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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
One of the themes I seem to keep on tripping across these days is the division between historical literary criticism, literary writing intended for the mythical common reader, and academic criticism, such as post-structuralism and deconstruction. The latest example of this comes from this review of The Oxford English Literary History:"Writers are intensely interested in what might be called aesthetic success: they have to be, because in order to create something successful one must learn about other people's successful creations... But conventional, non-theoretical criticism often acts as if questions of value are irrelevant, or canonically settled... In his new book, After Theory, Terry Eagleton describes two camps, the belletristic and the theoretical. Why is it, he asks, that the former is credited with seeing what is 'really in the text'? 'To see The Waste Land as brooding upon the spiritual vacancy of Man without God is to read what is there on the page, whereas to view it as a symptom of an exhausted bourgeois civilisation in an era of imperialist warfare is to impose your own crankish theory on the poem."
On the whole I have always been sceptical of claims regarding aesthetic judgement, where, it seems to me, the difference between opinion and prejudice is merely a recognition than man is as much a rationalising animal as a rational one. This seems particularly so in this case, where the problem is not that the Oxford Review lacks aesthetic discrimination, but that it does indeed discriminate between works according to an aesthetic the reviewer is not in sympathy with (i.e. one that prefers postmodern and politically committed aesthetics).
In fact, this review raises several questions that are poorly answered; for example, surely there is a great deal that is arbitrary about the formation of the canon (after all, the Victorians read Scott and Rossetti rather than Austen and Hopkins; a prejudice always rather more congenial to me than that of modern times). Equally, if one should be wary of reasing texts symptomatically, one feels tempted to ask what is the value of literature if it cannot be regarded as being symptomatic? But rather than doing nothing more than writing a rebuttal, it might be better to recall what a criticism of aesthetic merit resembled. Though he disliked the term 'aesthetic' FR Leavis would nonetheless seem to the very acme of the type of criticism being exalted. His criticism sought to weigh the merits of differing authors. Those admitted into the great tradition included George Eliot, James, Conrad and Lawrence; those excluded had Milton, Woolf, Tennyson and Hardy amongst their number. Dickens and Charlotte Bronte flitted between the two camps. While contemporary criticism might be guilty of neither selecting nor rejecting, aesthetic criticism promptly went to the other extreme.
There's a good argument to be made that some notion of 'literatity' is important, even an arbitrary one. But such arbitrary notions cannot be founded on anything other than prejudice masked as judgement. It seems to me that a division between criticism and theory is something to welcome. Let the former return to being the preserve of writers like James, where there is little pretence that one is seeing anything other than a mirror of the writer themself (as with Rushdie and Franzen, both cited by the reviewer) while the role of the critic as self-appointed arbiter of taste can comfortably be left to wither on the vine. While I have a great many reservations about contemporary theory (its selective appropriation of philosophy and linguistics, its ignorance of historical conditions in favour of what remains a vulgar Marxism, to cite the two most obvious complaints in what would otherwise be a rather long list) I'd still prefer the likes of Bakhtin and Lukacs to Trilling and Richards any day of the week.Labels: Interpretation, Literature
posted by Richard 6:41 pm
