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Reading Criticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Cary Nelson
Cary Nelson*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana
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Abstract

Prefaces to critical books often display more self-consciousness and uneasiness than we usually associate with critical discourse. These moments when critics speak about their own work can undermine our assumptions about disinterested scholarship. Moreover, they can lead to a reexamination of the critical activity and a search for new ways of evaluating critical prose that take account of the critic's attitude toward his own work. We need to examine criticism's stylistic and formal properties, not just its paraphrasable content. Such analysis can reveal the way a critic's interests and commitments are woven into the texture of his language. That language, however, will always partly betray or suppress the critic's experience. Criticism, moreover, can neither wholly escape nor wholly dominate the texts it treats. Yet it can also never be entirely self-effacing. As a result, criticism is a particularly ambivalent and compromised form of writing.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 91 , Issue 5 , October 1976 , pp. 801 - 815
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by The Modern Language Association of America

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References

Notes

1 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), p. vii; de Man, Blindness and Insight (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), pp. ix-x; Sontag, Against Interpretation (1966; rpt. New York: Dell, 1969), p. 6; Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1972), p. xi.

2 For an examination of a related issue, the critic's reluctance to write, see my “The Paradox of Critical Language: A Polemical Speculation,” Modern Language Notes, 89 (1974), 1003-16. This essay also cites and discusses several general studies of criticism which helped to stimulate my interest in the present topic.

3 For a wittily involuted exploitation of the ironies involved in writing prefaces, see the opening essay, “Hors livre,” in Jacques Derrida's La Dissémination (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972).

4 Review of The Anxiety of Influence, Contemporary Literature, 16, No. 2 (1975), 244. As Bloom continues to restate his theory, the pattern of reviews will, inevitably, move toward ironically revisionist readings of his influence. By overstating his case, Bloom virtually guarantees the kind of attack his theory can preempt.

5 Bloom takes notice of one aspect of this issue (his use of Blakean categories) in his preface to the revised edition of The Visionary Company (Ithaca.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1971). On the influence of Blake on his study of Yeats, see Sandra Siegel, “Prolegomenon to Bloom: The Opposing Virtue,” Diacritics, 1, No. 2 (1971), 35-38. As Bloom acknowledges, his understanding of Blake has been mediated by Northrop Frye. In that context, see Bloom's comments on Frye in A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), p. 30, and Angus Fletcher's “Northrop Frye: The Critical Passion,” Critical Inquiry, 1 (1975), 741-56.

6 One critic whose work has been analyzed in terms of its author's intellectual and personal commitments is F. O. Matthiessen. See George Abbott White, “Ideology and Literature: American Renaissance and F. O. Matthiessen,” Triquarterly, No. 23/24 (1972), pp. 430–500; Giles B. Gunn, “Criticism as Repossession and Responsibility: F. O. Matthiessen and The Ideal Critic,” American Quarterly, 22 (1970), 629-48; F. O. Matthiessen: A Collective Portrait, ed. Paul M. Sweezy and Leo Huberman (New York: Henry Schuman, 1950); Richard Ruland, The Rediscovery of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967). Ruland's chapter on Matthiessen goes the furthest toward documenting the presence of Matthiessen's ethos in the diction and structures of his criticism, though there remains more work to be done on that subject.

7 This differs from the overt, argumentative redemption traditional in attempts to demonstrate the value of American literature, though criticism in America does have its own special covert pressures toward redemption.

8 The literature on this subject is extensive, and I do not wish to summarize its central issues and reargue them here. In any case, I am not raising the question of whether objective knowledge about the past is possible. I am merely saying that our motives for assembling and interpreting such knowledge remain, at least in academic literary history, largely unexamined. In that context, I would recommend two essays for their suggestiveness: Walter Benjamin's “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in his Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, 1968) and William Rueckert's “Literary Criticism and History: The Endless Dialectic,” New Literary History, 6(1975), 491-512.

9 See Jonathan Culler's “Stanley Fish and the Righting of the Reader,” Diacritics, 5, No. 1 (1975), 26-31, for an analysis of the self-deceptive element in Fish's methodology.

10 One exception is Bloom, who characterizes Kenner more contentiously: “Eliot and Pound gossiped with one another; the New Criticism aged them into a myth of Modernism; now the antiquarian Hugh Kenner has dogmatized this myth into the Pound Era, a canon of accepted titans. Pretenders to godhood Kenner roughly reduces to their mortality,” A Map of Misreading, p. 28. Bloom's comment is particularly relevant to Kenner's A Homemade World: The American Modernist Writers (New York: Knopf, 1975), though that book must now color Kenner's earlier remarks on these writers.

11 The Pound Era (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971), p. 469.

12 The difficulties that poets have had in dealing with their modernist father figures are common knowledge. Critics, however, are also troubled by the period. See the opening comments by Robert M. Adams and A. Walton Litz in their respective essays in Eliot in His Time, ed. Litz (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972).

13 The table of contents can sometimes provide a useful guide to a critical book's structure. See, e.g., the sequence of chapters in Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Orion, 1964). Following the introduction, the first chapter examines the exemplary instance of inhabited space, the house. After dealing with houses that have been differentiated into various spaces from basement to kitchen to attic, the chapter collapses these qualities into a single space, the primitive hut. The second chapter, “House and Universe,” extends that image to a discussion of the interchanges between the self and the world. The third chapter, “Drawers, Chests and Wardrobes,” and the sixth chapter, “Corners,” are parallel; they transfer the image of the hut to segments of the house chosen with deliberate playfulness. At their center, however, are Chs. iv and v, “Nests” and “Shells,” which move down the evolutionary ladder to even more primitive habitations. Bachelard is searching for the primeval, instinctual qualities of inhabitation, for a perceptual resource that can then be made conscious. That resource is extended to a wide range of images in Chs. vii and viii, “Miniature” and “Intimate Immensity.” In those chapters, however, he is also preparing for a broad generalization of his initial categories. Finally, in Chs. ix and x, “The Dialectics of Outside and Inside” and “The Phenomenology of Roundness,” Bachelard fulfills the larger motive behind the book's structure: He transforms inhabitation into a human capacity that can be applied to any poetic image and any experience. It is no longer necessary to begin with an image or a setting that provides its own obvious enclosure. Along the way, of course, Bachelard provides a remarkable phenomenological handbook of inhabitable spaces, but he is also pursuing a comprehensive vision.

14 One cannot expect that every critic will want to apply a variety of methodologies to critical language. One alternative would be for journals to juxtapose essays using distinctly different methods to analyze the same critical books. I should also repeat a suggestion that has been made before: departments of English, speech, and rhetoric might profitably coordinate some courses in critical theory.

15 This point is reargued to frame several of J. Hillis Miller's recent essays: “Williams' Spring and All and the Progress of Poetry,” Daedalus, 99 (1970), 405-34; “The Still Heart: Poetic Form in Wordsworth,” New Literary History, 2 (1971), 297-310; “The Stone and the Shell: The Problem of Poetic Form in Wordsworth's Dream of the Arab,” Mouvements premiers: Études critiques offertes a Georges Poulet (Paris: José Corti, 1972).

16 I am, of course, aware that more evidence than I can present here will be necessary before many readers will agree that these methods can be widely applied. To that end, I am presently working both on several other general essays on criticism and on extended treatments of several of the critics mentioned here.

17 My diction here may seem unnecessarily provocative, but my intention is descriptive. Critics may, as Roland Barthes suggests in The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill, 1975), p. 54, try “to speak from a moral site cleansed of any linguistic sensuality,” but their efforts cannot succeed. The sensuality of the language they quote, of the narrative or formal structures they describe, will permeate their critical discourse. Moreover, even the most coldly persuasive critical rhetoric has its sensual attractions. So long as language can be spoken or overheard, its appeal to both writer and reader will be partly erotic.

18 Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, 1969), p. 33. Quotations identified internally as SRW are from Styles of Radical Will; those identified as AI are from Against Interpretation.

19 My own The Incarnate Word: Literature as Verbal Space (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1973) demonstrates that I am not above this temptation.

A related closing convention is the broad humanistic affirmation. That verbal gesture is often earned by the critic's descent into nihilistic literature. See, e.g., the final paragraph of R. W. B. Lewis' “Days of Wrath and Laughter” in his Trials of the Word (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1965).

20 I am partly in agreement with Norman Holland here, when he argues that readers internalize literature according to their own individual psychology. See Holland's “Unity Identity Text Self,” PMLA, 90 (1975), 813-22, and Poems in Persons (New York: Norton, 1973). However, two important qualifications need to be made. The first point Holland himself somewhat reluctantly makes—that educated readers bring to bear on a poem a past that is not merely infantile; it is also a past that is adult and, most important, verbal. The second point has to do with the usefulness of Holland's method. Here one has to differentiate both between the naive and the sophisticated and between readers and writers. Furthermore, I don't think that Holland's method will be of more than limited use in dealing with complicated critical language. An exclusively psychoanalytic reading of Anatomy of Criticism would be comically reductive. As Northrop Frye has written, “there is always a sense in which criticism is a form of autobiography,” “Expanding Eyes,” Critical Inquiry, 2 (1975), 203. But autobiography, especially if we conceive it as unconscious motivation, will not be sufficient to account for the act of writing criticism.

21 It may be that some of the negative reactions to Stanley Fish's recent work represent defensive responses to its tendency to exaggerate New Critical method. His close readings intensify irony to the point where our sense of formal coherence may be undermined.

22 A more accurate analogy might be made between a novelist's characters and the recurrent character in criticism—the normative reader. Asking whether the normative reader is a fiction will not help us here. Whether we approve of him or not, he exists in thousands of scholarly essays. Moreover, he has undergone more purgative journeys than any single character in fiction. We need rather to determine what psychological and verbal function the normative reader serves.

23 The Unmediated Vision (1954; rpt. New York: Harcourt, 1966), p. v. These attitudes become more explicit, though still filtered through an irony that is alternately anxious and playful, in “The Interpreter: A Self-Analysis,” the opening essay in Hartman's The Fate of Reading (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975): “The ‘unmediated vision’ I sought then, seems, in retrospect, not a solution but a form of heroism. ... I wrote because I was too alive and unwilling to die even symbolically. ... I was wrong, certainly, in thinking that . . . the artist's only ‘text’ was nature, the body, consciousness” (p. 4).

24 For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Pantheon, 1969), p. 14.

25 The Disappearance of God (1963; rpt. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976).

26 Riddel Joseph N., “A Miller's Tale,” Diacritics, 5, No. 3 (1975), 61. Riddel's essay was written in response to Miller's review of Riddel's The Inverted Bell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1974). To trace the self-reflexive ironies in their interchange would require a third essay. Two examples that will not suffer too much from the loss of context will suffice. Riddel observes that when Miller faults him for trying to “dissolve the difference between poetic and discursive texts” he is faulting something his “own earlier criticism used to insist upon.” That is true enough, but Miller is also one of the few critics who would be willing to admit that kind of irony. On the other hand, neither critic could win the argument about who has truthfully adapted Derrida. The issue, in both cases, is a resistance to Derrida's mercilessly involuted style.

I offer these examples because they suggest that a careful study of the masks of academic reviewing is long overdue. A good deal of what passes in book reviews for objective evaluation is often unconscious self-promotion.

27 Miller J. Hillis, “Deconstructing the Deconstructors,” Diacritics, 5, No. 2 (1975), 31. This is Miller's review of Riddel.

28 See the “Polemical Introduction” to Anatomy of Criticism.