The Reading Experience

The Absolute Horizon

"Why," asks James Draney at the beginning of his review of Fredric Jameson's latest book, Allegory and Ideology, "does Fredric Jameson’s interpretive method — his insistence that the political interpretation of texts constitutes the 'absolute horizon' of all meaning — still call for defense in today's academic scene?" I'm not sure it does require defense in the current "academic scene": It seems to me that Jameson's notion that political ideology "subsumes everything else in culture" has pretty much won the day. While a few academics periodically question the totalizing influence of this orientation to literary study (everything is politics), those challenges are unlikely to remove it from its position as the authoritative assumption of academic criticism any time soon. (It is itself the pervasive "ideology" among literary scholars against which no effective resistance can really be made.)

However, for those of us who are not obligated to defer to this critical doctrine (no tenure decision looms ahead), the answer to Draney's question actually seems pretty simple: the idea that there is no escape from the conceptual shackles imposed by "late capitalism," no alternative in our approach to reading works of literature to the exactions of "ideology critique," takes all the gratification out of reading, converts it into a dreary exercise in rhetorical self-congratulation for seeing through it all. If this is all we are to get from our engagement with imaginative literature, why bother? I already know what I'm going to find, so spending time with a literary work of any complexity or inventiveness seems pretty stupid.

Many of us, of course, think that the complexity and inventiveness are themselves the payoff, valuable for their own sake. According to Draney, though, to believe this is to succumb to the foolishness that that "there are areas of life and culture that somehow fall outside politics and ideology," something we are not to do with "a straight face." 

But it is possible to find this sort of gratification in reading literature, nevertheless. To do so, we don't have to believe "there is such a thing as an unmediated relationship to art, culture, Being." We can assume that of course no one can encounter a literary text in a state of radical innocence, freed of all previous exposure to the cultural presuppositions our life in the world in which we have been thrown has pressed upon us. How could we be? Why would we want to be? It is possible to find the act of reading works of the literary imagination to be itself an act of resisting the control of all ideologies, even if finally it can never be quite complete.

 

Their Own Approach to Book Criticism

At the Bookseller, Adam Blades, a "lecturer in Publishing," attempts to defend "celebrity tastemakers" (those with "book clubs") by making this claim about actual literary critics:

On the contrary, literary critics have rarely been objective. From Edgar Allen [sic] Poe to Elizabeth Hardwick, all promote their own approach to book criticism, injecting biases and agendas into their work.

On the face of it, these statements are conceptually incoherent. Of course literary critics are not objective, since criticism unavoidably involves interpretation and evaluation, and these are inherently subjective processes. Even that part of criticism requiring description is ultimately a subjective kind of description--this is the way the text works as I experienced it. And of course critics promote their own approach to the act of criticism since "approaches" to criticism are all we have. (Good critics are well aware of this, and do not  pretend their own approach is "objectively" the most appropriate.) In literary criticism, "biases and agendas" are just other words for "critical judgment."

Blades invokes "objectivity" in order to muster the usual attack on expertise or authority in literary criticism--all judgment is subjective, so no one's perspective can be valued above that of anyone else. It's all "mere" opinion. But not all critical opinions are "mere." Some are reached through sustained reflection and achieved through genuine insight. They can be defended because they are anchored in a  reading of the particulars of the work in question that is applied to a consistent overall explication intended to persuade other readers of its credibility. In other words, the critic's subjectivity is indistinguishable from the skill with which his/her "own approach" is exercised.

Such skill is grounded in an ability (perhaps a willingness) to pay careful attention to the "particulars"--the formal and stylistic strategies the work enlists to achieve its effects--and, ideally, a sufficient familiarity with the relevant literary history in which a work of prose or poetry is inevitably situated. The latter is usually the attribute of the professional literary critic that most induces populist resentment: isn't this sort of knowledge just an exercise in pedantry, an opportunity for the elitist critic to insinuate the superiority of his own impeccable taste? While a version of this criticism remains implicit in this writer's allusion to "biases and agendas," Blades instead suggests it is finally only the "flowery prose" to which such a critic resorts that separates the self-proclaimed literary critic from the celebrity book enthusiast.

While it may be true that too many reviewers substitute colorful phrasemaking for critical insight (although sometimes the phrasemaking succinctly embodies the insight, as in, say, the critical writing of William Gass), in my experience as a reader of reviews, the more frequent stylistic trespass is the constant invocation of the empty superlative (stunning! brilliantly original! glorious!), while the most common manifestation of an "agenda" usually involves not the promotion of a preferred critical method but the elevation of the reviewer through tedious reflections on the reviewer's own personal predilections and life circumstances.

Blades also cites a Harvard Business School study that, he says, found that professional reviewers are "less favourable to first-time authors, and rat[e] higher books that have already received media attention." It would appear that critics are harder on debuts than Amazon reviewers, while they are also more favorable to books that other critics have praised. The bandwagon effect is indeed a noticeable phenomenon in current literary culture, and it seems to suggest that whatever standards critics manage to sustain in reviewing debut authors strangely dissipate when considering the latest from established writers. If professional literary criticism does have a credibility problem, it is highlighted here, in this herd mentality and deference to the prerogatives of reputation--a cultivation of celebrity in its own way.