Better Texts

Graham Harman thoughtfully replied to my previous post on his article, "The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism," and I would like in turn to make a few comments about his response.

Harman thinks that my insistence the New Critics simply contended that the reading experience required no "context" outside the text to be fully satisfying fails to address "whether they sufficiently accounted for the context in their theory." But my point is that they did not need to "account" for context. At its core, New Criticism holds that my reading of poem X can proceed entirely without reference to context and still be a perfectly coherent and self-sufficient reading. It's not required that I do this, and to the extent the New Critics maintained it is, they were wrong. The true "logical consequence" of the "theory" of New Criticism is that context need not be considered in reading poems and novels, although it could be. However, since, as OOO itself tells us, context is always incomplete if not finally inaccessible, bringing in the context does not make for "better" or more thorough reading. Pragmatically speaking, the context-free reading is good as any other, and, since its purpose is actually to stick as closely as possible to the actual experience of the text as read, it's a more concerted effort to do justice to the "literary."

Thus the reading experience itself is really the only "context" the critic needs. Harman cites the "paradox" that New Criticism rejects "rules," but this isn't paradoxical. If one strategy works better here and another there, this is because they each occur in a different context--the context of reading that work or looking at that painting.

I do think of the literary text as a "holistic unit," but I don't think it "must be" taken as such, as Harman alleges. You can certainly think of it in some other way if you want, but if you're thinking of it as a way of validating a particular philosophical perspective, I really don't understand how it's different from thinking of it as a political document or a sociological "case." Nothing prevents you from doing this, and I can't plausibly say you're wrong to do it, but if the goal is to read literature more sensitively, I can't see how a "counter-factual literary criticism" accomplishes that. Perhaps we don't finally share the same goal, and if so, I'm fine with that.

I confess that when Harman says that "Not only do authors fail to master the infinite dissemination of their texts, they probably don’t even put the text in the right shape in the first place," the discussion has gotten altogether too mystical and metaphysical for me. If these authors actually "should have written better texts," then those texts must exist in some Platonic realm to which I neither have nor desire access. I still accept that OOO can be usefully applied to literary analysis, and for that matter I'm actually looking forward to reading Harman's new book on Lovecraft in which he apparently defends some of these more radical claims, but for now I'll stick to the text at hand.

 

Comments

[JL]

I’m reminded of the Borges idea that when we read something new it alters old texts, or our reading of old texts, such that Kafka gives new meaning to Shakespeare. From “Kafka and His Precursors”: “If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. This second fact is the more significant. In each of these texts we find Kafka’s idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist. The poem ‘Fears and Scruples’ by Browning foretells Kafka’s work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and deflects our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now.” … “The fact is that every writer creates his precursors.”
Borges then references Eliot’s Points of View: “His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”
Maybe another, though more pedestrian, example of this idea can be found in sewing the threads of three poems: Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” Hecht’s “The Dover Bitch,” and Biespiel’s “Dover Butch,” and the thread may go back to Marvel’s “Coy Mistress” and to Herrick’s “Virgins.”
Another way of putting this: no matter what our contemporary experience, we probably won’t be able to read, say, Langston Hughes’s poem “Harlem” the same way Langston did. Our experience changes his poem. The text moves as we move. Maybe this is why Melville’s “Moby Dick” failed in his own time while it is viewed as a classic in our time, even as that skews the meaning of the word classic as it applies to a book. Then, as for putting the text “in the right shape,” how can we possibly predict that, not knowing what will come next?

[Dan Green]

I think the idea that the new alters the old is actually Eliot's before Borges's.

[JL]

Yes, and Borges credits Eliot that, in his Kafka essay, but can we read Eliot the same way having now read Borges? Or, can we write Arnold's response to Hecht?

[Dan Green]

Eliot would agree we must read him differently after reading his successors.