What I Do

[Preface i]
Right now I am reading PARADISE LOST, which is one of my favorite books, but I am in the middle of the most boring part, where the angel Raphael is explaining Ptolomeian astrophysics to Adam: Zzzzzz. Thus, time for a blog post!

[Preface ii]
The other day I was talking with a friend and our conversation wandered into the frontier where basically we were complaining that "no one understands us." This seemingly juvenile claim is probably the truth of existence. I am always shocked (shocked!) to hear people repeat back to me what they think I am saying, or hear descriptions of myself, etc. (Except in obvious cases where of course what someone thinks about me says everything about them and is therefore predictable.) And that all could be really petty. However, the very claim of "what I do" is that I understand things and their meanings. I think I "get" Dickens and Proust and Trollope, in a way that I probably don't "get" any person whom I actually know. My job is basically to express this understanding--and if this blog is any indication, my writing does not produce the same universal head-nodding as a novel.

In a way, then, criticism is a very sad thing. It takes something that everyone loves, like OLIVER TWIST, and turns it into something we probably can't all agree on, that we may even argue about. This all sounds very naive, as if the question of criticism were only, "What is XXXX book about?"

That is not what I mean, though. For me, the question of criticism is as follows.

[What I Do]
There are numerous criticisms. Let's name a few. New Historicism. Deconstruction. New Criticism. Queer Criticism. Post-colonial. Marxist. History of the book. Reader Response. And so forth. What one immediately notices when listing these schools is that a few are totalizing and others are partial. Queer criticism won't tell us everything about a work. New Criticism pretends to. This is a dialectic.

In life (which I separate from academia), I am a fan of all the questions motivating these schools. What history underlies a fictional work? Why is this work *good* or how does it mean anything at all? How should one teach it? What are its political implications or overt commitments? What can we learn from it about the central human question of sexuality? and so forth. As "interesting topics," they are all fine. They are not my topic.

I actually would like to play dumb as regards literature. New Criticism's question is something like, "how does this thing, literature, work?" My question is even more naive: "How is it this thing even is at all?" For me, "the thing" is the novel. The novel qua literature, and the great 19th century novels qua Novel. [An interesting project suggested by a recent conversation: what is the implicit formal criticism of the 19th century novel as seen by the development of the Modernist novel? There is, as Spivak would say, a "criticism-shaped hole" in the Modernist novel.]

Narratology approaches this question but does not ask it. Roland Barthes' semiological analysis (especially in S/Z, hands-down the critical work I admire most) asks it, but his answer is already its methodology.

What I am not interested in:
- thematic criticism. What a book is "about" or conspicuously *not* about. Edward Said's superb criticism of MANSFIELD PARK falls into the latter category, while ORIENTALISM into the former. [I love Edward Said. A source of infinite encouragement. His early book BEGINNINGS also approaches what I would like to do.]
- the topic of reading. First, criticism is already reading, and vice versa. Second, while I am with Kant on "we can only know our impression of things, not the thing itself", studies of reading can be weirdly sociological or beside the point of the individual text. Ie: what is the difference between reading LITTLE DORRIT and MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT? Probably not one that can be explained by the concept of "reading."
- the "bad" deconstruction of J. Hillis Miller. Really there is nothing more dated or embarrassing.
- discourse analysis/cultural analysis. A novel is not one writing among others. The novel, the Magna Carta, a politician's speech, an essay by Hannah Arendt, and a legal brief are not all the same. "Duh," you think. But I mean it. For one, as "discourse" one immediately runs into (Bakhtin's notion of) the dialogical discourse employed by the novel and NOT employed by these other forms [two different meanings of discourse here, but you take my point]. By "culture", I mean: "What Victorians thought about XXXX." The novel is both a limited, and it seems wrong-headed way to access these thoughts. The novel is SO individual. A "communal" form like the epic would seem much better for cultural analysis, although again, only quasi-psychoanalytically or imaginatively: what a culture fantasizes about itself.

That is what I don't do. A real failure to me is the recent book by Nancy Armstrong, "How Novels Think," which is a fine book, but the title is misleading [it is about historical ideas of the subject and individualism in the novel]--but how DO novels think? What are its elements? Genre, narration, character, plot, etc. We are a long way from having said all there is to say about these things. Take TRISTRAM SHANDY for instance. No genre. No plot. A paper I wrote about OUR MUTUAL FRIEND questions the limits of what counts as "a character" in a Charles Dickens novel. I just finished my MA thesis about the multiplicity of locations of narration in GREAT EXPECTATIONS. The closer we look, the more these banal categories which nonetheless form our conception of the Novel--the more insufficient they seem, the more they call for troubling and redefinition. And if Character and Narration are no longer stable terms, how can we then proceed to treat these works as thematically/politically coherent?

So, to blatantly pose Heidegger, before we do anything else with novels, we need to be able to say how it is that they ARE novels in the first place. What it means. *How* they mean. This may tend increasingly towards a "linguistics" of literature that would expand on Jakobson, Bakhtin, and Barthes. [Not yet how it is that "there are" novels in the first place, which probably belongs to a different discipline.] Not to take novels for granted, not to lose sight of their strangeness, not to forget that each one is its own world, and not to imagine that there ever could be an answer to this question. [Or, at least, an answer better than "prose fiction over a certain length.] This question needs to be historicized, indeed even the question has a history, and probably seems too vague without looking at specific criticism that I mean, but I think the question can be seen in Said (BEGINNINGS), Franco Moretti (ATLAS OF THE EUROPEAN NOVEL), Bakhtin, DA Miller (NARRATIVE AND ITS DISCONTENTS), Barthes (S/Z), Peter Brooks (READING FOR THE PLOT), as well as many works that approach the question more tangentially (Henry James' criticism, Fredric Jameson's POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS)--but certainly *not* in dissertations/books that take a theme and have 5 chapters on 5 novels taking up that theme. This appears to be the majority of graduate work, and although misunderstanding is built into understanding, I hope no one will ever misunderstand what I do to be a variety of that practice.

DAVID COPPERFIELD (or REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST, or PARADISE LOST) may be the greatest and most astonishing thing ever produced by a human mind. I'm not joking.

It is certainly not the business of the everyday.