plot or character or any other imposed device rather than considering the way such devices are conditioned by and embedded in language ignores the very medium through which literature exists, as if a work of fiction was really just like a movie aside from those pesky words. (Although film criticism certainly requires attention to the use of medium as well, in this case the manipulation of visual imagery.)

Being attentive to language does not mean picking out isolated passages of “fine writing” and making a fuss over them. More often than not, such purported fine writing is just the decorative cover for a work that otherwise does aspire to be a movie. Ultimately language is everything in a work of literature, and a critic needs to account for the way a writer marshals the resources of language to create all of the effects in that work. If, for example, “setting” seems to play an especially important role in a novel or story, a critic should be expected to notice the way the writer’s prose works to make setting (again an illusion created with words) seem so prominent. To a significant extent, this means the critic needs to describe the work at hand as carefully as possible, or at least the work as experienced by the critic (and potentially the reader) paying close attention. Judgment, which critics such as Mendelsohn want to assign such an essential part in literary criticism, can only be justified, and ultimately taken seriously, if it is preceded by this kind of scrupulous description.

Absent the effort to give close attention to the tangible features of the literary work, to explain what the experience of reading that work is like, what Mendelsohn calls “expertise” is largely beside the point. If Mendelsohn means by using this term to suggest that someone possessing it is an “expert” reader in that he/she does indeed know how to pay close attention, then of course I agree with him, although it is not necessary to be “expert” in some credentialed way in order to exercise this expertise. If, as I suspect, Mendelsohn means that an authentic critic is one who can cite all the myriad books he/she has read, or has read all the right ones, or who possesses the appropriate academic pedigree, then this sort of expertise by itself is mostly meaningless. An amateur critic can read just as sensitively as a “professional” critic.

Indeed, the “authority” a critic can bring to the consideration of literary works can only come from the authority that the sensitivity and insight of any particular reading brings with it (although of course some critics can demonstrate over time a consistency of insight that gives that critic a kind of default authority). Unless the critic’s work earns its authority, the sort of authority that comes from the supposed prestige of the publication in which that work appears or from some other external affiliation is just specious. Whenever someone like Mendelsohn (or Sir Peter Stothard, who recently opined about the “harm” blogging is doing to literature) complains about the loss of “authority” being suffered by literary criticism (or book reviewing), it always seems to me they’re basically lamenting the loss of this latter, artificial, and self-assumed authority.

“Taste,” of course, is the most subjective of the qualities Mendelsohn prizes in a critic, and the purported possession of it by some (critics) and its absence in others (too many readers) has long been used as justification for the implicit deference we are to pay to the “best” critics. At some level it is undeniably good for a critic to be able to discern the artful from the meretricious, but the notion of taste is also used, frequently I think, as the excuse for bringing attention to some books and writers and ignoring others, thus giving the former the tacitly official approval of the guardians of literary culture. When critics are presuming to act as such guardians, their “judgment” especially needs to be examined with skepticism, as this act of sorting (abetted by editors) can actually do harm to literary culture by excluding adventurous writers and elevating those more acceptable to the cultural mainstream. “Taste” is again something that can be validated only by the strength of the critic’s descriptions and analysis. It shouldn’t be assumed.

I do not say that Daniel Mendelsohn in particular is guilty of this offense or that he abuses the critic’s privileges in the other ways I have described. I find most of his reviews to be perfectly sound, although I don’t always agree with him. And I do agree with him when he says that the “serious critic ultimately loves his subject more than he loves his reader.” The literary critic’s primary allegiance should be to literature, to its continuation and continued vitality. If his/her “expertise” consists of ideas about how to effect this, if “authority” is something that helps to ensure it, if “taste” means being able to recognize when a writer or work is likely to contribute to the effort, then indeed the critic needs all of these qualities.

The Authority of Criticism

Ron Silliman begins The New Sentence (1987) with this unimpeachable claim:

. . .if we look to that part of the world which is the poem, tracing the historical record of each critical attempt to articulate a poetics, a discursive account of what poetry might be, we find instead only metaphors, translations, tropes. That these models have a use should not be doubted—the relationships they bring to light, even when only casting shadows, can help guide our way through this terrain. Yet their value stands in direct relation to their provisionality, to the degree to which each paradigm is aware of itself as a translation of the real, inaccurate and incomplete.

Such a pragmatic perspective on the utility of “poetics” (of literary criticism in general) seems to me the most efficacious way of encouraging open-ended debate about all questions relating to a subject so thoroughly contingent as what properly constitutes the “literary” qualities of literature. (I especially like Silliman’s reference to “that part of the world which is the poem,” which correctly emphasizes that a poem is a phenomenon in the world, not a reflection on or of the world that somehow transcends or detours around the merely real. A text is an element of reality, not just an opportunity to discourse about it.) It is admirable that Silliman’s first words warn against taking his own poetics as the last words on the subject, but as a critic he has firmly-held positions nonetheless, and they are positions that encourage readers to take sides.

Silliman next locates his approach as a critic by identifying himself with other poet-critics such as Pound, Olson, and Cree-ley, who were themselves situated “warily midway between the New Critics” and the “anti-intellectualism” that New Criticism provoked among “other sectors of ‘New American’ poetry.” Although it seems to me that Silliman’s criticism, both in this book and on his blog, has much in common with the close reading of the New Criticism, he is very harsh here in his comments about it, characterizing it as a “positivist” approach encompassing “an empiricist claim to transcendent (and trans-historical) truth.” But the New Critics did not view poems as “empirical” evidence (the text) that would lead to a claim to “transcendent” truth (the critic’s interpretation). This is, in fact, a wholly mistaken representation of the New Critics’ project: New Criticism was “empirical” only in that it insisted readers attend to the perceptible structure and actual language of the text, and the only “transcendent truth” it implied was that reading a poem was not a search for transcendent truth. Indeed, the burden of New Criticism was exactly to convince readers to read rather than interrogate poems for their unitary “meaning.”

Silliman makes his disdain for New Criticism (or at least the conception of “literature” he thinks it represents) even more blatant by comparing it to Stalinism:

Necessarily. . .a poetics must be concerned with the process by which writing is organized politically into literature. It is particularly disturbing when, under the New Critics as well as Stalin, this transformation is posed and explained as though it were objective and not related directly to ongoing and fluid social struggles.

Certainly the New Critics were attempting an “objective” form of reading in that they believed a poem could be approached as a work of art with discernible features that could be identified by paying close attention—“dispassionate” is perhaps the term that might justifiably be used to characterize the attitude of the New Critics’ ideal reader. And they surely did not have any interest in “ongoing and fluid social struggles” (at least where the analysis of literature is concerned) and would never have accepted that “a poetics must be concerned with the process by which writing is organized politically into literature.” Silliman, of course, believes they were a part of such organizing nevertheless (a retrograde part), and in the first several essays in The New Sentence he undertakes to establish that indeed poetics is finally about politics, poetry “a form of action,” presumably on behalf of those “social struggles.”

These first few essays are aggressively Marxist in their declarations about the place of poetry. In “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” we are told that the transparency of language we encounter in much ordinary communication is part of “a greater transformation which has occurred over the past several centuries: the subjection of writing (and, through writing, language) to the social dynamics of capitalism.”

Words not only find themselves attached to commodities, they become commodities and, as such, take on the “mystical” and “mysterious character” Marx identified as the commodity fetish: torn from any tangible connection to their human makers, they appear instead as independent objects active in a universe of similar entities, a universe prior to, and outside, any agency by a perceiving Subject. A world whose inevitability invites acquiescence. Thus capitalism passes on its preferred reality through language itself to individual speakers. . . .

Because poetry “is not only the point of origin for all the language and narrative arts” but “returns us to the very social function of art as such,” it is in the best position to combat this commodification. Indeed, “perhaps only due to its historical standing as the first of the language arts, poetry has yielded less to (and resisted more) this process of capitalist transformation.” But it hasn’t resisted enough. According to Silliman, “The social role of the poem places it in an important position to carry the class struggle for consciousness to the level of consciousness.”

By recognizing itself as the philosophy of practice in language, poetry can work to search out the preconditions of a liberated language within the existing social fact.

Despite the dogmatic tone of these passages, the underlying analysis of public language vs. literary language seems pretty cogent to me. Extending the analysis to fiction, Silliman notes that “the most complete expression” of the “invisibility” of language “is perhaps in the genre of fictional realism, although it is hardly less pervasive in the presumed objectivity of daily journalism or the hypotactic logic of normative expository style.” Further, “it is the disappearance of the word that lies at the heart of the invention of the illusion of realism and the breakdown of gestural poetic form.” That calls for simplicity of style and an emphasis on narrative—both in fiction and journalism—reflect an impatience with language as medium and the dominance of “message” is undoubtedly true, and the proposition that poetry especially represents an opportunity to “liberate” language from these constraints is one I can easily accept. But I fail to see why it is necessary to lay the blame for the crudity of public language specifically on capitalism, as opposed to the general human reluctance to pay attention to subtlety and nuance and willingness to accept the “preferred reality” of authority. Capitalism will get no propping up from me, but I can’t see that it has uniquely invoked these human limitations.

Much of the logic of Silliman’s poetics (as well as, ultimately, his own poetry) depends on the assumptions he brings about the “role of the reader in the determination of a poem’s ideological content” (“The Political Economy of Poetry”). Silliman contends there is no “genuine” version of a poem, only those versions experienced by a particular audience at a particular time:

What can be communicated through any literary production depends on which codes are shared with its audience. The potential contents of the text are only actualized according to their reception, which depends on the social composition of the receivers.

Again this is a defensible position, but again I fail to see that asserting reception is determined by “social composition” is to say anything very significant. At best it establishes that audiences and readers bring to the reception of poetry their life experiences and circumstances, but to make “social composition” into the kind of essentialized, metaphysical entity Marxists want it to be doesn’t convert a mere sociological fact into a revelation. Similarly, to say that “context determines the actual, real-life consumption of the literary product, without which communication of a message (formal, substantive, ideological) cannot occur” seems to me little more than a truism, and belies the question whether “communication of a message” is the goal a poet ought to be setting for him/herself. It is the goal that Silliman is setting, although in his practice as a poet he does concentrate on the “formal” message, through which the substantive and ideological are finally expressed.

If in essays such as “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World” and “The Political Economy of Poetry” Silliman contends that New Criticism (presumably Silliman wants New Criticism to stand in for other varieties of formalism as well) puts too much emphasis on author and text in determining the “potential content” of the work, in my opinion he compensates for this failing by in turn giving over too much of the opportunity to “actualize” content to individual readers. Silliman is right to insist that the reading experience must include the reader as part of the process—the reader must be up to the task of apprehending the aesthetic qualities of the text—but in his determination to make poetry the servant of Marxist social reform, Silliman, at least in these theoretical essays, wants the reader’s attention so thoroughly directed at the “meaning” a poem might provide that whatever aesthetic effects might accompany it are at best an afterthought, at worst regressive cultural baggage that must be discarded.

Silliman is no...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1: Critical Issues
• Part 2: Critical Failures
• Part 3: Critical Successes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments