Critical Conditions

Going Online

Fillips of Contempt, Wet Kisses—Literary Weblogs vs Print Media

(This essay was delivered as a paper at the 2016 Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900)

While “surfing” the world wide web in late 2003, I began noticing certain websites—they looked more like online diaries—discussing books and writers with an enthusiasm and a seriousness of purpose I was not seeing elsewhere on the web. I then had some nascent ideas of my own about how the online medium could serve more usefully as a forum for serious-minded literary commentary than it had up to that point, and the creators of these websites seemed to have had similar ideas, although understandably they were as yet being applied in somewhat rudimentary ways.

What most made these sites stand out for me was that they were linked to each other, as if this was some kind of network that had been around for a while, an opportunity for like-minded readers to conduct an ongoing discussion about recent books and literary news. Most of this discussion was in the form of relatively brief observations or opinions offered along with numerous hyperlinks, but often the observations were astute and the opinions expressed with sharpness and wit. If this was something that could not exactly be called criticism, it was manifesting an intensity of interest in serious writing—“literature” was usually used without irony—that was clearly not being satisfied by the coverage afforded it by publications in what these bloggers—and these were indeed blogs that I was reading, although I was only vaguely aware of the term—called the “mainstream print media.”

So I decided to see if I might join that network. My goal was to explore the possibility that this new online medium—new, at least, in its focus on literature—could in fact be used to foster creditable literary criticism. In my very first post on my own blog—which I called The Reading Experience, drawing on my affinity for John Dewey’s aesthetic philosophy of “art as experience”—I said: “I would like to test the proposition that the internet, in the form of the so-called ‘blogosphere,’ can provide a forum for a new kind of literary criticism, more compact and concise, perhaps, than conventional print lit-crit, but serious criticism nonetheless.” I should say that my background was in academic criticism, but I had recently been writing and publishing more or less general-interest criticism in book reviews and literary magazines, with some hazy notion of becoming a freelance writer, if it was still possible to actually succeed in that ambition. Perhaps this “new kind of literary criticism” would prove to be a worthwhile alternative both to academic criticism, which was no longer receptive to the critical approach I preferred (focusing on the aesthetic character of literature), and to the precarious practice of newspaper and print magazine book reviewing.

Thus did I find myself participating in the development of the “literary weblog” (most often referred to as the “litblog”) from essentially a kind of public reading diary to a much more flexible medium capable of incorporating the whole array of discursive forms—personal essays, manifestos, reviews, critical analyses, as well as fiction and poetry. This discourse was indeed generally “more compact and concise” than these same forms as they might appear in print, and typically it was characterized by a more informal, often quite conversational tone. But this conversational quality of what came to be known as the “blog post” was directly related to the device that most obviously distinguishes the blog post (or any online writing) from writing in print: the existence and availability of hyperlinks. The ability to direct readers elsewhere as a way of supplementing or supporting the writer’s purpose, of directly counterposing the writing at hand with other voices considering the subject, often voices in dissent as well as support, inherently encourages a conversational, dialogic approach, and many literary bloggers explicitly sought to demonstrate that this sort of literary discussion had its own kind of value.

That value was certainly disputed in the few years it took for the literary blog to evolve and begin to attract the notice of the broader literary culture—editors, critics, publishers, and readers. Notable figures from within that culture rendered pointed and often severe judgments:

Recognition is. . .measured in the number of hits—by their clicks you shall know them—and by the people who bother to respond to your posts with subposts of their own. The lit-bloggers become a self-sustaining community, minutemen ready to rise up in defense of their niches. So it is when people have only their precarious self-respect. But responses—fillips of contempt, wet kisses—aren’t criticism.

                                                                        Editors, n + 1

To listen to the avatars of the New Information Age, the means of communication provided by digital devices and ever-enhanced software have democratized debate, empowered those whose opinions have been marginalized by, or, worse, shut out of mainstream media, and unleashed a new era of book chat. . . .

                                                                        Steve Wasserman

(“Book chat” was one of the favored words used by critics from the “mainstream media” to belittle the level of discourse they perceived to be characteristic of litblogs.) Sven Birkerts wrote:

The implicit immediacy of the “post” and “update,” the deeply embedded assumptions of referentiality (linkage being part of the point of blogging), not to mention a new-of-the-moment ethos among so many of the bloggers (especially the younger ones) favors a less formal, less linear, and essentially unedited mode of argument. While more traditional print-based standards are still in place on sites like Slate and the online offerings of numerous print magazines, many of the blogs venture a more idiosyncratic, off-the-cuff style, a kind of “I’ve been thinking” approach. At some level it’s the difference between amateur and professional. What we gain in independence and freshness we lose in authority and accountability.

In a piece published in the Los Angeles Times, Richard Schickel wrote, after registering his horror at the thought that literary blogs might come to replace newspaper book reviews:

Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism—and its humble cousin, reviewing—is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author’s (or filmmaker’s or painter’s) entire body of work, among other qualities.

Schickel’s description of the practice of criticism may or may not be correct—I agree with much of it, but find it difficult to conclude that the authentic responsibilities of conscientious criticism necessarily make it an “elite enterprise”—but the mistake he and these other critics made was in assuming that the particular qualities they discerned at that moment in literary weblogs, and online writing in general, were fixed qualities, that online critical discourse could not continue to develop to the point it could just as easily attract “individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book” as print. Even at the time, Wasserman conceded that “what counts is the nature and depth and authority” of criticism, “as well as its availability to the widest possible audience. Whether readers find it on the web or the printed page matters not at all. Content rules.”

 All along there were litblogs that tried to uphold the critical standards that were supposedly being abandoned (I won’t be so presumptuous as to pronounce mine as one of them), but these blogs were generally never mentioned in the surveys of the damage being done by the literary blogosphere that for a while appeared with numbing regularity (or so it seemed). If it was true enough that some litblogs (whose number was increasing quite quickly) offered “criticism” that was not that far removed from n + 1’s caricature of the typical blogospheric “response”—“I shit on Dante”—there were plenty of others whose authors considered themselves to be contributing to a valuable collective discourse about literature of a kind not previously available to the broader literary public and took seriously the imperative to offer more than off-the-cuff remarks. (And if at the time it would been accurate enough to call many of these bloggers “amateur” critics, very many of them have since, in fact, gone on to establish themselves as respected professional writers and reviewers.)

Something like a validation of the potential for the literary weblog to provide intellectually serious literary criticism was the appearance in 2005 of a blog called The Valve. This was a multi-author blog, intended by its founder, John Holbo, to be explicitly “academic” both in the affiliations of its contributors and in the focus of the subjects addressed.  I was asked by Holbo to be among its original lineup of contributors, and The Valve rather quickly became a very popular site (certainly its number of daily “hits” far exceeded anything I had seen on my blog, or any of my blogger colleagues had seen, for that matter), succeeding in its purpose of attracting academics as both authors and readers and of taking up literary issues in a way that academic critics could find credible. Eventually The Valve began presenting blogging “events” in which all of the contributors posted extended commentary on or related to a currently prominent scholarly or critical book. The first of these events considered Theory’s Empire, which allowed The Valve’s slate of contributors to examine the generally anti-theory essays collected in this book, resulting in a lively but also carefully considered series of essays, in sympathy with the book’s agenda, strongly critical of it, and somewhere in between. Each of these posts also attracted a large number of comments (some of them as long as the post itself; most of them civil), and altogether this event provided a range and depth of response to and coverage of this book and the scholarly issues it raised that in my view could not have easily been accomplished in print journals.

Over the course of its existence (it officially ceased publishing new posts in 2012), The Valve continued to solicit new contributors, but eventually the initial enthusiasm waned, although I would argue that in part this was because the original inspiration for the blog had been fulfilled and the idea of intelligent, informed critical writing appearing on the web no longer seemed such a novel proposition. Something similar happened with the first wave of literary weblogs. Although a few of them still exist (including my own, in an updated iteration), many do not, or at least have been inactive for a long time. But these blogs were in fact remarkably successful, not just in ultimately reaching a wide audience of interested readers but in establishing a space in the cybersphere for the nontrivial discussion of literature, and ultimately in changing the reading habits of many serious readers who previously would never have regarded the internet as a source of legitimate literary debate. I believe it fair to say that the notion one can find entirely respectable web-based critical commentary online is now incontestable and mostly noncontroversial. Someone surfing the web as I did 14 years ago will discover much of interest within a few clicks, although these sites and pages might not be blogs. But this, too, seems to me a sign of their success, not their obsolescence.

Today literary weblogs are more likely to be known simply as “book blogs,” and most of them have indeed settled for something like “book chat” as their mode of operation. More serious-minded blogs do remain, authored by reviewers, critics, and some academics, as well as by poetry and fiction writers using the weblog medium as more than a promotional instrument. Admittedly these blogs have a smaller audience than many literary bloggers had during their period of greatest notoriety, but they may also have a more easily assumed authority and less defensive tone. Nevertheless, the “litblog” is not the object of attention it once was, when it seemed for some to promise liberation from the arbitrary authority of print book reviewers and so-called literary journalists and for others to threaten the already wobbly status of book coverage in the digital era print press.

 A significant factor in the relative decline of the litblog is surely the concurrent rise of social media, specifically the development of a substantial literary presence on Twitter and Facebook. The sort of brief commentary and linking with which literary blogging began, and continued to be a prominent feature, has largely been taken over by these social media forums, where a network of “connected” Friends and Followers exchange news and views, albeit often in an unavoidably offhand way due to the limitations of the medium used. To the extent that a need for “connection” itself is met by sites such as Facebook and Twitter, the same function as served by blogs becomes less urgent, since social media provides it more immediately and ultimately more broadly. Arguably, however, the force of this need was first fully expressed through the success of blogs, which demonstrated that it could be met through digital communication.

In my view, the most important reason why the literary weblog is not now the center of literary discourse online is that in retrospect it also served to illustrate that a serious and sustained level of wired critical discourse was possible, and in the process initiated a transformation of attitude that eventually resulted in its being superseded by other kinds of web-based publication that, while perhaps using the template introduced by weblogs, could not really be called blogs. Multi-author sites such as The Millions or The Rumpus looked like blogs, but they published something much closer to conventional literary essays, articles, and reviews. In tone these sites were not much removed from typical literary journalism, although the pieces posted there had fewer restrictions on both content and style than traditional print publications. Soon enough, web-specific journals focusing entirely or in part on book reviews such as The Quarterly Conversation, Open Letters Monthly, and Full Stop appeared, as well as other publications that offered print versions but also had significant presence online, such as Rain Taxi and The Brooklyn Rail. Some intellectually weighty journals such as 3:AM Magazine and Jacket had been around as long as, or longer, than blogs, but they, too, gained greater attention in the litblog’s wake.

The literary criticism in these publications, generally, but not exclusively, reviews, often went far beyond, both in length and in critical heft, what was offered in all but the most studious general interest print publications. Indeed, these book review sites are much more likely to cover experimental and translated works and books from independent presses, which are at best sporadically reviewed in mainstream print book review sections. Few of the reviewers could be called “amateurs” as most of them are experienced reviewers, many with credits as well in the print press, or aspiring reviewers with clear ties to the literary community (themselves writers, writing students, or independent critics). Perhaps it would not be quite accurate to call these critics “professionals,” since much of this work is unfortunately unpaid, but the breadth of reading and the critical sensibility on display signal that the motivation behind the work transcends the affirmation of status symbolized by monetary remuneration, coming instead from a conviction that contemporary literature deserves genuine critical debate and assessment, which increasingly cannot be fully supplied by newspaper and periodical criticism. (But it would still be nice if these reviewers were paid.)

The appearance of such web-based book review journals as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, and the National Book Review has definitively refuted any remaining claims for the inherent superiority of print criticism to criticism originating online. LARB in particular makes it impossible to think that intellectually engaged and critically scrupulous writing needs print on paper for its ideal expression. (This is true not just of LARB—one can find this kind of writing on many of the other sites I have mentioned.) Numerous contributors are in fact academics writing about subjects not always addressed in general interest publications, usually in an accessible prose avoiding the most reflexive kinds of jargon but also the most overt attempts to “popularize.” The same thing is true of Public Books, which, however, has not yet attained the prominence of LARB. The National Review of Books is closer to the conventional newspaper book review, but it is notable as an implicit acknowledgement of the decline in book coverage in American newspapers in its founding as an online alternative.

 A number of the publications I have identified do also offer print versions, although in many cases contents are also available, in part or in their entirety, on the websites. This does not so much indicate a retreat from a commitment to the online medium as it does a recognition that a strict demarcation between the two media has become increasingly untenable, at least as it is supposed to mark some essential difference, about which we must always remain mindful. Sampling both the online and print editions of one of these journals shows there is no such difference, neither in ambition nor in quality of thought. In these publications it becomes clear that writing in print has no intrinsic, metaphysical advantage over writing published through digital means, no greater authority that doesn’t come from the centuries-long dominance of the printing press. It should also be said that the convenience and immediacy of online publication does not make it superior to print when convenience and immediacy are not relevant concerns.

I would argue that the primary legacy of the literary blog consists of its questioning of the hegemony not of print but of those critics and reviewers claiming the imprimatur of authority on the basis of little more than their access, however much achieved through perceived merit, to the limited supply of critical outlets in print. That so many of the first wave of bloggers have subsequently achieved considerable status as writers and critics, online and in print, makes it pretty clear that “merit” was a more widely dispersed phenomenon than some critical “gatekeepers” would have had us believe. The point is not that blogs facilitated the career aspirations of any particular writers or critics but that they fomented a reappraisal of the way we talk about our literary culture that ultimately has reinvigorated non-academic literary criticism. That talk is both livelier and more comprehensive than it was before there was such a thing as a “literary weblog,” and the critics who fretted over their own looming demise still have their part in it.

Criticism in Cyberspace

(This review originally appeared in Open Letters Review)

As they should, the essays collected in The Digital Critic: Literary Culture Online offer a mixed assessment of the literary culture the Internet has both transformed and distorted. By now it is clear that online literary culture is no longer seen as an appendage to the “real,” more serious and authoritative culture originating in print but is now a fully functioning source of both literary writing and commentary about that writing—it might be argued, in fact, that it now provides the largest and most significant part of the latter. While The Digital Critic is not focused on making such an argument, nevertheless the range of issues discussed makes it clear that, for better and worse, the future of writing, reading, and publishing are inextricably tied to the ways in which everyone involved adapts to the possibilities and the limitations of cyberspace as a communications medium.

Only a few essays attempt to appraise the value of the literary criticism now to be found on the various kinds of literary websites devoted to book discussion and literary news, but it seems to me, at least, that the most important consequence of the migration of literary culture to its online residency is that both the quantity and the quality of serious literary criticism has in fact been enhanced. Certainly there are more outlets for  both book reviews and longer-form criticism than existed when the critical space was monopolized by print publications, but I would maintain that a judicious survey of the criticism appearing in many of these web journals, and even still in some of the more thoughtful literary blogs, would unavoidably conclude that on the whole digitally-based literary criticism as represented by these sites is more substantive, more fully considered, and less dependent on the formulaic conventions of literary journalism than were the sorts of book reviews and occasional criticism found in most of the newspapers and the handful of magazines discussing books prior to the development of the literary cybersphere.

At first, of course, the corner of the then less expansive world-wide-web concerning itself with literature and literary criticism was known more specifically as the “blogosphere,” the connected network linking sites using the self-designation “literary weblogs,” commonly shortened to the more informal “litblog.” Of the contributors to The Digital Critic, Scott Esposito, whose essay, “The Upside to Being an Avatar: Communities on the Web” is the volume’s first, has the deepest and longest-reaching ties to the blogosphere in its initial manifestation, as his blog, Conversational Reading, can be counted among those that first brought attention to the blog as a medium for the serious consideration of books and writing. (I should add that my own blog, The Reading Experience, dates to this time as well, and that the experience Scott Esposito relates concerning the reception of his blog and its ultimate influence on his subsequent literary activities to a great extent mirrors mine.) Esposito’s essay emphasizes the way in which his increasingly visible presence in “literary culture online” (his career as a writer essentially began with his blog) sewed multifarious seeds that blossomed in a multitude of unforeseen places, ultimately providing him with a literary career he could never have planned.

But it was the blog that nourished the ground that would make these blossoms fruitful: “simply because I started a blog and began tossing out opinions, I was able to become known to people of power and influence in my industry, some of whom down the line would be in a position to open doors for me. There are certainly few—if any—similarly powerful leveling mechanisms in the modern history of publishing.” Esposito exaggerates for rhetorical effect in describing his activity on the blog as “tossing out opinions” (although tossing out opinions was one of the things a blog was good for). If skepticism about the merit of literary discourse in the first wave of literary blogs often focused on the lack of a certain kind of quality control—which presumably was what print publications still had to offer—what distinguished many if not most of these blogs from “mainstream” literary coverage was not the casual way in which opinions were sometimes offered (print reviews could be just as opinionated, but they were acceptably cloaked in journalistic customs), but the objects of those opinions, which tended to be not the usual literary fiction by unofficially certified authors but works by lesser-known writers, often published by independent presses. In Esposito’s case in particular, he became especially identified with translated fiction, on behalf of which he is now one of the most prominent advocates in American literary culture, both as critic and publisher.

Blogs no longer dominate literary discourse online because they have been supplemented and to a degree replaced by web-based critical journals and book reviews. These sites are the direct descendants of literary blogs (literally so in Scott Esposito’s own journal, The Quarterly Conversation) in that they too often focus on independent presses and less well-publicized writers, although now online literary criticism and book coverage have been sufficiently integrated into literary culture more generally that there is no longer much of a divide between book discussion as it is conducted online and as practiced in “mainstream” print media. Online criticism and literary journalism have become the mainstream. Thus in addition to these web publications devoted to avowedly serious literary writing (which would include such journals as Review 31 and 3:AM Magazine, the former of which was founded by Houman Barekat, one of the editors of this book, the latter co-edited by David Winters, also one of the editors of The Digital Critic), other book-related websites such as Electric Literature and Lithub have appeared to take on a more populist role reporting on the literary scene more generally, as well as publishing critical pieces and columns spanning genres and implied audiences.

Beyond Scott Esposito’s account of the way his eventual emergence as an editor and critic literally became a possibility because of the parallel emergence of online literary culture, The Digital Critic doesn’t really attempt much analysis of the implications of the victory of online criticism in establishing itself as a credible endeavor. Is literary criticism still adequately equipped to carry out the tasks traditionally assigned to it: to sort out the diverse practices of writers soliciting our attention, to assess their efforts using justifiable standards, to assist readers in their own efforts to more fully integrate the reading experience? Is literature itself affected by a digitized literary culture, not just through the existence of online literary magazines that publish creative writing but simply because of the particular ways literary discussion occurs online, as well as the ways in which information about books, new and old, is disseminated? I would argue that the answer to all of these question is “yes,” but while such questions are periodically raised by the contributors to The Digital Critic, the book as a whole finally doesn’t really offer a synoptic perspective on the implications of the real, tangible changes in both the publication and critical reception of literary writing the internet has brought about. (This is an observation about the book’s scope, not a judgment of its quality, which on the whole is very high, the included essays providing a broad survey of the general subjects of writing and publishing online that readers should find quite useful.)

One essay that does directly address these changes is Sara Veale’s “Economies, Exposure, and Ethics in the Digital Age,” which takes a contrarian position on one of the most frequent complaints about the way online literary culture has literally cheapened book reviewing and other forms of literary journalism: the widespread practice among most literary websites of publishing writers without paying them for their work. Veale, citing her own experience doing both paid and unpaid writing, makes a distinction between those websites that deliberately exploit writers and those that are simply trying to make a contribution to literary culture, usually “manned by voluntary contributors side-stepping channels of publishing and creating their own in-roads to the field.” Writers appearing in these journals frequently do go on to gain a higher profile through other, often paid, jobs, while others might simply prefer to contribute to publications attempting to “broaden the literary establishment’s borders, using digitalization to democratize access to an historically exclusive sphere and to carve out niches where there were previously no markets or available platforms.” Many of these journals—including the one for which I am writing this review—have in fact enlivened and enhanced literary culture in general by featuring the kind of longer-form, well-considered literary criticism (in the form of reviews as well as stand-alone critical essays) that in the era of print dominance could be found, when at all, only in a few “intellectual” magazines. It is not only that, as Veale says, “without these outlets, a great deal of excellent writing would go unwritten, or at least unpublished,” but that this kind of writing, done for its own sake, and the sake of literature, might not exist at all.

The judgment that the online medium implies the possibility of a certain kind of altruism in its potential for circulating knowledge and instruction as goods in themselves is reflected in Lauren Elkin’s “The Digital Critic as Public Critic: Open-Source Journals, Paywalls, and the Nature of Criticism” and Marc Farrant’s “Theory Online: A New Critical Commons?,” both of which reflect on the way the online availability of serious writing—in Elkin’s case, “scholarship” generally, for Farrant critical theory—affects the nature of that writing. Elkin is an advocate of “open access” scholarship because “research should be available to all who wish to consult it,” but she also opposes the paywalls blocking access to literary criticism in more general-interest publications as well, which also block critics from access to the animating spirit behind the  “free-ranging, genre-defying criticism” that can be found online.. Farrant examines the rise of the “theory blog,” which, he maintains, “at their best, were neither esoteric nor popular, and were more accessible than conventional modes of academic writing.” Theory blogging has become more and more indistinguishable from academic work itself (often bringing the nascent theorist his/her first exposure to an audience) but not so much that blogging doesn’t retain its insurgent potential:

If the humanities are sometimes guilty of being inaccessible or elitist, forgetting their public role in society at large, the accessibility and dynamism of online theory is of a different nature to institutionalized “interdisciplinarity,” primarily because it doesn’t merely serve as a means to an end, but is an end in itself.

Of course, there is much online discussion ostensibly about literature that by no means is so scrupulous in its intentions as the literary-critical web at its most admirable. Louis Bury’s “Topical Criticism and the Cultural Logic of the Quick Take” considers what is perhaps the least valuable, but unfortunately perhaps most ubiquitous from of literary commentary online, the hot take. Bury uses the controversies stirred up by conceptualists Kenneth Goldsmith and his “The Body of Michael Brown” and Vanessa Place, with her Twitter project tweeting the text of Gone with the Wind, to examine how social media, especially Twitter, has accelerated the process of critical response to literary works, obviously in so doing also reducing literary debate and commentary to twitter-sized bits. Bury does not take a position on these controversies, merely attempting to give as thorough an account of their trajectories as possible, confessing that finally his inability to really do so serves as illustration of his overall point about the need for more patient deliberation in criticism and concluding that “the endpoint of a literary critical culture that values speed, blind declaration, and immediate answers above all else would constitute the op-edification of that culture.”

It is hard to disagree with this assessment, although there are still few signs that “twitcrit” actually threatens to usurp the authority of more careful criticism online. Moreover, the phenomenon of the topical “quick take” is surely not confined to literary discourse, and despite the prevalence of the incendiary or self-interested hot take, there exists a community of literary Twitter users who regard the medium not as a replacement for more deliberate critical thinking but simply as another way of engaging in discussion of literature or criticism, one that has its own protocols but that ultimately exists alongside other forms of critical engagement, not as their substitute. Bury is certainly correct that to the extent the kind of topical criticism enabled by Twitter ultimately “conditions audience expectations and authorial sensibilities” it would reduce literary culture to just more noise in the social media din, but truly serious literary scholarship and literary criticism have always been drowned out by the topical and the trivial, and it hardly seems likely that shifting from a dispensation in which print inherently had the potential to distract us from the important tasks of analysis and understanding to one in which digital technology does so will result in the complete abandonment of those tasks.

Likewise, while the account Jonathan Sturgeon gives of his time spent as a “literary hack” seems entirely accurate as testimony to the particular form of drudgery online literary journalism demands, but is this situation of finding oneself “indentured to daily literary concerns” so that other, more ambitious literary goals go unfulfilled finally all that different from the conditions prevailing on Grub Streets of yore? Granted that on the virtual street online the writer or editor is compelled to work “at speed,” which in Internet time can be fast indeed. Still, coping with the hyperspeed of the literary web seems mostly just the current dilemma facing those who attempt to eke out a living in the literary trade, a dilemma that surely has recurred in different forms throughout a literary history that has never made it easy for anyone feeling a call to write—especially a call to write criticism—to answer it in anything like comfort and security.

None of this is to deny the genuinely existing problems posed by online literary culture delineated by many of the contributors to The Digital Critic. It is true that much book discussion occurs in a context of “fragmentation” and “aggregation” as described in the essay by Luke Neima, where more opinions are expressed by more people than ever before, although it seems to me that the possibilities of aggregation in overcoming the inevitable fragmentation of response induced by the Internet, at least if separating worthwhile, appropriately exacting criticism from the mass of noisy pronouncements is a goal, have not yet fully been explored. Michael Braskhar addresses the more general problem of “superabundance,” in this case focusing specifically on the oversupply of books that inevitably can’t find readers, but his suggestion that publishers have themselves become critics in the way they “manage” this abundance seems instead precisely to underscore the need for informed, dedicated literary critics to sift through what publishers are offering, through these efforts trying to reckon with these books in ways that take advantage of the flexibility and accessibility of the online medium rather than yielding to its worst tendencies toward haste and facile conclusions.

Certainly as well both Robert Barry and Laura Waddell are right to caution us against taking the Internet itself for granted, the possession of those who have cultivated it as a medium for free expression or more simply claim it through habitual use. The “blogosphere” and its immediate successors in sounding out the possibilities of the web as a forum for literary discussion may have been able to do so when the Internet still offered a space somewhat independent of the commercial imperative, where a certain degree of idealism could help to determine the terms and scope of the critical conversation, but that time has obviously long passed, and we are indeed in the era of data harvesting and digital “influencers.” Literary critics can hardly ignore these circumstances and can only acknowledge that the medium through which they wish to offer their studious analyses of literary style or insightful scrutiny of concealed cultural forces is also offering shallow consumer gratification. Surely, however, the latter doesn’t have to preclude the former.

The Novel Could Be Dead

Taken together, Mark McGurl's three books, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James, (2001), The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009), and Everything & Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021) read like the author's attempt to perceive the entire "literary field" of the 20th and now 21st centuries in its fully visible totality. If the modern history of literary study in the United States, with the ascension of New Criticism, essentially begins in the close analysis of individual works of literature, the dominant approaches today, in books like McGurl's and the rise of "digital humanities," embrace distance and breadth, not critical rigor but scholarly amplitude, the ability (or at least the attempt) to "see it all."

The notion that to study literature is to contemplate a "literary field" is originally attributable to the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, who posited that literary activity constituted a dynamic system in which all of the participants--writers, critics, publishers--occupy a "position" in this system relative to each other, each with their own priorities, to some extent in competition with each other but also to some extent sharing the reigning assumptions, both commercial and literary, of their time and place. From the interactions of these players in the system vying for the rewards and prestige the system avails comes the literary work, and to fully understand the meaning represented by the work we have to locate it in the "field of power" from which it emerged. Literary values are not so much subsumed to commercial values as actually pitted against commercial values so that the capital at stake is not financial but artistic--"cultural capital."

I confess I have never been much able to appreciate a sociological theory of literature such as Bourdieu's. Mostly it just seems to recapitulate the obvious (in suitably academic jargon): writers are subject to the prevailing cultural forces of their era. (How could they not be?) Writing is not produced in a self-enclosed aesthetic zone scrubbed of social influences. (How could it be?) Of course Bourdieu himself as a sociologist was perfectly justified in examining the structural processes of what we so loosely call the "literary world," but his work as taken up by literary scholars has been used to ground literary study in "material" concerns and not just to dismiss the aesthetic value of literature as a hopelessly subjective interest but in general to imply that the aesthetic doesn't really exist apart from its determination by material conditions. In some cases this is accessory to (or excuse for) the politicization of literary study that is now a fait accompli, but ultimately marks the mutation of academic criticism into a sub-branch of sociology, a transformation that can only contribute to the final dissolution of academic literary study as a separate discipline. (Who needs a special focus on literature when it can easily be folded into social analysis more generally?)

McGurl does not dismiss the aesthetic value of literature, although he consistently refers to it as an "elite" preoccupation that has as much to do with status as it does with the actual experience or creation of works of art. The first book, The Novel Art, is ostensibly about the "art novel," which McGurl defines as a literary work intended as an object of art, not commerce, but this very ambition is treated with implicit suspicion, as just another form of accumulation, in this case the accumulation of prestige rather than money. In some ways, McGurl's books in fact favor the latter kind of gain over the former (especially in Everything & Less, where the prevailing tone is one of barely concealed admiration for the scale of Amazon's success, a sort of awestruck wonder at the canniness of Jeff Bezos), which at least has the virtue of being undeceived about its aims, unlike the writers and critics, who don't realize how thoroughly they are implicated in the commercial system they think they are resisting.

This attitude toward the aesthetic claims of both writers and "naïve" literary critics is not really peculiar to Mark McGurl, however. He is just participating in the discourse that current academic criticism has developed for establishing the superiority of the scholarly perspective on literary creation to the credulous assumptions of the creators and most readers. While certainly literary scholars have always been willing to display their learning and their "hermeneutic" skills, the first few contingents of academic critics by and large devoted such skills to elucidative interpretation or textual studies that assumed "new knowledge" (the traditional goal of scholarship) meant knowledge of literature as a self-sufficient object of attention, worthwhile in and of itself as a form of human expression. Gradually literature in academe has become instead the means for the scholar to assert other priorities, a convenient instrument through which to engage in various kinds of social, cultural, political, or theoretical analysis but not worth the scholar's time for mere "appreciation."

There are indications throughout McGurl's three books that he does in fact have appreciation for the aesthetic qualities of literature (or at least fiction, since discussions of poetry are completely absent from all three of the books), but even in The Program Era, in which American fiction as produced through the auspices of academic creative writing are accorded various degrees of praise for such qualities, McGurl's real focus of analysis is the creative writing system itself, which, he maintains, is something we should account for if we are to understand postwar American literature in "genuinely historical materialist terms." In his review of The Program Era, Fredric Jameson praises McGurl's account of this system, but cautions that his classification of the modes of fiction most central to the creative writing Program is somewhat unwieldy and that  "unless we somehow identify the aesthetic of production all three classifications share (their ‘autopoiesis’), the system, however useful or satisfying it may be, will risk breaking down into a series of empirical traits and characteristics."

Heaven forbid that literary criticism might retreat to the consideration of "empirical traits and characteristics"! Should it retreat far enough, critics might even find themselves focusing on the palpable traits and characteristics of individual works without regard to the system to which they putatively belong! At its most extreme, such a concession to the integrity of literary value could lead to the mere appreciation of literature, relegating literary scholars to the status of belletristic critics acting as arbiters of taste rather than learned exegetes and theorists rising above such purely subjective judgment. Or perhaps an enhanced respect for the empirical in the consideration of works of literature--the experience of the actual "traits and characteristics" a literary text offers--could begin to persuade academic critics that the interpretive frameworks assembled by most of the succeeding schools of critical thought that have emerged in literary studies over the past 50 years are themselves finally just fabrications, elaborate fictions created by professors not to aid in the interpretation of literature but to supplant it, to substitute the wisdom and insights of scholars for the incorrigibly undisciplined creative imagination.

These frameworks are just as susceptible, in turn, to the same ineluctable forces and unexamined assumptions by which literary scholars contend the expressive autonomy of works of literature is necessarily constrained. McGurl's sociological contemplations reach in Everything & Less perhaps their most intricate elaboration--although The Program Era is complex enough in the web of connections it makes between various postwar literary works and the conditions of creative writing instruction in American universities--and the book as a whole provides us less with an examination of the effect Amazon has had on the writing and distribution of books and more a phantasmagoric excursion through the generic and subgeneric wilderness Amazon has cultivated through its various self-publishing and eBook services. McGurl maintains that in surveying this scene--and no one should exactly envy his no doubt now near-encyclopedic knowledge of the terrain--he is offering the most authentic perspective on the current "literary field," since Amazon has so thoroughly colonized both publishing (through the dominance of the Kindle and through Kindle Direct Publishing) and bookselling. But McGurl as a critic seems as controlled by the prerogatives of capitalism as the fiction he discusses, confining himself to the popular, the commercially successful, the well-publicized. If much of this writing would not be called "mainstream"--either commercially or culturally--nevertheless the measure of its importance is its salience to the marketplace, not its artistic value.

Indeed, most readers whose interest in fiction has its source in the latter are not likely to find much to spark their interest in McGurl's book, aside from its sideshow qualities. It is doubtful that such readers really need to know about Dmitry Rus, author of the Play to Live series of "LitRPG" novels, or the "alpha billionaire" subgenre of romance novels, or that "there is a case to be made for self-published Adult Baby Diaper Lover (ABDL) erotica as the quintessential Amazonian genre of literature." While I'm willing to take McGurl's word for it that these ridiculous genres exist (although I'm less willing to concede they are part of "literature") and that the Kindle platform has both made them possible and amplified their popularity, I am dubious that, absent an effort like his to do such a comprehensive survey of Amazon's book-related services, that McGurl's intended audience (people interested in contemporary literature or in book culture more generally) are likely to regard such works as worthy of the attention of serious readers. From this perspective, the elaborate scrutiny of them and their part in Amazon's annexation of the literary field in effect itself assembles these texts and genres into a coherent account that hardly exists outside of it except as the discontinuous artifacts of Amazon's digital machinery.

McGurl contends that as the visionary demiurge who called this machinery into being, Jeff Bezos could be called the author of the novel that is Amazon--or at least that is Amazon's rewriting of the premises of fiction and the reading of fiction in the electronically networked world. But this conceit is again something McGurl himself invokes, as Bezos becomes the protagonist of the novel McGurl implicitly shadows into being through using the conceit. In this novel Bezos (as represented by his company) is the larger than life figure whose mighty deeds produce both emulation and resistance, with the latter finally only resulting in an unwitting version of the former. Finally no one can evade the reach of this figure's influence, and, while the nature of this influence can't necessarily be fully characterized as benign, most of those subject to it are satisfied with the service done.

Thus the title of McGurl's book: Amazon promises to offer us everything, which in the provision of books results in the proliferation of narrative genres and reading platforms, but when some writers and readers seek alternatives to Amazon's maximalist aesthetic, such efforts are inevitably tied to this system that makes them intelligible in the first place--and are still available on Amazon, of course. Needless to say, McGurl's classification of fiction as either maximalist or minimalist (the category under which he places most "literary fiction"), "epic" and "romance," reduces the current "literary field" to simple binaries that don't remotely capture the actual range of practices to be found in contemporary fiction, especially outside the confines of literary fiction as "just another genre" in McGurl's simplistic scheme. But then neither is this classification meant to be adequate to the needs of literary criticism per se, as opposed to those of literary critics assuming the role of "cultural critic" to contemplate not mere works of literature but the cultural circumstances in which they are embedded--an orientation by which the literary works disappear into generalizations and abstractions. "Maximalism" and "minimalism" as terms employed in McGurls's analysis thus tell us nothing at all about literature, only about the ways in which such terms can be obscured beyond any practical critical value they might have.

McGurl's adaptation of the terms really offers little specific insight into the tangible influence of Amazon on publishing and bookselling, either. Readers expecting from Everything & Less an examination of Amazon's business practices, its effects on the economics of publishing (especially as related to smaller publishers), or its transformation of reading practices beyond the expansion of genre certainly won't get it. At best McGurl takes Amazon's status as a provider of "service" at face value, preferring to look more closely at the peculiar kinds of commodities it has produced rather than the process of commodification itself. Although certainly books have long been treated as commodities in the capitalist system, Amazon has surely gone the farthest in discarding any pretense that they are anything but merchandise (even if they are merchandised as autotherapy). McGurl doesn't seem much perturbed about this: if its approach has amassed for Amazon a fortune in sales, it has also supplied the sociologically inclined literary critic with an overflowing source of material suitable for his scrutiny.

For all the sophisticated critical tools and close reading skills--and McGurl certainly does a sort of critical reading that effectively maps onto the texts he examines the interpretive scheme he employs --the results of his far-flung explorations of the literary wilds Amazon has cultivated seem rather unremarkable: American fiction during the time when Amazon has come to dominate publishing would appear to be very. . .Amazonian. Not only is it unsurprising that such might be the case, but we could also grant McGurl this conclusion, yet find it trivial. That works of fiction display the signs of the circumstances in which they are created is finally banal, even tautological. How could it be otherwise? How could an alteration of circumstances as consequential as the rise of Amazon (and of the internet that made it possible) not be registered, directly or indirectly, in the writing that ensues? Everything and Less provides us with a photograph of a literary culture adapting to a cultural development that directly affects its own means of existence, but the implication the book leaves that Amazon's presence has enacted some sort of permanent transformation of writing and publishing is surely subject to doubt. If it certainly appears that literary culture has for now fully assimilated itself to the internet, its currently hybrid print/online status hardly seems immutable, and Amazon itself scarcely seems immune to further technological shifts that would make it less relevant.

McGurl's account of the sort of fiction Amazon is making possible is useful, however, in showing us what the future of fiction might be like should Amazon continue to dominate bookselling and especially the self-publishing market, or rather the future without fiction, since in this future the novel would indeed be dead. No amount of special pleading on behalf of preposterous popular genres will make them worth taking seriously. Relegating aesthetically serious fiction to its own sickly genre will do nothing but ensure that it remains sickly. Writers still interested in the idea of literature will no doubt stubbornly persist in authoring texts that might represent some synthesis of poetry and what we now call fiction, but the processes delineated by McGurl in Everything and Less if they retain their hold will so thoroughly trivialize fiction as a literary form that all claims for the novel as the predominant incarnation of "literature" will seem passingly absurd, although at that point neither will there be literary critics to contemplate its demise. 

Taking Sides

(This review originally appeared in Review 31)

In Better Living Through Criticism, A.O. Scott first of all demonstrates that he is eminently qualified to be the chief film critic of The New York Times. On the basis of what the book reveals about Scott’s breadth of knowledge, interpretive skill, and belief in the importance of criticism, we would be justified in concluding that this own reviews, whether we ultimately agree with them or not, are written from a comprehensive understanding of the history and purpose of criticism and with a seriousness of intent that goes beyond the simplistic thumbs up/thumbs down approach to which reviews of popular art in mainstream media are especially prone, as well as the widespread conception of a review as primarily a form of consumer advice. To the extent that we can take Better Living Through Criticism as a brief on behalf of the kind of criticism A.O. Scott practices, the kind able to provide “better living,” both for critics and for readers, it is accurate enough to call the book a success.

However, if it does succeed in clarifying and, to a degree, justifying the work of a critic such as himself, that very success highlights one of the book’s most severe limitations as a guide to criticism at the moment. The case for the sort of job A.O. Scott does increasingly applies only to A.O. Scott and a handful of other critics who have the opportunity to practice a general interest criticism that can be expected both to be taken seriously as an attempt to reckon with works of art (popular or “high”) and to do so while reaching a relatively wide audience. As review space in newspapers continues to dwindle, coverage of the arts in general consigned to anodyne puff pieces acting as ersatz advertisements, and print magazines increasingly continue to become “niche” publications, with fewer and fewer niches available to arts criticism, the widespread assumption might be that online publications have taken up much, it not all, of the critical slack. But while it is true that numerous web-based journals (not to mention blogs) have now established themselves as dependable sources of intelligent criticism (in some cases exceeding in its scope and substance what was previously available in print publications), these journals generally have small audiences and their focus is inevitably more narrow, more oriented toward readers with a pre-established, in some cases even selective, interest in the form or subject under consideration. The criticism on these sites is more likely to take for granted that such readers understand and appreciate the importance of criticism than does Scott, who assumes readers skeptical not just of his judgment of a particular film or book but of the very enterprise of passing judgment as a profession.

It would not really be quite accurate to say that in Better Living Through Criticism Scott attempts to convince this skeptical reader of the value of criticism, since he doesn’t really make an argument at all in the book, its second and even more crippling flaw. Scott ostensibly addresses six different topics in the book’s six chapters, but not only do these topics not exactly cohere in a discernible line of argument, but each of the chapters is very discursive, ultimately allowing him to cover a lot of ground, from the history of criticism to the philosophy of beauty to the perennial debate over the role of form vs. content, but this also exacerbates the problem that originates in Scott’s extreme reluctance not just to advance a unifying argument but ultimately to take a firm position on any of the issues he raises. Scott sees the wisdom of both sides of most critical debates and typically advises that we accept both, or neither, which for him essentially amounts to the same thing. Sometimes his caution seems nearly metaphysical:

            It doesn’t matter. Actually, it matters a great deal. It matters more than anything. You are guaranteed to be wrong—to insult good taste, to antagonize public opinion, the judgment of history, or your own uneasy conscience. And there is no beautiful synthesis, no mode or method of criticism that can resolve these contradictions. They cannot be logically reconciled, any more than a safe, sensible middle path can be charted between them. Still less is it possible to declare a decisive allegiance, to cast one’s lot with the party of form or the party of content, the armies of tradition or the rebel forces of modernity, the clique of skeptics or the church of enthusiasts.

In seeming to assure us that it does indeed matter that critics are so habitually wrong, Scott appears to posit error as an unavoidable condition of the critic’s situation. Yet surely it also matters exactly how a critic is wrong. Precisely by asserting a “decisive allegiance” to a particular philosophy of criticism, a particular method, a specific conception of art, the critic commits to the necessity of demonstrating that philosophy or method can reveal why the work of art itself matters, why the reader/viewer/audience should pay attention in a particular way. If the critic succeeds in either or both of these goals, he/she has gotten it right, but only in that, provisionally, the effort has paid off for some readers. If the critic doesn’t succeed, the approach could be wrong (especially if no one finds it convincing), or it could be that the critic hasn’t done justice to it. (It also remains possible, it must be said, that the reader has gotten it wrong.) A good critic isn’t offering a judgment or interpretation to be tallied as right or wrong, correct or incorrect in the first place, merely as a perspective acute enough to be considered fully and fairly, along with all others. Readers are free to take the critic’s offering more or less seriously, but if hardly seems an affront to art, or an abrogation of the critic’s duty to an ethereal ideal of “objectivity,” that a critic would cast lots with one set of critical principles rather than others.

It is as if Scott can’t abandon the conventional journalistic imperative to “cover” a subject by reporting on both sides of disputes about it, without interceding to provide some normative appraisal. But Scott seems to experience this obligation as a struggle, not between the points of view surveyed but within himself, represented most obviously in the interchapters included in the book, presented in the form of a dialogue between the two sides of critic A.O. Scott. These dialogues ultimately leave the book even more rhetorically fragmented, as even the disconnected points Scott does make in the other chapters prove debatable to his skeptical questioner, the ultimate effect of whose questions is essentially to chastise Scott for his presumptions and pretensions in making those points to begin with. These interchapters succeed mostly in diverting attention away from criticism as an intellectual vocation and focusing it instead on A.O. Scott, a paradoxical move for a book that otherwise hesitates to assert a strong thesis or declare a distinctive critical position.

One proposition that Scott is willing to affirm relatively early in the book is the notion that criticism is not just a skill or a craft but itself art, although he is predictably diffident in stating it: “Will it sound defensive or pretentious if I say that criticism is an art in its own right?” he asks in the middle of a paragraph. But he continues: “Not in the narrow, quotidian sense in which art is more or less synonymous with skill, but in the grand, fully exalted, romantic meaning of the word. That the critic is a craftsman of sorts is obvious enough; I want to insist that the critic is also a creator.” It is a surprisingly bold claim, but unfortunately Scott’s digressive expository strategy doesn’t really allow him to support it. Instead he relies on testimony form the like-minded H.L. Mencken, but since Mencken’s assertions are themselves not very persuasive, Scott’s own case remains unproven. Mencken contends that only by going beyond the “material” provided by art works and “adorn[ing] their theme with variations of his own” can the mere “reviewer” become an actual critic. Putting aside the fact that this is an entirely incoherent conception of criticism (in maintaining that a critic can’t become a critic until he stops being a reviewer, it empties “criticism” of its meaning in relation to works of art), nowhere in Better Living Through Criticism does A.O. Scott lay claim to such a conception, confining himself throughout to the assumption that reviews fully qualify as criticism.

Scott seems to me on much firmer ground, however, when he stops grasping after “art” as an honorific boost to his craft and defines criticism in more restrained terms: “[C]riticism, far from sapping the vitality of art, is instead what supplies its lifeblood. . .properly understood is not an enemy from which art must be defended, but rather another name—the proper name—for the defense of art itself.” The direct defense of art—at least in the cumulative sense, through criticism taken as a whole—can only occur through forms of argument and analysis, that is, by using language instrumentally to accomplish a purpose beyond its own fashioning. A work of art has no obligation other than to be itself. A work of criticism that expects to be admired for its own ingenuity or aesthetically fine style (which is not to say that criticism can’t ever be admired for such qualities) in my view has in so doing abandoned the primary obligation of criticism to indeed defend the integrity and value of art, often by defending it in the particular instance of a particular work or artist.

If criticism “contends against [the other arts] for their own benefit,” it does so to challenge art to fulfill its potential, not to set itself up as competition. If it can be “in fact larger” than the other arts considered separately, that is because criticism at its best attempts a synthesis of artistic history and principles to enable its critique of individual forms and specific works. If “there is more of it” than of actual works of art, this is due to the interest so many of us take in art, and our need to account for that interest, not a free-floating compulsion to “adorn” art with critical accessories and flourishes.

Surely the rise of, first, the blogosphere and, subsequently, a relative abundance of online arts reviews and critical web journals attests to this interest. If the sort of critical voice represented by A.O. Scott is likely to be less commanding as the centrality of such cultural touchstones as the New York Times continues to erode, we might still look to these new cultural voices—more muted perhaps, but in general much more interested in books or movies or music than in assuming the role of critic-artist—to successfully demonstrate the ongoing value of criticism.

The Old and the New

Critical Objects 

My knowledge of Object-Oriented Philosophy is certainly imperfect (and thus open to correction), but I think I understand it well enough to assess Graham Harman's article, "The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism," on the relationship of OO philosophy (or "speculative realism" more generally) to literary criticism. I find his discussion fascinating, full of potentially useful application, even if I can't ultimately agree either with his critique of New Criticism or with his suggestions about what an appropriately object-oriented criticism might attempt to do.

First of all, I do not think it is accurate to say that the New Critics conceived of the poem (the literary text) as "encapsulated machines cut off from all social and material context." It would be absurd to say that a literary work is literally "free" of the social/biographical/cultural context in which it was written. The New Critics just believed that this context had little to do with the reader's experience of the poem, and it is the experience of reading that the New Critics wanted to emphasize. Consideration of "social and material context" is a distraction from the reading experience, at least in our initial encounter with the work.

Using Cleanth Brooks's The Well-Wrought Urn as his representative work of New Criticism (a good choice), Harman approvingly describes its "hostility to paraphrase," casting this as the "object-oriented side" of New Criticism. Brooks's emphasis on ambiguity and paradox correctly signals that, in Harman's words "the literal rendition of the poem is never the poem itself, which must exceed all interpretation in the form of a hidden surplus." But Harman believes this excess "haunts all human dealings with the world," including all other intellectual disciplines. While Brooks opposes poetry to the discourses of science, "regardless of aspiration, the irreducibility of reality to literal presence applies as much to the sciences as it does to poetry,” Harman writes.

 It seems to me that here aspirations are everything. Science and theology aspire to communicate directly and unambiguously, even though, given the inaccessibility of the "objects" of which they speak (but which exist, nevertheless) they are prevented from doing so. This is a condition against which such discourses fight. Poetry aspires to avoid such direct and unambiguous claims, depending on the inability of language to always convey transparent meaning for its very existence. Conceding poetry this "separate zone" in which paraphrase is actually antithetical to the purposes of poetry may be merely a convention, without anchor in the protocols of speculative realism whereby objects are never fully present for description, but this convention serves a useful enough purpose in human reality by making "literature" possible as something other than undifferentiated "writing." It seems to me that insisting it be treated like any other form of discourse suggests a sensibility that ultimately has little actual use for poetry.

I do not say that Graham Harman possesses such a sensibility, since he writes frequently about literature, and with obvious respect for it. However, I do think he is being overly literal-minded in his reading of Brooks, both in discussing the claim for a "separate zone" and in his further criticism of Brooks for regarding the text as "a holistic wonderland in which everything is defined solely by its interrelations with everything else." Here Harman finds fault with the New Critics' contention that a literary text must be understood as self-enclosed, its "meaning" to be derived from the way elements of the text interact with other elements internally, not with referents outside the text. "There is no reason," Harman writes, "to descend the slippery slope and posit a general relational ontology in which all things are utterly defined by even the most trivial aspects of their context."

That slippery slope might indeed be hazardous, but I'm not at all sure Cleanth Brooks and most of the New Critics descend it. I don't think Brooks really suggests that "all things" have equally important significance in our assessment of the poem's parts, merely that the parts have significance only when considering the whole as an "autonomous" creation. We can only enter the "gates" of the poem, as Harman describes the boundary markers of the poem's separate zone, once we acknowledge there are gates. Once inside, we might judge that some of what we find is more revealing or important, but I can't see why the argument for this sort of autonomy does other than indeed "open a space where certain interactions and effects can take place and not others." These interactions are what we choose to call literary interactions, which require that we attend to the way the "elements" of the poem work to make it a poem rather than, say, a newspaper article.

When a New Critic such as Brooks uses terms such as "harmony" or "balance," he is not asserting that they define the essential nature of a poem. These are terms of judgment, not ontological claims. Not all poems are harmonious or balanced, or succeed in "making" a poem out of the interrelationship of its language: far from it. Most poems (and most works of fiction as well)  are inharmonious and unbalanced, many all-too-eager to compete with science and theology in dispensing wisdom, in "saying something." Again it is the aspiration of poetry as understood by the New Critics—to contribute autonomous aesthetic "objects" to the world—that, in my view at least, ought to be honored. That the goal can't be reached metaphysically seems to me beside the point.

Harman's criticism seems accurate when directed toward the New Historical approach to criticism, which, as Harman does indeed point out, eliminates all boundaries and makes the literary text a thoroughly permeable excuse to consider everything else. The New Historicism at its most dogmatic seems to posit that, if a literary text is not autonomous, the only alternative is to turn it into nothing at all. Harman also considers the poststructuralist approach of Derrida, which Harman considers along with New Criticism and New Historicism the three main lines of contemporary literary criticism, at least in the academy. I have always considered Derrida compatible with New Criticism in their common emphasis on "writing" as a self-sufficient subject, not what the writing is about, but Harman's critique of Derrida here is cogent enough. If all writing is equally without moorings in some "deep" bedrock of reality, however inaccessible, then science and theology are indeed no different than poetry in their efforts to communicate about that reality, although I do have trouble understanding why Harman would say that Brooks "shares" with Derrida the inability to recognize that "the thing is deeper than its interactions." What "thing" is deeper than the poem? Some Platonic form of the poem?

Suffice it to say that Harman thinks all three approaches to literary criticism are inadequate for incorporating the insights of Object-Oriented philosophy. And I ultimately find myself in complete agreement when Harman declares that the "literary text runs deeper than any coherent meaning, and outruns the intentions of author and reader alike," a fact Harman believes too much current literary criticism ignores. However, it seems to me that he unnecessarily discounts the possibilities of the object-oriented approach by explicitly trying to sell it as "the next big thing" in academic criticism, displacing previous approaches destined to be ephemeral. If the literary text "outruns" intentions, it does so always, and a criticism focused on careful (if inevitably incomplete) description, without closing off interpretive possibilities, would always be relevant.

Harman is also right in noting that to "call someone 'a product of their time and place' is never a compliment; neither should it be a compliment when aimed at a literary work," suggesting further that we should attend to "how works reverse or shape what might have been expected in their time and place, or. . .how some withstand the earthquakes of the centuries much better than others." But I can't see how Harman's final proposal of a "method" for critics to try out either reinforces these insights or, finally, would lead to a method of literary criticism at all. “Instead of just writing about Moby-Dick," Harman writes,

why not try shortening it to various degrees in order to discover the point at which it ceases to sound like Moby-Dick? Why not imagine it lengthened even further, or told by a third-person narrator rather than by Ishmael, or involving a cruise in the opposite direction around the globe? Why not consider a scenario under which Pride and Prejudice were set in upscale Parisian neighborhoods rather than rural England--could such a text plausibly still be Pride and Prejudice?

This project is not an exercise in criticism but a further experiment in object-oriented ontology, a philosophical, rather than a critical, move. Harman seems to want to prove that OOO is correct, using the literary text as vehicle. How is this different from using the text to do politics or sociology?

Reclaiming Literature?

(This review originally appeared in Review 31)

Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History is a book with a provocative premise addressing an important subject that ultimately does justice to neither. North contends that academic literary study has settled into a stagnant and unavailing practice that aligns it entirely with  “scholarship’]” at the expense of  “criticism.” Further, the putative goal of this scholarship in a by now thoroughly politicized discipline – to act as a counterforce against the dominant neoliberal ideologies – is one that scholarship in its current form is actually unable to meet. Indeed, North maintains that the historicist/cultural studies approach that now dominates academic literary scholarship (to the virtual exclusion of nearly everything else) arises from and reinforces the neoliberal status quo and that only a return to criticism, with its greater attention to the aesthetic nature of literature, can in fact reorient academic literary study in such a way that it might have the capacity to “intervene” and effect real political and cultural change.

Unfortunately, North’s argument, as conveyed through his attenuated institutional history (the title of the book is misleading, since it offers a history of the shifting fashions in academic literary study, not a history – political or otherwise – of literary criticism per se) does little to clarify the stakes involved in distinguishing between criticism and scholarship, to explain exactly what North has in mind in his use of the term ‘aesthetic’ to identify the literary value currently absent in the dominant mode of literary scholarship, or what its presence would add. Nor does he specify how the ‘close reading’ he advocates would differ from the versions that in his account helped lead to the banishment of aesthetic criticism from the realm of literary study in the first place. Finally, North offers virtually no defense of the fundamental assumption of the book that literary study as an academic discipline has as an ultimate justification its role in achieving political transformation, in creating a more just world order. These flaws ought to be palpable to readers devoted to the “historicist/contextualist paradigm,” but those of us inclined to agree with North’s premise even before reading his book should be even more disappointed that he fails to make a case for the need to intervene in academic literary study to restore literary criticism to something like its formerly more central place.

It is possible, of course, to believe in the centrality of what North is calling “criticism” and not to care much whether it has a place in the academic study of literature at all, at least when such study is formally consolidated in an actual academic system. Criticism predates its inclusion in university curricula, and it will endure long after college professors have given up entirely on the notion that their interest lies in what was, after all, designated as ‘literature’ not that long ago – largely for the purpose of gathering together otherwise disparate forms of writing for ‘study’ in the first place. If criticism understood as the attempt to describe and assess a literary work in order to grasp and “appreciate” it as “literary” is no longer much evident in the academy, it continues to be practiced in publications associated with the general literary culture – it could be argued, in fact, that it is flourishing online in a way that itself begins to return to criticism some of the credibility it initially gained from its ascension to academic status but subsequently lost when its “subjectivity” was deemed too insubstantial to support a properly academic discipline devoted to the creation of “knowledge.” If the sort of criticism whose primary purpose is to measure the strengths and weaknesses of a literary work on its own terms, to register the critic’s informed but inevitably unhistoricized response, is not welcome in academe, that aesthetic sensibility and critical judgment continue to be cultivated by serious-minded writers about literature seems apparent enough in the range of critics featured in these publications, many of them writers clearly impatient with the pervasive expectation that mainstream academic journals will almost exclusively feature scholarship (according to North’s delineation of the term).

North is certainly correct that ‘academic criticism’ in the strictest sense is now literally absent from literary study at the highest levels. North contends that criticism was discredited not because of its inherent unsuitability to academic study but through its appropriation by the wrong sort of people, the sort who wanted to convert it into a convenient means for elevating their own tastes and in the process reducing criticism to a tool for determining the relative ‘greatness’ of writers and works of literature. This betrayal was performed by the New Critics (the great collective bête noire in accounts usually given by those eager to hasten the transition to the post-criticism era) in sympathetic concert with FR Leavis, who together took the strategy of close reading introduced by IA Richards and wrenched it out of the context in which the latter had developed it, thereby rendering it as the method of choice for the most conservative and elitist forces in the academic hierarchy. This is a very familiar story, retold by North in the usual condescending way, differing only in that he exempts Richards from blame, maintaining that his notion of ‘practical criticism’ was intended to ground the study of literature not in an autonomous text but in the full context of the reader’s cultural position. ‘Before anything,’ North writes,

Practical Criticism is an attempt to examine as precisely as possible the actual relationships existing between works of literature and their most important context: their readers. Once we have put aside the idea that Richards is an early New Critic, we can begin to see that he is concerned everywhere to put the text into some productive relationship to its context of reception.

It is entirely defensible to argue that Richards has never really been accurately identified as a New Critic, although his initial example in focusing close attention on the effects of a work (specifically poems) was a real enough influence on critics such as Cleanth Brooks and John Crowe Ransom. However, Richards’s approach is more appropriately understood in its correspondences with the philosophy of art advanced by John Dewey, which is similarly experiential and focused on the pragmatic – what is meaningful in works of literature is to be found in the reader’s encounter with the text, not the latter’s abstraction into an autonomous aesthetic object. Although North champions Richards as the potential source of renewal in contemporary literary study, it seems unlikely that Richards himself would have much approved of North’s use of his example to advocate for literary study as a site of political transformation. Richards believed that close reading could reveal cultural and psychological forces that should occupy the critic’s attention, but he hardly thought this attention would best be concentrated on narrowly conceived political interests. Richards’s own interest in the aesthetic extends to its effect on the reader’s whole sensibility (culturally-inflected, of course), and while he does not, as Dewey does, emphasize the particular qualities of the experience itself, Richards is surely not so instrumentalist that he regards the aesthetic quality of literature to be valuable primarily because it might help to subvert global capitalism.

That this should be the object of academic literary study is an axiom embraced by the current establishment that North does not relinquish, despite his analysis of the shortcomings of the present scholarly paradigm. Indeed, North spends much time throughout the book reassuring scholarly readers that he is a dedicated foe of neoliberalism, trying to convince those readers that a renewed commitment to the aesthetic is actually the better strategy for overturning the neoliberal order. It might be possible to imagine a generation of readers more intensively educated in the close reading of literature as way of becoming more appreciative of its values, coming to realize that those promoted by market capitalism are in contrast shallow and destructive, that instrumental ambitions are not the only kind possible, but this would ultimately entail that these very readers also reject the underlying assumption that Joseph North himself clings to in this book about the role of literary study, since it too in its current incarnation (which North wants to modify, not abolish) understands its ostensible subject, literature, in strictly instrumental, utilitarian terms.

In fairness to North, perhaps it is this immersion in the ‘humane’ qualities of literature that he has in mind as the source of literary study’s potential to bring social and cultural reform. However, if so, North never really clearly identifies the mechanism by which social or political action is a necessary consequence of a curriculum of literary study with aesthetic analysis at its core. Most of the book is taken up with an institutional anatomy, tracing the ascendance of the historicist/cultural studies model back to Raymond Williams, whom North credits with justifying the shift from criticism to scholarship, and examining several scholars who, originally scholars of the knowledge-producing sort, began to struggle against the totalizing dominion of the new scholarly model. They sought to escape it, if not back to the discredited modes of moral and formalist criticism associated with Leavis and the New Critics, then toward some different relationship with literature that acknowledges the possibility of relating to it as other than a conduit for cultural analysis. In North’s judgment, none of these attempts (by, among others, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Isobel Armstrong, and Lauren Berlant) managed to fully depart from the reigning paradigm (but, then again, neither does Joseph North), and so the task remains to find the means to finally do so.

Whether academic literary study manages to regain its focus on literature considered as literary art, separate from or in addition to its utility as a window on culture, is finally not a very interesting question in itself. As North additionally points out, academic criticism has evolved as a series of shifts from one favored method to another, united only by the conviction that the latest is the one true way to study literature. This is not likely to change even if aesthetics retakes the field and a new cohort of close readers emerges. That both aesthetics and close reading might remain relevant concerns to readers and critics is of more consequence, however much the original relocation of “criticism” to a home in the academy joined the two in a seemingly permanent association, so that whatever falls out of academic fashion must accordingly be disavowed more generally. Joseph North objects to the New Critics because of their reactionary politics and their elevation of favorite writers to the status of unquestioned greatness. But there is nothing about the kind of close reading introduced by the New Critics that necessarily entails right-wing politics, nor requires the creation of an imperious canon of great writers. “New Criticism” can’t be revived under that name – its reputation is no doubt inextricably tied to its founding figures, who did indeed distort the underlying precepts of close reading in ways that made the principle of ‘disinterestedness’ seem transparently hypocritical – but North’s book most usefully demonstrates, through the very contortions by which it seeks to identify an approach to literary study that allows for attention to “literature itself” but that is also politically acceptable, the extent to which the loss of focus on literature as first of all an object of aesthetic regard has itself left academic literary study floundering in its own self-imposed futility.

The Singularity is Near 

The very title of Derek Attridge’s The Work of Literature announces it as a deviation from what has become the usual sort of academic study of literature. No subtitle indicating that whatever work literature does for the critic is in the service of something other than itself? “Representation as Political Resistance”? “Style and the Cultural Determinants of Language”? Just the “work of literature,” in isolation from its historical and sociological context, as if such a work might actually be approached on its merits as, well, art, or some other reactionary, now discredited and outdated practice? Heavens to Betsy!

Attridge makes it clear soon enough that “work” in this book can be understood both as a way of identifying a poem or novel (“a work of fiction’) and as the labor involved in the work’s actualization (its “performance,” as Attridge has it). Still, the focus of his analysis is unmistakably on the experience of reading literature: “Can we do justice to literature?” Attridge asks. “More specifically, can we do justice to literature as literature when the institutions within which we engage with it—as teachers, students, researchers, and critics—exert constant pressure to treat it instrumentally—to reduce it to a set of rules, or a source of information, or a deployment of skills?” What complicates the attempt to do justice to the literary work (that is, if it is truly “literary”) is the difficulty of grappling with its “singularity,” the “particularity of the work’s power, intellectual and affective.” Singularity occurs not in fixed features of the text (which Attridge regards simply as the words printed on a page) but as an event, an “act-event,” Attridge’s coinage intended to capture the activity of both writer and reader. “Singularity” refers more broadly as well to literature as a whole, accounting for its “distinctiveness among linguistic practices, allowing us to appreciate what is different about a novel or poem in comparison with a letter, a factual article, an opinion piece, a sermon, a historical study, a scientific treatise, a philosophical argument, an after dinner speech.”

Attridge’s concept of singularity was first introduced and developed in his 2004 book, The Singularity of Literature, and he describes The Work of Literature as a supplement to that book and an extension of its argument. Fortunately, for readers unfamiliar with the earlier book, Attridge provides a recapitulation of sorts in the form of a self-interview comprising the first chapter of the new book. In this chapter the reader will learn not just what Attridge means by “singularity” but also how writers display “invention” to invoke “otherness,” the latter of which (although Attridge also uses the term “alterity” as a term for this) is for Attridge the defining feature of the reading experience, bringing to the reader’s awareness the absolutely different, something never before apprehended “because the modes of encounter made possible by the state of things. . .do not allow for it.”

. . .Otherness is not just out there, unapprehended because no-one has thought of apprehending it, or because it bears no relation whatever to existing forms of knowledge, but because to apprehend it would threaten the status quo.

“Status Quo” does not refer simply to the reigning political order but includes all existing categories of thought, cultural, psychological, or aesthetic. The disclosure of otherness represents for Attridge the singular value of literature (and to an extent, art more generally), taking the place of aesthetic beauty, moral suasion, or political enlightenment in other accounts of the efficacy of art and literature, not least because those kinds of value can be affirmed in many other, non-artistic endeavors and experiences. In the subsequent chapters, Attridge further pursues questions posed but not fully explored in The Singularity of Literature, especially the salience of the alternative approaches to literature that have dominated academic discourse over the last several decades and within the context of which Attridge’s theory must compete for recognition and respect. What is the proper role of the critic of literature? How does historical context shape our response to the literary work? To what extent does cultural difference affect our reception of the work?

Attridge answers all of these questions by maintaining throughout that literature’s singularity, for both writer and reader, is, while unavoidably conditioned by context and culture, always present to the reader approaching the work as an artistic expression, in fact must be present if the work is to be experienced as such. (Some works no longer afford this kind of experience, while others, not originally written to afford it, can begin to do so.) It is not that a work of literature can only be encountered in its singularity—all literary works can be read for many other purposes (as historical document, as cultural symptom, etc.). But Attridge insists that they exist as “literature” only when they are allowed to manifest in the “event” of conscientious reading open to the unknown and unexpected. Although he also repeatedly acknowledges that literary writing can be considered from other perspectives for a variety of motives, Attridge clearly believes that it is the transformative power of poetry and fiction that most warrants our attention to it, that, indeed, justifies creating the category of “literature” in the first place.

To illustrate how the various concepts employed in his theory might be applied, Attridge offers a number of close readings of specific works, from Emily Dickinson’s poem “As imperceptibly as Grief” to Alaa al-Aswany’s novel The Yacoubian Building (2004). These readings are uniformly effective in the context of this book, demonstrating both that Derek Attridge is a skilled and discerning reader and that terms of the theory as he defines them can indeed be coherently applied. But the very success of these readings in exemplifying Attridge’s own apprehension of literary invention and its revelations of otherness raise questions about how his method could be transferred to the formal study of literature. Arguably New Criticism gained the prominence it once had because the strategy of close reading proved effective not just in generating a distinctive kind of academic literary criticism but also in organizing a classroom in the still-developing discipline of literary study; however, for this strategy to really succeed, analysis should lead to conclusions that can be generalized, even if only toward a broadly shared “appreciation” that nevertheless is anchored in manifest features of the work at hand. Attridge’s mode of analysis discourages us from thinking that a literary work actually has manifest features to which all readers will respond in a similar way.

For Attridge, the “text” is simply the otherwise inert printing of words. The “work” is the text as brought to life by the reader, whose experience of its singularity is itself singular. Attridge speaks of the possibility that the teacher might “encourage and leave a space for the encounter with otherness,” but it scarcely seems plausible that a curriculum of literary study could be justified according to how felicitously it enabled its students to register the singular experience of reading assigned literary works. If the kind of close reading associated with New Criticism was ultimately discredited because the appreciation it was intended to foster seemed hopelessly indistinct as an object of knowledge, it is hard to see how the kind of approach implied by Attridge’s description of the reading experience would be perceived as rigorous enough to become a generally accepted practice. Indeed, however much notions like the “autonomy” or the “singularity” of the literary work (Attridge rejects the former as a denial of reality, it should be said) are legitimate names for the artistic integrity many of us feel a work of literature should be granted at some point in our consideration of its value, using the literature classroom (the literature curriculum more generally) simply to reinforce this particular value, the possibility of a potentially transformative experience, can’t finally be the solely sanctioned strategy for “teaching” literature. There is, after all, a difference between studying literature and reading it, and there would seem little need for formal programs in literary study if joining a book discussion group might work just as well.

That Attridge underplays the practical applications of his theoretical construct suggests he knows those applications are problematic. Thus The Work of Literature ultimately seems more preoccupied with ethics than with either pedagogy or aesthetics (certainly not formalist aesthetics), in the process locating the book comfortably enough in currently respectable academic discourse after all. Attridge’s precepts are expressed in unequivocally ethical language—“doing justice,” “responsible” reading—even in the final chapter recasting the activity of readers and critics as a form of “hospitality”: “effective hospitality to the literary work involves informing and energizing one’s conscientious, careful, rule-governed reading with the unlimited, unpredictable force of unconditional openness to whatever might arrive.” It would seem that for Attridge academic criticism can provide in its attentiveness and solicitude, its scrupulous accountability, a model ethical project, his book becoming an extended gloss on the ethical theories of Derrida and Levinas. Literature itself, it turns out, is most valuable in making this sort of ethical and reading and criticism possible, provoking the question whether Attridge doesn’t de facto stress the instrumental convenience of literature himself, prizing it more as a source of ethical reflection or inquiry (including the inquiry resulting in this book) than for its intrinsic value as aesthetic expression.

It might be said further that Attridge’s analysis of literary value and its embodiment in the event of reading, to the extent it relies on widely-accepted ethical concepts (“hospitality” is rather unconventional in its bearing on literary criticism, but the term identifies an attitude toward reading the ethical status of which is readily apparent) is also dubiously faithful to his own stated preference for a criticism that recognizes literature’s singularity, pursuing ends that could not be accomplished just as well using other kinds of illustration, other rhetorical means. Surely the ethical considerations that inform Attridge’s analysis could be explored in numerous contexts apart from reading poems and novels. If Attridge makes a good case for the singularity of literature as realized through the reading experience, his book itself serves as a less persuasive model, except in isolated flourishes designed to reckon with that singularity in its tangible expressions.

The most tangible element of a literary work’s artistic expression –its formal and stylistic features—would presumably correspond to what Attridge designates as “invention,” but just as (deliberately, it seems) he defines “otherness” as broadly as possible, he also does little to specify what characteristics constitute invention, or whether some forms of invention might be aesthetically superior to others. We can get some sense of how he measures it by looking at his sample readings, such as the discussion of Emma Donoghue’s novel, Room (2010) at the conclusion of Chapter 3. Attridge asserts that Donoghue accomplishes “something new” in her novel related from the perspective of a young child, but exactly what is new about it is never made clear. The novel is somewhat unorthodox in that the child’s at times opaque language is allowed to be the novel’s center of discourse, but that hardly seems an innovation, however much it does condition the reader’s perception of the story’s immediate circumstances. Ultimately the novel’s language and its oblique narration serve the fairly standard function (standard in contemporary fiction) of delaying the full revelation of setting (a single room in which the child and his mother have been imprisoned by a rapist abductor) and creating a kind of mystery plot. Donoghue’s invocation of her character’s verbal reality may be done skillfully enough, but that it represents some kind of advance over, for instance, The Sound and the Fury is not a sustainable claim.

Attridge’s case is not strengthened by the arguably circular reasoning employed in his elucidation of the connections among his central concepts: “A work that is inventive is necessarily one that introduces otherness and is singular; a work that brings the other into the field of the same is necessarily singular and inventive in its handling of the available materials.” The notion that a work of literature has managed to introduce something unprecedented and heretofore unknown because it is inventive in a particularly “literary” way seems perfectly sound, but when “otherness” is defined so loosely that the perception of it can only be subjective (“It’s ‘other’ to me!”) then invention comes to seem a rather indeterminate activity—since I feel the work reveals an unfamiliar subject or technique, it must be inventive because, according to Attridge’s formula, the two qualities always appear together. In his readings of passages from poets such as Milton and Wordsworth, Attridge is quite persuasive in showing how specific elements of these passages can lead to a recognition of invention, but when such features are irretrievably tied to the “act-event” disclosing otherness, it is not at all certain that different readers will respond to them with the same sort of faciltity.

However attuned to the subtle effects of literary language Attridge proves himself to be in his close readings, there is also a certain modesty to them, in keeping with his assertion that “a critical method should be no more powerful than is absolutely necessary for the task it is called upon to carry out.” Attridge explicitly poses such modesty against the criticism of someone like Christopher Ricks, whose considerable skills are “deployed to move, delight, and persuade” more than they are used to convey the critic’s direct experience of the work at hand. Attridge suggests that the critic instead pause to ask, “does what I am pointing out really matter in my experience of the works?” This seems at first a perfectly reasonable suggestion, but when “experience” in effect overrules the claims that might be made for the existence of more or less objective—or at least stable—features possessed by the literary text that predispose the reader’s experience, it merits further reflection. For one thing, the notion of “my experience of the works” here seems surprisingly static. Does criticism so easily capture that experience, as if recording a unitary reading, unalterable in its results? As a way, perhaps, of making the concept of “singularity” seem less absolute, Attridge stresses that it is subject to change according to time and circumstance, that a work can gain or lose it, so it is curious he would enjoin the critic against attempting to “move” or “persuade” the reader, to introduce critical matters that might, for example, modify and enhance some readers’ future experience of the work.

Even if we were to accept that the experience of reading can be regarded as something unified and discrete, how, finally, would we determine what “really matters” in an assimilation of that experience? Is it what matters to the integrity of the experience, or is it what matters in our attempt to do justice to the literary work itself? Perhaps Attridge would say there is no way to separate the two questions, since they are both answered in the affirmative and describe the same phenomenon. But for the critic’s attempt to be either just or unjust, the “literary work itself” must have palpable qualities that are not simply functions of the reader’s perception. There must be the possibility that some critics might do greater justice to the work than others, even the possibility that some critics might simply get it wrong. “Getting it wrong” is not something that applies to the act of reading taken purely as a psychological state; the retort, “That’s the way I read it” is impossible to counter with an admonition to read better, not unless it is acknowledged that the “text” exists as more than a rumored presence enabling the act-event of literature, that the singularity of literature begins in the writing, the very material medium through which all literary art is irreducibly given its form.

The Horizon of the Sentence

Ron Silliman begins The New Sentence (1987) with this unimpeachable claim:

. . .if we look to that part of the world which is the poem, tracing the historical record of each critical attempt to articulate a poetics, a discursive account of what poetry might be, we find instead only metaphors, translations, tropes. That these models have a use should not be doubted--the relationships they bring to light, even when only casting shadows, can help guide our way through this terrain. Yet their value stands in direct relation to their provisionality, to the degree to which each paradigm is aware of itself as a translation of the real, inaccurate and incomplete.

Such a pragmatic perspective on the utility of "poetics" (of literary criticism in general) seems to me the most efficacious way of encouraging open-ended debate about all questions relating to a subject so thoroughly contingent as what properly constitutes the "literary" qualities of literature. (I especially like Silliman's reference to "that part of the world which is the poem," which correctly emphasizes that a poem is a phenomenon in the world, not a reflection on or of the world that somehow transcends or detours around the merely real. A text is an element of reality, not just an opportunity to discourse about it.) It is admirable that Silliman's first words warn against taking his own poetics as the last words on the subject, but as a critic he has firmly-held positions nonetheless and they are positions that, in my view, cast all those who would disagree with them not just as mistaken but as fundamentally bad people.

Silliman next locates his approach as a critic by identifying himself with other poet-critics such as Pound, Olson, and Creeley, who were themselves situated "warily midway between the New Critics" and the "anti-intellectualism" that New Criticism provoked among "other sectors of 'New American' poetry." Although it seems to me that Silliman's criticism, both in this book and on his blog, has much in common with the close reading of the New Criticism, he is very harsh here in his comments about it, characterizing it as a "positivist" approach encompassing "an empiricist claim to transcendent (and trans-historical) truth." But the New Critics did not view poems as "empirical" evidence (the text) that would lead to a claim to "transcendent" truth (the critic's interpretation.) This is, in fact, a wholly mistaken representation of the New Critics' project: New Criticism was "empirical" only in that it insisted readers attend to the perceptible structure and actual language of the text, and the only "transcendent truth" it implied was that reading a poem was not a search for transcendent truth. Indeed, the burden of New Criticism was exactly to convince readers to read rather than interrogate poems for their unitary "meaning."

Silliman makes his disdain for New Criticism (or at least the conception of "literature" he thinks it represents) even more blatant by comparing it to Stalinism:

Necessarily. . .a poetics must be concerned with the process by which writing is organized politically into literature. It is particularly disturbing when, under the New Critics as well as Stalin, this transformation is posed and explained as though it were objective and not related directly to ongoing and fluid social struggles.

Certainly the New Critics were attempting an "objective" form of reading in that they believed a poem could be approached as a work of art with discernible features that could be identified by paying close attention--"dispassionate" is perhaps the term that might justifiably be used to characterize the attitude of the New Critics' ideal reader. And they surely did not have any interest in "ongoing and fluid social struggles" (at least where the analysis of literature is concerned) and would never have accepted that "a poetics must be concerned with the process by which writing is organized politically into literature." Silliman, of course, believes they were a part of such organizing nevertheless (a retrograde part), and in the first several essays in The New Sentence he undertakes to establish that indeed poetics is finally about politics, poetry "a form of action," presumably on behalf of those "social struggles."

These first few essays are aggressively Marxist in their declarations about the place of poetry. In "Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World," we are told that the transparency of language we encounter in much ordinary communication is part of "a greater transformation which has occurred over the past several centuries: the subjection of writing (and, through writing, language) to the social dynamics of capitalism."

Words not only find themselves attached to commodities, they become commodities and, as such, take on the "mystical" and "mysterious character" Marx identified as the commodity fetish: torn from any tangible connection to their human makers, they appear instead as independent objects active in a universe of similar entities, a universe prior to, and outside, any agency by a perceiving Subject. A world whose inevitability invites acquiescence. Thus capitalism passes on its preferred reality through language itself to individual speakers. . . .

Because poetry "is not only the point of origin for all the language and narrative arts" but "returns us to the very social function of art as such," it is in the best position to combat this commodification. Indeed, "perhaps only due to its historical standing as the first of the language arts, poetry has yielded less to (and resisted more) this process of capitalist transformation." But it hasn't resisted enough. According to Silliman, "The social role of the poem places it in an important position to carry the class struggle for consciousness to the level of consciousness."

By recognizing itself as the philosophy of practice in language, poetry can work to search out the preconditions of a liberated language within the existing social fact.

Despite the dogmatic tone of these passages, the underlying analysis of public language vs. literary language seems pretty cogent to me. Extending the analysis to fiction, Silliman notes that "the most complete expression" of the "invisibility" of language "is perhaps in the genre of fictional realism, although it is hardly less pervasive in the presumed objectivity of daily journalism or the hypotactic logic of normative expository style." Further, "it is the disappearance of the word that lies at the heart of the invention of the illusion of realism and the breakdown of gestural poetic form." That calls for simplicity of style and an emphasis on narrative--both in fiction and journalism--reflect an impatience with language as medium and the dominance of "message" is undoubtedly true, and the proposition that poetry especially represents an opportunity to "liberate" language from these constraints is one I can easily accept. But I fail to see why it is necessary to lay the blame for the crudity of public language specifically on capitalism, as opposed to the general human reluctance to pay attention to subtlety and nuance and willingness to accept the "preferred reality" of authority. Capitalism will get no propping up from me, but I can't see that it has uniquely invoked these human limitations.

Much of the logic of Silliman's poetics (as well as, ultimately, his own poetry) depends on the assumptions he brings about the "role of the reader in the determination of a poem's ideological content" ("The Political Economy of Poetry"). Silliman contends there is no "genuine" version of a poem, only those versions experienced by a particular audience at a particular time:

What can be communicated through any literary production depends on which codes are shared with its audience. The potential contents of the text are only actualized according to their reception, which depends on the social composition of the receivers. 

Again this is a defensible position, but again I fail to see that asserting reception is determined by "social composition" is to say anything very significant. At best it establishes that audiences and readers bring to the reception of poetry their life experiences and circumstances, but to make "social composition" into the kind of essentialized, metaphysical entity Marxists want it to be doesn't convert a mere sociological fact into a revelation. Similarly, to say that "context determines the actual, real-life consumption of the literary product, without which communication of a message (formal, substantive, ideological) cannot occur" seems to me little more than a truism, and belies the question whether "communication of a message" is the goal a poet ought to be setting for him/herself. It is the goal that Silliman is setting, although in his practice as a poet he does concentrate on the "formal" message, through which the substantive and ideological are finally expressed.

If in essays such as "Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World" and "The Political Economy of Poetry" (The New Sentence, 1987) Silliman contends that New Criticism (presumably he wants New Criticism to stand in for other varieties of formalism as well) puts too much emphasis on author and text in determining the "potential content" of the work, in my opinion he compensates for this failing by in turn giving over too much of the opportunity to "actualize" content to individual readers. Silliman is right to insist that the reading experience must include the reader as part of the process--the reader must be up to the task of apprehending the aesthetic qualities of the text--but in his determination to make poetry the servant of Marxist social reform, Silliman, at least in these theoretical essays, wants the reader's attention so thoroughly directed at the "meaning" a poem might provide that whatever aesthetic effects might accompany it are at best an afterthought, at worst regressive cultural baggage that must be discarded.

Silliman is not advocating for a crudely propagandistic kind of poetry, reducible to polemic and explicit "statements." Indeed, the meaning he wants readers to get from poetry is conveyed indirectly, through its material formal and syntactic procedures. Silliman believes (or at least this is what the Silliman of these essays, written twenty-five years and more ago, believed) that by frustrating the reader's ability to ready "hypotactically" (via transparent language and explicit connections made between parts of a discourse), the reader could be made aware of the way in which capitalist culture maintains its dominance through hypotactic communication. Thus both Silliman's poetry and that which generally came to be called "Language Poetry" employed instead a "paratactic" strategy, by which language refuses transparency and connections are denied (the former achieved mainly by the latter). The notion that parataxis might work to produce worthwhile poetry is far from outlandish (more on this in a later post on Silliman's The Alphabet), but while the disruption of expectations implied by Silliman's poetics could easily enough lead readers to a reconsideration of the assumptions behind conventional definitions of poetry, that this would in turn necessarily lead to increased skepticism about the machinations of capitalism is not a step in logic I can follow.

Silliman's most important exposition of his call for paratactic poetry, "The New Sentence," is largely free of Marxist rhetoric, and offers an account of what such a poetry might be like that even an apologist for New Criticism could take seriously. It is first of all a relatively straightforward and learned history of ideas about the sentence in both linguistics and literary criticism that demonstrates the potential of the sentence as an autonomous unit of language has not really been appreciated. Silliman also discusses a few precursor poets, such as the French symbolists as well as Gertrude Stein, who point to this potential but don't finally fully realize it.

The "new sentence," for Silliman, is one that "has an interior poetic structure in addition to interior ordinary grammatical structure." The "poetic structure" of the poem derives from the poetic structure of the sentences, arranged into paragraphs, a device that "organizes the sentences" but is "a unit of quantity, not logic or argument." In combination, this approach "keeps the reader's attention at or very close to the level of language, that is, most often at the sentence level or below."

Thus the notion of "language poetry," which in effect forces the reader to attend to the poem's language as it comes, not in relation to the "syllogistic movement" we ordinarily expect between sentences and through the poem as a whole. It is ultimately a kind of prose poetry, and, according to Silliman "the new sentence is the first prose technique to identify the signifier [language itself]. . .as the locus of literary meaning. As such, it reverses the dynamics which have so long been associated with the tyranny of the signified [that to which the language refers], and is the first method capable of incorporating all the levels of language, both below the horizon of the sentence and above. . . ."

Unless by "prose technique" Silliman means specifically techniques used in prose poetry, I really can't accept the assertion that the new sentence is "the first prose technique" to call attention to the signifier as an end in itself. Metafiction, anyone? However, the radical break with the inherited presumptions about what makes for "good poetry" is real enough. Still, as far as I can tell, there is nothing in Silliman's poetics that should alienate the most recalcitrant formalist (even a backsliding New Critic). One could easily conclude after reading "The New Sentence" that poets without the slightest interest in Marxist theory could adopt the new sentence as credo and produce potentially interesting poetry, a challenge to convention and ordinary ways of reading, yes, but not necessarily a challenge to poetry as an ongoing tradition. (Or to Western capitalism, although one could also imagine some readers making the connection between the two kinds of challenges that Silliman would like, pursuing the extra-literary implications of the strategy after engaging with it on a purely aesthetic level--in my opinion an appropriate reversal of Silliman's priorities that more suitably preserves the integrity of the literary text.)

Silliman's animus toward New Criticism is additionally unfortunate in that his own close readings of particular writers and their work are surely New Critical in spirit if not in fact. In The New Sentence, his essay on Jack Spicer, "Spicer's Language," is a very precise and ultimately very evocative analysis of one relatively brief Spicer poem (as well as, along the way, Ezra Pound's 84th Canto and a few additional Spicer passages). Granted, the burden of the essay is to show Spicer as an important influence on the new sentence, but I found it to be the best piece of commentary on Spicer's work I've read, typified by this sort of careful exposition:

Spicer's poem is composed in one stanza, written in what are ostensibly sentences, with a surface conventionality that extends to the capitalization of the letters at the lefthand margin. We have already seen the amount of tension which is set up in the first line ["This ocean, humiliating in its disguises"] by the irreducibility of the subject and its modifying clause to any single, simple envisionment. The leap to the second sentence is made before a verb occurs in the first. In being suppressed, this verb ("is"?) becomes yet another moment of an absent presence. And there are no less than five positions in the sentence which it could have taken, so that its absence (i.e., its presence) is not perceived at a single point, but instead floats freely, a syntactic equivalent of anxiety. Far more jolting to the reader, however, is that the two sentences to a degree that is nowhere possible in the Pound passage, appear to come from entirely different discourses.

The combination of detailed description and critical insight ("a syntactic equivalent of anxiety") is very satisfying, and here, as in similar readings posted on his blog, Silliman seems to me to exemplify a particularly scrupulous (and therefore all too rare) kind of literary criticism. While The New Sentence elucidates a poetics that affirms the active part played by the reader in locating the "potential content" of the poem, his critical readings nevertheless implicitly assert the importance of informed criticism, the existence of some readers who through skill with the "codes" always associated with attentive reading can help other readers overcome the limitations of their inherited codes and approach poetry in a more rewarding way.

It is indeed true there is no "universal" mode of poetry--no "normal poetry" from which anything else is an aberration--and it is also true that much conventional poetry, with its "normative syntax, classical metrics, and a deliberately recessive linebreak" requires "at the level of the reader's experience" only "passivity." (Although I can't accept the further complaint that this passivity means the reader "can only observe, incapable of action": observation is not what happens in our interaction with a text, only reading, which is itself a form of action.) Silliman's challenge to the universalist and passive conception of poetry is entirely well-justified and should not be dismissed. But it is literary criticism embodying universal intelligence that keeps the multifarious practices of poets from devolving into chaos, and Silliman's criticism participates in this stabilizing process. It is, after all, in critical writing such as The New Sentence and on his weblog that Silliman convincingly makes his case against universalist assumptions and passive reading. Yet the cogency of this case depends upon a reader willing to defer to a critic speaking in what can't be denied is a critical "voice" of manifest authority.

Literary Periods

There are some writers who are, and likely always will be, inextricably linked to the “period” with which their work is associated, and in many cases helped to define. Surely Wordsworth and Keats will always be “Romantic” poets, while Faulkner and Woolf will remain modernists, as the term “modern” has been fully appropriated to describe the historical era beginning just before World War I and ending with the coming of World War II (the 1920s in particular representing the truest efflorescence of modernism). Anyone who has taken a college literature course knows that the English department (and literary study more broadly) organizes itself using these sorts of historical designations, but this way of understanding literary history has become so pervasive that probably few readers regard it as an especially “academic” assumption.

In Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Context and the Prestige of English Studies, Ted Underwood proposes that such a view of the literary past—through “periodization”—ultimately does not in fact derive from academic literary study but from a more general perspective on history introduced by a popular source, the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott. Scott “was celebrated specifically for his power to recreate particularized historical moments in intimate social detail,” writes Underwood, “and the English professors who introduced period survey courses to universities in the 1840s modeled their new courses implicitly on Scott’s accomplishment.” Scott’s ability to “recreate particularized historical moments” somewhat paradoxically depends on the reader’s awareness of an essential discontinuity in history, a recognition that the past is fundamentally different, irretrievable by study or representation except through contrast with the present. “Historical contrast” thus came to seem the logical way to organize a curriculum in English literature, since works of the literary past (at the time the only works that might conceivably be taught) are presumably marked as well by historical variance.

Underwood’s book is valuable not least for the account it gives of the establishment of English literature as a university subject (at University College—then the University of London—and King’s College) in the 1840s, prior to the efforts to introduce English as a field of study chronicled by Gerald Graff in Professing Literature, otherwise the definitive history of the rise of “English studies,” particularly in the United States. Graff frames the debate about whether the study of vernacular literature should have a place in the university as between “philology” and “criticism,” with the advocates of the latter arguing that studying literature for its own sake is justified because it helps to cultivate critical reading skills, against the linguistic/historical approach of the former, whereby literature serves as a source for the study of the development of language per se. Underwood’s analysis shows that underlying the triumph of criticism was the organizing principle of historical periodization, which survived all of the changes of critical approach that have characterized modern literary study, from the initial dominance of New Criticism to its later supplanting by critical theory and cultural studies.

This certainly suggests that periodization has been useful to the academy, so much so that Underwood believes most academic scholars and critics simply take it for granted, and in fact often resist the idea that some other organizing strategy might better suit literary study. By the end of the book Underwood more or less concludes that it is indeed time for English departments to reconsider periodization as the curricular norm, but the primary burden of Why Literary Periods Mattered is to illuminate why literary periods did indeed matter, and why the period course continued to endure even though there were challenges to its dominion and the orientation of literary study toward its subject, literature, has changed rather profoundly.

The most logical alternative to organization by period would be an organization emphasizing continuity through genre, through “types” of literary practice, or through “issues” that arise across generic boundaries or even across nationalities. This sort of alternative was offered by “comparative literature” in its earliest manifestation. The comparatists, according to Underwood, “sought to explain continuous processes of development” and thus “challenged the whole underlying notion that literary study ought to be organized around discrete movements at all.” But comparative literature pretty quickly evolved into the discipline as we know it today, in American universities emphasizing literature in translation (at its most anodyne a vague sort of “world literature”). Soon enough comp lit courses were also being offered through periodization: “The literary curriculum was already organized around nations and periods. To gain entry to the curriculum, comparative literature generally had to borrow faculty from departments of national literature and adapt itself to a periodized structure.” Eventually, comparative literature became just as preoccupied with critical theory as English studies, managing to make it compatible with a period structure in both scholarship and course offerings. Underwood argues, in fact, that the view of history represented by a theorist such as Foucault actually accommodates itself quite nicely to periodization.

The real blow against comparative literature’s incipient challenge to historical periodization in the literature curriculum was struck by Rene Wellek, a supporter of New Criticism and himself a comparatist. Wellek believed that a literature curriculum needed to combine “critical evaluation” with literary history, and that periodization was the only way to do that. For Wellek, the challenge was to preserve a place for literary study that was distinctively literary, that did not simply loan out literature to approaches more interested in history or the study of culture more broadly. Underwood quotes Wellek’s expression of concern that

The study of everything connected with the history of civilization will crowd out strictly literary studies. All distinctions will fall and extraneous criteria will be introduced into literature, and literature will necessarily be judged valuable only insofar as it yields results for this or that neighboring discipline.

Wellek is essentially arguing that literary study, whose status within the modern research university was already precarious, could maintain itself as an academic discipline only if it remained self-evidently about literature. Once the study of literature had been admitted to the university curriculum, its integrity, Wellek believed, depended on avoiding “extraneous” issues that pointed away from “literature itself” to subjects properly belonging to other disciplines.

This is not an idle concern if you do believe that “literature” is a definable subject that includes an identifiable history of practice and a supply of important works, as well as provides a continuity of such practice so that it becomes more than just a collection of old texts but instead a “living tradition” to which students can be exposed (and perhaps some of them will eventually contribute). Whether the triumph of the comparative lit model would have had the effective of hollowing out literary study in the way Wellek describes is certainly open to question. That Wellek’s position prevailed as readily as it did suggests that scholars weren’t so eager to collapse the distinctions he wanted to reinforce, but even so the impression that losing sight of the autonomy of literature as an aesthetic form or special kind of moral reflection might eventually lead to the dissolution of “strictly” literary study into a hodgepodge of disparate approaches, often indeed moving into “neighboring disciplines,” was not ill-founded. Arguably this is exactly what has happened to academic literary study, even while periodization has otherwise continued to structure the curriculum. Wellek thus ultimately was wrong about the necessity of periodization for the preservation of “strictly literary studies”: organization by periods has made for a certain stability in course offerings and academic publishing, but it has by no means ensured that a focus on the kind of critical evaluation Wellek had in mind would continue to predominate.

We might even speculate that the “intrinsic” study of literature Wellek championed in his most famous book, Theory of Literature (written with Austin Warren) may have in fact been better served by a curriculum organized by literary forms or genres, with or without distinctions of nationality. To emphasize “historical contrast” is still to consider literature historically, and a field of study in which history weighs so heavily is going to foreground historical forces themselves to a degree that begins to make literary scholarship into a species of historical inquiry as much as, in some cases more than, it is a form of literary criticism. Likewise, the additional separations of nationality lead to analyses focused on social and cultural traits and tendencies that works of literature conveniently make visible. The beginnings of “American Literature” may have involved efforts to celebrate the Americanness of American literature, while later on the goal was more often to question and critique the cultural assumptions to be found in American writing, but ultimately both approaches are equally willing to reduce literature to its instrumental value in examining national character or disclosing cultural attitudes.

Wellek and the New Critics wanted to value literature for itself, and their preferred method of doing so, what came to be called “close reading,” practiced within the framework of periodization, appeared to give literary study its disciplinary identity. The scholar became the academic critic (although more traditionally “scholarly” activities continued to be carried out, in a kind of modus vivendi with New Criticism), with “critical evaluation” taking on a more elevated status in relation to the book reviewer or literary journalist. Yet even close reading could not finally be safely claimed as the defining method of “strictly literary studies,” as the proponents of critical theory, while otherwise rejecting New Critical notions of the literary text as “verbal icon” to be held up for appreciation, nonetheless retained close reading as their own strategy for drawing out political, historical, and cultural implications of literary texts (which were to be “interrogated” more than read). Because periodization still allowed academic criticism in this new mode to operate perfectly well—in some ways even encouraged it, since these implications work themselves out differently in different historical conditions—the period-centered curriculum largely escaped scrutiny.

Underwood believes that the increasing prominence of “digital humanities” signals the end of periodization, and he argues that the quantitative methods of digital data-gathering can provide literary study a new mission in which the goal becomes to “map broad patterns and trace gradients of change.” The most well-known proponent of the quantitative approach is probably Franco Moretti and his notion of “distant reading,” its very name suggesting that academic literary criticism has now fully severed itself from the kind of criticism Rene Wellek once advocated. Underwood acknowledges that the quantitative mode also probably means that the autonomy of literary study Wellek wanted to safeguard is no longer desirable or expedient, predicting that with the adoption of quantitative analysis “it becomes increasingly difficult to draw disciplinary boundaries.” For those of us who continue to believe the study of literature carries its own kind of value that has not been exhausted, perhaps the only possible silver lining in this rather cloudy prospect is that the final erasure of the disciplinary boundary that once gave definition to “literary study” will be complete enough that someone will again have the idea that literature might be an interesting addition to the college curriculum.

Literary Biography 

(This review originally appeared in Open Letters Monthly.)

 Near the beginning of his book, The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography, Scott Donaldson identifies what he takes to be the “central justification” of biographies about writers: “that knowledge of the life throws light on the work and vice versa.” This is no doubt a very common assumption, held by both writers and readers of literary biographies, and Donaldson apparently considers it so indisputable that nowhere in the rest of his book does he proceed to defend it, although surely it is a debatable proposition. What kind of “knowledge” of a writer’s life does a biography ultimately offer us? What kind of “light” is shined on the work, and is it really very helpful to us in reading the work with greater satisfaction? Why would we look for the work to cast light on the life, if we are reading the biography in the first place because of our interest in what the subject wrote?

To be fair, Donaldson is responding to what he perceives as hostility toward biographical inquiry in academic criticism, especially among those approaches that explicitly discount any and all considerations “outside the text.” Although Donaldson has maintained a long and successful career as a literature professor, it is nevertheless true that literary biography has never exactly been an esteemed practice in academic literary studies, the copious citations of such influential biographies as Leon Edel’s on Henry James, Richard Ellmann’s on James Joyce, and Joseph Frank’s on Dostoevsky notwithstanding. As the academy has shifted away from formalism and old-style historicism and instead adopted critical approaches—from deconstruction to “digital humanities”—that deemphasize the writer and focus more on impersonal forces outside the writer’s control, biography arguably has become even more passé.

Still, even if the biographer has struggled to gain acceptance for the form within the academy, the appeal of biography for many, perhaps most, readers is captured more accurately in Donaldson’s additional observation that “professional craftsmen” will persist in producing biographies “until human beings lose their curiosity about each other, and about the way they lived and loved and did their work.” It is telling that Donaldson refers to “work” last, only after the invocation of “human curiosity” is followed by the suggestion that our interest lies first in the way others “have lived and loved.” It seems a safe bet that the majority of those who read biographies, even literary biographies, are not scholars and students of literature but members of a more general audience motivated by the kind of curiosity Donaldson specifies. If these readers are not quite seeking enlightenment about the writer’s work but instead hope to find out about the lives and loves of writers (especially of certain more notorious writers, such as, say, Hemingway and Fitzgerald), it is not surprising that most biographies seem eager enough to furnish the latter and don’t always attempt to provide much of the former

 Donaldson’s own biographies, of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, as well as John Cheever and Edwin Arlington Robinson, among others, do make such an attempt, although his preferred method is to abstract an overarching theme from his subject’s life and apply this as a thesis in considering both the writer and the work. He characterizes the thesis with which he approached his Cheever biography, for example, as the notion that this writer “was a man divided against himself,” struggling to reconcile “bifurcations [that] split Cheever down the middle.” Donaldson elsewhere in the book tells us that “as a biographer I resisted the New Critics’ obliteration of the author,” but in his classroom activities he “embraced their insistence upon ‘close reading.’” Whatever close reading he does in his biographies (at least to judge by his description of them) is done in the name of advancing the thesis, in this case offering a unified but very general account of Cheever’s fiction. At best, the sort of “light” this kind of thesis-driven biography can muster is rather low wattage, and it still ends up offering more understanding of the writer than the work. The psychological context of Cheever’s work may be illuminated, but “close reading” here does little to elucidate the experience of reading Cheever’s fiction.

Of course, a biographer would counter, it is not the role of biography to focus on the explication of text so acutely. This is the job of literary criticism, practiced in tentative isolation from biographical investigation. If biography can be said to enhance the reading experience, it is by providing readers with information and perspective they can themselves apply if they find it adds to their enjoyment or appreciation of a particular work. But while it may be true enough that a certain degree of knowledge about a writer and his/her experiences and assumptions can sometimes give the act of reading the work a firmer foundation in fact and circumstance—indeed, can sometimes make reading the work effectively at all even possible to begin with—of what exactly does the “knowledge” gained by reading a biography consist? Does familiarity with facts—the author drank, relations with his wife weren’t so great, he lived in the same sort of suburb he wrote about—help us much in appreciating how the author has transmuted his experience into fiction, which is, after all, the distortion of fact, its alteration into something else?

 A common defense of literary biographies is that they do indeed help us to comprehend how writers have realized their ambitions, how literary art happens. (Donaldson does not claim this as a goal for his biographies.) But this admirable objective never seems to be reached. Even a biographer as indefatigable as Hershel Parker, with his encyclopedic knowledge of almost every moment in the life of Herman Melville, can really only chronicle the process by which a writer like Melville worked, not explain how this process rather than some other resulted in the sort of literary art we encounter when we read Melville. The biographer can tell us what the writer did, but not why it worked (or didn’t, as the case may be). Knowing what writers do may or may not be a valuable thing to know, but at some point it threatens to reduce the artistic process itself to the same tedium that reading about it frequently becomes. Perhaps admirers of Melville’s work inevitably want to know more about the circumstances of its creation. Surely, however, this is finally a satisfying supplement to the rewards of reading Melville’s stories, novels, and poems, not a condition of their fulfillment.

Biography as supplement is a perfectly worthwhile function nevertheless, even for a New Critic. Attend first to the work, then by all means learn more about the writer, his/her life and times. In the long run, it’s always better to know more than less (not only about literature). But there is little reason to believe that this is the use to which most readers put the biographies they read. If the most useful source of insight about a work of literature is criticism, it is hardly the case that most ordinary readers avail themselves of very much criticism, except for what can be found in the best book reviews (and of course we could ask how many readers take reviews that seriously). Since literary biographies continue to be written at a steady pace—and in fact the number of biographies taking still-living writers as their subjects has only increased—a reasonable conclusion is that there is a demand for these books, that a significant proportion of readers do indeed turn to biography, making it the primary form of discussion about literature among readers whose interest in books is more than casual. It is more common to find critics pondering whether the biography at hand is the “definitive” one to appear, comparing this one to that one, than it is a critic explicating a writer’s work in any but the briefest and most cursory way.

But can’t the criticism-starved reader turn to the nearest academic journal, where “serious” criticism presumably has a home? Unfortunately, such a reader would find little of interest there, not because of increased difficulty or narrowness of focus but because academic criticism is now as preoccupied with context over text as biography, although in this case the context concerns those political, cultural, and historical forces that shaped the text, or that the text makes available to us in a way that academic critics find more worthy of their attention than the work itself. At a time, then, when “criticism” is either unavailable or unappealing to general readers, biography de facto remains as the most visible kind of commentary about writing and writers.

It is to some extent true that biographies help maintain recognition for some writers whose work might otherwise fall completely into obscurity or neglect. Even writers whose work continues to be read are probably given enhanced consideration they would not have received absent the appearance of a biography. But the most serious problem with biographies is that finally readers cannot be sure they are being provided with what they are seeking from a biography, namely an accurately rendered account of the life that adequately captures the “truth” about the writer. Whether the life has been correctly represented or not is a question that must be settled before anything at all can be said about the relationship between the life and the work. Even readers more interested in a gossipy tell-all about a famous writer must trust that the gossip has some basis in fact or else the biography becomes indistinguishable from fiction, lessening the titillation of eavesdropping on someone else’s life. And there are those who would contend that biographies are indeed a form of fiction, by default if not intent. Donaldson quotes Louis Menand, who has written that “biography is a tool for imagining another person, to be used along with other tools. It is not a window or a mirror.” Donaldson himself warns that “we should be suspicious of enthusiastic reviewers who tell us that a biography has managed to capture its subject as a living and breathing person. And of books that sound too knowing, glide past gaps in the life, smooth over the rough spots. . . .”

 “All any biographer can hope,” according to Menand, “and all any reasonably skeptical reader can expect, is that the necessarily somewhat fictional character in the book bears some resemblance to the actual person who lived and died, and whose achievements (and disgraces) we care to learn more about.” Donaldson hopes for a little more:

. . . You cannot go inside another human being’s heart and head: agreed. You cannot reconstruct his bone and blood in a word portrait: also agreed. But it may be that if you are diligent and devoted, persistent and perceptive enough, you may come close.

We could take The Impossible Craft to be Donaldson’s extended brief on behalf of this claim. It attempts to show how in the biographies he and others have written, diligence, devotion, and persistence have contributed to works that (so he hopes) “come close” to revealing their subjects’ essential characters. The book seems addressed less to general readers of biography than to those who might take up the genre themselves, who might make the effort to reconstruct a life in a word portrait, making The Impossible Craft a kind of how-to book for aspiring writers.

Donaldson begins his book by providing a very brief history of the biography as a form, as well as his own path to becoming a biographer. Although he makes no generalization about the evolution of biographical writing, he does contend that biography in the 20th/21st centuries is now characterized by a no-holds-barred approach that assumes all “veils have been lifted, leaving no taboo subject,” and by a tendency to the “vast accumulation of detail.” Throughout the book, Donaldson endeavors to portray his biographies as more disciplined than this, although the condensed narrative he gives of his own discovery of biography as a vocation seems partly intended to suggest that biography belongs to no particular “discipline” in the academic sense, given the circuitous and serendipitous way he became a biographer. After an early career as a journalist, he pursued a Ph.D. in American Studies, which ultimately resulted in his first book, a study of the postwar American suburb (anticipating, as it turned out, his later interest in John Cheever).

Donaldson acknowledges that he did not plan to become literary biographer, and that “For a long time, I had no occupational plans at all, other than vaguely hoping to become a writer of some sort.” His academic career appears to have developed from equally vague ambitions as well, or at least from a much more favorable job market than today’s academic job-seekers face:

The university market was not yet overstuffed with doctored candidates and. . . I secured a post teaching American literature at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. There I could teach bright students—and myself—about great literature and take summers off to write material that would not be used, the following day, to wrap the fish in.

If Donaldson apparently taught himself “great literature” as he went along, he also taught himself biography (and it must be said that in his more extensive accounts of each of his biographies he is entirely frank about this), and at its best the book generously passes on what he has learned. The Impossible Craft does not offer a theory of biography, but a loosely linked series of reflections on the practice of biography as Donaldson has come to understand it.

The book couldn’t really be called an intellectual memoir, although parts of it certainly do recount both the accomplishments and the mistakes Donaldson can claim, in his biographies and in the process by which they were written. He examines biographies by other writers and the issues they raise as well, including the examples of iconic biographies by Edel, Ellmann, and Justin Kaplan. Thus ranging widely over biographical practice, Donaldson considers whether biographers are allowed to use their imaginations, why writers make especially difficult subjects, how much revelation is “too much,” what ways of interviewing subjects and witnesses work best, and how “involved” with the subject the biographer should be (is it necessary to “like” the subject?). None of these questions are answered conclusively, although Donaldson does indicate how he came to answer them in particular instances. On the issue of involvement, for example, Donaldson sums up what he has learned:

You begin writing a biography with love or at least a strong admiration for your subject, and with a complementary curiosity about what sort of person was able to accomplish such wonders. You do your dutiful yet often exhilarating research, discovering illuminating remarks and unexpected actions along the way. You read and reread and assemble boxes full of notes. Eventually the notes begin to fall into a pattern. You shape your book along the lines of that pattern, You hope to end with understanding. . . .

Ultimately we also do learn a good deal about Donaldson’s own subjects as well as efforts to write their biographies. Because of his outwardly colorful life (and inwardly conflicted one), Ernest Hemingway has been especially appealing to biographers. Donaldson both surveys the still-expanding series of Hemingway biographies (including his own) and focuses more intensively on the initial attempts by various writers to write about Hemingway’s life. This latter discussion, while interesting enough for what it reveals about the resistance writers like Hemingway put up to having their lives become the object of scrutiny (even when the scrutiny is not that intense), nevertheless diverts the reader’s interest from the art and craft of biography to the particular situation faced by Ernest Hemingway in a sufficiently protracted way that it often seems like a parenthetical digression, a pretext for Donaldson to augment his biography of Hemingway, as does the similar story of Zelda Fitzgerald’s putative affair with a French aviator in 1924, which is posited as a watershed event in the lives of the Fitzgeralds and in Scott Fitzgerald’s subsequent career as a writer but seems even more like an excursus into an episode covered in less detail in Donaldson’s own biography. Both of these sections of the book reinforce the weaknesses of Donaldson’s scattershot approach, so that it seems organized less informally than haphazardly.

The lengthy exposition of the fight forced on early biographers for full disclosure from family members and friends of the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson is also quite detailed, but here it does have the benefit of showing how a biographer such as Donaldson can benefit from such a fight after its participants have “faded from the scene.” The obstacles faced by the would-be biographers of Robinson also illustrate the special problems attendant on writing a biography of a living writer, or one just recently deceased, whose survivors are still very much around and consider themselves to have an interest in how the writer (and they) will be perceived. Donaldson addresses this dilemma more directly in the final section of The Impossible Craft, which presents a full report on his encounters with the Cheever family during and after writing his biography of John Cheever. This account is notable for its acknowledgments of the mistakes Donaldson believes he made, both in dealing with Cheever’s widow and children and in his interpretation of Cheever’s life (actually taking a too-forgiving view, he now thinks). Indeed, Donaldson intersperses his chronicle of what he calls “the Cheever misadventure” with extended passages he simply labels “Mistakes,” as in his interaction with Cheever’s daughter, Susan:

In retrospect I knew I should have said less and listened more. The putative biographer should keep his mouth shut and, above all, should not make any show of superior knowledge. When I talked about Cheever stories that Susan had not read, it led to “bad chemistry.” I’d offended her, she subsequently told a reporter, by acting as though I knew more about her father than she did and by “bragging” about research grants. So far as she was concerned, we were in competition, and it was a competition she did not mean to lose.

The story Donaldson tells has an undeniable fascination, as it opens the curtain behind which the biographer is pulling the levers that will produce a plausible image of the writer. But if Donaldson believes he got the trajectory of Cheever’s life wrong, does this mean he also in that book gave us an incorrect view of Cheever’s fiction? If the life throws light on the work, does this mean a flawed portrait of the life throws a distorting light on the work, or just leaves it in darkness? The ultimate disappointment of The Impossible Craft is that it doesn’t try to answer such questions. If Donaldson believes that the claim for biography as a critical tool doesn’t need defending, he is wrong. That biography in itself can enlighten us about a writer’s work is mere conjecture short of an explanation of how this happens and illustrative examples. If he can’t defend it because the “light” thrown on the work is too dim, then biographers like Donaldson should stop making the claim. It is understandable that he does not want his “impossible craft” to be associated with the sensationalism found in many biographies of “famous” people (a quality that is all too possible), but asserting a value to it that can’t be sustained does very little to substantiate that literary biography is “literary” beyond the fact that it takes writers as its subject.

 

 

Taken together, Mark McGurl's three books, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James, (2001), The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009), and Everything & Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon (2021) read like the author's attempt to perceive the entire "literary field" of the 20th and now 21st centuries in its fully visible totality. If the modern history of literary study in the United States, with the ascension of New Criticism, essentially begins in the close analysis of individual works of literature, the dominant approaches today, in books like McGurl's and the rise of "digital humanities," embrace distance and breadth, not critical rigor but scholarly amplitude, the ability (or at least the attempt) to "see it all."

The notion that to study literature is to contemplate a "literary field" is originally attributable to the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, who posited that literary activity constituted a dynamic system in which all of the participants--writers, critics, publishers--occupy a "position" in this system relative to each other, each with their own priorities, to some extent in competition with each other but also to some extent sharing the reigning assumptions, both commercial and literary, of their time and place. From the interactions of these players in the system vying for the rewards and prestige the system avails comes the literary work, and to fully understand the meaning represented by the work we have to locate it in the "field of power" from which it emerged. Literary values are not so much subsumed to commercial values as actually pitted against commercial values so that the capital at stake is not financial but artistic--"cultural capital."

I confess I have never been much able to appreciate a sociological theory of literature such as Bourdieu's. Mostly it just seems to recapitulate the obvious (in suitably academic jargon): writers are subject to the prevailing cultural forces of their era. (How could they not be?) Writing is not produced in a self-enclosed aesthetic zone scrubbed of social influences. (How could it be?) Of course Bourdieu himself as a sociologist was perfectly justified in examining the structural processes of what we so loosely call the "literary world," but his work as taken up by literary scholars has been used to ground literary study in "material" concerns and not just to dismiss the aesthetic value of literature as a hopelessly subjective interest but in general to imply that the aesthetic doesn't really exist apart from its determination by material conditions. In some cases this is accessory to (or excuse for) the politicization of literary study that is now a fait accompli, but ultimately marks the mutation of academic criticism into a sub-branch of sociology, a transformation that can only contribute to the final dissolution of academic literary study as a separate discipline. (Who needs a special focus on literature when it can easily be folded into social analysis more generally?)

McGurl does not dismiss the aesthetic value of literature, although he consistently refers to it as an "elite" preoccupation that has as much to do with status as it does with the actual experience or creation of works of art. The first book, The Novel Art, is ostensibly about the "art novel," which McGurl defines as a literary work intended as an object of art, not commerce, but this very ambition is treated with implicit suspicion, as just another form of accumulation, in this case the accumulation of prestige rather than money. In some ways, McGurl's books in fact favor the latter kind of gain over the former (especially in Everything & Less, where the prevailing tone is one of barely concealed admiration for the scale of Amazon's success, a sort of awestruck wonder at the canniness of Jeff Bezos), which at least has the virtue of being undeceived about its aims, unlike the writers and critics, who don't realize how thoroughly they are implicated in the commercial system they think they are resisting.

This attitude toward the aesthetic claims of both writers and "naïve" literary critics is not really peculiar to Mark McGurl, however. He is just participating in the discourse that current academic criticism has developed for establishing the superiority of the scholarly perspective on literary creation to the credulous assumptions of the creators and most readers. While certainly literary scholars have always been willing to display their learning and their "hermeneutic" skills, the first few contingents of academic critics by and large devoted such skills to elucidative interpretation or textual studies that assumed "new knowledge" (the traditional goal of scholarship) meant knowledge of literature as a self-sufficient object of attention, worthwhile in and of itself as a form of human expression. Gradually literature in academe has become instead the means for the scholar to assert other priorities, a convenient instrument through which to engage in various kinds of social, cultural, political, or theoretical analysis but not worth the scholar's time for mere "appreciation."

There are indications throughout McGurl's three books that he does in fact have appreciation for the aesthetic qualities of literature (or at least fiction, since discussions of poetry are completely absent from all three of the books), but even in The Program Era, in which American fiction as produced through the auspices of academic creative writing are accorded various degrees of praise for such qualities, McGurl's real focus of analysis is the creative writing system itself, which, he maintains, is something we should account for if we are to understand postwar American literature in "genuinely historical materialist terms." In his review of The Program Era, Fredric Jameson praises McGurl's account of this system, but cautions that his classification of the modes of fiction most central to the creative writing Program is somewhat unwieldy and that  "unless we somehow identify the aesthetic of production all three classifications share (their ‘autopoiesis’), the system, however useful or satisfying it may be, will risk breaking down into a series of empirical traits and characteristics."

Heaven forbid that literary criticism might retreat to the consideration of "empirical traits and characteristics"! Should it retreat far enough, critics might even find themselves focusing on the palpable traits and characteristics of individual works without regard to the system to which they putatively belong! At its most extreme, such a concession to the integrity of literary value could lead to the mere appreciation of literature, relegating literary scholars to the status of belletristic critics acting as arbiters of taste rather than learned exegetes and theorists rising above such purely subjective judgment. Or perhaps an enhanced respect for the empirical in the consideration of works of literature--the experience of the actual "traits and characteristics" a literary text offers--could begin to persuade academic critics that the interpretive frameworks assembled by most of the succeeding schools of critical thought that have emerged in literary studies over the past 50 years are themselves finally just fabrications, elaborate fictions created by professors not to aid in the interpretation of literature but to supplant it, to substitute the wisdom and insights of scholars for the incorrigibly undisciplined creative imagination.

These frameworks are just as susceptible, in turn, to the same ineluctable forces and unexamined assumptions by which literary scholars contend the expressive autonomy of works of literature is necessarily constrained. McGurl's sociological contemplations reach in Everything & Less perhaps their most intricate elaboration--although The Program Era is complex enough in the web of connections it makes between various postwar literary works and the conditions of creative writing instruction in American universities--and the book as a whole provides us less with an examination of the effect Amazon has had on the writing and distribution of books and more a phantasmagoric excursion through the generic and subgeneric wilderness Amazon has cultivated through its various self-publishing and eBook services. McGurl maintains that in surveying this scene--and no one should exactly envy his no doubt now near-encyclopedic knowledge of the terrain--he is offering the most authentic perspective on the current "literary field," since Amazon has so thoroughly colonized both publishing (through the dominance of the Kindle and through Kindle Direct Publishing) and bookselling. But McGurl as a critic seems as controlled by the prerogatives of capitalism as the fiction he discusses, confining himself to the popular, the commercially successful, the well-publicized. If much of this writing would not be called "mainstream"--either commercially or culturally--nevertheless the measure of its importance is its salience to the marketplace, not its artistic value.

Indeed, most readers whose interest in fiction has its source in the latter are not likely to find much to spark their interest in McGurl's book, aside from its sideshow qualities. It is doubtful that such readers really need to know about Dmitry Rus, author of the Play to Live series of "LitRPG" novels, or the "alpha billionaire" subgenre of romance novels, or that "there is a case to be made for self-published Adult Baby Diaper Lover (ABDL) erotica as the quintessential Amazonian genre of literature." While I'm willing to take McGurl's word for it that these ridiculous genres exist (although I'm less willing to concede they are part of "literature") and that the Kindle platform has both made them possible and amplified their popularity, I am dubious that, absent an effort like his to do such a comprehensive survey of Amazon's book-related services, that McGurl's intended audience (people interested in contemporary literature or in book culture more generally) are likely to regard such works as worthy of the attention of serious readers. From this perspective, the elaborate scrutiny of them and their part in Amazon's annexation of the literary field in effect itself assembles these texts and genres into a coherent account that hardly exists outside of it except as the discontinuous artifacts of Amazon's digital machinery.

McGurl contends that as the visionary demiurge who called this machinery into being, Jeff Bezos could be called the author of the novel that is Amazon--or at least that is Amazon's rewriting of the premises of fiction and the reading of fiction in the electronically networked world. But this conceit is again something McGurl himself invokes, as Bezos becomes the protagonist of the novel McGurl implicitly shadows into being through using the conceit. In this novel Bezos (as represented by his company) is the larger than life figure whose mighty deeds produce both emulation and resistance, with the latter finally only resulting in an unwitting version of the former. Finally no one can evade the reach of this figure's influence, and, while the nature of this influence can't necessarily be fully characterized as benign, most of those subject to it are satisfied with the service done.

Thus the title of McGurl's book: Amazon promises to offer us everything, which in the provision of books results in the proliferation of narrative genres and reading platforms, but when some writers and readers seek alternatives to Amazon's maximalist aesthetic, such efforts are inevitably tied to this system that makes them intelligible in the first place--and are still available on Amazon, of course. Needless to say, McGurl's classification of fiction as either maximalist or minimalist (the category under which he places most "literary fiction"), "epic" and "romance," reduces the current "literary field" to simple binaries that don't remotely capture the actual range of practices to be found in contemporary fiction, especially outside the confines of literary fiction as "just another genre" in McGurl's simplistic scheme. But then neither is this classification meant to be adequate to the needs of literary criticism per se, as opposed to those of literary critics assuming the role of "cultural critic" to contemplate not mere works of literature but the cultural circumstances in which they are embedded--an orientation by which the literary works disappear into generalizations and abstractions. "Maximalism" and "minimalism" as terms employed in McGurls's analysis thus tell us nothing at all about literature, only about the ways in which such terms can be obscured beyond any practical critical value they might have.

McGurl's adaptation of the terms really offers little specific insight into the tangible influence of Amazon on publishing and bookselling, either. Readers expecting from Everything & Less an examination of Amazon's business practices, its effects on the economics of publishing (especially as related to smaller publishers), or its transformation of reading practices beyond the expansion of genre certainly won't get it. At best McGurl takes Amazon's status as a provider of "service" at face value, preferring to look more closely at the peculiar kinds of commodities it has produced rather than the process of commodification itself. Although certainly books have long been treated as commodities in the capitalist system, Amazon has surely gone the farthest in discarding any pretense that they are anything but merchandise (even if they are merchandised as autotherapy). McGurl doesn't seem much perturbed about this: if its approach has amassed for Amazon a fortune in sales, it has also supplied the sociologically inclined literary critic with an overflowing source of material suitable for his scrutiny.

For all the sophisticated critical tools and close reading skills--and McGurl certainly does a sort of critical reading that effectively maps onto the texts he examines the interpretive scheme he employs --the results of his far-flung explorations of the literary wilds Amazon has cultivated seem rather unremarkable: American fiction during the time when Amazon has come to dominate publishing would appear to be very. . .Amazonian. Not only is it unsurprising that such might be the case, but we could also grant McGurl this conclusion, yet find it trivial. That works of fiction display the signs of the circumstances in which they are created is finally banal, even tautological. How could it be otherwise? How could an alteration of circumstances as consequential as the rise of Amazon (and of the internet that made it possible) not be registered, directly or indirectly, in the writing that ensues? Everything and Less provides us with a photograph of a literary culture adapting to a cultural development that directly affects its own means of existence, but the implication the book leaves that Amazon's presence has enacted some sort of permanent transformation of writing and publishing is surely subject to doubt. If it certainly appears that literary culture has for now fully assimilated itself to the internet, its currently hybrid print/online status hardly seems immutable, and Amazon itself scarcely seems immune to further technological shifts that would make it less relevant.

McGurl's account of the sort of fiction Amazon is making possible is useful, however, in showing us what the future of fiction might be like should Amazon continue to dominate bookselling and especially the self-publishing market, or rather the future without fiction, since in this future the novel would indeed be dead. No amount of special pleading on behalf of preposterous popular genres will make them worth taking seriously. Relegating aesthetically serious fiction to its own sickly genre will do nothing but ensure that it remains sickly. Writers still interested in the idea of literature will no doubt stubbornly persist in authoring texts that might represent some synthesis of poetry and what we now call fiction, but the processes delineated by McGurl in Everything and Less if they retain their hold will so thoroughly trivialize fiction as a literary form that all claims for the novel as the predominant incarnation of "literature" will seem passingly absurd, although at that point neither will there be literary critics to contemplate its demise. 

There are some writers who are, and likely always will be, inextricably linked to the “period” with which their work is associated, and in many cases helped to define. Surely Wordsworth and Keats will always be “Romantic” poets, while Faulkner and Woolf will remain modernists, as the term “modern” has been fully appropriated to describe the historical era beginning just before World War I and ending with the coming of World War II (the 1920s in particular representing the truest efflorescence of modernism). Anyone who has taken a college literature course knows that the English department (and literary study more broadly) organizes itself using these sorts of historical designations, but this way of understanding literary history has become so pervasive that probably few readers regard it as an especially “academic” assumption.

In Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Context and the Prestige of English Studies, Ted Underwood proposes that such a view of the literary past—through “periodization”—ultimately does not in fact derive from academic literary study but from a more general perspective on history introduced by a popular source, the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott. Scott “was celebrated specifically for his power to recreate particularized historical moments in intimate social detail,” writes Underwood, “and the English professors who introduced period survey courses to universities in the 1840s modeled their new courses implicitly on Scott’s accomplishment.” Scott’s ability to “recreate particularized historical moments” somewhat paradoxically depends on the reader’s awareness of an essential discontinuity in history, a recognition that the past is fundamentally different, irretrievable by study or representation except through contrast with the present. “Historical contrast” thus came to seem the logical way to organize a curriculum in English literature, since works of the literary past (at the time the only works that might conceivably be taught) are presumably marked as well by historical variance.

Underwood’s book is valuable not least for the account it gives of the establishment of English literature as a university subject (at University College—then the University of London—and King’s College) in the 1840s, prior to the efforts to introduce English as a field of study chronicled by Gerald Graff in Professing Literature, otherwise the definitive history of the rise of “English studies,” particularly in the United States. Graff frames the debate about whether the study of vernacular literature should have a place in the university as between “philology” and “criticism,” with the advocates of the latter arguing that studying literature for its own sake is justified because it helps to cultivate critical reading skills, against the linguistic/historical approach of the former, whereby literature serves as a source for the study of the development of language per se. Underwood’s analysis shows that underlying the triumph of criticism was the organizing principle of historical periodization, which survived all of the changes of critical approach that have characterized modern literary study, from the initial dominance of New Criticism to its later supplanting by critical theory and cultural studies.

This certainly suggests that periodization has been useful to the academy, so much so that Underwood believes most academic scholars and critics simply take it for granted, and in fact often resist the idea that some other organizing strategy might better suit literary study. By the end of the book Underwood more or less concludes that it is indeed time for English departments to reconsider periodization as the curricular norm, but the primary burden of Why Literary Periods Mattered is to illuminate why literary periods did indeed matter, and why the period course continued to endure even though there were challenges to its dominion and the orientation of literary study toward its subject, literature, has changed rather profoundly.

The most logical alternative to organization by period would be an organization emphasizing continuity through genre, through “types” of literary practice, or through “issues” that arise across generic boundaries or even across nationalities. This sort of alternative was offered by “comparative literature” in its earliest manifestation. The comparatists, according to Underwood, “sought to explain continuous processes of development” and thus “challenged the whole underlying notion that literary study ought to be organized around discrete movements at all.” But comparative literature pretty quickly evolved into the discipline as we know it today, in American universities emphasizing literature in translation (at its most anodyne a vague sort of “world literature”). Soon enough comp lit courses were also being offered through periodization: “The literary curriculum was already organized around nations and periods. To gain entry to the curriculum, comparative literature generally had to borrow faculty from departments of national literature and adapt itself to a periodized structure.” Eventually, comparative literature became just as preoccupied with critical theory as English studies, managing to make it compatible with a period structure in both scholarship and course offerings. Underwood argues, in fact, that the view of history represented by a theorist such as Foucault actually accommodates itself quite nicely to periodization.

The real blow against comparative literature’s incipient challenge to historical periodization in the literature curriculum was struck by Rene Wellek, a supporter of New Criticism and himself a comparatist. Wellek believed that a literature curriculum needed to combine “critical evaluation” with literary history, and that periodization was the only way to do that. For Wellek, the challenge was to preserve a place for literary study that was distinctively literary, that did not simply loan out literature to approaches more interested in history or the study of culture more broadly. Underwood quotes Wellek’s expression of concern that

The study of everything connected with the history of civilization will crowd out strictly literary studies. All distinctions will fall and extraneous criteria will be introduced into literature, and literature will necessarily be judged valuable only insofar as it yields results for this or that neighboring discipline.

Wellek is essentially arguing that literary study, whose status within the modern research university was already precarious, could maintain itself as an academic discipline only if it remained self-evidently about literature. Once the study of literature had been admitted to the university curriculum, its integrity, Wellek believed, depended on avoiding “extraneous” issues that pointed away from “literature itself” to subjects properly belonging to other disciplines.

This is not an idle concern if you do believe that “literature” is a definable subject that includes an identifiable history of practice and a supply of important works, as well as provides a continuity of such practice so that it becomes more than just a collection of old texts but instead a “living tradition” to which students can be exposed (and perhaps some of them will eventually contribute). Whether the triumph of the comparative lit model would have had the effective of hollowing out literary study in the way Wellek describes is certainly open to question. That Wellek’s position prevailed as readily as it did suggests that scholars weren’t so eager to collapse the distinctions he wanted to reinforce, but even so the impression that losing sight of the autonomy of literature as an aesthetic form or special kind of moral reflection might eventually lead to the dissolution of “strictly” literary study into a hodgepodge of disparate approaches, often indeed moving into “neighboring disciplines,” was not ill-founded. Arguably this is exactly what has happened to academic literary study, even while periodization has otherwise continued to structure the curriculum. Wellek thus ultimately was wrong about the necessity of periodization for the preservation of “strictly literary studies”: organization by periods has made for a certain stability in course offerings and academic publishing, but it has by no means ensured that a focus on the kind of critical evaluation Wellek had in mind would continue to predominate.

We might even speculate that the “intrinsic” study of literature Wellek championed in his most famous book, Theory of Literature (written with Austin Warren) may have in fact been better served by a curriculum organized by literary forms or genres, with or without distinctions of nationality. To emphasize “historical contrast” is still to consider literature historically, and a field of study in which history weighs so heavily is going to foreground historical forces themselves to a degree that begins to make literary scholarship into a species of historical inquiry as much as, in some cases more than, it is a form of literary criticism. Likewise, the additional separations of nationality lead to analyses focused on social and cultural traits and tendencies that works of literature conveniently make visible. The beginnings of “American Literature” may have involved efforts to celebrate the Americanness of American literature, while later on the goal was more often to question and critique the cultural assumptions to be found in American writing, but ultimately both approaches are equally willing to reduce literature to its instrumental value in examining national character or disclosing cultural attitudes.

Wellek and the New Critics wanted to value literature for itself, and their preferred method of doing so, what came to be called “close reading,” practiced within the framework of periodization, appeared to give literary study its disciplinary identity. The scholar became the academic critic (although more traditionally “scholarly” activities continued to be carried out, in a kind of modus vivendi with New Criticism), with “critical evaluation” taking on a more elevated status in relation to the book reviewer or literary journalist. Yet even close reading could not finally be safely claimed as the defining method of “strictly literary studies,” as the proponents of critical theory, while otherwise rejecting New Critical notions of the literary text as “verbal icon” to be held up for appreciation, nonetheless retained close reading as their own strategy for drawing out political, historical, and cultural implications of literary texts (which were to be “interrogated” more than read). Because periodization still allowed academic criticism in this new mode to operate perfectly well—in some ways even encouraged it, since these implications work themselves out differently in different historical conditions—the period-centered curriculum largely escaped scrutiny.

Underwood believes that the increasing prominence of “digital humanities” signals the end of periodization, and he argues that the quantitative methods of digital data-gathering can provide literary study a new mission in which the goal becomes to “map broad patterns and trace gradients of change.” The most well-known proponent of the quantitative approach is probably Franco Moretti and his notion of “distant reading,” its very name suggesting that academic literary criticism has now fully severed itself from the kind of criticism Rene Wellek once advocated. Underwood acknowledges that the quantitative mode also probably means that the autonomy of literary study Wellek wanted to safeguard is no longer desirable or expedient, predicting that with the adoption of quantitative analysis “it becomes increasingly difficult to draw disciplinary boundaries.” For those of us who continue to believe the study of literature carries its own kind of value that has not been exhausted, perhaps the only possible silver lining in this rather cloudy prospect is that the final erasure of the disciplinary boundary that once gave definition to “literary study” will be complete enough that someone will again have the idea that literature might be an interesting addition to the college curriculum.

Literary Biography 

(This review originally appeared in Open Letters Monthly.)

 Near the beginning of his book, The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography, Scott Donaldson identifies what he takes to be the “central justification” of biographies about writers: “that knowledge of the life throws light on the work and vice versa.” This is no doubt a very common assumption, held by both writers and readers of literary biographies, and Donaldson apparently considers it so indisputable that nowhere in the rest of his book does he proceed to defend it, although surely it is a debatable proposition. What kind of “knowledge” of a writer’s life does a biography ultimately offer us? What kind of “light” is shined on the work, and is it really very helpful to us in reading the work with greater satisfaction? Why would we look for the work to cast light on the life, if we are reading the biography in the first place because of our interest in what the subject wrote?

To be fair, Donaldson is responding to what he perceives as hostility toward biographical inquiry in academic criticism, especially among those approaches that explicitly discount any and all considerations “outside the text.” Although Donaldson has maintained a long and successful career as a literature professor, it is nevertheless true that literary biography has never exactly been an esteemed practice in academic literary studies, the copious citations of such influential biographies as Leon Edel’s on Henry James, Richard Ellmann’s on James Joyce, and Joseph Frank’s on Dostoevsky notwithstanding. As the academy has shifted away from formalism and old-style historicism and instead adopted critical approaches—from deconstruction to “digital humanities”—that deemphasize the writer and focus more on impersonal forces outside the writer’s control, biography arguably has become even more passé.

Still, even if the biographer has struggled to gain acceptance for the form within the academy, the appeal of biography for many, perhaps most, readers is captured more accurately in Donaldson’s additional observation that “professional craftsmen” will persist in producing biographies “until human beings lose their curiosity about each other, and about the way they lived and loved and did their work.” It is telling that Donaldson refers to “work” last, only after the invocation of “human curiosity” is followed by the suggestion that our interest lies first in the way others “have lived and loved.” It seems a safe bet that the majority of those who read biographies, even literary biographies, are not scholars and students of literature but members of a more general audience motivated by the kind of curiosity Donaldson specifies. If these readers are not quite seeking enlightenment about the writer’s work but instead hope to find out about the lives and loves of writers (especially of certain more notorious writers, such as, say, Hemingway and Fitzgerald), it is not surprising that most biographies seem eager enough to furnish the latter and don’t always attempt to provide much of the former

 Donaldson’s own biographies, of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, as well as John Cheever and Edwin Arlington Robinson, among others, do make such an attempt, although his preferred method is to abstract an overarching theme from his subject’s life and apply this as a thesis in considering both the writer and the work. He characterizes the thesis with which he approached his Cheever biography, for example, as the notion that this writer “was a man divided against himself,” struggling to reconcile “bifurcations [that] split Cheever down the middle.” Donaldson elsewhere in the book tells us that “as a biographer I resisted the New Critics’ obliteration of the author,” but in his classroom activities he “embraced their insistence upon ‘close reading.’” Whatever close reading he does in his biographies (at least to judge by his description of them) is done in the name of advancing the thesis, in this case offering a unified but very general account of Cheever’s fiction. At best, the sort of “light” this kind of thesis-driven biography can muster is rather low wattage, and it still ends up offering more understanding of the writer than the work. The psychological context of Cheever’s work may be illuminated, but “close reading” here does little to elucidate the experience of reading Cheever’s fiction.

Of course, a biographer would counter, it is not the role of biography to focus on the explication of text so acutely. This is the job of literary criticism, practiced in tentative isolation from biographical investigation. If biography can be said to enhance the reading experience, it is by providing readers with information and perspective they can themselves apply if they find it adds to their enjoyment or appreciation of a particular work. But while it may be true enough that a certain degree of knowledge about a writer and his/her experiences and assumptions can sometimes give the act of reading the work a firmer foundation in fact and circumstance—indeed, can sometimes make reading the work effectively at all even possible to begin with—of what exactly does the “knowledge” gained by reading a biography consist? Does familiarity with facts—the author drank, relations with his wife weren’t so great, he lived in the same sort of suburb he wrote about—help us much in appreciating how the author has transmuted his experience into fiction, which is, after all, the distortion of fact, its alteration into something else?

 A common defense of literary biographies is that they do indeed help us to comprehend how writers have realized their ambitions, how literary art happens. (Donaldson does not claim this as a goal for his biographies.) But this admirable objective never seems to be reached. Even a biographer as indefatigable as Hershel Parker, with his encyclopedic knowledge of almost every moment in the life of Herman Melville, can really only chronicle the process by which a writer like Melville worked, not explain how this process rather than some other resulted in the sort of literary art we encounter when we read Melville. The biographer can tell us what the writer did, but not why it worked (or didn’t, as the case may be). Knowing what writers do may or may not be a valuable thing to know, but at some point it threatens to reduce the artistic process itself to the same tedium that reading about it frequently becomes. Perhaps admirers of Melville’s work inevitably want to know more about the circumstances of its creation. Surely, however, this is finally a satisfying supplement to the rewards of reading Melville’s stories, novels, and poems, not a condition of their fulfillment.

Biography as supplement is a perfectly worthwhile function nevertheless, even for a New Critic. Attend first to the work, then by all means learn more about the writer, his/her life and times. In the long run, it’s always better to know more than less (not only about literature). But there is little reason to believe that this is the use to which most readers put the biographies they read. If the most useful source of insight about a work of literature is criticism, it is hardly the case that most ordinary readers avail themselves of very much criticism, except for what can be found in the best book reviews (and of course we could ask how many readers take reviews that seriously). Since literary biographies continue to be written at a steady pace—and in fact the number of biographies taking still-living writers as their subjects has only increased—a reasonable conclusion is that there is a demand for these books, that a significant proportion of readers do indeed turn to biography, making it the primary form of discussion about literature among readers whose interest in books is more than casual. It is more common to find critics pondering whether the biography at hand is the “definitive” one to appear, comparing this one to that one, than it is a critic explicating a writer’s work in any but the briefest and most cursory way.

But can’t the criticism-starved reader turn to the nearest academic journal, where “serious” criticism presumably has a home? Unfortunately, such a reader would find little of interest there, not because of increased difficulty or narrowness of focus but because academic criticism is now as preoccupied with context over text as biography, although in this case the context concerns those political, cultural, and historical forces that shaped the text, or that the text makes available to us in a way that academic critics find more worthy of their attention than the work itself. At a time, then, when “criticism” is either unavailable or unappealing to general readers, biography de facto remains as the most visible kind of commentary about writing and writers.

It is to some extent true that biographies help maintain recognition for some writers whose work might otherwise fall completely into obscurity or neglect. Even writers whose work continues to be read are probably given enhanced consideration they would not have received absent the appearance of a biography. But the most serious problem with biographies is that finally readers cannot be sure they are being provided with what they are seeking from a biography, namely an accurately rendered account of the life that adequately captures the “truth” about the writer. Whether the life has been correctly represented or not is a question that must be settled before anything at all can be said about the relationship between the life and the work. Even readers more interested in a gossipy tell-all about a famous writer must trust that the gossip has some basis in fact or else the biography becomes indistinguishable from fiction, lessening the titillation of eavesdropping on someone else’s life. And there are those who would contend that biographies are indeed a form of fiction, by default if not intent. Donaldson quotes Louis Menand, who has written that “biography is a tool for imagining another person, to be used along with other tools. It is not a window or a mirror.” Donaldson himself warns that “we should be suspicious of enthusiastic reviewers who tell us that a biography has managed to capture its subject as a living and breathing person. And of books that sound too knowing, glide past gaps in the life, smooth over the rough spots. . . .”

 “All any biographer can hope,” according to Menand, “and all any reasonably skeptical reader can expect, is that the necessarily somewhat fictional character in the book bears some resemblance to the actual person who lived and died, and whose achievements (and disgraces) we care to learn more about.” Donaldson hopes for a little more:

. . . You cannot go inside another human being’s heart and head: agreed. You cannot reconstruct his bone and blood in a word portrait: also agreed. But it may be that if you are diligent and devoted, persistent and perceptive enough, you may come close.

We could take The Impossible Craft to be Donaldson’s extended brief on behalf of this claim. It attempts to show how in the biographies he and others have written, diligence, devotion, and persistence have contributed to works that (so he hopes) “come close” to revealing their subjects’ essential characters. The book seems addressed less to general readers of biography than to those who might take up the genre themselves, who might make the effort to reconstruct a life in a word portrait, making The Impossible Craft a kind of how-to book for aspiring writers.

Donaldson begins his book by providing a very brief history of the biography as a form, as well as his own path to becoming a biographer. Although he makes no generalization about the evolution of biographical writing, he does contend that biography in the 20th/21st centuries is now characterized by a no-holds-barred approach that assumes all “veils have been lifted, leaving no taboo subject,” and by a tendency to the “vast accumulation of detail.” Throughout the book, Donaldson endeavors to portray his biographies as more disciplined than this, although the condensed narrative he gives of his own discovery of biography as a vocation seems partly intended to suggest that biography belongs to no particular “discipline” in the academic sense, given the circuitous and serendipitous way he became a biographer. After an early career as a journalist, he pursued a Ph.D. in American Studies, which ultimately resulted in his first book, a study of the postwar American suburb (anticipating, as it turned out, his later interest in John Cheever).

Donaldson acknowledges that he did not plan to become literary biographer, and that “For a long time, I had no occupational plans at all, other than vaguely hoping to become a writer of some sort.” His academic career appears to have developed from equally vague ambitions as well, or at least from a much more favorable job market than today’s academic job-seekers face:

The university market was not yet overstuffed with doctored candidates and. . . I secured a post teaching American literature at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. There I could teach bright students—and myself—about great literature and take summers off to write material that would not be used, the following day, to wrap the fish in.

If Donaldson apparently taught himself “great literature” as he went along, he also taught himself biography (and it must be said that in his more extensive accounts of each of his biographies he is entirely frank about this), and at its best the book generously passes on what he has learned. The Impossible Craft does not offer a theory of biography, but a loosely linked series of reflections on the practice of biography as Donaldson has come to understand it.

The book couldn’t really be called an intellectual memoir, although parts of it certainly do recount both the accomplishments and the mistakes Donaldson can claim, in his biographies and in the process by which they were written. He examines biographies by other writers and the issues they raise as well, including the examples of iconic biographies by Edel, Ellmann, and Justin Kaplan. Thus ranging widely over biographical practice, Donaldson considers whether biographers are allowed to use their imaginations, why writers make especially difficult subjects, how much revelation is “too much,” what ways of interviewing subjects and witnesses work best, and how “involved” with the subject the biographer should be (is it necessary to “like” the subject?). None of these questions are answered conclusively, although Donaldson does indicate how he came to answer them in particular instances. On the issue of involvement, for example, Donaldson sums up what he has learned:

You begin writing a biography with love or at least a strong admiration for your subject, and with a complementary curiosity about what sort of person was able to accomplish such wonders. You do your dutiful yet often exhilarating research, discovering illuminating remarks and unexpected actions along the way. You read and reread and assemble boxes full of notes. Eventually the notes begin to fall into a pattern. You shape your book along the lines of that pattern, You hope to end with understanding. . . .

Ultimately we also do learn a good deal about Donaldson’s own subjects as well as efforts to write their biographies. Because of his outwardly colorful life (and inwardly conflicted one), Ernest Hemingway has been especially appealing to biographers. Donaldson both surveys the still-expanding series of Hemingway biographies (including his own) and focuses more intensively on the initial attempts by various writers to write about Hemingway’s life. This latter discussion, while interesting enough for what it reveals about the resistance writers like Hemingway put up to having their lives become the object of scrutiny (even when the scrutiny is not that intense), nevertheless diverts the reader’s interest from the art and craft of biography to the particular situation faced by Ernest Hemingway in a sufficiently protracted way that it often seems like a parenthetical digression, a pretext for Donaldson to augment his biography of Hemingway, as does the similar story of Zelda Fitzgerald’s putative affair with a French aviator in 1924, which is posited as a watershed event in the lives of the Fitzgeralds and in Scott Fitzgerald’s subsequent career as a writer but seems even more like an excursus into an episode covered in less detail in Donaldson’s own biography. Both of these sections of the book reinforce the weaknesses of Donaldson’s scattershot approach, so that it seems organized less informally than haphazardly.

The lengthy exposition of the fight forced on early biographers for full disclosure from family members and friends of the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson is also quite detailed, but here it does have the benefit of showing how a biographer such as Donaldson can benefit from such a fight after its participants have “faded from the scene.” The obstacles faced by the would-be biographers of Robinson also illustrate the special problems attendant on writing a biography of a living writer, or one just recently deceased, whose survivors are still very much around and consider themselves to have an interest in how the writer (and they) will be perceived. Donaldson addresses this dilemma more directly in the final section of The Impossible Craft, which presents a full report on his encounters with the Cheever family during and after writing his biography of John Cheever. This account is notable for its acknowledgments of the mistakes Donaldson believes he made, both in dealing with Cheever’s widow and children and in his interpretation of Cheever’s life (actually taking a too-forgiving view, he now thinks). Indeed, Donaldson intersperses his chronicle of what he calls “the Cheever misadventure” with extended passages he simply labels “Mistakes,” as in his interaction with Cheever’s daughter, Susan:

In retrospect I knew I should have said less and listened more. The putative biographer should keep his mouth shut and, above all, should not make any show of superior knowledge. When I talked about Cheever stories that Susan had not read, it led to “bad chemistry.” I’d offended her, she subsequently told a reporter, by acting as though I knew more about her father than she did and by “bragging” about research grants. So far as she was concerned, we were in competition, and it was a competition she did not mean to lose.

The story Donaldson tells has an undeniable fascination, as it opens the curtain behind which the biographer is pulling the levers that will produce a plausible image of the writer. But if Donaldson believes he got the trajectory of Cheever’s life wrong, does this mean he also in that book gave us an incorrect view of Cheever’s fiction? If the life throws light on the work, does this mean a flawed portrait of the life throws a distorting light on the work, or just leaves it in darkness? The ultimate disappointment of The Impossible Craft is that it doesn’t try to answer such questions. If Donaldson believes that the claim for biography as a critical tool doesn’t need defending, he is wrong. That biography in itself can enlighten us about a writer’s work is mere conjecture short of an explanation of how this happens and illustrative examples. If he can’t defend it because the “light” thrown on the work is too dim, then biographers like Donaldson should stop making the claim. It is understandable that he does not want his “impossible craft” to be associated with the sensationalism found in many biographies of “famous” people (a quality that is all too possible), but asserting a value to it that can’t be sustained does very little to substantiate that literary biography is “literary” beyond the fact that it takes writers as its subject.

 

Literary Biography 

(This review originally appeared in Open Letters Monthly.)

 Near the beginning of his book, The Impossible Craft: Literary Biography, Scott Donaldson identifies what he takes to be the “central justification” of biographies about writers: “that knowledge of the life throws light on the work and vice versa.” This is no doubt a very common assumption, held by both writers and readers of literary biographies, and Donaldson apparently considers it so indisputable that nowhere in the rest of his book does he proceed to defend it, although surely it is a debatable proposition. What kind of “knowledge” of a writer’s life does a biography ultimately offer us? What kind of “light” is shined on the work, and is it really very helpful to us in reading the work with greater satisfaction? Why would we look for the work to cast light on the life, if we are reading the biography in the first place because of our interest in what the subject wrote?

To be fair, Donaldson is responding to what he perceives as hostility toward biographical inquiry in academic criticism, especially among those approaches that explicitly discount any and all considerations “outside the text.” Although Donaldson has maintained a long and successful career as a literature professor, it is nevertheless true that literary biography has never exactly been an esteemed practice in academic literary studies, the copious citations of such influential biographies as Leon Edel’s on Henry James, Richard Ellmann’s on James Joyce, and Joseph Frank’s on Dostoevsky notwithstanding. As the academy has shifted away from formalism and old-style historicism and instead adopted critical approaches—from deconstruction to “digital humanities”—that deemphasize the writer and focus more on impersonal forces outside the writer’s control, biography arguably has become even more passé.

Still, even if the biographer has struggled to gain acceptance for the form within the academy, the appeal of biography for many, perhaps most, readers is captured more accurately in Donaldson’s additional observation that “professional craftsmen” will persist in producing biographies “until human beings lose their curiosity about each other, and about the way they lived and loved and did their work.” It is telling that Donaldson refers to “work” last, only after the invocation of “human curiosity” is followed by the suggestion that our interest lies first in the way others “have lived and loved.” It seems a safe bet that the majority of those who read biographies, even literary biographies, are not scholars and students of literature but members of a more general audience motivated by the kind of curiosity Donaldson specifies. If these readers are not quite seeking enlightenment about the writer’s work but instead hope to find out about the lives and loves of writers (especially of certain more notorious writers, such as, say, Hemingway and Fitzgerald), it is not surprising that most biographies seem eager enough to furnish the latter and don’t always attempt to provide much of the former

 Donaldson’s own biographies, of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, as well as John Cheever and Edwin Arlington Robinson, among others, do make such an attempt, although his preferred method is to abstract an overarching theme from his subject’s life and apply this as a thesis in considering both the writer and the work. He characterizes the thesis with which he approached his Cheever biography, for example, as the notion that this writer “was a man divided against himself,” struggling to reconcile “bifurcations [that] split Cheever down the middle.” Donaldson elsewhere in the book tells us that “as a biographer I resisted the New Critics’ obliteration of the author,” but in his classroom activities he “embraced their insistence upon ‘close reading.’” Whatever close reading he does in his biographies (at least to judge by his description of them) is done in the name of advancing the thesis, in this case offering a unified but very general account of Cheever’s fiction. At best, the sort of “light” this kind of thesis-driven biography can muster is rather low wattage, and it still ends up offering more understanding of the writer than the work. The psychological context of Cheever’s work may be illuminated, but “close reading” here does little to elucidate the experience of reading Cheever’s fiction.

Of course, a biographer would counter, it is not the role of biography to focus on the explication of text so acutely. This is the job of literary criticism, practiced in tentative isolation from biographical investigation. If biography can be said to enhance the reading experience, it is by providing readers with information and perspective they can themselves apply if they find it adds to their enjoyment or appreciation of a particular work. But while it may be true enough that a certain degree of knowledge about a writer and his/her experiences and assumptions can sometimes give the act of reading the work a firmer foundation in fact and circumstance—indeed, can sometimes make reading the work effectively at all even possible to begin with—of what exactly does the “knowledge” gained by reading a biography consist? Does familiarity with facts—the author drank, relations with his wife weren’t so great, he lived in the same sort of suburb he wrote about—help us much in appreciating how the author has transmuted his experience into fiction, which is, after all, the distortion of fact, its alteration into something else?

 A common defense of literary biographies is that they do indeed help us to comprehend how writers have realized their ambitions, how literary art happens. (Donaldson does not claim this as a goal for his biographies.) But this admirable objective never seems to be reached. Even a biographer as indefatigable as Hershel Parker, with his encyclopedic knowledge of almost every moment in the life of Herman Melville, can really only chronicle the process by which a writer like Melville worked, not explain how this process rather than some other resulted in the sort of literary art we encounter when we read Melville. The biographer can tell us what the writer did, but not why it worked (or didn’t, as the case may be). Knowing what writers do may or may not be a valuable thing to know, but at some point it threatens to reduce the artistic process itself to the same tedium that reading about it frequently becomes. Perhaps admirers of Melville’s work inevitably want to know more about the circumstances of its creation. Surely, however, this is finally a satisfying supplement to the rewards of reading Melville’s stories, novels, and poems, not a condition of their fulfillment.

Biography as supplement is a perfectly worthwhile function nevertheless, even for a New Critic. Attend first to the work, then by all means learn more about the writer, his/her life and times. In the long run, it’s always better to know more than less (not only about literature). But there is little reason to believe that this is the use to which most readers put the biographies they read. If the most useful source of insight about a work of literature is criticism, it is hardly the case that most ordinary readers avail themselves of very much criticism, except for what can be found in the best book reviews (and of course we could ask how many readers take reviews that seriously). Since literary biographies continue to be written at a steady pace—and in fact the number of biographies taking still-living writers as their subjects has only increased—a reasonable conclusion is that there is a demand for these books, that a significant proportion of readers do indeed turn to biography, making it the primary form of discussion about literature among readers whose interest in books is more than casual. It is more common to find critics pondering whether the biography at hand is the “definitive” one to appear, comparing this one to that one, than it is a critic explicating a writer’s work in any but the briefest and most cursory way.

But can’t the criticism-starved reader turn to the nearest academic journal, where “serious” criticism presumably has a home? Unfortunately, such a reader would find little of interest there, not because of increased difficulty or narrowness of focus but because academic criticism is now as preoccupied with context over text as biography, although in this case the context concerns those political, cultural, and historical forces that shaped the text, or that the text makes available to us in a way that academic critics find more worthy of their attention than the work itself. At a time, then, when “criticism” is either unavailable or unappealing to general readers, biography de facto remains as the most visible kind of commentary about writing and writers.

It is to some extent true that biographies help maintain recognition for some writers whose work might otherwise fall completely into obscurity or neglect. Even writers whose work continues to be read are probably given enhanced consideration they would not have received absent the appearance of a biography. But the most serious problem with biographies is that finally readers cannot be sure they are being provided with what they are seeking from a biography, namely an accurately rendered account of the life that adequately captures the “truth” about the writer. Whether the life has been correctly represented or not is a question that must be settled before anything at all can be said about the relationship between the life and the work. Even readers more interested in a gossipy tell-all about a famous writer must trust that the gossip has some basis in fact or else the biography becomes indistinguishable from fiction, lessening the titillation of eavesdropping on someone else’s life. And there are those who would contend that biographies are indeed a form of fiction, by default if not intent. Donaldson quotes Louis Menand, who has written that “biography is a tool for imagining another person, to be used along with other tools. It is not a window or a mirror.” Donaldson himself warns that “we should be suspicious of enthusiastic reviewers who tell us that a biography has managed to capture its subject as a living and breathing person. And of books that sound too knowing, glide past gaps in the life, smooth over the rough spots. . . .”

 “All any biographer can hope,” according to Menand, “and all any reasonably skeptical reader can expect, is that the necessarily somewhat fictional character in the book bears some resemblance to the actual person who lived and died, and whose achievements (and disgraces) we care to learn more about.” Donaldson hopes for a little more:

. . . You cannot go inside another human being’s heart and head: agreed. You cannot reconstruct his bone and blood in a word portrait: also agreed. But it may be that if you are diligent and devoted, persistent and perceptive enough, you may come close.

We could take The Impossible Craft to be Donaldson’s extended brief on behalf of this claim. It attempts to show how in the biographies he and others have written, diligence, devotion, and persistence have contributed to works that (so he hopes) “come close” to revealing their subjects’ essential characters. The book seems addressed less to general readers of biography than to those who might take up the genre themselves, who might make the effort to reconstruct a life in a word portrait, making The Impossible Craft a kind of how-to book for aspiring writers.

Donaldson begins his book by providing a very brief history of the biography as a form, as well as his own path to becoming a biographer. Although he makes no generalization about the evolution of biographical writing, he does contend that biography in the 20th/21st centuries is now characterized by a no-holds-barred approach that assumes all “veils have been lifted, leaving no taboo subject,” and by a tendency to the “vast accumulation of detail.” Throughout the book, Donaldson endeavors to portray his biographies as more disciplined than this, although the condensed narrative he gives of his own discovery of biography as a vocation seems partly intended to suggest that biography belongs to no particular “discipline” in the academic sense, given the circuitous and serendipitous way he became a biographer. After an early career as a journalist, he pursued a Ph.D. in American Studies, which ultimately resulted in his first book, a study of the postwar American suburb (anticipating, as it turned out, his later interest in John Cheever).

Donaldson acknowledges that he did not plan to become literary biographer, and that “For a long time, I had no occupational plans at all, other than vaguely hoping to become a writer of some sort.” His academic career appears to have developed from equally vague ambitions as well, or at least from a much more favorable job market than today’s academic job-seekers face:

The university market was not yet overstuffed with doctored candidates and. . . I secured a post teaching American literature at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. There I could teach bright students—and myself—about great literature and take summers off to write material that would not be used, the following day, to wrap the fish in.

If Donaldson apparently taught himself “great literature” as he went along, he also taught himself biography (and it must be said that in his more extensive accounts of each of his biographies he is entirely frank about this), and at its best the book generously passes on what he has learned. The Impossible Craft does not offer a theory of biography, but a loosely linked series of reflections on the practice of biography as Donaldson has come to understand it.

The book couldn’t really be called an intellectual memoir, although parts of it certainly do recount both the accomplishments and the mistakes Donaldson can claim, in his biographies and in the process by which they were written. He examines biographies by other writers and the issues they raise as well, including the examples of iconic biographies by Edel, Ellmann, and Justin Kaplan. Thus ranging widely over biographical practice, Donaldson considers whether biographers are allowed to use their imaginations, why writers make especially difficult subjects, how much revelation is “too much,” what ways of interviewing subjects and witnesses work best, and how “involved” with the subject the biographer should be (is it necessary to “like” the subject?). None of these questions are answered conclusively, although Donaldson does indicate how he came to answer them in particular instances. On the issue of involvement, for example, Donaldson sums up what he has learned:

You begin writing a biography with love or at least a strong admiration for your subject, and with a complementary curiosity about what sort of person was able to accomplish such wonders. You do your dutiful yet often exhilarating research, discovering illuminating remarks and unexpected actions along the way. You read and reread and assemble boxes full of notes. Eventually the notes begin to fall into a pattern. You shape your book along the lines of that pattern, You hope to end with understanding. . . .

Ultimately we also do learn a good deal about Donaldson’s own subjects as well as efforts to write their biographies. Because of his outwardly colorful life (and inwardly conflicted one), Ernest Hemingway has been especially appealing to biographers. Donaldson both surveys the still-expanding series of Hemingway biographies (including his own) and focuses more intensively on the initial attempts by various writers to write about Hemingway’s life. This latter discussion, while interesting enough for what it reveals about the resistance writers like Hemingway put up to having their lives become the object of scrutiny (even when the scrutiny is not that intense), nevertheless diverts the reader’s interest from the art and craft of biography to the particular situation faced by Ernest Hemingway in a sufficiently protracted way that it often seems like a parenthetical digression, a pretext for Donaldson to augment his biography of Hemingway, as does the similar story of Zelda Fitzgerald’s putative affair with a French aviator in 1924, which is posited as a watershed event in the lives of the Fitzgeralds and in Scott Fitzgerald’s subsequent career as a writer but seems even more like an excursus into an episode covered in less detail in Donaldson’s own biography. Both of these sections of the book reinforce the weaknesses of Donaldson’s scattershot approach, so that it seems organized less informally than haphazardly.

The lengthy exposition of the fight forced on early biographers for full disclosure from family members and friends of the poet Edwin Arlington Robinson is also quite detailed, but here it does have the benefit of showing how a biographer such as Donaldson can benefit from such a fight after its participants have “faded from the scene.” The obstacles faced by the would-be biographers of Robinson also illustrate the special problems attendant on writing a biography of a living writer, or one just recently deceased, whose survivors are still very much around and consider themselves to have an interest in how the writer (and they) will be perceived. Donaldson addresses this dilemma more directly in the final section of The Impossible Craft, which presents a full report on his encounters with the Cheever family during and after writing his biography of John Cheever. This account is notable for its acknowledgments of the mistakes Donaldson believes he made, both in dealing with Cheever’s widow and children and in his interpretation of Cheever’s life (actually taking a too-forgiving view, he now thinks). Indeed, Donaldson intersperses his chronicle of what he calls “the Cheever misadventure” with extended passages he simply labels “Mistakes,” as in his interaction with Cheever’s daughter, Susan:

In retrospect I knew I should have said less and listened more. The putative biographer should keep his mouth shut and, above all, should not make any show of superior knowledge. When I talked about Cheever stories that Susan had not read, it led to “bad chemistry.” I’d offended her, she subsequently told a reporter, by acting as though I knew more about her father than she did and by “bragging” about research grants. So far as she was concerned, we were in competition, and it was a competition she did not mean to lose.

The story Donaldson tells has an undeniable fascination, as it opens the curtain behind which the biographer is pulling the levers that will produce a plausible image of the writer. But if Donaldson believes he got the trajectory of Cheever’s life wrong, does this mean he also in that book gave us an incorrect view of Cheever’s fiction? If the life throws light on the work, does this mean a flawed portrait of the life throws a distorting light on the work, or just leaves it in darkness? The ultimate disappointment of The Impossible Craft is that it doesn’t try to answer such questions. If Donaldson believes that the claim for biography as a critical tool doesn’t need defending, he is wrong. That biography in itself can enlighten us about a writer’s work is mere conjecture short of an explanation of how this happens and illustrative examples. If he can’t defend it because the “light” thrown on the work is too dim, then biographers like Donaldson should stop making the claim. It is understandable that he does not want his “impossible craft” to be associated with the sensationalism found in many biographies of “famous” people (a quality that is all too possible), but asserting a value to it that can’t be sustained does very little to substantiate that literary biography is “literary” beyond the fact that it takes writers as its subject.