Coriolanus, literary theory, bad fiction, literary utility, Grimms, shelves, Public humanities, dead novels, fictional therapy, Where is our Milton of the space age?, Austen's sisters, AI art

The irregular review of reviews, vol. XII

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Coriolanus

I am delighted to have written about Coriolanus for the journal Liberties, edited by Celeste Marcus. The essay discusses how everyone in the play has a hand in the bloody tragedy.

one of the lessons of Coriolanus is that our own passions, our own feelings, are part of the way the polity works. We cannot only blame our leaders, just as our leaders cannot excuse themselves with speeches about how they are not the authors of themselves. The determinism of Coriolanus’ tragedy runs deep — it comes out of his childhood and is rooted in the behavior of the populace.

I also discuss the play’s debate between authoritarianism and populism, including a discussion of Shakespeare as a grain hoarder.

Hazlitt thought that Coriolanus was a play in favor of authority because it gave all the most memorable lines to the tyrant himself — all of Shakespeare’s poetic power was invested in his cruelest character. And there’s some truth to this: Shakespeare is not kind to the mob. In Plutarch’s account of these events, the people are described as battle-scarred, but Shakespeare tells us they were of no use in battle. Indeed, the play focuses on the idea that Coriolanus has brought far more wealth to Rome through battle than the people have through labour. Indeed, one interesting question is why Shakespeare shows so little sympathy to the people in Coriolanus when their complaint is that the state has hoarded grain from them.

One answer is that Shakespeare was a grain hoarder himself.

Do read the whole thing.

How bad is literary theory?

I get it. I hated critical theory when I first encountered it because it was so boring and badly written. It uses impenetrable, clinical, technocratic jargon that takes forever to decode and understand. I figured that theorists used this jargon to conceal the fact that they weren’t saying anything at all. They were bullshit artists. As a first-generation student who was insecure and self-conscious about my own intellectual capacities, it felt satisfying to dismiss these pretentious snobs. The reason I couldn’t understand them wasn’t because I wasn’t smart or well-read enough. There was something wrong with them.

A persuasive argument in favour of reading literary theory, with some good discussion about the breadth of the term. I am “against” Literary Theory, but not literary theories. Literary Theory is Foucault and Derrida and post-structuralism and New Historicism and Terry Eagleton and all that jazz. Whereas literary theories are merely that: theories based on literature, such as were produced by Northrop Frye. The latter is good honest criticism, while the former is often self-referential and unliterary. I generalise and many good Theorists work alongside many uninspiring “traditionalists”. But we need to generalise to make some headway with this vexed topic.

The problems of New Historicism, for example, are that it took the Theory of Foucault as a starting point, rather than literature, and worked up an inconsistent set of ideas that were not very much about literature. D.G. Myers wrote,

We can yield the point that Elizabethan culture was patriarchal, or that those who serve ruling minorities desire secretly to see them toppled, and still go on to deny that A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Dürer’s sketch contain these meanings. If it is not self-contradictory for us to do this—if we can simultaneously grant an assumption and reject its interpretive significance—it follows that any interpretation grounded upon an unproven assumption about a work’s historical context is trifling, if not untenable. Only if a reader of a New Historicist argument is prepared to accept its a priori assumptions can its conclusions be accepted as true to history.

So much Literary Theory is like this: grounded on a set of ideas that all have to be assumed, but still highly declarative about what literature is and is not (usually, in the case of New Historicists, a means of discovering an ideology and little else). And the ideologies being discovered at work in the texts are always modern leftist bien pensant thinking. Once you declare that texts can hold many interpretative meanings, there’s very little internal contradiction involved in this, but it forgets common sense. There is always an appeal open from criticism to nature, as Samuel Johnson said. Or there ought to be.

If you want the rest of my thoughts about this vexed debate, along with the rest of the links, take advantage of the special offer and get 25% off.

This paragraph from Stefan Collini’s review of John Guillroy sums up one of the positions that is most important.

Guillory wants quietly to remind English scholars—his characteristic tone is quiet, even though the effect of his writing is both conclusive and devastating—of the value of their basic activity: that of extending knowledge and understanding of English literature. ‘The study of literature is a rational procedure for what can be known about an object’ (the literary work). This is a cognitive enterprise, and it centres on the study of writing that is ‘sufficiently wrought’ for the writing itself to be of interest. Put in that simple way, this may seem to beg all the important questions, yet it also points to an intellectual achievement that should not be disregarded. This doesn’t settle anything, for, as we know, justification is a never-ending game—‘Yes, but why is that important?’—but exaggerating the political consequences of what we do does not terminate that endless chain of questions and answers any better than any other claim.

The literary theories of people like Northrop Frye should not, to my mind, be counted as the same sort of enterprise as this sort of thinking. Nuttall’s distinction between opaque and transparent critics continues to haunt me. Literature works when you believe in it, and when you don’t it drops out from beneath you. Many practitioners of Literary Theory still do believe in literature, but man are more interested in their Theory. None of this is absolute, nor is this subject of huge interest to me, to say the least. But it is important. The true criticism must begin with the text and must resist the wholesale imposition of second-hand philosophies onto the methods of reading.

Christopher Rick is one of the best anti-Theory writers, and he inevitably draws on Johnson, the greatest of the untheorists, and the hero of this little blog of mine,

‘The task of criticism’ was, for Johnson, to ‘establish principles’, and he everywhere made clear that his refusal to elaborate and concatenate the needed concepts beyond a certain point (a point reached early) was not a refusal to continue to think, but a decision to think thereafter about the application of the principles rather than to elaborate principle into theory.

And this,

A fully-fledged theory is a philosophy; a fully-compacted principle is a proverb. Theory is hostile to contradictions; proverbs admit contradictions, and leave us only (only!) to decide which of two contradictory proverbs applies on any particular occasion. Principles, like proverbs, suppose that difficulties are more worth our attention than are problems; theory, like philosophy, is sure that once you have said, ‘What you must do is to admit that a problem exists,’ then what you must do is attend to the problem.

I suspect this subject is contentious mostly because of the way undergraduate degrees are taught. Literary Theory is often rather unliterary. It results, often, in a way of thinking that has much to say about philosophical and political ideas, but has already bound itself to a set of conclusions or methods, usually Marxist and the like, so that you get neither history nor literature in the common-sense understanding. An awful lot of the people you see talking about “late-stage capitalism” and the Problems of Modernity learned it all on literature courses, not on the courses where you begin with Plato. (Nor have they studied much economics!) And so what looks like a disagreement about literary subjects is in fact a disagreement about the ideas we are teaching to our children, hence the hot collars.

The literary disagreement, beyond the points I made above, are mainly that Theorists undermine the canon. I don’t care if people dedicate their lives to Derrida, or whoever, but I damn well do care if they go around calling Shakespeare a cultural artefact and denying his aesthetic power in the name of explicating ideologies. This was the Harold Bloom angle, and he became such a prominent figure in the culture wars because the diminishment of Shakespeare is a serious cultural affront for the nations of the English-speaking world. It amazes me that Stanley Fish and Terry Eagleton became so prominent and praised as they did.

We can only afford to be so careless with our civilization. Too many Theorists too often neglected that point, whereas civilization often sits at the heart of the Frye-type theorist’s work.

One reason this debate carries on is that the anti-Theory people often make terrible arguments and defend the unTheoretical approach to literature by talking about “the human condition”, which is an utterly vapid phrase, and, ironically, reduces literature to a mono-purpose enterprise. Stuck for an answer about what this book is about? Ah, the human condition! Phew.

If you believe in a Johnsonian criticism of applied principles, you not only need decent principles (i.e. not just “the human condition”), but you should actually get on and apply them…

To present an authentic alternative to Theory we need to be able to discover what Theory is good for, and provide an alternative (preferably synthetic) practice: we need to extend the tradition of Johnson and Ricks. The challenge is to have done enough reading, to be adept enough at improving opinion into knowledge, to be able to make literature seem worthy not because of this disagreement, but for its own sake, as a central part of the intellectual and emotional life of civilization.

I intend to carry on reading some of those works classed as “Theory” at least the ones I can manage, and which don’t go full Catherine Belsey. Wherever a better understanding of literature can be found, we should be eager to inquire.

Literary fiction is bad

Most writers understand that although there are a few tricks you can use to create the impression that you’re extremely talented, these tricks should be used sparingly. Most writers aim for the minimum possible amount of manipulation—just enough to get published, and then no more. And most writers attempt over time to dial down their manipulation. And that is precisely why most writers are not successes.

The great failing of most mediocre fiction (or indeed of any sort of writing) results from the author not realising that style always has a moral purpose. This can sometimes confound the intellectual aesthetes, who don’t realise that style for its own sake can be either serious and sublime, or merely vapid. The more closely you look at Martin Amis’s prose, the more you realise that he is closer to P.G. Wodehouse than Vladimir Nabokov. His style is its own moral purpose, not in the highest aesthetic sense, but because he wants to make clever jokes. Johnson asked what Swift contributed to style, but he missed the fact that Swift’s plain style was well suited to his moral purpose, which was to be a hypocrite reversed. Rooney’s critics often decline to think of her work in these terms, for example. Isaac Kolding is surely right that modern criticism has often preferred moral ambiguity to clarity, and that is perhaps the source of this confused idea among certain novelists that style merely as style is all that matters, which itself is merely a debased version of the Keatsian-Wildean proposition.

The utility of literature

This is a subject close to my heart and I am a fan of Daisy Christodoulou so I was very pleased to see her writing about this. Preach it!

However, if we often neglect the beauty of maths, we can also be guilty of the opposite error: neglecting the utility of literature. I hear stories of smart, motivated and hard working graduates who turn up in prestigious graduate roles and say why do I need to read? Can't I get everything I need from podcasts and videos? In a purely utilitarian sense, no. Podcasts and videos are less efficient methods of transmitting information. Just as a useful equation is also beautiful, a beautiful sentence is also useful in the way it can efficiently transmit information across time and space. This communication function of reading and writing is well understood. But there is also another function of literacy which is equally important, but perhaps less well understood, which is the ability of literacy to extend thought.  Even if you never write for an external audience, writing allows you to extend your own thoughts beyond the limitation of puny working memory.  This is one the reasons literate societies are bigger and more complex than pre-literate societies. It is also a reason why we cannot rely on artificial intelligence to do the writing for us, because to outsource our writing is to outsource our thinking.

Real-life fairy tales?

In 1796, Philipp, only forty-four years old, succumbed to pneumonia. Jacob later recalled seeing his father’s body being measured for a coffin. Dorothea and her children were ordered to clear out. Without Philipp’s income, they were forced for a time to shelter in an almshouse just next door—cursed with a view of their former home and the courtyard where they once played, happily, until what came after.

Jacob and Wilhelm, the Brothers Grimm, experienced the kind of sharp reversal of fortune characteristic of the genre that became synonymous with their name: the fairy tale.

That’s from the New Yorker review of the new biography. Also this,

For the Grimms, what mattered was to be authentic, not appropriate, and fairy tales, across many literary traditions, weren’t always intended for children. According to the scholar Maria Tatar, these were folktales shared among adults after hours, while the children were asleep. She cites a French version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” in which the big bad wolf has designs on the little girl that are not gastronomical. In that version, she does what amounts to a striptease, peeling off her clothes as the disguised wolf watches from the bed, giving fresher context to “What big hands you have!”

Shelves for rent in bookstores

“Regular bookstores sell books that are popular based on sales statistics while excluding books that don’t sell well,” says Imamura, who also writes novels about warring samurai in Japan’s feudal era.

“We ignore such principles. Or capitalism in other words,” he says. “I want to reconstruct bookstores.”

What do these people think capitalism is?

Public humanities

Devoney Looser on Twitter: “A new open-access journal, Public Humanities, has launched. I'm proud to have a piece in the inaugural "Manifesto" issue, on "The Necessity of Public Writing." I hope academo-friends will read, circulate, propose, and submit.” Looser’s piece is excellent, and there’s an excerpt below, but why not publish it on Substack? (Any academics who want to write for a public audience, get in touch. I have hosted essays by scholars before and am very happy to do so again.)

Not every attempt will be a success. It’s important to acknowledge that public writing sometimes ends up feeling like it was wasted time, without positive, visible, or measurable results. I’ve certainly produced public-facing writing that appeared to fall entirely flat, failing to connect with people or groups I hoped might care. (Of course, scholarly articles may land with a greater thud, with one study showing 75% of essays in literature and literary theory failed to be cited even once in the 5 years after their publication.Footnote ⁶) Some of us have the good fortune to work on material with robust popular audiences, hungry for new information based on original research. But even if you’re working on a subject about which you think, “It’s too specialized for non-academic audiences to care,” I encourage you to reimagine that take.

Looser of course did the recent work about Jane Austen’s abolitionist brothers, which was excellent both as scholarship and as public humanities. Looser has a forthcoming book about Austen, too, which looks very promising.

Fictional therapy

This isn’t how I read literature, but it may be how you read it.

Death of the novel?

A review of a new history of the twentieth century novel.

Stranger than Fiction has a global scope if a largely European focus. Machado de Assis, of Brazil, and Natsume Soseki, of Japan, emerge as two of Frank’s most intriguing subjects, self-consciously plowing new tracks for the novel under the awareness that they are far from its zone of genesis. The book, which concludes with readings of V. S. Naipaul and W. G. Sebald, displays little interest in the form’s present or future. Frank mentions a classical-music critic who told him that “in the last 30 years or so there had been to his ear no significant developments in the music, something unheard of in all its earlier history. The same could be said of the novel.”

I’m not so pessimistic, but perhaps I’m more of a partisan of Donald Antrim, Don DeLillo, Helen DeWitt, Percival Everett, Sheila Heti, and Atticus Lish than Frank is, to name only Americans. Or J. M. Coetzee, Gerald Murnane, and Kazuo Ishiguro, to betray our country. I don’t think any of these writers could be said to be practitioners of judicious realism in the 19th-century mode. Then again, maybe they’re all 18th-century revenants—latter-day acolytes of Fielding and Sterne—and I’m fooling myself that they’ve done anything new.

Christian Lorentzen is surely right. I haven’t read all of those authors, but if Helen deWitt didn’t do anything new in the novel, who ever did? It might feel like right now we are stuck with some good novels but nothing entirely new or indeed just with mediocre literary fiction, but not every decade is the 1850s. And Helen deWitt has a new novel coming in the new year…

Science and Poetry

I would have enjoyed and agreed with this essay even if it didn’t quote judiciously from Samuel Johnson.

If Haldane is right, we lack a “modern synthesis” of science and poetry because of a weakness in modern poets. And although I’ll refrain from endorsing Haldane’s accusation straight out, it has, I think, some truth to it. There does seem to be a quality of exceeding complication and abstraction to the science of the last century, compared to what came before. Maybe technology has grown so dramatically complex that fewer modern artists are able to perform their ancient roles— that of renovating our inner worlds to accommodate the material change around us.

I have my own answers to these questions, but I am hoping to work them up into a chapter of my book, so I shall keep them to myself for now… But the question of why we don’t have a Milton for the space age or an epic of the internet remains a large and often ignored one.

Austen’s Sisters

If you are a character of importance in a Jane Austen novel, your mother is likely either dead (Emma, Persuasion) or incredibly socially embarrassing (Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park). The sibling relationship is a much likelier field for displays of growth, affection, and fidelity.

This is a really excellent assessment of Austen’s heroines.

No heroine finds a friend in her parents. The intelligent ones are indifferent, the kind ones are unreliable, the rest are scarcely worth ignoring. It is only in her siblings that she can look for anything like real companionship, equality of terms, and unrestrained affection

AI and art

The 1278 people who said they utterly loathed AI art (score of 1 on a 1-5 Likert scale) still preferred AI paintings to humans when they didn't know which were which (the #1 and #2 paintings most often selected as their favorite were still AI, as were 50% of their top ten).

Pretty striking results… the same thing happens with poetry too.