as a lay person, who never studied literature beyond A level, and who loves books and literature. I read criticism because it illuminates what I love. I like Henry and his substack because he is comprehensible to a lay person. So much literary criticism to me is like reading Klingon, or a stern political instruction panel. So as a lay person, I liked Nabokov's lectures, in which he said we should approach the novel and understand it in terms of its spatial terms, chronology, geography, events, objects etc. And then re-read the novel. And to be wary of reducing it to an 'idea'. This is all very practical. But when you do that, I find, you notice many other things. He also said that re-reading is most important. At its best, literary criticism is like a best friend to the text and the person reading the criticism. It says, did you notice this? Not bad, is it?
Yes, I think that's right - but it also, I feel, shows up the weakness of a lot (not all) of what Henry calls "transparent" literary criticism.
If I read someone saying about the first scene of King Lear "Cordelia cannot bear to have her love for her father made the subject of a partly mercenary game", I say to myself, yes, well, that's pretty obvious. I didn't need to read a critic to find that out - I just needed to see (or read) King Lear. But if I read someone saying about the first scene of King Lear "In the opening of King Lear folk-tale elements proper to narrative are infiltrated by a finer-grained dramatic mode" - that's not obvious. I might have come to the idea independently, but probably not - and it makes me think. It makes me ask if it's true (of course!), and if I decide it isn't, then I dismiss it, but if I decide it is true, or might be, it makes me think differently about the play.
My chief criteria for good criticism are: (a) is this true? but more importantly (b) if so, did I see this for myself, or did I need the critic to point it out to me? That's what's so great about close reading styles of criticism: it so often draws my attention to details which I didn't see for myself, but which, once I saw them, seem obviously right, and expand my experience of the work. And I can get that expanded experience at least as much from "opaque" criticism as from "transparent" criticism. I can enter into the emotional drama of Lear in a new way if I (e.g.) recognize that I am responding to folk-tale elements in it.
When I teach a poem, I always begin by reading it out - because I want the students to respond to it before analyzing it. The analysis should show the students things they haven't thought of - or, even better, show them how they can themselves find things they hadn't thought of before. But I constantly go back to the response as well - how we can feel the emotion more intensely through learning more deeply.
The statement toward the end that "Art is where the rational and the irrational meet" seems a sweeping claim that might require more support than a quick assertion. The risk is that in a post-Nietzsche world, the supposed Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy is commonly viewed as a tug-of-war that results in 'X', even as the rest of this post seems to warn against succumbing to such binary traps.
So what of that space where they 'meet'? How wide and deep is it? What is it exactly?
The Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck thought and wrote about this 'threshold' space, rejecting binary clashes in favor of "twin phenomena". So this notion suggests that opposites like inside/outside or form/space are mutually constitutive halves of a single realm:
"Architecture is nothing if it does not provide for the twin phenomena... A room is a realm within a realm; it is the space inside and the space outside at once."
He argued that this "in-between" space transcends the binary altogether. In his framework, there aren't just six physical surfaces to a room, but eight elements: the four walls, a floor, a ceiling, the inside, and the outside.
"Enclosure is not merely a matter of six surfaces holding a volume; it is the simultaneous creation of an interior reality and an exterior response."
So isn't Van Eyck suggesting that "inside" and "outside" are an illusion? Is space a single continuum until matter is imposed and bisects it, creating two seemingly opposite realms out of one? If so, the threshold isn't necessarily where two warring forces clash. The binary instead is created by our own imposed action. Similarly, are the 'rational' and the 'irrational' positions we create by an imposition?
Does a poet require another reader of their poem before it is Art?
This erudition at its best and very welcome. Thank you. I shall keep this by me for further study. I enjoy close analysis but always bear in mind Archibald MacLeish's dictum 'A poem should not mean but be...' Happy reading all!
Thank you for a very illuminating essay. I am not schooled in English Literature, but had some experience with the Psychology of Narrative and Narratology (especially Gérard Genette) in my earlier years. In my retirement, I am a voracious reader, primarily of fiction. The best literary criticism that I read starts with the magic, and then gives consideration to the ways that the spell is created. I often find this nice combination in literate book reviews: I read the first half of the review to see if I will be charmed; if so, I read the book, saving the second half of the review for later in the hope that it will open up further insights about the how. (I just wish such reviewers would take your division seriously, placing their reviews into two sections, labelled Introduction and Epilogue, or Before and After, or Magic and Means).
Henry, your last line - "The job of criticism is to let the poems teach us how to read them." - the perfect ending. "By reason and by truth; what we have loved/Others will love; and we may teach them how . . ." at the end of Wordsworth's "The Prelude" came immediately to mind. Beautiful writing - immensely satisfying and exciting perspective. Thank you!
Just the manifesto we need! I suspect a great many people are thinking along these lines.
The word “text” may be at the heart of the matter. I’ve never felt moved, inspired, or exalted by a “text,” the way I am by a poem, novel or an essay. Did any writer ever start a work by thinking: “I have to write a text?” An unpleasant-sounding word, further degraded by its association with texting.
A most interesting post, and good to see AD Nuttall, along with John Bayley and Frank Kermode, referred to favourably.
Here's a very sympathetic 'French' view of the issue (if we're allowing prose as well as poetry):
'A story is told in a children’s book of the disappointment of a small boy who put on his grandmother’s spectacles and took up her book in the expectation of being able himself to find in it the stories which she used to tell him. The tale ends with these words: “Well, what a fraud! Where’s the story? I can see nothing but black and white.” For the child the “story” and the thing expressed are not “ideas” or “meanings”, nor are speaking or reading “intellectual operations”. The story is a world which there must be some way of magically calling up by putting on spectacles and leaning over a book. The power possessed by language of bringing the thing expressed into existence, of opening up to thought new ways, new dimensions and new landscapes, is, in the last analysis, as obscure for the adult as for the child. In every successful work, the significance carried into the reader’s mind exceeds language and thought as already constituted and is magically thrown into relief during the linguistic incantation, just as the story used to emerge from grandmother’s book.' [Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception]
Just came across this! Thanks very much for the shout out. I am very interested in what literature does in the world, but also in its potential to enchant. Perhaps you might like the chapter on Robert Walser in my new book, which I link to the idea of literature as disclosing otherwise unimaginable realities?
I think to be decerning literature, it cannot be done in a vacuum, this to means to me that decerning may always mean comparison, so knowing the canon and knowing when you need to read more in the space you are looking to judge, but I also find that we often want to discuss the new so comparing it to the old or canonical may have issues with new emerging ideas or forms, Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote for E.E. Cummings's 1933 Guggenheim Fellowship application, saying we have to see what he writes to know if he is a poet, this is the right attitude, Millay also saw that Cummings could experiment with form because he fully understood form and the poetic landscape. Digression: I have a love for both poets, yet so different, though Millay is under noticed now, she brought the tension of sex and love into poetry in a new expression she was also exceptional in knowing the poetic landscape of the classics, Digression fine.
The emergent must get an open judgement, yet the past is still a good yard stick. I struggle on my whether my opinions are critical (analysis by criterion, as a criterion proper criterion may be hard determine ) or preferential (opinion and justification of that opinion.) I am trying to read things I think are good but maybe not fully my preference to find the good in them. I read the Decameron even though it was a bit flat in characterization, I found much good and much to take with me even though it is not preferential to me. I am reading Auden's Shield of Achilles, a banner of excellence, emergence and much much preferred. Thanks we must be willing to judge but judge fairly.
opposition is true substackship, i think. that said. i always mistake the status quo for the way things naturally are. to me, provocation alone does not change the way things are. i love your piece though. i appreciate you.
What a splendid valuable essay! One measure of how much piece of writing like this matters to me is how many snippets I must copy and paste for my own notebook or in this case to share with my students in an upcoming series on the plays of Brian Friel. I think that he would agree with your sentiments especially, "Art is where the rational and the irrational meet. It makes us realise we know more than we can say. It shows us the emotions as a route to the understanding. It acts, as George Eliot said, as a companion in the struggle for thought. It is always saying Look! Look at what you did not know you could see! Art is provocation, not instruction. We must choose how we react." It seems to me that BF showed us the emotions as a root to the understanding as a companion in the struggle for thought, but was adamant that we might see that there is not just one conclusion and not just one truth
What have I just read, meta-criticism, auto-criticism, criticism through a glass darkly, definitely not transparent but a hall of mirrors, uber-criticism, or more self-importantly, "Oliver with Keats on first looking into Chapman looking at Homer or translation as criticism?" Is anything criticism but thinking about it makes it so....
as a lay person, who never studied literature beyond A level, and who loves books and literature. I read criticism because it illuminates what I love. I like Henry and his substack because he is comprehensible to a lay person. So much literary criticism to me is like reading Klingon, or a stern political instruction panel. So as a lay person, I liked Nabokov's lectures, in which he said we should approach the novel and understand it in terms of its spatial terms, chronology, geography, events, objects etc. And then re-read the novel. And to be wary of reducing it to an 'idea'. This is all very practical. But when you do that, I find, you notice many other things. He also said that re-reading is most important. At its best, literary criticism is like a best friend to the text and the person reading the criticism. It says, did you notice this? Not bad, is it?
To me, the best literary criticism is summarized nicely in your own words: It is always saying Look! Look at what you did not know you could see!
Yes, I think that's right - but it also, I feel, shows up the weakness of a lot (not all) of what Henry calls "transparent" literary criticism.
If I read someone saying about the first scene of King Lear "Cordelia cannot bear to have her love for her father made the subject of a partly mercenary game", I say to myself, yes, well, that's pretty obvious. I didn't need to read a critic to find that out - I just needed to see (or read) King Lear. But if I read someone saying about the first scene of King Lear "In the opening of King Lear folk-tale elements proper to narrative are infiltrated by a finer-grained dramatic mode" - that's not obvious. I might have come to the idea independently, but probably not - and it makes me think. It makes me ask if it's true (of course!), and if I decide it isn't, then I dismiss it, but if I decide it is true, or might be, it makes me think differently about the play.
My chief criteria for good criticism are: (a) is this true? but more importantly (b) if so, did I see this for myself, or did I need the critic to point it out to me? That's what's so great about close reading styles of criticism: it so often draws my attention to details which I didn't see for myself, but which, once I saw them, seem obviously right, and expand my experience of the work. And I can get that expanded experience at least as much from "opaque" criticism as from "transparent" criticism. I can enter into the emotional drama of Lear in a new way if I (e.g.) recognize that I am responding to folk-tale elements in it.
When I teach a poem, I always begin by reading it out - because I want the students to respond to it before analyzing it. The analysis should show the students things they haven't thought of - or, even better, show them how they can themselves find things they hadn't thought of before. But I constantly go back to the response as well - how we can feel the emotion more intensely through learning more deeply.
I agree with this perhaps should have made that clearer
I enjoyed this post immensely.
The statement toward the end that "Art is where the rational and the irrational meet" seems a sweeping claim that might require more support than a quick assertion. The risk is that in a post-Nietzsche world, the supposed Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy is commonly viewed as a tug-of-war that results in 'X', even as the rest of this post seems to warn against succumbing to such binary traps.
So what of that space where they 'meet'? How wide and deep is it? What is it exactly?
The Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck thought and wrote about this 'threshold' space, rejecting binary clashes in favor of "twin phenomena". So this notion suggests that opposites like inside/outside or form/space are mutually constitutive halves of a single realm:
"Architecture is nothing if it does not provide for the twin phenomena... A room is a realm within a realm; it is the space inside and the space outside at once."
He argued that this "in-between" space transcends the binary altogether. In his framework, there aren't just six physical surfaces to a room, but eight elements: the four walls, a floor, a ceiling, the inside, and the outside.
"Enclosure is not merely a matter of six surfaces holding a volume; it is the simultaneous creation of an interior reality and an exterior response."
So isn't Van Eyck suggesting that "inside" and "outside" are an illusion? Is space a single continuum until matter is imposed and bisects it, creating two seemingly opposite realms out of one? If so, the threshold isn't necessarily where two warring forces clash. The binary instead is created by our own imposed action. Similarly, are the 'rational' and the 'irrational' positions we create by an imposition?
Does a poet require another reader of their poem before it is Art?
This erudition at its best and very welcome. Thank you. I shall keep this by me for further study. I enjoy close analysis but always bear in mind Archibald MacLeish's dictum 'A poem should not mean but be...' Happy reading all!
'A poem should not mean but be...'
Perfect.
Thank you for a very illuminating essay. I am not schooled in English Literature, but had some experience with the Psychology of Narrative and Narratology (especially Gérard Genette) in my earlier years. In my retirement, I am a voracious reader, primarily of fiction. The best literary criticism that I read starts with the magic, and then gives consideration to the ways that the spell is created. I often find this nice combination in literate book reviews: I read the first half of the review to see if I will be charmed; if so, I read the book, saving the second half of the review for later in the hope that it will open up further insights about the how. (I just wish such reviewers would take your division seriously, placing their reviews into two sections, labelled Introduction and Epilogue, or Before and After, or Magic and Means).
You would appreciate Nabokov on the art, the magic, the pictures, the pleasure, the “tingle.”
Henry, your last line - "The job of criticism is to let the poems teach us how to read them." - the perfect ending. "By reason and by truth; what we have loved/Others will love; and we may teach them how . . ." at the end of Wordsworth's "The Prelude" came immediately to mind. Beautiful writing - immensely satisfying and exciting perspective. Thank you!
Just the manifesto we need! I suspect a great many people are thinking along these lines.
The word “text” may be at the heart of the matter. I’ve never felt moved, inspired, or exalted by a “text,” the way I am by a poem, novel or an essay. Did any writer ever start a work by thinking: “I have to write a text?” An unpleasant-sounding word, further degraded by its association with texting.
A most interesting post, and good to see AD Nuttall, along with John Bayley and Frank Kermode, referred to favourably.
Here's a very sympathetic 'French' view of the issue (if we're allowing prose as well as poetry):
'A story is told in a children’s book of the disappointment of a small boy who put on his grandmother’s spectacles and took up her book in the expectation of being able himself to find in it the stories which she used to tell him. The tale ends with these words: “Well, what a fraud! Where’s the story? I can see nothing but black and white.” For the child the “story” and the thing expressed are not “ideas” or “meanings”, nor are speaking or reading “intellectual operations”. The story is a world which there must be some way of magically calling up by putting on spectacles and leaning over a book. The power possessed by language of bringing the thing expressed into existence, of opening up to thought new ways, new dimensions and new landscapes, is, in the last analysis, as obscure for the adult as for the child. In every successful work, the significance carried into the reader’s mind exceeds language and thought as already constituted and is magically thrown into relief during the linguistic incantation, just as the story used to emerge from grandmother’s book.' [Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception]
http://michaelnath.wordpress.com
Just came across this! Thanks very much for the shout out. I am very interested in what literature does in the world, but also in its potential to enchant. Perhaps you might like the chapter on Robert Walser in my new book, which I link to the idea of literature as disclosing otherwise unimaginable realities?
I look forward to it!
PS a great essay again.
Thanks!
I think to be decerning literature, it cannot be done in a vacuum, this to means to me that decerning may always mean comparison, so knowing the canon and knowing when you need to read more in the space you are looking to judge, but I also find that we often want to discuss the new so comparing it to the old or canonical may have issues with new emerging ideas or forms, Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote for E.E. Cummings's 1933 Guggenheim Fellowship application, saying we have to see what he writes to know if he is a poet, this is the right attitude, Millay also saw that Cummings could experiment with form because he fully understood form and the poetic landscape. Digression: I have a love for both poets, yet so different, though Millay is under noticed now, she brought the tension of sex and love into poetry in a new expression she was also exceptional in knowing the poetic landscape of the classics, Digression fine.
The emergent must get an open judgement, yet the past is still a good yard stick. I struggle on my whether my opinions are critical (analysis by criterion, as a criterion proper criterion may be hard determine ) or preferential (opinion and justification of that opinion.) I am trying to read things I think are good but maybe not fully my preference to find the good in them. I read the Decameron even though it was a bit flat in characterization, I found much good and much to take with me even though it is not preferential to me. I am reading Auden's Shield of Achilles, a banner of excellence, emergence and much much preferred. Thanks we must be willing to judge but judge fairly.
Wonderful! Always liked Owen Barfield's view that poetry could and often should effect a "felt change of consciousness".
Love Barfield!
I’ve been searching for that LRB article. I don’t know if this is it, but it’s a good read: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v02/n10/s.l.-goldberg/the-deconstruction-gang
Oh this is fun thank you
But it’s not it?
opposition is true substackship, i think. that said. i always mistake the status quo for the way things naturally are. to me, provocation alone does not change the way things are. i love your piece though. i appreciate you.
What a splendid valuable essay! One measure of how much piece of writing like this matters to me is how many snippets I must copy and paste for my own notebook or in this case to share with my students in an upcoming series on the plays of Brian Friel. I think that he would agree with your sentiments especially, "Art is where the rational and the irrational meet. It makes us realise we know more than we can say. It shows us the emotions as a route to the understanding. It acts, as George Eliot said, as a companion in the struggle for thought. It is always saying Look! Look at what you did not know you could see! Art is provocation, not instruction. We must choose how we react." It seems to me that BF showed us the emotions as a root to the understanding as a companion in the struggle for thought, but was adamant that we might see that there is not just one conclusion and not just one truth
What have I just read, meta-criticism, auto-criticism, criticism through a glass darkly, definitely not transparent but a hall of mirrors, uber-criticism, or more self-importantly, "Oliver with Keats on first looking into Chapman looking at Homer or translation as criticism?" Is anything criticism but thinking about it makes it so....