The Use and Abuse of Literature (8 page)

Plainly, though, the use of literary criticism is not the same as the use of literature. As Harold Brooks’s opening remarks suggest, he views literary criticism as a helping discipline, one that will assist the “complete human being” in encountering and understanding literary works. Whether the purpose of such an understanding is completed and fulfilled by this encounter (“the education of feeling, and of the sensibilities”), or whether it requires and expects a further application “in understanding, through the literature, the civilization it belongs to,” has itself been the matter of considerable debate. As for the transgression Brooks calls “the final abuse of criticism,” which he describes somewhat tendentiously as “to put its analysis in the place of the experience of art itself”
⁵²
—this creates a dichotomy between
analysis
and
experience
that is worth unpacking. A truly unmediated experience of art would stand apart from all the helping mechanisms Brooks enumerates, from explanatory footnotes to kindly reassurance. “My toddler can paint (write, play, act) better than that” or “I don’t know much about art (poetry, novels, movies), but I know what I like” is, arguably, the experience or, rather, an experience of “art itself.” In fact, what is the “itself,” the self-identity, of literature?

The literary critic, in this model, is an intermediary, a translator, a guide. Like other members of “helping professions” (medicine, social work, therapy, counseling, clinical psychology), the critic enables, intercedes, advises, nurtures, ministers, sometimes even corrects. But this is not the role, or the only role, that literary and cultural critics, scholars and theorists play either in today’s academy or in today’s journals, magazines, blogs, or electronic media. Since the time of Sidney, Ben Jonson, and Samuel Johnson, extending through Samuel Coleridge, William Hazlitt, Oscar Wilde, T. S. Eliot, to the present day, strong critics have been read and considered “primary” as well as “secondary” authors. Any serious inquiry into the use of literature must take into consideration the idea that criticism and interpretation are not inevitably helping or parasitic behaviors, but part of the life of the work of art.

——

The fortunes of literary studies have gone up and down during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with the same volatility as the stock market. And like the stock market, the market in literary studies can be charted with confidence only with the benefit of hindsight.

English studies held the comfortable middle ground of the humanities in U.S. and Anglophile/Anglophone universities through the middle part of the twentieth century. The combined heritage of belletrism and the “little magazines” imparted a certain gloss of creativity and artiness to the practice of reading and writing about poems, novels, plays, and what was then often described as “intellectual prose”—works like Robert Burton’s
The Anatomy of Melancholy
, for example, or Samuel Johnson’s
Lives of the Poets
. Practices like textual explication, often cognate with or imported from the study of other European languages and literatures—were partnered with literary history, thematic criticism, and the study of images, tropes, and what was called literary influence (the indebtedness and echoes of one literary work to another) whether such influence was deemed serene or “anxious.”
Intertextuality
, a term borrowed from the French, offered an adjustment to the question of influence by seeing it as a two-way street, and by emphasizing the agency of the text over that of the controlling author. Texts could converse with one another whether or not the author was consciously speaking or listening. The conscious/unconscious borderline was a natural topic for scholars steeped in the heritage of romanticism, whether or not they acknowledged the pervasive influence of Sigmund Freud’s writings on the development of twentieth-century art and culture.

An infusion of exciting and provocative theoretical writing, again largely continental in origin, coming to the United States from France, Germany, and the UK, made “literary studies”—or, more properly then, “literary theory”—the star, and in some views the bad child, of humanistic work in the 1970s and 1980s. Intellectual practices like semiotics, phenomenology, and structuralism changed the way critics and scholars read literature, and literature itself changed with the onset of lively debates about the literary canon, cultural inclusiveness, and popular culture. Whether described under the heading of poststructuralism, deconstruction, or postmodernity, the work of European writers like
Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault shifted attention to issues of text and agency.

A phrase like
the linguistic turn
(later transformed into
the cultural turn
) signaled a high-water mark for the prestige of this particular mode of literariness in the late twentieth century. As Lynn Hunt and Victoria Bonnell note in their introduction to
Beyond the Cultural Turn
(1999), the publication of two key works in 1973—Hayden White’s
Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe
and Clifford Geertz’s
The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays
—established the importance of techniques derived from literary studies for the disciplines of history and cultural anthropology. White’s book used terms like
trope
and
emplotment
to argue for a deep structure of thought that organized historical research at the linguistic level, working with categories derived from the literary scholars Kenneth Burke and Northrop Frye. Geertz’s idea of a “thick description” of cultures presented symbols, artifacts, social arrangements, and rituals as texts that could be read as a consistent story or interpretation—a word itself grounded in literary study. The powerful influence of Geertz has naturalized the phrase
interpretation of cultures
so that it no longer offers any hint of the jostling of disciplines.

White introduced his study with a strong claim about the relationship of history to language that established the first as dependent upon the second: “In this theory I treat the historical work as what it most manifestly is: a verbal structure in the form of a narrative prose discourse.” Histories, he maintained, “contain a deep structural content which is generally poetic, and specifically linguistic, in nature, and which serves as the precritically accepted paradigm of what a distinctively ‘historical’ explanation should be.”
⁵³
His table of contents was explicitly indebted to Frye’s structuralist account of genre, with chapters on topics like “Michelet: Historical Realism as Romance,” “Ranke: Historical Realism as Comedy,” “Toqueville: Historical Realism as Tragedy,” and “Burckhardt: Historical Realism as Satire.”

“The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts,” wrote Geertz in his celebrated essay on the Balinese cockfight.

“A deep structural content which is
generally poetic, and specifically linguistic
”; “An
extension of the notion of the text
beyond written material, and even beyond verbal.” Both Hayden White and Clifford Geertz found the models of linguistic and literary analysis instrumental and clarifying as they grappled with fresh ways of understanding the methodologies of their own disciplines. Indeed, as such passages from their work make evident, these scholars would come to argue that history and anthropology were modes of reading and writing. “As in more familiar exercises in close reading,” Geertz wrote in his concluding paragraph to the cockfight essay, “one can start anywhere in a culture’s repertoire of forms and end up anywhere else.” Later, he would sum this up in the phrase “the text analogy,” which, when linked with “interpretive theory,” allows for new reconfigurations of social thought.
⁵⁵

The idea of a master discourse has fallen into disuse and even into disrepute, but if there is any discourse that holds the mastery in these excerpts from two groundbreaking works of cultural theory, it is
literary studies
.

How quickly we forget.

In the years that followed these brilliant appropriations from literary studies, the appropriators were themselves reappropriated
by
literary critics and established in the rhetorical position of mastery. New historicists Steven Mullaney and Stephen Greenblatt invoke Geertz’s methodology:
“Employing a kind of ‘thick description’ in Clifford Geertz’s sense of the phrase,” Mullaney writes, “I examine diverse sources and events, cultural as well as literary, in an effort to situate the popular stage within the larger symbolic economy of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.”
⁵⁶
Greenblatt cites a passage from Geertz comparing Elizabethan and Majapahit royal progresses at a key turning point in his own essay on Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays.
⁵⁷
J. Hillis Miller, a specialist in the British nineteenth-century novel, lists Hayden White as an important figure in the development of modern theories of narrative. “The inclusion of Hayden White,” he writes, “is testimony to the fact that in recent years history writing as well as fictional narratives have been addressed by narrative theorists.”
⁵⁸

Authority in literary critical—and literary theoretical—writings increasingly began to derive from such voices. Not only White and Geertz but the anthropologist Mary Douglas (
Purity and Danger
), the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the cultural historian Robert Darnton, and others were cited in argument and epigraph, and a new vocabulary became the common medium of exchange: “
Culture, practice, relativism, truth, discourse, narrative, microhistory
, and various other terms,” note Hunt and Bonnell, were in general use across many of the social-science disciplines. But these same terms became words to conjure with in literary studies as well, together with others that originated in social-scientific or scientific disciplines: genealogy, archaeology, agency, paradigm.

Not long after their eager engagement with the linguistic turn, historians and others drew back, returning to an emphasis on empirical data, sometimes in conjunction with theoretical arguments and sometimes to trump them. In a book pointedly called
Telling the Truth About History
, Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob noted the difficulties of aligning postmodern theory with historical practice:

The authors were at pains to say that they did not reject all the ideas of postmodernist thinkers, noting that the text analogy and various cultural and linguistic approaches had helped to disengage historians from some other models, like Marxism and other economic and social determinisms, while also “puncturing the shield of science behind which reductionism often hid.” But linguistic determinism also presents a problem, they argued. And since postmodernism “throws into question the modern narrative form,” key methodologies for history writing, including historiography, narrative, and storytelling, were all subject to critique. Yet historians have to tell stories, they claimed, in order to make sense of the past, as well as to reach toward practical political solutions for the future. So these authors, themselves historians, suggested that there was a point when members of the historical profession, however initially energized by the likes of Derrida and Foucault, had to part company with them, to rejoin the referent and leave the play of the signifier, or to leave the text and rejoin the world. In fact, they wrote in 1994, “a similar kind of crisis that foreshadows a turning away from the postmodern view can be seen in almost every field of knowledge or learning today.”
⁶⁰

A few key observations might be made about the foregoing: first, that it ties “the linguistic turn” (quickly broadened, to accommodate anthropology, into “the cultural turn”) to postmodern theory, thus eliding the linguistic, the literary, the cultural-anthropological, and the philosophical. Second, that it ultimately sets aside postmodernism as antifoundationalist and thus is likely to pose questions rather than seek solutions. (“In place of plot and character, history and individuality, perhaps even meaning itself, the most thoroughgoing postmodernists would offer an ‘interminable pattern without meaning,’ a form of writing closer to modern music and certain postmodern novels.”)
⁶¹
Third, that it generalizes a crisis—supplementary to the fabled “crisis in the humanities”—which
led, or would lead, or was then currently leading, participants “in almost every field of knowledge or learning” to turn away from the postmodern view, and thus from the temporary hegemony of humanistic and literary critical studies.