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"Measure for Measure" by Jonathan Gottschall, Boston Globe 11 May 2008

In his recent article on the state of literary criticism, Jonathan Gottschall keenly perceives some of the field's real and pressing problems. He writes that contemporary literary criticism combines, "obsolete theory, inadequate methods, unbridled theoretical bias, and a spirit of surrender to 'unknowability,'" an apt description of the broad state of affairs. Yet his proposed panacea to these academic ailments, that literature must adopt scientific theory, method, and ideology, misses the mark. Science is neither a remedy for present nor an innoculation against future outbreaks of poor literary criticism. The remedy is not science but art. The two are essentially different modes of knowledge which both aim at truth, approaching it from different directions. The cure for literary criticism, then, must emerge from within its own discipline by a cultivation of the arts of language. (In an upcoming series of posts, I will be reviewing several books which attempt just such a cultivation.)

As evidence in favor of marrying science and literary studies, Gottschall cites two obviously tenuous yet nearly unanimous tenets of contemporary literary studies: a feminist reading of beauty as male dominance and the death of the author, a la Roland Barthes. He then demonstrates how science can debunk such soft thinking. To refute the notion of a "beauty myth" as male dominance, Gottschall cites his own scientific analysis of the descriptions of physical attractiveness in folk tales from around the globe. What did all that scientific analysis discover? "Female characters in folktales were about six times more likely than their male counterparts to be described with a reference to their attractiveness." Conclusion: the beauty myth does not say something unique about Western culture, but rather it says something about human nature. To refute the notion that the author is dead, Gottschall again cites his own work, an survey of "the emotional and analytic responses of 500 literary scholars and avid readers to characters from scores of 19th-century British novels." Conclusion: "rumors of the author's demise have been greatly exaggerated."

Based upon the examples Gottschall provides, we are meant to understand the value of this innovative cooperation between literary studies and the sciences. Such a partnership would end the "epochal loss of confidence" in American English departments that William Deresiewicz recently described. But for those of us who never bought into the conclusions of late 20th-century literary theory in the first place, its collapse is merely the inevitable result of its own shoddy construction, not a demolition project that we should contract out to science. The question is not how to demolish poor criticism; it is already crumbling under its own weight. The real question is whether literary critics can construct anything better, and I think Gottschall's own examples demonstrate that partnering with science is not the answer. After what I am sure was hours and hours of strenuous research, his scientific method produced conclusions that merely reinforce common sense: 1) Feminine beauty has its roots in human nature and is not merely a social construction, and 2) A reader's experience of a novel does not "vary profoundly from reader to reader." Is this the "new and durable" knowledge that science would offer us? Unless I were to blind myself to criticism prior to 1960, I fail to see anything new in Gottschall's examples.

I also fail to see anything durable either for the literary profession or for the broader culture. Consider the difference between an encyclopedia article on eagles and Tennyson's poem, "The Eagle":

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sky in lonely lands,
Ringed by the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt, he falls.

We have to ask ourselves whether at this cultural moment the average person needs Encyclopedia Brittanica more than Tennyson, i.e. factual description more than essence. If we choose the former, we will be left "a little disappointed, as though we had grasped the feathers of the eagle but not its soul. True, we have learned many facts about the eagle, but we have missed somehow its lonely majesty, its power, and the 'wild grandeur' of its surroundings that would make the eagle a living creature rather than a mere museum specimen. For the living eagle we must turn to literature" (See Perrine and Arp). Adopting scientific methods, theory, and ideology would provide scholars with verifiable data of a certain kind but at what cost?

Finally, literary criticism may, as William Deresiewicz suggests, be dying. But surely those who suppose themselves members of that field must also understand that a field is not always in harvest; sometimes it must lie fallow. If current literary scholars and teachers desire another literary renaissance, and not just more funding, we must remember the words of Martin Heidegger:

To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods. This is why the poet in the time of the world’s night utters the holy. This is why, in Hölderlin’s language, the world’s night is the holy night ("What are Poets for?" 94).

As with poets, so with literary critics.

We ought not merely to lament a poor harvest with our collective head in our hands. Instead, we ought to cultivate the soil by teaching the arts of language, namely grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Committing to such a recovery effort will mean less innovation and more repetition, less prestige and more perspiration, less research and more teaching. It will mean tilling soil and planting seeds, and it will mean only small profits from a harvest we will not reap fully. But it is nevertheless what must be done if the literary profession is to contribute to the broader culture and not just leech short-term gains from other supposedly successful disciplines in a faddist melee for relevance.

Later this week, I will review The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric by Sister Miriam Joseph, an example of the gritty scholarship combined with classroom application that I think literary criticism needs. It is a real alternative to the predominance of science, without the esotericism that Gottschall correctly identifies and rightly decries.

Review: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

I read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight last night before bed. It is a short book, first written down around 1400. The first and only other time I read Sir Gawain, in the 10th grade, I also ingested it whole, and after reading it a second time I am led to believe one should always read it in a single sitting. The tale still retains the original vitality which arrested me as a youth, compelling me to enter a world of chivalric knights, deeds of valour, and beautiful maidens. The Gawain-poet's delightful capacity for description makes that world even more alluring than it already would be for a young man remembering what it was like to be a young boy. For instance, the Gawain-poet portrays the Green Knight when he interrupts King Arthur's banquet:

For he was clad all in green, with a straight coat, and a mantle above; all decked and lined with fur was the cloth and the hood that was thrown back from his locks and lay on his shoulders. Hose had he of the same green, and spurs of bright gold with silken fastenings richly worked; and all his vesture was verily green. Around his waist and his saddle were bands with fair stones set upon silken work, 'twere too long to tell of all the trifles that were embroidered thereon--birds and insects in gay gauds of green and gold. All the trappings of his steed were of metal of like enamel, even the stirrups that he stood in stained of the same, and stirrups and saddle-bow alike gleamed and shone with green stones. Even the steed on which he rode was of the same hue, a green horse, great and strong, and hard to hold, with broidered bridle, meet for the rider.
The knight was thus gaily dressed in green, his hair falling around his shoulders; on his breast hung a beard, as thick and green as a bush, and the beard and the hair of his head were clipped all round above his elbows. The lower part of his sleeves were fastened with clasps in the same wise as a king's mantle. The horse's mane was crisp and plaited with many a knot folded in with gold thread about the fair green, here a twist of the hair, here another of gold. The tail was twined in like manner, and both were bound about with a band of bright green set with many a precious stone; then they were tied aloft in a cunning knot, whereon rang many bells of burnished gold. Such a steed might no other ride, nor had such ever been looked upon in that hall ere that time; and all who saw that knight spake and said that a man might scarce abide his stroke.

But aside from the sheer beauty and delight of reading this finely crafted legend, I was struck by the relevance of its moral teaching. In the story, Gawain repeatedly upholds the chivalric code, despite many opportunities privately to transgress and with no apparent consequences. Gawain acts in accordance with what he perceives is a divine order that compels him to remain virtuous despite any idea of "getting away with it." For Gawain and the Gawain-poet, there is no getting away with anything, not simply because God views our deeds, but because every deed is an extension of character. To be a knight is to act according to chivalry and valour; therefore, to act differently is to reduce one's being and, after death, one's legacy.
However simplistic this medieval sensibility appears to the modern mind, with its sophisticated notion (most poignantly expressed by Shakespeare) of the difference between appearance and reality, Gawain's troth, chivalry, and gentilesse still cry out for a people who cannot "smile, and smile, and be a villain."

Review: The Sacred Wood by T.S. Eliot

The Sacred Wood is a collection of literary critical essays by T.S. Eliot, a modern poet and new critical literary scholar. The single best essay is "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in which Eliot describes his organic understanding of tradition as an evolving order that adapts to incorporate new works:

The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist afte the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.

[Tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.

He also defines the individual talent, i.e. the impassive and keenly intellectual mind of the poet, as the necessary catalyst for the shaping of a work of art:

. . . my meaning is, that the poet has, not a 'personality' to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

The Sacred Wood also contains several fine essays by Eliot on Euripedes, Marlow, Rhetoric, Hamlet, Ben Jonson, William Blake, and Dante. In nearly every case, Eliot engages in a secondary critical debate esoteric to his time and discipline, but there remain enough moments of timeless brilliance to make the book worthwhile for any reader.