I’ve nearly finished the required periodic trip into the Lit-Crit-scape, and I feel like one of those deranged characters being led to a cell on the old Barney Miller TV show. The detective says, “Yeah, Barney, I found this guy down by the library grabbing passersby and threatening to poke the eyes out of anyone who’d write lit crit–whatever the hell that is.”
I know, I know–everybody’s got to do it. You’ve got to publish to stay alive. But that’s the same argument they used in defense of slavery–you just couldn’t raise cotton without ’em. Frankly, I’m not sure I buy it.
Sure, there’s some good criticism out there. But pressuring everyone to contribute leads to an ungodly situation. “Yes, child, you may go out in the literary criticism–just be careful not to step in any.”
And the issue really has little to do with artistic temperament vs. scholarly. It’s more like this: For a paper on Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat,” I waded through an article that examined the epistemological dilemma posed by the story. The reader proceeds from epistemological indifference to epistemological anxiety through the course of the narrative, according to Christopher Metress. Not to say that there isn’t a smidgeon of an epistemological question raised in the story, but the “Boat” is not about epistemology–hell, I don’t see that it’s all that much about naturalism. “The Open Boat” is about a writer who takes a sentiment like, he felt utterly forsaken and resented it, and turns it into:
When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples. Any visible expression of nature would surely be pelleted with his jeers.
Then, if there be no tangible thing to hoot he feels, perhaps, the desire to confront a personification and indulge in pleas, bowed to one knee, and with hands supplicant, saying: “Yes, but I love myself.”
A high cold star on a winter’s night is the word he feels that she says to him. (Crane 666)
Besides poetry Jarrell apparently wrote criticism, but he did it right–from the heart, as well as the head–and he seems to have been one of the few worthy of a license to practice. (Gopnik’s piece includes excerpts.) I dearly love the following for its succinct insight:
[Jarrell, 1941:] “Our universities should produce good criticism; they do not–or, at best, they do so only as our prisons produce good counterfeit money: a few hardened prisoners are more or less surreptitiously continuing their real vocations.”
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
Several things I like about that note. First, and parenthetically, it connects three independent clauses with two semicolons, a thing I was told by a certain American Lit. professor should not be done. But then Mark Twain’s concern is not to satisfy any literary requirements; his aim is to capture a time, a language, a people, a river, and all with authenticity; the voice required for such a task doesn’t necessarily bend to the rules.
So why is it that we must take the best stuff fitted into words and discuss it as if we wear white lab coats and carry clipboards? It seems the height of irony. What if Homer or Twain or Woody Allen had taken to their narratives with the language of the Modern Language Association? Where would we be then?
The cold, formal language of science results from the notion that ideas stated in such form can be protected or prevented from such troubling things as bias and emotional involvement of the writer. Instead, this strained and convoluted language only cloaks the inevitable bias and emotion. That humans could do anything without personal involvement is a leftover fiction from the nineteenth century “perfection of mankind” stuff.
Literature chronicles the human condition–isn’t that a fusion of the heart and the head, passion with a smattering of reason? If logic, reason, is an imperfect science, surely logic contaminated by passion is an impossible mess (and splendor) that will submit to no science yet known.
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