May

13

Good Scholarship.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

May 13, 2008 |

Responding to, and adding to, an article by William Deresiewicz, who said that literary criticism is “losing its will to live”, Jonathan Gottschall has come up with an astounding proposal: make literary criticism more like science. Blaming the decline in criticism’s relevance on the critics themselves, he says,

We literary scholars have mostly failed to generate surer and firmer knowledge about the things we study. While most other fields gradually accumulate new and durable understanding about the world, the great minds of literary studies have, over the past few decades, chiefly produced theories and speculation with little relevance to anyone but the scholars themselves. So instead of steadily building a body of solid knowledge about literature, culture, and the human condition, the field wanders in continuous circles, bending with fashions and the pronouncements of its charismatic leaders.

Although he says the reasons are “multiple and complex”, I think it can probably be traced back as far as Oscar Wilde’s statement, “All art is quite useless.” While Wilde meant that as a compliment, in our consumer-driven society anything that’s “useless” is irrelevant and disposable. And it’s not true that art is necessarily useless. In other cultures art often serves political or religious purposes, sometimes both, especially when politics and religion are inseparable. In Western culture there’s a long tradition of art bucking the system, though, of playing gadfly to politics and religion, a role that intensified with the rise of the avant-garde. For artists and critics, though, there’s a serious danger: fighting the system too hard, drawing too much attention to yourself, in short, being too relevant and you risk getting your funding cut off. For all that politicians claim irrelevance as an excuse to cut funding for the humanities they often seem to be spooked by the power of the spoken word.

As much as I like Gottschall’s argument in favor of treating criticism as a science, requiring training and methodology, possibly even a process of peer-review, I think it faces some serious challenges. The first is the cult of personality. He mentions those “charismatic leaders”, and I suspect those charismatic leaders–at least the ones who are still around–aren’t going to want to give up their positions as holders of all the keys. While literary criticism has, in recent years, moved back toward clarity, I remember in college going cockeyed trying to make sense of some of the things Derrida and Barthes were saying. I was talking about this with a friend recently and he said that it’s hard to argue with someone if you don’t know what they’re talking about. While this isn’t always true of Derrida or Barthes or even of all literary critics, I do think obscurity is a form of self-protection. To borrow a more familiar example, I once heard someone say that everyone knew Alan Greenspan was a genius because no one could understand him. I asked, “If no one can understand him how does anyone know he’s a genius?”

Gottschall also refers to Roland Barthes’ idea of “the death of the author”, the idea that a text doesn’t really exist but that we, as readers, create it in our minds; the act of reading, according to Barthes, is really the act of writing. Gotschall hits this idea squarely on its head:

Hijacking methods from psychology, Joseph Carroll, John Johnson, Dan Kruger, and I surveyed the emotional and analytic responses of 500 literary scholars and avid readers to characters from scores of 19th-century British novels. We wanted to determine how different their reading experiences truly were…Our conclusion: rumors of the author’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.

While it’s a variation of the barrier imposed by the cult of personality, Gottschall would seem to be raising the possibility of replacing the death of the author with the death of the critic. What if there are absolutes in literature, or in art as a whole? Once these are known, would it mean the end of criticism? It would be, at best, an exaggerated fear, though, and, drawing on his own argument, look at the example of science. Three-hundred years after Newton scientists still don’t fully understand gravity. That doesn’t make gravity any less real or the science of studying it any less relevant. Every answer just raises new and more exciting questions. And if there are testable, knowable absolutes in literature or art, critics should be the last people to shy away from these, if only because of academic integrity.

If there are knowable, testable absolutes in literature and art, though, it raises a disturbing possibility: utilitarianism. Imagine music critics, applying scientific methods and knowledge, discovering why certain tunes stick in our minds and others don’t, and imagine this discovery being hijacked by advertising. I think it’s farfetched at best, but I’m sure it’s an objection that will be raised, if it hasn’t already, to treating criticism as science. And there are even darker implications. For all that science has benefitted humanity it’s also been abused. Because it is essentially objective science is neither good nor evil; it’s the uses to which science is put that either raise us up or destroy us. There is a bright side to this: a valuable field of study would be the question of why speeches and words that lead us into war, as well as wartime statements, are so powerful, carry so much weight, while peace treaties are largely ignored. Unfortunately such power could, and almost certainly would, be misused. Robert Oppenheimer was not happy having the atomic bomb on his conscience. Would critics–or artists–want to treat their field so objectively that there could potentially be a cultural Hiroshima? This may seem like a gross exaggeration, and I think it is, but bear in mind that, when fighting broke out in former Yugoslavia, libraries and institutes were burned and countless rare and valuable manuscripts were destroyed. This was described as “cultural genocide”. Genocide itself is an extremely powerful word, so powerful politicians have to be careful where and when they use it. While I don’t think destruction of any work of art, or any amount of art, could ever be comparable to the power of nuclear weapons–or any weapons, for that matter–I’d rather live in a culture where words and artifacts are so important and so valued. The alternative would be no culture at all.

Gottschall ends on a positive note, saying, “It’s a good time to be a literary scholar after all.” And I’d say, not yet. The shift he calls for in literary criticism, which will allow it to “rejoin the oldest, and still the premier, quest of all the disciplines: to better understand human nature and its place in the universe” hasn’t yet occurred. When a degree in English is meaningful, when the professors in the English Department–as well as Art History, Music, and other humanities–have the same level of respect as their peers in the sciences, then it will be a good time to be not just a literary scholar but a scholar.

 


Comments

1 Comment so far

  1. larryniven on May 14, 2008 8:26 pm

    I suspect, actually, that marketers have already been studying catchiness - Oliver Sacks I think has some stories about catchiness, and I’m confident that at least some musicians have a basic idea of how it works. Similarly, art-as-propaganda has at least a small history. You’re probably right that the threats from art-gone-bad are small compared to real horrors, but I think in a sense they’re also much more sad and hateful.

    I assume you’re writing from the perspective of a U.S. citizen (as am I), because I feel like a lot of the issues you mention are, if not specific to the U.S., at least quite prevalent here. In Japan, for instance, I know of at least a few extremely popular, extremely artistic works that are hugely relevant to the structure of Japanese society (e.g., Paranoia Agent - sorry, I’m a bit of an anime geek).

    I myself feel as though art criticism is dying because it’s a field that survives on the people’s need to seek out an expert for pay. The internet has been well-chronicled in its ability to spread expert-level knowledge for free, especially regarding information that’s already heavily traded like art (computer code is another such instance). I guess the death of art criticism started before the ‘net, but it sure isn’t helped any by art review sites. Would a change in culture help? Sure - but I’d also like to see a change in the way that art criticism happens, so that it’s not such a tunnel-vision-happy enterprise. Movie reviews, for instance, still read like play reviews, which actually might vary from one show to the next. Now that that consideration is irrelevant, why not bring extra information into it? Teach the readers something, yknow?

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