Posts
Wole Talabi, THE FIST OF MEMORY
1 week ago
Oct 11, 2009
What is literature?
One answer: literature is that use of language in which impersonal propositions can be properly asserted without evidence or reason.
Sep 30, 2009
Literature and Evolution
I haven't read Brian Boyd's Literature and Evolution: a biocultural approach, and don't intend to. But I've read a number of reviews, including Terry Eagleton's in the latest London Review of Books. And reading that, it occured to me: how do we in fact know that literature is part of the species's apparatus for survival, an tool for adaptation? Mightn't it in fact belong to those of our capacities which will in the end kill us off? Let's not forget that in the end we won't survive, and in not surviving will join most other species that have ever come into existence.
Sep 11, 2009
God & spiritual anthropology
A central problem with arguments like that of Charles Taylor's in A Secular Age can be put like this: if man has an inherent appetite for God and transcendence, how come we (i.e. man) lost him (i.e. God)? It follows that, if we are to accept a spiritual anthropology that assumes mankind's hunger for the transcendent, the story of human secularization can only be told coherently from God's side not from man's. It needs to be told as God's plot for man.
And so it must belong theology, not to historical sociology. And a strictly theological account of secularization can only be in dialogue with secular thought, if at all, under strict limits since it needs to believe, against reason and the evidence, in a God who actively concerns himself with man.
And so it must belong theology, not to historical sociology. And a strictly theological account of secularization can only be in dialogue with secular thought, if at all, under strict limits since it needs to believe, against reason and the evidence, in a God who actively concerns himself with man.
Sep 7, 2009
Bedtime reading: Saki & Lydia Davis
I tend to read a few pages before I go to sleep, it's an old habit. At the moment I have by my bedside two books: Saki's Collected Stories and Lydia Davis's collection of short fictions, Almost no Memory.
I love both. Each night, I read a story by Saki, and then a story by Davis.
This makes for the strangest of literary experiences: fictions by Davis, US-centred, written around now, avant-garde, theoretically informed, begin to feel as smart (in the British more than in the US sense), artificial and gimmicky as those by Saki, written for the large readerships of Edwardian Britain's newspapers.
It doesn't work the other way.
I love both. Each night, I read a story by Saki, and then a story by Davis.
This makes for the strangest of literary experiences: fictions by Davis, US-centred, written around now, avant-garde, theoretically informed, begin to feel as smart (in the British more than in the US sense), artificial and gimmicky as those by Saki, written for the large readerships of Edwardian Britain's newspapers.
It doesn't work the other way.
Aug 15, 2009
Is literary criticism a failed project (short paper version)?
Here's my paper, as it stands.
Is literary criticism a failed project?
Is academic literary criticism a failed project? If so, what might that failure mean for literary studies more generally?
There are many reasons for asking these questions, but they have a particular urgency under current modes of university governance, in which the humanities in particular are under managerial pressure to account for their value, and to maintain themselves through complex market mechanisms. For us in English—whose discipline is also threatened by literature’s declining status in the culture as a whole—one way of re-establishing our purposes might be to examine the forces and energies that first shaped us. That is a familiar move within religious and intellectual institutions: Latin Christianity, for instance, has often attempted a revitalizing return to “primitive Christianity”. In difficult times, philosophy too has returned for inspiration to its putative Greek sources.
For English, however, this move is problematic not just because the discipline is not dogmatic, and not just because our founders lack the first Greek philosophers’ heroic status, but because our field is so de-centred. Today, English departments routinely teach various skills and research various archives. For all that, I take it that most would agree that what we have to come call “close reading” still lies at our heart. And “close reading” is a version, even if (as I will argue) a rather debased version, of the literary criticism that did indeed ground the English department between about 1925 and 1970, the period of its greatest authority. I contend, then, that criticism rather than scholarship is what first granted the English department its legitimacy and prestige. And I further contend that modern literary criticism was established at a specific time and place—in England, and more especially at Cambridge, immediately after the first world war.
***
What do I mean by modern literary criticism? Let me begin to address the question by examining a moment just prior to its invention, when British literary intellectuals began agitating for the university study of English, and for a new relation between the discipline and the State.
The most important such intervention was made by John Churton Collins, a well-known journalist, textbook editor, and university-extension lecturer, who had taught across Britain and the US. Involved in the efforts to establish a Chair of English Literature at Oxford in the 1880s, he became English studies’ most formidable champion. In his The Study of English Literature: a plea for its recognition and organization at the Universities (1891) which won support from a wide range of public figures, Collins complains that, although the state had taken responsibility for both technical education and primary and secondary schooling, it had not yet supported the liberal arts.
The disciplined study of English was necessary because the system now needed to shape citizens’ characters so they could take full advantage and control of political enfranchisement. That is, Collins was responding to the first stirrings of the social-democratic state, which took on some responsibility for the general population’s cultivation as well as for their welfare and security. For him, classical Athens and Rome provided a model of social-democratic pedagogy, since education there was used to disseminate cultivation in the required senses, namely as applied from the centre ethically, politically, morally, and aesthetically(4). Ethically, so Collins argued, the “interpretation of literature” could “effect for popular culture what it is of power to effect”, that is, as he cites John Morley saying, it could protect against “the disgorgements of the cheap popular press—with its superficial second-hand criticism, its flimsy summaries of the results of original scholarship or research, its slovenly vulgar editions of the English classics, and its irrepressible floods of sloppy, foolish, illiterate fiction.” (112) Politically, literary study could “warn, admonish and guide.” (4). And as a means of “aesthetic and moral education”, it could “exercise … influence on taste, on tone, on sentiment, on opinion, on character”. (4)
It is clear that Collins’s project is primarily based in discrimination—in sorting out good literature from less good or bad literature—but, for all that, Collins’s curriculum lacks anything that we can recognize as criticism as such. Criticism became the focus of English studies only after first world war. It did so when T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis appealed to three concepts in particular. Perhaps surprisingly, the most important of these was experience. Indeed, literary criticism could emerge as a specific academic discipline, independent of literary history, philology and rhetoric, by figuring the text precisely as communicating experiences, and hence by defining itself as “the endeavour to discriminate between experiences and to evaluate them” as Richards put it in his Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) (Richards 1928 2). With the horror of the war unforgotten, and as a contribution to what has come to be called “modernism”, English studies could sharpen its opposition to the destablizing and debasing cultural consequences of industrialization, militarism, modernization and democracy, could, as it were, refit its practices of discrimination, by appealing not to conventional but bankrupt categories like civilization, wisdom and gentlemanly cultivation but to what we might call the elemental particle of being-in-the-world: the experience, thought of as combining thought and feeling, intuition and sensation, desire and understanding, or, more simply, as the basic unit of what Henry James named “felt life”. As we shall see, and paradoxically, criticism could assert the full importance of close reading by replacing linguistic categories by experience for literary analysis.
The second key concept for modernist literary criticism was “impersonality”, through which a form of classicism already apparent in Churton Collins could decisively rebut both what was considered as romantic subjectivism and the “new humanism” which, from the critics’ perspective, was providing ethical cover for modernization’s wrecking force, including the passions that led to war.
More problematically, literary criticism’s last constitutive concept was “history”, or rather a particular notion of history which assumed, first, that changing social structures were imprinted in experiences themselves, and, then, that relations between literature and society have been in degraded over the modern period in ways that required criticism to present itself as a weapon for cultural resistance.
***
T.S. Eliot’s central contribution to the new discipline, mainly written in 1919, did not involve any effort towards its academic institutionalization. It first appeared in his journalism for the literary weekly, The Atheneum. By that time, however, Eliot had completed his Harvard dissertation, Knowledge and Experience in the philosophy of F.H. Bradley in which he contributes to that reconfiguring of the concept of experience that had been a major philosophical enterprise since the 1880s, and which had two key features.
First, experience is considered as prior to the division between subject and object: “if, in seeking for reality, we go to experience, what we certainly do not find is a subject or an object,” as Bradley put it. (Bradley 1897, 146) Instead, experience forms a whole which ceaselessly divides into local clusters or centres, one of which is the self itself. This line of thought—which aligns experience to impersonality— offers a way out of methodological individualism and metaphysical atomism, but it has political consequences too since, in its de-individuating force, it unsettles political liberalism, making literature increasingly available both to collectivism and to conservatism.
The second key feature of experience as theorized in the period was Dilthey’s distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung, which for our purposes can be thought of as the distinction between the experience as it happens serially in a moment, and experience as accumulated knowledge and practical skill.
For Eliot, all our relations to the world occur as experiences, so that all that is knowable is experience. Within our experiences, however, particular knowable objects appear as “points of attention.” Objects always and only result from an effort of attention. (Eliot 1964, 157) As to truth: it is always a matter of interpretation, with the corollary that there is no difference except in degree between interpretation and description (164). Furthermore, no interpretation is normatively neutral: interpretation is understood as “a valuation and an assignment of meaning” (165). For Eliot it is also the case that that the only “significant experiences” occur outside convention and doxa’s web. But such experiences also tend towards the arbitrary, and, indeed, the mad. Here the figure of the critic enters: significant experiences are protected by “the true critic” who is “a scrupulous avoider of formulae” and who “refrains from states that pretend to be literally true,” knowing that her “truths are the truths of experience rather than of calculation.” (164)
Neither Eliot nor Bradley consider the relationship between language and experience head-on, but it should already be clear that Eliot assumes that experiences are semantic in that they always possess significance and meaning. That is why they need to be protected from repetition, emotionalism and uniformity. So even if Eliot was not interested in establishing connections between his academic philosophy, his literary journalism and his poetry, it follows from his philosophical work that, 1) the critic’s task is to objectify experiences by closely attending to the literary work. The more concrete the quality of attention to words on the page, the greater the objectivity and particularity of the literary experience; and 2) criticism’s task will be to assess experiences in terms of a significance which is to be measured, in the first instance, by their remoteness from the commonplace as well as from private arbitrariness.
Eliot’s early criticism extends and breaks from his commentary on Bradley by distinguishing the work of emotion from that of intelligence and contemplation, since now it is emotion, whether the reader’s or writer’s, that is associated with the “accidents of personal association” (Eliot 1928, 6) extrinsic to the literary work itself. In something of a conceptual leap, this means that intelligent appreciation of literature engages with content only secondarily. Such appreciation primarily attends to “structure” and medium both in the individual work and in the a-temporal order of literature as a whole. We can put it like this: for Eliot, literary form is to content roughly as experience is to the object. The first provides the structuring conditions for the second. Critical attention to form starves the merely personal response: it staves off subjectivity. This heightening of form’s functionality, along with the insistence that form is experience’s vehicle enables Eliot to think that successful literature involves an “extinction of personality” on the reader and writer’s behalf. Nonetheless good literature uses its medium both so that “impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways” (56) and so that “sensory experiences” are sufficiently objectified to invoke a particular emotion. (100) For criticism tuned to consider literature like this, the literary text is fundamentally uninterpretable: (“qua work of art the work of art cannot be interpreted” (96)) in the same way that one experience cannot be translated into another experience. It is because literature is primarily experiential that texts are uninterpretable, just as it is because literature is experience that its forms may become fragmented into discrete evocative moments. Nor—and this is crucially important— can critics establish general rules or principles as criterion for judgment in their acts of discrimination: the threats of abstraction and routinization restrict them to comparing one literary text to another, mutely.
At this point Eliot turns to history, since, as he argues in his essay on Phillip Massinger, in England the capacity to experience deteriorated soon after John Donne’s death, when the “intellect ceased to be at the tip of the senses” and when the language became less and less capable of providing “new and sudden combinations.” Otherwise put, after about 1640, literary language became more disjoined from the object (i.e. from the attended/evoked experience) (149). Indeed by Swinburne’s time “language uprooted [had] adapted itself to an independent life of atmospheric nourishment” (149). This means that literary critics are involved in a struggle “against the continual deterioration of language” (8) in relation to experience. The critic’s weapon in this struggle is an organized attention to 1) literary structure, 2) literary tradition and 3) the new writing in which that tradition may be extended and transformed. In effect, Eliot is urging a dehistoricised historicism: a double temporality in which modern history progressively disjoins language from experience, while the literary tradition, in changing shape each time it welcomes a new work, protects language’s adequacy to experience from history’s predations.
***
Eliot’s program first took academic shape with I.A. Richards. This is surprising since Richards’s intellectual orientation was very different from Eliot’s. He had been a student of the anti-idealist G.E. Moore and had interests in academic psychology (especially Gestalt theory, psychoanalysis and Pavlovian behaviorism) as well as the new language-centred “analytic” philosophy which Moore helped develop after 1920. Richards began teaching English literature at Cambridge in 1919, and in 1926, when the subject was given a new curriculum and placed in the Faculty of Archeology and Anthropology so as to detach it from Philology, he was hired as a University lecturer. That appointment acknowledged that Principles of Literary Criticism had legitimated the new field by offering it a means of removing itself from belle-lettrism as well as from philology.
Richards grounded literary studies as a discipline both intellectually and practically by reformulating Eliot’s project for a modernized version of Collins’s institutional activism, on the basis of the latest scientific psychology. In Principles of Literary Criticism, he is concerned first to demonstrate the social value of the aesthetic in general: “What is the value of the arts?” he begins by asking (Richards 1928, 4), and answers that the aesthetic realm provides uniquely complex, unified, and harmoniously structured experiences. This appeal to experience is crucial since once again the transitivity of literary and lived experiences allows literature to salve social damage. Aesthetic experiences are also ethically essential for historical reasons. Richards, like Arnold and Churton Collins before him, contends that literary experience can resist the “commercialism” that threatens a “transvaluation by which popular taste replaces trained discrimination.” (36) But he argues further that “customs change more slowly than conditions” (56) and, this being so, art is where new conditions first produce coherent and stable experiences proper both to human potential and to the times, namely experiences that neither tear affect from thought, nor are bound to reactionary “occultism, absolutes and arbitrariness” (58), nor to the limiting discourse of virtue and vice (61). In Science and Poetry (1926), the literary experience forms the endpoint of a radically immanent and anti-religious worldview in which “experience is its own justification” (79) and which alone can stimulate what is truly valuable, “the fullest, keenest, most active and completest kind of life.” (41)
Richards departs from Eliot by the force with which he insists that literary texts communicate. It is this that requires their formalization, their use of symbols (i.e. of experiences that elicit other experiences) and their stripping away of “personal particularities” (78). For him, to repeat, aesthetic experience is uniquely valuable in that it enables a Schillerian harmonization of faculties, yet it is because literature presents experience within an organized verbal communication, that “keeps it from being a mere welter of disconnected impulses.” (Richards 1926, 36.) Nonetheless the transmission of experience trumps the transmission of meaning: poets and their readers are to be interested not in what “a poem says….but what it is” (Richards 1926: 34-35), just because the poem communicates not a message or a truth but a significant experience. It’s in these terms that, for Richards, literary works can become “simply the best data available for deciding what experiences are more valuable than others” (32). And, in a further (leftish) move, he claims that literary texts may stimulate wider social co-operation (136) on the grounds that their communicability shelters impersonality and stable experiences.
As to criticism: while teaching at Cambridge, Richards launched an ethnographical project on students and colleagues, recording their responses to anonymous poems of varying quality. (Richards 1929, 4) What he found was that students typically failed to understand not so much what the poems said as what they expressed. Students did not grasp “the experience, the mental conditions relevant to the poems.” (10) As a result, he realized that criticism must focus on a poem’s “minute particulars” for only then could its experiental ambivalence, suggestiveness, nuances and complex admixtures of thought and emotion be uncovered. Here again, it’s a poem’s psychological rather than linguistic complexity that neither any casual attention nor any constative proposition can catch. And Richards carefully itemizes the various kinds of response that prevent readers from distinguishing between significant experiences and routinized ones. Such bad reading habits include, “mnenomic irrelevances”, “stock responses”, “sentimentality”, “inhibitions”, and “doctrinal adhesions.” Richards also notes two crippling professional presuppositions—first, those that he calls “technical” i.e. the false assumption that it is the poem’s use of language rather than its effect upon us that is the proper object of critical attention (whose consequence will be “dogmatic pronouncements upon detail” (277)), and, then, “critical presuppositions”, that is, any theory about, or any application of rules for, what a poem should be or do (283). In the end, just as a poem requires careful attention because it is an expression of an experience rather than a mere linguistic artifact, criticism must neither lapse into rule-bound judgement nor into interpretation since it needs to judge whether “new experience can or cannot be taken into the fabric [of past experiences and developed habits of mind] with advantage.” (285)
***
Although F.R. Leavis modified his position in important ways across the course of his career, all his writing remain recognizably within the paradigm established by his immediate Eliot and Richards. (Unlike Eliot and Richards, Leavis fought in the war, of which he was indeed a serious trauma victim.) Indeed it is with Leavis and his followers that modern academic criticism revealed its full potentiality as well as its limits. That’s because, especially after about 1940 when his aim to stimulate a serious reading public through his journal Scrutiny floundered, Leavis was committed to harnassing the education system’s full power on literary criticism’s behalf. By that time Eliot and Richards were elsewhere engaged: Eliot, in retreat from capitalist modernity, had turned to High Anglicanism, and Richards, working in Harvard’s Education Faculty, was working to extend communicative rationality and critical literacy. But Leavis was building an institution he called the English School. He and his followers established journals; built bridges between the tertiary and secondary sectors; fixed a canon (in which the requirements of the curriculum magically harmonized with the heritage’s number of masterworks); and fostered academic disciples.
At Leavism’s core lay a classroom moment in which the critic-teacher guided students to value the best writing as Eliot and Richards understood it. In a seminar discussion, the teacher asked students to compare passages by attending to the concreteness of each—especially in their tropes—as well as to how tightly form cohered to content, a collective act of attention in which in which any signifier might be revealed as unexpectedly important. This careful scrutiny, attuned to fine surprises, culminated not simply in the teacher offering a definitive judgment of the text’s capacity to objectify a full and significant experience but in their then pointing to words on the page and asking the students: “that’s so, isn’t it”? This authoritative solicitation of student assent was only contingently attached to interpretation, since for Leavis as for Eliot and Richards, interpretation as such would smother and personalize the discrimination of experiences. It is worth noting that, in the Leavisite classroom, authoritative solicitation of an assent to judgment after analysis repeats the freedom/necessity relation within Kantian aesthetics, since the teacher-critic requires the student’s assent to an act of judgment in order for the student’s literary experience to be free, while the teacher’s insistence on a particular judgment is necessary if that freedom is not to fall prey to arbitrariness and subjectivism.
Yet the first literary-critical category to feel the stress under Leavisitism is experience. For Leavis, literature, at its best, was able to evoke less “the ordinary experience of life in time” and more, experiences of “supremely illuminating significance” as he put it in response to Eliot’s Four Quartets. (Leavis 1943, 92). So the literary canon becomes less a register of impersonal, harmonious, full and punctual encounters with the world and more a suggestion or symbol of unworlded possibilities, orientation towards which, however, is a moral accomplishment. The literary experience becomes less a balanced Erlebnis and more an elevated Erfahrung, often directed towards an unrealized future. And in Leavis’s later work, the aspirational character of the literary experience is conceived of as a vital creativity—the “living principle”—which drives both great writers and great critics, and which supplements actual fallen social conditions.
Leavis’s replacement of Erlebnis by Erfahrung is partly driven by his having a more sociological understanding than Eliot and Richards’s. For him the connection between social structures and individual experience is so strong that the experiental flow from reading to living to which Richards in particular was committed cannot easily be affirmed. After all individuals are formed socially rather than ethically through their reading. It is clear that Leavis’s years of teaching, his sensitivity to the hierarchical nature of the education system, along with his close connections to secondary-school English, meant that he fully understood the difficulties not just of effectively teaching criticism but of the barriers in using literature to realize and perfect experience in the larger world.
The second category to feel the stress was history. When, in 1943, Leavis presented a detailed curriculum for an English school, commentators were surprised how much history, or rather historical sociology, it contained. Topics he presented for discussion included “Calvinism to Puritan individualism”, “Church and State”, “The reaction against Whig history”, “The rise of Capitalism”, “Economic individualism”, “The causes of the civil war”, “The revolution of 1688”, “the social-economics correlations of literary history”, ‘the rise of the Press.” (Leavis 1943, 52-53). In effect, he fleshed out and extended Eliot’s Tory history by connecting it to the Hammonds’ left-liberal account of industrialization’s destructive wake; Tawney’s Christian Socialist critique of capitalism’s impact upon community and charity; some of Christopher Dawson’s right-wing Catholic polemics against the enlightenment, as well as contemporary works of sociology like the Lynds’ Middletown. Leavisite literary criticism was, then, based on a counter-capitalist, or, as he later put it, a counter-“technological-Benthamite” historiography. For the younger Leavis especially, one could not be a literary critic except against liberal democratic capitalism. But he also recognized that what he believed to be industrial capitalism’s predecessor, a Tawneyesque “organic society,” could not be returned to, and could survive as a truncated memory only in the university and the English school itself. So for him the universities are not just “the recognized symbols of cultural tradition” but cultural tradition and order’s “directing force” “having an authority that should check and control the blind drive onward of material and mechanical development, with its human consequences.” (Leavis 1943, 16) Yet the university—and especially the English school—could shelter only a small minority. Especially in the aftermath of the second world war and the incorporation of the wider university sector into social-democratic state planning, Leavis’s task was to extend this minority into the population through the education system, without losing sight of the fact that the conditions for genuine criticism did not exist in society as such, and would thus only be available to the elect.
I cannot here spell out the various routes through which Eliot, Richards and Leavis’s project floundered. It is enough to say that Leavism never took hold in the US. American new criticism, in accommodating itself to liberal capitalism, to the Cold War machinery of state as well as to the requirements of professional reproduction, elaborated close-reading techniques first developed by Richards’ student William Empson, and quickly succumbed to the heresy of interpretation and to what Leavis himself denounced as the seconding of “the sense of value” to mere ingenuity. (Leavis 1943, 71-72. To take an important early test-case: R.P. Blackmur, probably the major American critic closest to Leavism and whom Leavis published in the thirties, rarely engaged in close-reading as experiental discrimination. Despite his sense that modernization has produced an intolerable society, whose lacks and failures literature best allows us to sense and know, Blackmur is more interested in sensitively defining a text or oeuvre’s particular literary mode (which is also a “mode of the psyche”) than in pointing to literature’s possibilities for life as literary criticism originally demanded.
Within Leavism itself, the pedagogy of authorized assent became routinized: Leavisite students dutifully and ceaselessly repeated the party line in a submissiveness which contradicted everything that literary criticism stood for. And Leavism came undone along another track when the post-war left-Leavisites—and in particular Raymond Williams —found criticism’s value less in the transmission of what Williams too could call “valuable experience” than in its relation to the institutions and collectivities in which “a set of conventional rules” could be converted “into an organic and contemporary body of judgment.” (Williams 1950, 29) That’s because literary experience was regarded as increasingly remote from ordinary life in society. The presentism that inheres in this move also meant that the category of experience was more radically historicized, and the experiential value supposedly preserved in great writing further diminished. Discrimination gradually became ideology critique. In the same period, that avant-garde critique which also urged the importance of literary experience as a category and insisted on experience as a form of impersonality—I am thinking in particular of Bataille and Blanchot’s writings of the forties and fifties—did not, however, privilege experiences which united feeling and thought, but those which negate and contest social living.
After 1968, the supposition that language was coextensive with experience also came undone, language being regarded as either autonomous from, or constitutive of, experience. Language’s divorce from experience was now shaped as academic orthodoxy. And in a twinned move, the universalism of the modernist category of experience was denounced. Whose experiences were Eliot, Richards and Leavis talking about? Upon what social system does any ‘significant experience’ rest? Whose particular interests lie cloaked in literary experience’s claim to significance and universality?
And so, a century on, nothing positive remains of modern literary criticism in its original form, barely even a memory.
The obvious lesson to be learnt from all this is that literary criticism cannot return to origins in any restorative spirit. Nonetheless my feeling is that there are few alternatives to this barred return. English can no doubt continue as an academic discipline without any commitment to the modernist literary criticism which first informed it, but only at the cost of its sense of purpose. This means that the field does need to try to re-assert—or reconnoiter—literary criticism’s fundamental suppositions in dialogue, admittedly, with the post-1968 transformations of the field and within a pedagogy that avoids coerced assent. To remind us again, those suppositions are 1) that great literature preserves valuable forms of experience so that criticism cannot succumb to populism, to pluralism or to cultural democracy; 2) in literary texts, form is inseparable from content, with the first requiring particular pedagogic attention; 3) that an enlightened metaphysics of immanence is a condition for ascribing a supreme value to literary experience; 4) literature, as criticism shapes it, exists both inside and outside of history, and 5) that the literary canon and its servants oppose democratic state capitalism and its commercial media;. We cannot, as I say, be confident that a criticism based on such propositions can now be articulated. If it were, it would likely be most energized by the last item on that list, by its left-conservative resistance to democratic capitalism. And it would remain the province of a minority much smaller than even Leavis imagined. In effect, criticism after the modernist epoch, will be an esoteric craft compelled to demonstrate literature’s social and experiential strength in terms that accommodate themselves to a society for which its purposes are either meaningless, obsolete or dangerously illiberal, a society for which, in turn, criticism can have no compelling respect.
To conceive of literary criticism like this is to echo Leo Strauss’s view that philosophers qua philosophers cannot wholly belong to their society because they must think outside the presuppositions and beliefs that enable social stability. It’s not of course that literary critics, like Strauss’s philosophers, need to believe too little to be wholly socialized, on the contrary they need to believe too much. Nonetheless, Strauss’s insistence on the distance between philosophy and society, and especially his defense of esotericism, do help us imagine literary criticism’s future. They help us anticipate the reserve that is required to re-imagine and re-activate the discipline: the ways in which anti-capitalist and less than fully democratic literary critics in the age of managerialism will not be able to be completely open and transparent either with university administrators or with their students. And I say this despite having no regard for Strauss’s own reactionary articulation of “liberal education,” where he shows no understanding of why the positive concepts he invokes—notably “education to perfect gentlemanliness”—became obsolete during the violent emergence of contemporary global capitalism, being pushed aside by the categories of experience and historicity as we’ve seen. (Strauss 1995, 6) But of all the academic intellectuals who worked in the modernist era, Strauss retained the strongest corporate sense of the consequences of thinking against the times. And to be a literary critic now and in any foreseeable future is, more than ever, to think against the times, especially, as I say, where critics find themselves working in highly managed universities.
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Russo, John Paul. 1989. I.A. Richards: his life and work, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Sheppard, Eugene, R. 2006. Leo Strauss and the politics of exile: the making of a political philosopher, Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press.
Slaughter, Sheila and Gary Rhoades. 2004. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Strauss, Leo. 1988. Persecution and the art of writing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
___. 1995. “What is Liberal Education?” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern, ed. Allan Bloom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: pps. 3-9.
Tillyard, E.M.W. 1958. The Muse Unchained, London: Bowes and Bowes.
Williams, Raymond. 1950. Reading and Criticism, London: Frederick Mueller.
____. 1983. “Cambridge English: Past and Present,” in Writing in Society, London: Verso, pps. 177-191.
Wollheim, Richard. 1973. "Eliot and F.H. Bradley," in On Art and the Mind: Essays and Lectures, London: Allen Lane. 1973).
Is literary criticism a failed project?
Is academic literary criticism a failed project? If so, what might that failure mean for literary studies more generally?
There are many reasons for asking these questions, but they have a particular urgency under current modes of university governance, in which the humanities in particular are under managerial pressure to account for their value, and to maintain themselves through complex market mechanisms. For us in English—whose discipline is also threatened by literature’s declining status in the culture as a whole—one way of re-establishing our purposes might be to examine the forces and energies that first shaped us. That is a familiar move within religious and intellectual institutions: Latin Christianity, for instance, has often attempted a revitalizing return to “primitive Christianity”. In difficult times, philosophy too has returned for inspiration to its putative Greek sources.
For English, however, this move is problematic not just because the discipline is not dogmatic, and not just because our founders lack the first Greek philosophers’ heroic status, but because our field is so de-centred. Today, English departments routinely teach various skills and research various archives. For all that, I take it that most would agree that what we have to come call “close reading” still lies at our heart. And “close reading” is a version, even if (as I will argue) a rather debased version, of the literary criticism that did indeed ground the English department between about 1925 and 1970, the period of its greatest authority. I contend, then, that criticism rather than scholarship is what first granted the English department its legitimacy and prestige. And I further contend that modern literary criticism was established at a specific time and place—in England, and more especially at Cambridge, immediately after the first world war.
***
What do I mean by modern literary criticism? Let me begin to address the question by examining a moment just prior to its invention, when British literary intellectuals began agitating for the university study of English, and for a new relation between the discipline and the State.
The most important such intervention was made by John Churton Collins, a well-known journalist, textbook editor, and university-extension lecturer, who had taught across Britain and the US. Involved in the efforts to establish a Chair of English Literature at Oxford in the 1880s, he became English studies’ most formidable champion. In his The Study of English Literature: a plea for its recognition and organization at the Universities (1891) which won support from a wide range of public figures, Collins complains that, although the state had taken responsibility for both technical education and primary and secondary schooling, it had not yet supported the liberal arts.
The disciplined study of English was necessary because the system now needed to shape citizens’ characters so they could take full advantage and control of political enfranchisement. That is, Collins was responding to the first stirrings of the social-democratic state, which took on some responsibility for the general population’s cultivation as well as for their welfare and security. For him, classical Athens and Rome provided a model of social-democratic pedagogy, since education there was used to disseminate cultivation in the required senses, namely as applied from the centre ethically, politically, morally, and aesthetically(4). Ethically, so Collins argued, the “interpretation of literature” could “effect for popular culture what it is of power to effect”, that is, as he cites John Morley saying, it could protect against “the disgorgements of the cheap popular press—with its superficial second-hand criticism, its flimsy summaries of the results of original scholarship or research, its slovenly vulgar editions of the English classics, and its irrepressible floods of sloppy, foolish, illiterate fiction.” (112) Politically, literary study could “warn, admonish and guide.” (4). And as a means of “aesthetic and moral education”, it could “exercise … influence on taste, on tone, on sentiment, on opinion, on character”. (4)
It is clear that Collins’s project is primarily based in discrimination—in sorting out good literature from less good or bad literature—but, for all that, Collins’s curriculum lacks anything that we can recognize as criticism as such. Criticism became the focus of English studies only after first world war. It did so when T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis appealed to three concepts in particular. Perhaps surprisingly, the most important of these was experience. Indeed, literary criticism could emerge as a specific academic discipline, independent of literary history, philology and rhetoric, by figuring the text precisely as communicating experiences, and hence by defining itself as “the endeavour to discriminate between experiences and to evaluate them” as Richards put it in his Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) (Richards 1928 2). With the horror of the war unforgotten, and as a contribution to what has come to be called “modernism”, English studies could sharpen its opposition to the destablizing and debasing cultural consequences of industrialization, militarism, modernization and democracy, could, as it were, refit its practices of discrimination, by appealing not to conventional but bankrupt categories like civilization, wisdom and gentlemanly cultivation but to what we might call the elemental particle of being-in-the-world: the experience, thought of as combining thought and feeling, intuition and sensation, desire and understanding, or, more simply, as the basic unit of what Henry James named “felt life”. As we shall see, and paradoxically, criticism could assert the full importance of close reading by replacing linguistic categories by experience for literary analysis.
The second key concept for modernist literary criticism was “impersonality”, through which a form of classicism already apparent in Churton Collins could decisively rebut both what was considered as romantic subjectivism and the “new humanism” which, from the critics’ perspective, was providing ethical cover for modernization’s wrecking force, including the passions that led to war.
More problematically, literary criticism’s last constitutive concept was “history”, or rather a particular notion of history which assumed, first, that changing social structures were imprinted in experiences themselves, and, then, that relations between literature and society have been in degraded over the modern period in ways that required criticism to present itself as a weapon for cultural resistance.
***
T.S. Eliot’s central contribution to the new discipline, mainly written in 1919, did not involve any effort towards its academic institutionalization. It first appeared in his journalism for the literary weekly, The Atheneum. By that time, however, Eliot had completed his Harvard dissertation, Knowledge and Experience in the philosophy of F.H. Bradley in which he contributes to that reconfiguring of the concept of experience that had been a major philosophical enterprise since the 1880s, and which had two key features.
First, experience is considered as prior to the division between subject and object: “if, in seeking for reality, we go to experience, what we certainly do not find is a subject or an object,” as Bradley put it. (Bradley 1897, 146) Instead, experience forms a whole which ceaselessly divides into local clusters or centres, one of which is the self itself. This line of thought—which aligns experience to impersonality— offers a way out of methodological individualism and metaphysical atomism, but it has political consequences too since, in its de-individuating force, it unsettles political liberalism, making literature increasingly available both to collectivism and to conservatism.
The second key feature of experience as theorized in the period was Dilthey’s distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung, which for our purposes can be thought of as the distinction between the experience as it happens serially in a moment, and experience as accumulated knowledge and practical skill.
For Eliot, all our relations to the world occur as experiences, so that all that is knowable is experience. Within our experiences, however, particular knowable objects appear as “points of attention.” Objects always and only result from an effort of attention. (Eliot 1964, 157) As to truth: it is always a matter of interpretation, with the corollary that there is no difference except in degree between interpretation and description (164). Furthermore, no interpretation is normatively neutral: interpretation is understood as “a valuation and an assignment of meaning” (165). For Eliot it is also the case that that the only “significant experiences” occur outside convention and doxa’s web. But such experiences also tend towards the arbitrary, and, indeed, the mad. Here the figure of the critic enters: significant experiences are protected by “the true critic” who is “a scrupulous avoider of formulae” and who “refrains from states that pretend to be literally true,” knowing that her “truths are the truths of experience rather than of calculation.” (164)
Neither Eliot nor Bradley consider the relationship between language and experience head-on, but it should already be clear that Eliot assumes that experiences are semantic in that they always possess significance and meaning. That is why they need to be protected from repetition, emotionalism and uniformity. So even if Eliot was not interested in establishing connections between his academic philosophy, his literary journalism and his poetry, it follows from his philosophical work that, 1) the critic’s task is to objectify experiences by closely attending to the literary work. The more concrete the quality of attention to words on the page, the greater the objectivity and particularity of the literary experience; and 2) criticism’s task will be to assess experiences in terms of a significance which is to be measured, in the first instance, by their remoteness from the commonplace as well as from private arbitrariness.
Eliot’s early criticism extends and breaks from his commentary on Bradley by distinguishing the work of emotion from that of intelligence and contemplation, since now it is emotion, whether the reader’s or writer’s, that is associated with the “accidents of personal association” (Eliot 1928, 6) extrinsic to the literary work itself. In something of a conceptual leap, this means that intelligent appreciation of literature engages with content only secondarily. Such appreciation primarily attends to “structure” and medium both in the individual work and in the a-temporal order of literature as a whole. We can put it like this: for Eliot, literary form is to content roughly as experience is to the object. The first provides the structuring conditions for the second. Critical attention to form starves the merely personal response: it staves off subjectivity. This heightening of form’s functionality, along with the insistence that form is experience’s vehicle enables Eliot to think that successful literature involves an “extinction of personality” on the reader and writer’s behalf. Nonetheless good literature uses its medium both so that “impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways” (56) and so that “sensory experiences” are sufficiently objectified to invoke a particular emotion. (100) For criticism tuned to consider literature like this, the literary text is fundamentally uninterpretable: (“qua work of art the work of art cannot be interpreted” (96)) in the same way that one experience cannot be translated into another experience. It is because literature is primarily experiential that texts are uninterpretable, just as it is because literature is experience that its forms may become fragmented into discrete evocative moments. Nor—and this is crucially important— can critics establish general rules or principles as criterion for judgment in their acts of discrimination: the threats of abstraction and routinization restrict them to comparing one literary text to another, mutely.
At this point Eliot turns to history, since, as he argues in his essay on Phillip Massinger, in England the capacity to experience deteriorated soon after John Donne’s death, when the “intellect ceased to be at the tip of the senses” and when the language became less and less capable of providing “new and sudden combinations.” Otherwise put, after about 1640, literary language became more disjoined from the object (i.e. from the attended/evoked experience) (149). Indeed by Swinburne’s time “language uprooted [had] adapted itself to an independent life of atmospheric nourishment” (149). This means that literary critics are involved in a struggle “against the continual deterioration of language” (8) in relation to experience. The critic’s weapon in this struggle is an organized attention to 1) literary structure, 2) literary tradition and 3) the new writing in which that tradition may be extended and transformed. In effect, Eliot is urging a dehistoricised historicism: a double temporality in which modern history progressively disjoins language from experience, while the literary tradition, in changing shape each time it welcomes a new work, protects language’s adequacy to experience from history’s predations.
***
Eliot’s program first took academic shape with I.A. Richards. This is surprising since Richards’s intellectual orientation was very different from Eliot’s. He had been a student of the anti-idealist G.E. Moore and had interests in academic psychology (especially Gestalt theory, psychoanalysis and Pavlovian behaviorism) as well as the new language-centred “analytic” philosophy which Moore helped develop after 1920. Richards began teaching English literature at Cambridge in 1919, and in 1926, when the subject was given a new curriculum and placed in the Faculty of Archeology and Anthropology so as to detach it from Philology, he was hired as a University lecturer. That appointment acknowledged that Principles of Literary Criticism had legitimated the new field by offering it a means of removing itself from belle-lettrism as well as from philology.
Richards grounded literary studies as a discipline both intellectually and practically by reformulating Eliot’s project for a modernized version of Collins’s institutional activism, on the basis of the latest scientific psychology. In Principles of Literary Criticism, he is concerned first to demonstrate the social value of the aesthetic in general: “What is the value of the arts?” he begins by asking (Richards 1928, 4), and answers that the aesthetic realm provides uniquely complex, unified, and harmoniously structured experiences. This appeal to experience is crucial since once again the transitivity of literary and lived experiences allows literature to salve social damage. Aesthetic experiences are also ethically essential for historical reasons. Richards, like Arnold and Churton Collins before him, contends that literary experience can resist the “commercialism” that threatens a “transvaluation by which popular taste replaces trained discrimination.” (36) But he argues further that “customs change more slowly than conditions” (56) and, this being so, art is where new conditions first produce coherent and stable experiences proper both to human potential and to the times, namely experiences that neither tear affect from thought, nor are bound to reactionary “occultism, absolutes and arbitrariness” (58), nor to the limiting discourse of virtue and vice (61). In Science and Poetry (1926), the literary experience forms the endpoint of a radically immanent and anti-religious worldview in which “experience is its own justification” (79) and which alone can stimulate what is truly valuable, “the fullest, keenest, most active and completest kind of life.” (41)
Richards departs from Eliot by the force with which he insists that literary texts communicate. It is this that requires their formalization, their use of symbols (i.e. of experiences that elicit other experiences) and their stripping away of “personal particularities” (78). For him, to repeat, aesthetic experience is uniquely valuable in that it enables a Schillerian harmonization of faculties, yet it is because literature presents experience within an organized verbal communication, that “keeps it from being a mere welter of disconnected impulses.” (Richards 1926, 36.) Nonetheless the transmission of experience trumps the transmission of meaning: poets and their readers are to be interested not in what “a poem says….but what it is” (Richards 1926: 34-35), just because the poem communicates not a message or a truth but a significant experience. It’s in these terms that, for Richards, literary works can become “simply the best data available for deciding what experiences are more valuable than others” (32). And, in a further (leftish) move, he claims that literary texts may stimulate wider social co-operation (136) on the grounds that their communicability shelters impersonality and stable experiences.
As to criticism: while teaching at Cambridge, Richards launched an ethnographical project on students and colleagues, recording their responses to anonymous poems of varying quality. (Richards 1929, 4) What he found was that students typically failed to understand not so much what the poems said as what they expressed. Students did not grasp “the experience, the mental conditions relevant to the poems.” (10) As a result, he realized that criticism must focus on a poem’s “minute particulars” for only then could its experiental ambivalence, suggestiveness, nuances and complex admixtures of thought and emotion be uncovered. Here again, it’s a poem’s psychological rather than linguistic complexity that neither any casual attention nor any constative proposition can catch. And Richards carefully itemizes the various kinds of response that prevent readers from distinguishing between significant experiences and routinized ones. Such bad reading habits include, “mnenomic irrelevances”, “stock responses”, “sentimentality”, “inhibitions”, and “doctrinal adhesions.” Richards also notes two crippling professional presuppositions—first, those that he calls “technical” i.e. the false assumption that it is the poem’s use of language rather than its effect upon us that is the proper object of critical attention (whose consequence will be “dogmatic pronouncements upon detail” (277)), and, then, “critical presuppositions”, that is, any theory about, or any application of rules for, what a poem should be or do (283). In the end, just as a poem requires careful attention because it is an expression of an experience rather than a mere linguistic artifact, criticism must neither lapse into rule-bound judgement nor into interpretation since it needs to judge whether “new experience can or cannot be taken into the fabric [of past experiences and developed habits of mind] with advantage.” (285)
***
Although F.R. Leavis modified his position in important ways across the course of his career, all his writing remain recognizably within the paradigm established by his immediate Eliot and Richards. (Unlike Eliot and Richards, Leavis fought in the war, of which he was indeed a serious trauma victim.) Indeed it is with Leavis and his followers that modern academic criticism revealed its full potentiality as well as its limits. That’s because, especially after about 1940 when his aim to stimulate a serious reading public through his journal Scrutiny floundered, Leavis was committed to harnassing the education system’s full power on literary criticism’s behalf. By that time Eliot and Richards were elsewhere engaged: Eliot, in retreat from capitalist modernity, had turned to High Anglicanism, and Richards, working in Harvard’s Education Faculty, was working to extend communicative rationality and critical literacy. But Leavis was building an institution he called the English School. He and his followers established journals; built bridges between the tertiary and secondary sectors; fixed a canon (in which the requirements of the curriculum magically harmonized with the heritage’s number of masterworks); and fostered academic disciples.
At Leavism’s core lay a classroom moment in which the critic-teacher guided students to value the best writing as Eliot and Richards understood it. In a seminar discussion, the teacher asked students to compare passages by attending to the concreteness of each—especially in their tropes—as well as to how tightly form cohered to content, a collective act of attention in which in which any signifier might be revealed as unexpectedly important. This careful scrutiny, attuned to fine surprises, culminated not simply in the teacher offering a definitive judgment of the text’s capacity to objectify a full and significant experience but in their then pointing to words on the page and asking the students: “that’s so, isn’t it”? This authoritative solicitation of student assent was only contingently attached to interpretation, since for Leavis as for Eliot and Richards, interpretation as such would smother and personalize the discrimination of experiences. It is worth noting that, in the Leavisite classroom, authoritative solicitation of an assent to judgment after analysis repeats the freedom/necessity relation within Kantian aesthetics, since the teacher-critic requires the student’s assent to an act of judgment in order for the student’s literary experience to be free, while the teacher’s insistence on a particular judgment is necessary if that freedom is not to fall prey to arbitrariness and subjectivism.
Yet the first literary-critical category to feel the stress under Leavisitism is experience. For Leavis, literature, at its best, was able to evoke less “the ordinary experience of life in time” and more, experiences of “supremely illuminating significance” as he put it in response to Eliot’s Four Quartets. (Leavis 1943, 92). So the literary canon becomes less a register of impersonal, harmonious, full and punctual encounters with the world and more a suggestion or symbol of unworlded possibilities, orientation towards which, however, is a moral accomplishment. The literary experience becomes less a balanced Erlebnis and more an elevated Erfahrung, often directed towards an unrealized future. And in Leavis’s later work, the aspirational character of the literary experience is conceived of as a vital creativity—the “living principle”—which drives both great writers and great critics, and which supplements actual fallen social conditions.
Leavis’s replacement of Erlebnis by Erfahrung is partly driven by his having a more sociological understanding than Eliot and Richards’s. For him the connection between social structures and individual experience is so strong that the experiental flow from reading to living to which Richards in particular was committed cannot easily be affirmed. After all individuals are formed socially rather than ethically through their reading. It is clear that Leavis’s years of teaching, his sensitivity to the hierarchical nature of the education system, along with his close connections to secondary-school English, meant that he fully understood the difficulties not just of effectively teaching criticism but of the barriers in using literature to realize and perfect experience in the larger world.
The second category to feel the stress was history. When, in 1943, Leavis presented a detailed curriculum for an English school, commentators were surprised how much history, or rather historical sociology, it contained. Topics he presented for discussion included “Calvinism to Puritan individualism”, “Church and State”, “The reaction against Whig history”, “The rise of Capitalism”, “Economic individualism”, “The causes of the civil war”, “The revolution of 1688”, “the social-economics correlations of literary history”, ‘the rise of the Press.” (Leavis 1943, 52-53). In effect, he fleshed out and extended Eliot’s Tory history by connecting it to the Hammonds’ left-liberal account of industrialization’s destructive wake; Tawney’s Christian Socialist critique of capitalism’s impact upon community and charity; some of Christopher Dawson’s right-wing Catholic polemics against the enlightenment, as well as contemporary works of sociology like the Lynds’ Middletown. Leavisite literary criticism was, then, based on a counter-capitalist, or, as he later put it, a counter-“technological-Benthamite” historiography. For the younger Leavis especially, one could not be a literary critic except against liberal democratic capitalism. But he also recognized that what he believed to be industrial capitalism’s predecessor, a Tawneyesque “organic society,” could not be returned to, and could survive as a truncated memory only in the university and the English school itself. So for him the universities are not just “the recognized symbols of cultural tradition” but cultural tradition and order’s “directing force” “having an authority that should check and control the blind drive onward of material and mechanical development, with its human consequences.” (Leavis 1943, 16) Yet the university—and especially the English school—could shelter only a small minority. Especially in the aftermath of the second world war and the incorporation of the wider university sector into social-democratic state planning, Leavis’s task was to extend this minority into the population through the education system, without losing sight of the fact that the conditions for genuine criticism did not exist in society as such, and would thus only be available to the elect.
I cannot here spell out the various routes through which Eliot, Richards and Leavis’s project floundered. It is enough to say that Leavism never took hold in the US. American new criticism, in accommodating itself to liberal capitalism, to the Cold War machinery of state as well as to the requirements of professional reproduction, elaborated close-reading techniques first developed by Richards’ student William Empson, and quickly succumbed to the heresy of interpretation and to what Leavis himself denounced as the seconding of “the sense of value” to mere ingenuity. (Leavis 1943, 71-72. To take an important early test-case: R.P. Blackmur, probably the major American critic closest to Leavism and whom Leavis published in the thirties, rarely engaged in close-reading as experiental discrimination. Despite his sense that modernization has produced an intolerable society, whose lacks and failures literature best allows us to sense and know, Blackmur is more interested in sensitively defining a text or oeuvre’s particular literary mode (which is also a “mode of the psyche”) than in pointing to literature’s possibilities for life as literary criticism originally demanded.
Within Leavism itself, the pedagogy of authorized assent became routinized: Leavisite students dutifully and ceaselessly repeated the party line in a submissiveness which contradicted everything that literary criticism stood for. And Leavism came undone along another track when the post-war left-Leavisites—and in particular Raymond Williams —found criticism’s value less in the transmission of what Williams too could call “valuable experience” than in its relation to the institutions and collectivities in which “a set of conventional rules” could be converted “into an organic and contemporary body of judgment.” (Williams 1950, 29) That’s because literary experience was regarded as increasingly remote from ordinary life in society. The presentism that inheres in this move also meant that the category of experience was more radically historicized, and the experiential value supposedly preserved in great writing further diminished. Discrimination gradually became ideology critique. In the same period, that avant-garde critique which also urged the importance of literary experience as a category and insisted on experience as a form of impersonality—I am thinking in particular of Bataille and Blanchot’s writings of the forties and fifties—did not, however, privilege experiences which united feeling and thought, but those which negate and contest social living.
After 1968, the supposition that language was coextensive with experience also came undone, language being regarded as either autonomous from, or constitutive of, experience. Language’s divorce from experience was now shaped as academic orthodoxy. And in a twinned move, the universalism of the modernist category of experience was denounced. Whose experiences were Eliot, Richards and Leavis talking about? Upon what social system does any ‘significant experience’ rest? Whose particular interests lie cloaked in literary experience’s claim to significance and universality?
And so, a century on, nothing positive remains of modern literary criticism in its original form, barely even a memory.
The obvious lesson to be learnt from all this is that literary criticism cannot return to origins in any restorative spirit. Nonetheless my feeling is that there are few alternatives to this barred return. English can no doubt continue as an academic discipline without any commitment to the modernist literary criticism which first informed it, but only at the cost of its sense of purpose. This means that the field does need to try to re-assert—or reconnoiter—literary criticism’s fundamental suppositions in dialogue, admittedly, with the post-1968 transformations of the field and within a pedagogy that avoids coerced assent. To remind us again, those suppositions are 1) that great literature preserves valuable forms of experience so that criticism cannot succumb to populism, to pluralism or to cultural democracy; 2) in literary texts, form is inseparable from content, with the first requiring particular pedagogic attention; 3) that an enlightened metaphysics of immanence is a condition for ascribing a supreme value to literary experience; 4) literature, as criticism shapes it, exists both inside and outside of history, and 5) that the literary canon and its servants oppose democratic state capitalism and its commercial media;. We cannot, as I say, be confident that a criticism based on such propositions can now be articulated. If it were, it would likely be most energized by the last item on that list, by its left-conservative resistance to democratic capitalism. And it would remain the province of a minority much smaller than even Leavis imagined. In effect, criticism after the modernist epoch, will be an esoteric craft compelled to demonstrate literature’s social and experiential strength in terms that accommodate themselves to a society for which its purposes are either meaningless, obsolete or dangerously illiberal, a society for which, in turn, criticism can have no compelling respect.
To conceive of literary criticism like this is to echo Leo Strauss’s view that philosophers qua philosophers cannot wholly belong to their society because they must think outside the presuppositions and beliefs that enable social stability. It’s not of course that literary critics, like Strauss’s philosophers, need to believe too little to be wholly socialized, on the contrary they need to believe too much. Nonetheless, Strauss’s insistence on the distance between philosophy and society, and especially his defense of esotericism, do help us imagine literary criticism’s future. They help us anticipate the reserve that is required to re-imagine and re-activate the discipline: the ways in which anti-capitalist and less than fully democratic literary critics in the age of managerialism will not be able to be completely open and transparent either with university administrators or with their students. And I say this despite having no regard for Strauss’s own reactionary articulation of “liberal education,” where he shows no understanding of why the positive concepts he invokes—notably “education to perfect gentlemanliness”—became obsolete during the violent emergence of contemporary global capitalism, being pushed aside by the categories of experience and historicity as we’ve seen. (Strauss 1995, 6) But of all the academic intellectuals who worked in the modernist era, Strauss retained the strongest corporate sense of the consequences of thinking against the times. And to be a literary critic now and in any foreseeable future is, more than ever, to think against the times, especially, as I say, where critics find themselves working in highly managed universities.
Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. 1999 [1933] “Experience and Poverty,” in M.W. Jennings (ed.) Selected Writings, vol 2. 1927-1934. Cambridge MA: Havard University Press, pp. 730-736.
Bataille, Georges 1954. L’experience interieure, Paris: Gallimard.
Blackmur, R.P. 1956. The Lion and the Honeycomb: essays in solicitude and critique, London: Methuen.
Bousquet, Marc. 2008. How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation, New York: New York University Press.
Collins, J. Churton. 1891. The Study of English Literature: a plea for its recognition and organization at the Universities, London: Macmillan.
Eliot, T.S. 1928. The Sacred Wood, London: Methuen.
___. 1964 [1915]. Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley, London: Faber and Faber.
Ellis, Charlie. 2008. “Relativism and Reaction: Richard Hoggart and Conservatism,” in Richard Hoggart and Cultural Studies, ed. Sue Owen. London: Palgrave, pps 198-213.
Empson, William. 1930. “O Miselle Passer!”, Oxford Outlook, 10: 470-478.
Fry, Paul H. 2000. “I.A. Richards,” in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: vol. 7.
Modernism and the New Criticism, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, pps 181-200.
Jancovich, Mark. 1993. The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jay, Martin. 2005. Songs of Experience: modern European and American Variations on a Universal Theme, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kearney, Anthony. 1986. John Churton Collins: the Louse on the Locks of Literature, Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press Ltd.
Leavis, F.R. 1943. Education & the University: a sketch for an ‘English School’, London: Chatto and Windus.
MacKillop, Ian. 1997. F.R. Leavis: a life in criticism, New York: St Martin’s Press.
Marginson, Simon and Mark Considine. 2000.The Enterprise University: Power, Governance and Re-invention in Australia, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
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Richards, I.A. 1926. Science and Poetry, New York: W.W. Norton and Co.
___. 1928 [1924]. Principles of Literary Criticism (rev. ed.) London: Routledge Kegan Paul.
___. 1929. Practical Criticism, London: Routledge, Kegan Paul.
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Slaughter, Sheila and Gary Rhoades. 2004. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Strauss, Leo. 1988. Persecution and the art of writing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
___. 1995. “What is Liberal Education?” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern, ed. Allan Bloom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press: pps. 3-9.
Tillyard, E.M.W. 1958. The Muse Unchained, London: Bowes and Bowes.
Williams, Raymond. 1950. Reading and Criticism, London: Frederick Mueller.
____. 1983. “Cambridge English: Past and Present,” in Writing in Society, London: Verso, pps. 177-191.
Wollheim, Richard. 1973. "Eliot and F.H. Bradley," in On Art and the Mind: Essays and Lectures, London: Allen Lane. 1973).
Aug 8, 2009
the most literary decade?
The fifties? Leavis, the new critics, Sartre, Blanchot. And it's surely the university English dept's great decade.
And if the fifties are the decade when literature has its greatest cultural authority, why should this be?
And what about the actual writing?
Is it a case of a lag? Social democracy absorbing modernism?
And if the fifties are the decade when literature has its greatest cultural authority, why should this be?
And what about the actual writing?
Is it a case of a lag? Social democracy absorbing modernism?
Aug 6, 2009
Ancient Greek money
A fascinating piece in the June 19 2009 TLS by Richard Seaford. It argues that, around the end of the seventh century BCE, the ancient Greeks first invented money as coinage—at least for the West towards. By the sixth century, it had spread across the penisula. And that was the exact same century when the genres of tragedy and philosophy were invented. Indeed they first appear in the very first monetized society, Iona. For Seaford, the projection of social power onto the cosmology is to be read as a displacement of money's social power. As is the notion of the limitless, and, especially, limitless desire which inhabits tragedy, since money enables desire without limits. For Seaford, too, Greek thinking is characterized by its insistence on limits, and its notion of freedom as self-sufficiency (Aristotle) and so on. It's a repulse of coinage's ideological reach.
I will read his book Money and the early Greek mind.
I will read his book Money and the early Greek mind.
Jul 27, 2009
Badiou & The Charterhouse of Parma
The question of what a Badiouian reading of a novel might be is a complicated one, Badiou's own account of Beckett notwithstanding. Quite unexpectedly then, while reading Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) it occurred to me that this is indeed a Badiouian novel. The story, of course, is set in Parma after Napolean's defeat, in a small absolutist state whose sovereign (Prince Ranuce-Erneste IV) is irrationally fearful of—paranoid about—liberals. Its hero is the naive and dashing young aristocrat, Fabrizio del Dongo, who aged seventeen flees from his reactionary family to fight for Napoleon, ending up, confused, at what turns out to be the battle of Waterloo.
Fabrizio is a hero because he has complete personal integrity: he is consumately and thoughtlessly brave; he follows his passions, know no hesitations, is committed to aristocratic honour. Both the novel's main women characters fall in love with him, first his aunt Gina, a beautiful and savvy woman in her thirties, and then, after he is jailed by a court faction opposed to his aunt, by Clelia, his jailor's young and innocent daughter.
The novel is finally about absolutism it seems to me: it describes absolutism's impact on life at court: the way in which politics become minaturised; the ways in which courtly intrigue requires skills of concealment, in which fear dominates. But also the way in which courtly life under the rule of an unpredictable despot is strangely liberating, since one is not able to participate in, or be responsible for, society at all. One is free to luxuriate in one's private integrity and intelligence, and in one's passions. It's a terrible political condition, but not as bad as America as Stendhal explicitly says. At the same time, the novel's real meaning appears only when the utter boredom of court society stands revealed: the characters' passions; their ability to reject worldly goods suddenly makes full sense: its not just worth having to put up with this. So if absolutism liberates by stripping subjects of all social responsibility; it also invigorates by the sheer weight of its censorship of everyday life excitements.
In this situation the characters live for love, which happens to them as if by chance. Gina, her lover and Parma's prime minister, Count Mosca, Fabrizio and Clelia will sacrifice almost everything for love. They live in the true because they are faithful to love, to put this in Badiouean terms. They have no commitment to society, to progress, to history, to justice: in an arbitrary absolutist regime, barely hanging on against liberalism, no such committment makes any sense at all. And that's the condition of their being able to live in the true (if not the true of science, art or politics to name Badiou's other "truth procedures")
There's a historical reason for this conjuncture. At a meta-level, both Badiou and Stendhal belong to post-revolutionary moments. Badiou's work only makes sense when read against the defeats of 1968; Stendhal's when read against the defeats of 1789, 1815 and 1830. It is this that turns them from history, from rational progressivity towards an honour economy set in a world where contingency reigns. But they also share an enmity to what they believe America stands for: shop-keeping morality and justice, or, in a word, utilitarianism.
Fabrizio is a hero because he has complete personal integrity: he is consumately and thoughtlessly brave; he follows his passions, know no hesitations, is committed to aristocratic honour. Both the novel's main women characters fall in love with him, first his aunt Gina, a beautiful and savvy woman in her thirties, and then, after he is jailed by a court faction opposed to his aunt, by Clelia, his jailor's young and innocent daughter.
The novel is finally about absolutism it seems to me: it describes absolutism's impact on life at court: the way in which politics become minaturised; the ways in which courtly intrigue requires skills of concealment, in which fear dominates. But also the way in which courtly life under the rule of an unpredictable despot is strangely liberating, since one is not able to participate in, or be responsible for, society at all. One is free to luxuriate in one's private integrity and intelligence, and in one's passions. It's a terrible political condition, but not as bad as America as Stendhal explicitly says. At the same time, the novel's real meaning appears only when the utter boredom of court society stands revealed: the characters' passions; their ability to reject worldly goods suddenly makes full sense: its not just worth having to put up with this. So if absolutism liberates by stripping subjects of all social responsibility; it also invigorates by the sheer weight of its censorship of everyday life excitements.
In this situation the characters live for love, which happens to them as if by chance. Gina, her lover and Parma's prime minister, Count Mosca, Fabrizio and Clelia will sacrifice almost everything for love. They live in the true because they are faithful to love, to put this in Badiouean terms. They have no commitment to society, to progress, to history, to justice: in an arbitrary absolutist regime, barely hanging on against liberalism, no such committment makes any sense at all. And that's the condition of their being able to live in the true (if not the true of science, art or politics to name Badiou's other "truth procedures")
There's a historical reason for this conjuncture. At a meta-level, both Badiou and Stendhal belong to post-revolutionary moments. Badiou's work only makes sense when read against the defeats of 1968; Stendhal's when read against the defeats of 1789, 1815 and 1830. It is this that turns them from history, from rational progressivity towards an honour economy set in a world where contingency reigns. But they also share an enmity to what they believe America stands for: shop-keeping morality and justice, or, in a word, utilitarianism.
Jul 13, 2009
Are politics grounded on metaphysics?
The answer to this seems to me: no. Or at best, hardly ever.
Here at the SCT at Cornell when I asked Leela Gandhi why she chose the ethical position of what she calls philophusikia (i.e. (renouncing the self and celebrating the world) over phusikaphobia (i.e. renouncing the world and celebrating the self) she said it was because she preferred the former's metaphysics. (This in a paper in which she argues (somewhat problematically?) that the choice between these ethico-political positions is important to (almost definitive of) early 20thc English non-state socialism.)
Leela's followed a paper by Brian Massumi in which he claimed that a radical pragmatic/Deleuzian ontology presupposes a certain kind of radically democratic and localist politics.
Bill Connolly and many others also believe there's an essential link between metaphysical beliefs and political orientation. (In private conversation, Bill has said to me recently that he doesn't actually believe this, but that metaphysics and political thought constantly act as figures of each other, so I may be misreading him). And so it comes about that a Deleuzian ontology can ground a politics (and the same is true for Nancy, for Badiou etc). At the end of this line of thought stand Aristotle and Plato, each with their metaphysics, each with their related politics. With Aristotle being pointed towards immanentism, pragmatism and process; and Plato towards transcendence and authority.
In this account liberalism becomes that politics which refuses metaphysical commitment of either kind.
But just think about Nietzsche, to think otherwise.....In the end, for him, becoming is ontologically prior to being (as it is for the radical pragmatists and Deleuze), but his politics head us to the right, surely.
Here at the SCT at Cornell when I asked Leela Gandhi why she chose the ethical position of what she calls philophusikia (i.e. (renouncing the self and celebrating the world) over phusikaphobia (i.e. renouncing the world and celebrating the self) she said it was because she preferred the former's metaphysics. (This in a paper in which she argues (somewhat problematically?) that the choice between these ethico-political positions is important to (almost definitive of) early 20thc English non-state socialism.)
Leela's followed a paper by Brian Massumi in which he claimed that a radical pragmatic/Deleuzian ontology presupposes a certain kind of radically democratic and localist politics.
Bill Connolly and many others also believe there's an essential link between metaphysical beliefs and political orientation. (In private conversation, Bill has said to me recently that he doesn't actually believe this, but that metaphysics and political thought constantly act as figures of each other, so I may be misreading him). And so it comes about that a Deleuzian ontology can ground a politics (and the same is true for Nancy, for Badiou etc). At the end of this line of thought stand Aristotle and Plato, each with their metaphysics, each with their related politics. With Aristotle being pointed towards immanentism, pragmatism and process; and Plato towards transcendence and authority.
In this account liberalism becomes that politics which refuses metaphysical commitment of either kind.
But just think about Nietzsche, to think otherwise.....In the end, for him, becoming is ontologically prior to being (as it is for the radical pragmatists and Deleuze), but his politics head us to the right, surely.
Disraeli, Burke and the novel
Could it be that after Burke it becomes possible to insert an individual's life into a history which is no longer to be thought of as constituted in discrete traditions (a la Alasdair Macintyre for instance) but as political in the sense that two fundamentally opposed parties have two interpretations of it? And that individuals can make a choice between enlightened modernity, on the one side, and inherited culture on the other?\
That Burke first divides history politically in this way is clear enough. But how does he conceive of the individual's relation to history? Not explicitly at all. But still: his thickening of tradition into a concept of prejudice which can stand against rationalist disordering does move in the direction I'm suggesting With it, Burke begins to treat society as a historically-given scene in which ethical choices are also political choices.
Walter Scott takes advantage of this imagining characters who choose between historical forces, and thereby grants the novel genre the weight that will make it the 19thc's priveged form. And in the 1840s, Disraeli and others (notably Charlotte Bronte) will imagine the present as a historical moment in these terms.
That Burke first divides history politically in this way is clear enough. But how does he conceive of the individual's relation to history? Not explicitly at all. But still: his thickening of tradition into a concept of prejudice which can stand against rationalist disordering does move in the direction I'm suggesting With it, Burke begins to treat society as a historically-given scene in which ethical choices are also political choices.
Walter Scott takes advantage of this imagining characters who choose between historical forces, and thereby grants the novel genre the weight that will make it the 19thc's priveged form. And in the 1840s, Disraeli and others (notably Charlotte Bronte) will imagine the present as a historical moment in these terms.
Jun 29, 2009
Jun 27, 2009
Zillow
On first playing with an iphone. Utterly exhilarating, the way that playing with my first Macintosh was around 1984 I think, or the first time I opened a web browser—Mosaic—in 1993. In each case, the first moments of fiddling about showed that important aspects of life were going to change radically and forever and for the better. The world had instantly a new size and scope (smaller and bigger); whole orders of chores had disappeared.
With the iphone, amazing as the device immediately is, it's not quite as sudden as that: it's possibilities become apparent more slowly. Take Zillow, one of its apps. It shows you on a map what real estate is for sale whereever you are as well as the value of every house on any road you're travelling through (or anywhere else come to that). It turns space into a series of dollar signs.
When you click on a dollar amount, an address and photos of a house appear: interiors and external views. So it's a medium for fantasies. It becomes easy, irresistable, to wonder, What if I were to buy this? What if I were to live here? A map dotted with dollar amounts, especially if not formidable ones, opens the door to a new life. Like novels might.
With the iphone, amazing as the device immediately is, it's not quite as sudden as that: it's possibilities become apparent more slowly. Take Zillow, one of its apps. It shows you on a map what real estate is for sale whereever you are as well as the value of every house on any road you're travelling through (or anywhere else come to that). It turns space into a series of dollar signs.
When you click on a dollar amount, an address and photos of a house appear: interiors and external views. So it's a medium for fantasies. It becomes easy, irresistable, to wonder, What if I were to buy this? What if I were to live here? A map dotted with dollar amounts, especially if not formidable ones, opens the door to a new life. Like novels might.
Critique of satisfaction
Hulme's concept of a "critique of satsifaction", which is related to the religious notion of the "vanity of desire". (See Collected Works, 210-11). This is not what I mean by living apart.
Jun 9, 2009
Secularism and mountaineering
Were the 19thc and early 20thc English mountaineers often programmatic humanists, climbing for secular spiritual reasons? I am thinking of Leslie Stephen and I.A. Richards. If so, do traces of this link linger? Petrarch, the great Renaissance humanist, is often thought of as the first modern (i.e. aesthetic) alpinist. Shelley's Mont Blanc is clearly another important moment in the connection between anti-religion and climbing. There are probably secondary sources on this which I'd be interested in knowing (googling doesn't reveal anything): if not there's an excellent article for someone.
Jun 6, 2009
After Lukács
Have been reading Karl Mannheim's Habilitationsschrift on Conservatism,one of the founding document of the sociology of knowledge. It was written under the spell of Lukács's History and Class Consciousness and is a really remarkable book, it deserves to be better known. Basically it attempts to connect different ways of thinking and experience to particular social groups and to understand the transformations and purposes of these ways of thinking and experience in relation to a Weberian/Marxian understanding of capitalist, rationalist modernity. Methodologically, it reminds me a great deal of another book written from a Lukácian perspective, Lucien Goldmann's book on Pascal, The Hidden God, which also takes the social position of particular groups (whether estates or classes or professional formations) as determinative of their mode of thinking and feeling (their ethical dispositions). Goldmann is a more sensitive analyst of actual modes of thinking than Mannheim, but he doesn't use an equivalent of Mannheim's broad stroke account of modernisation. A great deal of the Frankfurt school is already in Mannheim. I haven't read his most famous book Ideology and Utopia but apparently its English translation is a travesty because Mannheim acceeded too broadly to the requirements of the coldwar social sciences for empiricism.
May 17, 2009
Seriousness as a literary criterion.
Let say that literary criticism's most important task is to distinguish serious work from what we might call the "upper-middlebrow". But what does serious mean when it comes to literary writing? I'm wondering about this while in the middle of reading Andrew O'Hagan's Personality (2003) which I think is about as good an example of an uppermiddlebrow literary novel as you can find of its period.
May 11, 2009
Is literary criticism a failed project?
Is literary criticism a failed project? Or, more to the point, was it ever anything else?
In reading for the talk I have to give at the SCT I am thinking that it is indeed at Cambridge that modern literary criticism establishes itself. If Eliot enunciates its basic principles and I.A. Richards as it were scienticizes and academicises it, then Leavis is lit crit's St Paul, i.e. he takes responsibility for the new discipline's institutional continuation as well as its doctrinal expansion. But lit crit was always bound to fail: its core supposition, namely that experience and literary writing have an especially immediate relation to one another, is wrong. A second of its presuppositions is also very problematic, namely its historicised dehistoricisation: its sense that modernity has undone proper relationships between language, thought and feeling, and that the literature which is where, and only where, those proper relationships may survive, belongs to a sequence and path of transmission (tradition) whose temporality is not that of history itself.
So literary criticism's invention can itself only be understood in terms of certain historical events, in particular: the resistance to democratization and, then, the first world war. (It's not an accident that Leavis suffered serious war trauma).
Literary criticism's more general original conditions of possibility include (in no particular order):
1) competition between the newer provincial universities and Oxford and Cambridge
2) the link between Germany and philology (the reigning academic mode of approach to literature), which gave a fillip to the anti-philology movement before, during and after WW1 and opened up a space for the new formation;
3) the overpowering experential impact of the war
4) the need for accessible civil service exams
5) the contigency through which the leading media propreitor, Harmondsworth, endowed a chair at Cambridge in the new field (he did so presumably to stall the Literature v Journalism division which runs high culture from Forster's Howards End through to the Leavises and Thompson.
6) the linguistic turn which is apparent in Russell's paper "On Denotation" (1905) and which brings Frege's work to Britain as well as in George Moore's turn to analysis and common sense out of his moral intuititionism. Note in particular Moore's report on Wittgenstein's lectures around 1930 (in Philosophical Papers) which, where W. remarks on aesthetics, chime in with Leavis's pedagogical practice of eliciding determined consent and agreement about the seriousness and success of a literary passage.
And in response to Facebook comments 0n this (Ben Myers, Paul Bowman), I added this, which points further in the direction I'm going:
In reading for the talk I have to give at the SCT I am thinking that it is indeed at Cambridge that modern literary criticism establishes itself. If Eliot enunciates its basic principles and I.A. Richards as it were scienticizes and academicises it, then Leavis is lit crit's St Paul, i.e. he takes responsibility for the new discipline's institutional continuation as well as its doctrinal expansion. But lit crit was always bound to fail: its core supposition, namely that experience and literary writing have an especially immediate relation to one another, is wrong. A second of its presuppositions is also very problematic, namely its historicised dehistoricisation: its sense that modernity has undone proper relationships between language, thought and feeling, and that the literature which is where, and only where, those proper relationships may survive, belongs to a sequence and path of transmission (tradition) whose temporality is not that of history itself.
So literary criticism's invention can itself only be understood in terms of certain historical events, in particular: the resistance to democratization and, then, the first world war. (It's not an accident that Leavis suffered serious war trauma).
Literary criticism's more general original conditions of possibility include (in no particular order):
1) competition between the newer provincial universities and Oxford and Cambridge
2) the link between Germany and philology (the reigning academic mode of approach to literature), which gave a fillip to the anti-philology movement before, during and after WW1 and opened up a space for the new formation;
3) the overpowering experential impact of the war
4) the need for accessible civil service exams
5) the contigency through which the leading media propreitor, Harmondsworth, endowed a chair at Cambridge in the new field (he did so presumably to stall the Literature v Journalism division which runs high culture from Forster's Howards End through to the Leavises and Thompson.
6) the linguistic turn which is apparent in Russell's paper "On Denotation" (1905) and which brings Frege's work to Britain as well as in George Moore's turn to analysis and common sense out of his moral intuititionism. Note in particular Moore's report on Wittgenstein's lectures around 1930 (in Philosophical Papers) which, where W. remarks on aesthetics, chime in with Leavis's pedagogical practice of eliciding determined consent and agreement about the seriousness and success of a literary passage.
And in response to Facebook comments 0n this (Ben Myers, Paul Bowman), I added this, which points further in the direction I'm going:
I guess I don't think English departments actually do literary criticism in the Eliot, Richards, Leavis sense nor have they done it since Leavisism failed: they do historicisms, structuralisms, political hermeneutics of one sort or another etc but not literary criticism as originally understood. They can't; it's impossible. (Which is what is good about literary criticism.)
Apr 30, 2009
The post-humanities novel
Both Coetzee's Disgrace and Allen Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty can be described as post-humanities novels in that both are about men whose identifications with canonical literary figures (Byron, Henry James) are not simply impractictible and idealist but expose them the more to a debased society. At the level of content, Coetzee is less bleak than Hollinghurst, since his hero David Lurie continues to dabble with his opera about Byron, even if only to express his sense of literary heroicism's failure. But Henry James offers nothing at all to Hollinghurst's hero Nick Guest who has thoroughly prostituted himself to the Thatcherites and is probably about to die. At the level of style it is rather different: Hollinghurst's prose is literary in a mode which includes James in its genealogy while Coetzee writes bare sentences which act out the literary heritage's irrelevance to post-apartheid South Africa.
Of course the concept of the post-humanities art novel, especially one that is evaluating contemporary society as debased, is paradoxical. And it's the paradox of a literature after literature from which they seem to draw their (literary) power.
Of course the concept of the post-humanities art novel, especially one that is evaluating contemporary society as debased, is paradoxical. And it's the paradox of a literature after literature from which they seem to draw their (literary) power.
Apr 17, 2009
After progress
Let's say: there once was historical progress and then it stopped. It did so about 1968. Since then the idea of progress continues but not the thing itself. There exist various relations to it: a melancholic one (it is preserved in order to be hated and rejected); a fantasmal one (progress's cessation is denied by imagining its continuation in denial of reality) and a celebratory one (now it's dead we can reinvent non-progessive cosmologies and epistemologies).
Apr 7, 2009
Two by Henry James
There are intriguing similarities between Henry James's The Princess Casamassima and 'The Beast in the Jungle.' Both are about young men who are committed to an life-altering future event which will happen in a form and at a time they cannot predict. Hyacinth in The Princess Casamassima has contracted himself to a radical underground organization to carry out a terrorist act when so instructed. John Marcher in 'The Beast' privately and secretly awaits a tremendous experience (an experience which takes the form of a 'law' as he understands it) which will also happen at some moment and in some form that he can't foresee. Both characters gain distinction and singularity by their submission to a major contingency; both attract women by virtue of it. The call to violence is indeed made to Hyacinth, though, having lost his faith in revolutionary politics he commits suicide rather than carrying it out. And Marcher's experience—the Beast in the Jungle—reveals itself in a very unexpected form indeed. He realizes that it is his indifference and selfishness to May Bartram, the woman who has for years shared his secret and loved him, that has marked him out and leapt at him. He has been the "man to whom nothing on earth was to have happened:" his experience is his realizing that at last and too late.
From a certain point of view, these are stories about the possibility of experience (the constructive role of anticipation, choseness and accident in sharpening experience and in shaping individuality: there's a kind of grace at work here). And they are also stories of triumph over what Forster in Howards End called "sameness", even if that triumph, because it makes its home in the pathologies of the imagination, inhabits nullity and flight. From another point of view "The Beast in the Jungle" in particular is about the impossibility of experience when it is thought as a break from the mundane and the expected. It is important that in his Preface to The Soft Side, James talks of Marcher's assessing his experiences as they come to him, and his failure to mark out the one that counts.
My interest in this is focussed on how these fictions might be used to think about the kind of literary criticism (Leavism) that thinks of literature as assessing and expanding the experiental. What these stories tell us: is not that the capacity to have experience belongs to the imagination, whether collectively or individually. Rather the will to experience is unsatisfiable. Even so, that means that there's an important sense in which experience does not belong outside literature itself. To judge experience is to make a literary judgement.
From a certain point of view, these are stories about the possibility of experience (the constructive role of anticipation, choseness and accident in sharpening experience and in shaping individuality: there's a kind of grace at work here). And they are also stories of triumph over what Forster in Howards End called "sameness", even if that triumph, because it makes its home in the pathologies of the imagination, inhabits nullity and flight. From another point of view "The Beast in the Jungle" in particular is about the impossibility of experience when it is thought as a break from the mundane and the expected. It is important that in his Preface to The Soft Side, James talks of Marcher's assessing his experiences as they come to him, and his failure to mark out the one that counts.
My interest in this is focussed on how these fictions might be used to think about the kind of literary criticism (Leavism) that thinks of literature as assessing and expanding the experiental. What these stories tell us: is not that the capacity to have experience belongs to the imagination, whether collectively or individually. Rather the will to experience is unsatisfiable. Even so, that means that there's an important sense in which experience does not belong outside literature itself. To judge experience is to make a literary judgement.
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