Re: “Beyond Suspicion”

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hill 

Responding to Joe Adamson’s post:

Joe, That was a really helpful post. You state that “it may be difficult to separate an author’s anxieties or ’secondary concerns’ about race, sexuality, or class, for example, from his imaginative vision. It is precisely the job of criticism to make that separation, and to do so means the critic should have and show an awareness of all aspects of an author’s work. It is a murky job for criticism in the case of a writer like Celine or Sade–and there may indeed be writers where it just doesn’t seem possible or worth the candle.” I think the point I was trying to make earlier is that to make that separation there has to be what Gadamer calls a fusion of horizons, a meeting of the world of the text and of the reader. In some situations, that will be difficult if not impossible. Some readers and some texts just don’t work together.

I think the main point where we differ is really one of emphasis. Sometimes Frye seems to me to downplay the difficulty of achieving this fusion of horizons. What he calls anxieties may be the product of painful experience that cannot be readily cast aside. To clarify the point about Shakespeare, it’s not that people are likely to be infected by sexist attitudes as a result of  The Taming of the Shrew, so much as the fact that if that play, or many other works of English literature, were presented for example by a professor unconscious of his own sexist assumptions, then young women in the class may well not be able to get past the ideology of the play. I am old enough to remember classes where things like that happened routinely. (Just as professors used to smoke in class, a fact which usually amazes my students!) But, of course, to allude to a point Michael made, one can imagine a great production of The Taming resisting that sexist ideology by emphasizing the aspects of the play that Michael pointed to. And for different readers or audiences different texts will be unrewarding, not “worth the candle.” For instance, I once read enough of American Psycho to know that I didn’t want to read the whole book.

I agree with you about the excessive privilege granted to the critic in much ideological criticism. And also with what you say about the student not being accorded an independent role. Gerald Graff touches on this in his MLA Presidential address, in the recent PMLA. When professors of literature talk of “training” their students I always suspect that their idea of education is closer to Mao’s than to anything one could describe as liberal.

For an example of a critic who can write about literature in its historical and ideological context and at the same time as literature, I would suggest Geoffrey Hill (pictured above). He is acutely aware of power and history, in both his poetry and his prose , but also of the power of poetry and the imagination. Apparently he is a lifelong Labour voter, but he has been accused of nostalgic conservatism and “kitsch feudalism.” He is for me a major figure, though he seems known mainly to specialists in modern poetry and people who have an affinity for his view of literature. And he does seem to me to be doing the kinds of things you are talking about in your post.

The Social Function of Literature

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Thank you so much for your comment, Clayton, in response to my previous post. You ask some big questions: “What does a life look like that has listened to what literature has to say? How does having an educated imagination affect one’s commitments? Or does concern replace commitment?” Any answer I offer here will simply be a stab in the dark, but here goes.

Frye, as you well know, does not assume that an active reader of literature automatically becomes a “good person.” I am reading the Third Book Notebooks right now, and I am struck with the emphasis he puts on education or the “educational contract” over the social contract as informing society and therefore social and political action: in other words, for him, the university is the ideal or Utopian form of society. In one of his previous posts Michael Happy cites Frye’s statement that universities are, or should be the engine room of society. Criticism and literature are, for Frye, a central, indeed perhaps the central part of that engine room, which is the world of the arts and sciences. This world, along with–in a much more complicated way–religion, seem to be the only thing that proves we are something more than “psychotic apes” on a berserk rampage bent on destroying both human society and the earth. I love Michael’s image of the crowbarring and “hacking away that has been done by self-declared iconoclasts and comfortably tenured revolutionists” that in the end have only weakened public support for liberal education, and thus undermined any strong intellectual defence against the very clear and present danger: the increasing privatization of the universities and the very sinister encroachments of corporate capitalism.

In terms of concern and commitment, as you also well know, Frye places ideology (political or religious belief) and  kerygma (spiritual proclamation) on the opposite sides, as it were, of literature, and the lines here tend to blur in certain forms of literature. Obviously, there are more rhetorical forms which aim at persuasion. On the kerygmatic side, in my own field of study, I think of Thoreau, whose Civil Disobedience and Walden are obviously much more prophetic and geared towards informing our actions than something like Poe’s poetry and tales which, if you could ever treat them as prescriptions, would lead you straight to suicide, murder, or a mental institution. A serial killer might read Poe that way, and indeed Poe pops up famously in thrillers and crime fiction precisely in that guise: as a guru for psychopaths. There is a killer in one of Michael Connolly’s novels, for example, who reads Poe “kerygmatically,” if one can use the term in such a context. Fictional though it may be, this is an extreme example of the countless possible illustrations of Milton’s famous statement: “a wise man will make better use of an idle pamphlet than a fool will do of sacred Scripture.”

It is often difficult to find something like a later concept in Frye–one is so often proved wrong–but it is my impression at least that he puts a greater emphasis in his later writings on the prophetic dimension of literature, especially post-romantic literature. Here the prophetic is not conceived of so much as informing a program of action as confronting history with vision. Writers like Dostoyevsky or Kafka seem to leap over their times in their capacity to give us an unsettling vision of the most nihilistic and catastrophic potential in their respective Zeitgeists, as though they had a sixth sense of the cultural fissures that were going to lead straight to the horrors of the Holocaust, concentration camps, and the Gulag.

On the ideological side, as Frye points out, literature is always more or less compromised. In the pre-eighteenth century dispensation the imagination is almost completely constrained by what the calls in The Critical Path a central “myth of concern.” In The Third Book Notebooks, he observes that “ literature, being part (the central part) of the myth of concern, is profoundly impure” (CW 9: 67). According to him, in the post-romantic age this myth of concern breaks down, but slowly, and is still with us to some extent. At the same time, with the ascendancy of science and a liberal myth of freedom the writer is increasingly freed from any central ideological constraint. (This was Melville‘s point in a letter when he said that even Shakespeare for all his truth-telling was constrained by the feudal order of his time, and that “the declaration of independence makes a difference.”) The dark side of this is that ideologies become polarized and you end up with writers like Celine–or “Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot/fighting in the Captain’s tower,” as Bob Dylan’s lyric goes– writers whose personal programs of action are often repugnant, at least to those of us who are not authoritarians, anti-Semites or fascist sympathizers. Literature gets both more imaginatively pure (Poe, Mallarme, etc) and messier, if that makes any sense.

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Beyond Suspicion: What Literature Isn’t Saying When It Is Actually Saying Something

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I wanted to respond a little more thoughtfully to Russell’s posts of the 28th and 30th. They demand some serious thought and a more considered response than what I offered in my previous post.  I hope that this one may provoke further discussion.

Frye clearly believes that literature says something, and obviously he is in no way a formalist in the sense of believing that it is enough that a poem is beautifully made and so no more need be said about it. In Notebook 19 (one of the so-called 3rd book notebooks),  Frye is struggling with the concept of the twin axes of speculation and concern, and makes the following note to himself:

Of course what I can present of this I must present not as my own speculation but as what I find implied by the order of words, as what poets say when they’re not saying anything. (my emphasis; CW 9: 32)

This defines what is of primary importance to Frye: what poets say when they’re not saying anything. This is right at the time when he is beginning to articulate the idea of literature as speaking the language of concern, and developing what later leads to the distinction between primary and secondary concerns. As he writes in The Critical Path:

Nobody would accept a conception of literature as a mere dictionary or grammar of symbols and images which tells us nothing in itself. Everyone deeply devoted to literature knows that it says something, and says something as a whole, not only in its individual works. In turning from formulated belief to imagination we get glimpses of a concern behind concern, of intuitions of human nature and destiny that have inspired the great religious and revolutionary movements of history. Precisely because its variety is infinite, literature suggests an encyclopaedic range of concern greater than any formulation of concern in religious or political myth can express. (103)

The phrase “concern behind concern,” of a concern that transcends the myth of concern, that transcends social mythology, is the germ of his later distinction between primary and secondary concerns.

That literature says something, and something of the utmost importance, is at the very heart of Frye’s theory of literature. This something that literature says is something very different from what it can very usefully tell you about a lot of other things,  such as customs and rules of conduct, power relations, gender roles, prevalent beliefs and ideologies in a given historical period. These latter may indeed be a particular preoccupation of the author, and it may be difficult to separate an author’s anxieties or “secondary concerns” about race, sexuality, or class, for example, from his imaginative vision. It is precisely the job of criticism to make that separation, and to do so means the critic should have and show an awareness of all aspects of an author’s work. It is a murky job for criticism in the case of a writer like Celine or Sade–and there may indeed be writers where it just doesn’t seem possible or worth the candle.

Frye’s objection to giving a pre-eminent place to what we might, in a new sense, call “secondary criticism,” is that it introduces into the encounter with the literary work another source of anxiety, not the author’s but the critic’s. We hear of the “problematic” or the “dangerous” nature of certain aspects of a given work, as though we, or at least naive and less armored readers, had something to worry about, something to fear from the text, as if it could not be approached without the right protective gear. In Touching Feeling, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, one of the more sensible “celebrity critics,” as Russell calls them, has related this underlying fear of literature’s potential malevolence to what the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein has called the paranoid position. Paul Ricoeur has called the same stance the “hermeneutics of suspicion”: a prevalent attitude of distrust towards culture that is the legacy of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. These three, among others, contributed to a great paradigm shift in human thought, with enormous and revolutionary consequences, and they have rightly shaped the way we think about culture and literature. Frye has outlined the mythological significance of this shift in his discussion of the romantic revolution, for example, in Studies in Romanticism and chapter 7 of Words with Power.

The form it takes in New Historicism and cultural studies, however, verges at times on parody, and is perhaps a symptom of exhaustion in the paradigm itself. The critic adopts a supervisory attitude to the reader or student, who is assumed to have no critical judgment of her own. It is as if without expert help the untrained reader or student would be vulnerable and dangerously exposed to the bad ideology of the text. This is no doubt a useful posture when teaching communications and the subliminal techniques of advertising and media, but as a way of approaching literature it is woefully inadequate, at times even grotesque. Indeed, it ignores the much more potent critical perspective that only literature provides: the one that derives from what poets are saying when they aren’t saying anything.

I have to ask: are there really readers out there in any significant number who would find themselves infected with sexist attitudes by the reading of something like The Taming of the Shrew, or who might take Othello as an encouragement of abuse and violence against women? I have never met one, but if they exist they are in dire need of an education, not just of their way of thinking but perhaps most of all of their imaginations.

Erich Fromm wrote a book decades ago called The Forgotten Language. The title is a reference to the loss in Western culture of symbolic literacy, the ability to read anymore the archetypal language which is the lingua franca of dreams, fairytales and myths around the world. It is a commonplace now that general readers and students cannot be expected to have the common cultural grounding that would give them the ability to pick up on the significance of allusions and references to the Bible.  But things are worse than that. The educating of undergraduates in the imaginative structures, conventions, and narrative shapes of literature is today not just neglected. It is actively opposed by a politicized criticism that sees  in the myth and metaphor of literature little more than, to use Althusser‘s phrase, “a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.”

“Updike has psoriasis”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgmvbbWM_Z0

Anyone who has seen Todd Solondz’s scabrous Storytelling knows that it’s an uneven but still unsettling satire of the “post-modern condition.” The hapless “documentary film-maker” of the movie’s second half, “Non-Fiction,” hollowly boasts that he intends to get Jacques Derrida to narrate his latest project.  The first half of the movie, meanwhile, “Fiction,” takes place in an English department where the passive-aggressive politics of shame and resentment roil pointlessly in the seminar room.  Perhaps the clip above is something like the seminar-in-hell Clayton Chrusch imagined for himself last week.

Another, more horrific clip, after the break.

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Re: “Celebrity Scholars”

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Responding to Russell Perkin:

We seem to be living in an age of sharply diminishing returns when it comes to literary scholarly relevance, let alone “celebrity.”  The “public scholar” is a curio now, a quaint holdover from an earlier age — when someone like Frye, for example, could boast of talking over the heads of his peers to the general reading public, and quip that while he believed in scholarly “rigor”, he was always concerned it might become “rigor mortis.” 

The turning point seems to have been the mid to late 1990s when the market in academic incoherence was reaching its surreal height, and notoriety took the place of celebrity.  First there was the Sokal hoax. Physicist Alan Sokal (above) strung together some poststructuralist gibberish in a paper with the all too familiar sounding title, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, which was then duly published in the journal Social Text.  In announcing the hoax, Sokal said of his fraudulent paper that it was merely “a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense”, which was “structured around the silliest quotations [he] could find about mathematics and physics” made by postmodernist academics. 

At about the same time, the journal Philosophy and Literature was holding its annual Bad Academic Writing contest, whose eminent winners included Judith Butler, Homi Bhabha and Frederic Jameson.  Here is editor Denis Dutton explaining the purpose of the competition:

The pretentiousness of the worst academic writing betrays it as a kind of intellectual kitsch, analogous to bad art that declares itself “profound” or “moving” not by displaying its own intrinsic value but by borrowing these values from elsewhere. Just as a cigar box is elevated by a Rembrandt painting, or a living room is dignified by sets of finely bound but unread books, so these kitsch theorists mimic the effects of rigor and profundity without actually doing serious intellectual work. Their jargon-laden prose always suggests but never delivers genuine insight. Here is this year’s winning sentence, by Berkeley Prof. Judith Butler, from an article in the journal Diacritics:

“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”

To ask what this means is to miss the point. This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it.

What seems to underlie this kind of phenomenon is a contempt for the non-specialist reading public, and that contempt has been returned.  Whenever you hear the banshees at Fox News howling about an “America-hating liberal elite,” you can be pretty sure the kind of people they have in mind. Universities are now mocked on the right as “islands of repression in a sea of liberty,” which of course is an ugly lie, but it’s a lie with just enough truth in it to gin up the anger on all sides.

In fact, it’s hard not to wonder whether the current sharp rise of demagoguery on the right is the result of the decline of the public scholar.  Frye called the university the engine room of society.  In what used to be known as the Humanities at least, the engine has been hacked at with crowbars for the last thirty years by self-declared iconoclasts and comfortably tenured revolutionists.  It may be that the steadily waning influence of this generation of scholars will have to collapse in on itself completely — the way the old Soviet Union did — before something better can take its place and a scholarship with a wide general audience can re-emerge.  Until then, maybe the best we can hope for are quasi-academic polemicists, like Naomi Klein.

Celebrity Scholars?

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booth

Bob’s account of the exchange between Frye and Wayne Booth (above) is a fascinating snapshot of an encounter between two great critics; a bit like the camera catching Tom Brady and Peyton Manning chatting before a game. And then I thought of the extent to which some critics had a kind of celebrity status, at least within the academic world, in the 1980s. One reviewer referred to Imre Salusinszky’s 1987 collection of interviews with various critics as the first hard-cover theory fan magazine, which did not do justice to an excellent book, but which probably did reflect the way that many of us read it (and looked at the photos).

Which made me wonder which critics, if any, have the same wide appeal today. Is literary studies too fragmented into subdisciplines and competing approaches for anyone to be able to have this authority now, or could another Anatomy of Criticism or Rhetoric of Fiction come along, another book that everyone has to read and discuss?

The late Edward Said was one such figure: Culture and Imperialism was published by a commercial press and must have sold widely, following on the immense influence of Orientalism. Terry Eagleton’s books also have a considerable profile.

I’d be very interested to hear what others think.

Who’s Anatomy?

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AnatomyOfCriticism

“The present cannot really be known or understood except through the past.  It follows inescapably that the more we know of the past the more we know of the present.  As T.S. Eliot has . . . said, the poet is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.” 

“I sometimes think with Oscar Wilde that lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of art.”

Do these two passages have a faint Frygian ring to them?  They are from Anatomy of Criticism.  Not Frye’s Anatomy but The Anatomy of Criticism  by Henry Hazlitt, pp. 155 and 239.

While on the topic––In 1982 Wayne Booth wrote to Frye to apologize for listing Anatomy of Criticism as The Anatomy of Criticism in the bibliography of The Rhetoric of Fiction, saying that it would be corrected in the next edition.  Frye replied: “Well, I don’t suppose it did any harm to either book to have mine listed as “The” Anatomy for a brief time.  Most people when speaking to me about it say ‘your Anatomy,’ which is much more disconcerting.  In the meantime, I am very pleased that ‘The’ Rhetoric of Fiction continues to do so well.”