The New New Criticism

A recent post here has garnered some attention from the internet, in particular, poet Joey De Jesus. He sent me a few messages on Twitter, reposted my article, and surprisingly, the two of us had a spirited–but in the end–friendly debate. We still disagree vehemently, but it might have been actually productive, which is odd because it took place on the internet. I would like to thank Joey for tweeting the article and posting it on Facebook, since after all, my goal is to get people talking about criticism, even if some of the conversation has reduced my argument to “white tears,” which, to my knowledge of the phrase, is an incorrect application. I don’t think it’s necessary to take others to task by name for their simplified engagement, as such arguments don’t actually state ideas or even offer criticism but instead, rely on the use of rhetorical devil-terms, designed to shut down argument rather than encourage it. With that said, however, I do want to get at the heart of what I began with “Kenneth Goldsmith and the Writ of Habeas Corpus”: Modern mainstream criticism has lost its way. Therefore, to Joey, because I hope you’re reading this, thanks.

So let me begin by saying I think I might take for granted the education I had as an undergrad. Many of today’s critics, who, as I’ve said before, are pretty highly educated, went to far more prestigous schools than me. But the thing I failed to recognize is that maybe those educations aren’t necessarily on the same page as mine. I don’t know to what extent many of today’s writers and poets learn about literary theory and the philosophical underpinnings behind a broad spectrum of critical approaches. It really depends on the program, and mine was very theory-based. (This is not to imply that your program was bad, dear reader, nor am I trying to talk down to those of you who bristle at the thought of theory. Presumably, we, and our respective programs, value and promote different ideas.) Furthermore, I’m well aware of the suspicious attitudes writers have voiced in the past about literary theory, as if it were some kind of slight of hand meant to distract, as if it undermines their authority as authors. (It does, and it should.) But for me, my undergrad experience has made my discovery and investigations of texts far more enriching, far more worthwhile–not to mention enhanced the thought I put into my own fiction. One text could, through the power of criticism, be seen through a multitude of lenses. We can see The Great Gatsby as a New Critic, a Freudian, a Feminist, a Structuralist, a New Historian, a Post-Colonialist, and one of my particular favorites, a Deconstructionist. However, I never felt comfortable identifying as any one type of critic. There were, after all, enormous benefits to each approach–as well as drawbacks. None, as I saw it, were perfect. Often, I would use the approach that I thought best fit that text. But my question is why these critical discourses are just that: discourses and not a discourse. Why can I not take these varying ideas and make them work together, rather than compete for authority? 

And that’s exactly what I plan to do now. 

The basis for any modern critical discipline has come from many of the tenets of New Criticism, in particular, the intentional fallacy and close reading. Just about every other critical approach relies on these two ideas. One, as stated in “The Intentional Fallacy” by Wimssatt and Monroe and later essentially expanded upon by Barthes as “the death of the author,” the author does not determine meaning. He or she has no greater claim on a text than anyone else. The author does not assign his or her own meaning and value. Two, the practice of close reading is meant to scrutinize each word, each mark of punctuation, every line break, every enjambment, every metaphor and simile, in order to determine how those choices determine the text’s meaning. 

However, New Criticism does have its flaws.                   

It aims to discover the best interpretation. This, I would argue, is a mistake not only because it assumes there is one best interpretation but because that best interpretation focuses on what the text is actually about. This is where I start to differ with most critical theorists. I say that a text already has a specific meaning, that it is about that one specific idea (or specific ideas). That theme or meaning is fixed. Everything else about it is a quibble, because the rhetoric is clearly aimed at that goal, if it is a good, well-constructed text. We must recognize that at first. The other problem with New Criticism is its emphasis on “the text itself.” It dismisses valuable concepts in the rhetorical traingle like context, author, and audience for intent. Many of these points of the triangle have, thankfully, been reinstated and emphasized through the many different schools. 

But, as I’ve said before, each new school of criticism only seems to acknowledge just one part of the triangle–except for Deconstruction which, at its worst, throws up its arms in an act of literary nihilism and says that meaning is “undecidable.” What would it look like if it acknowledged all parts of the rhetorical triangle, not just one? What if we married the princples of literary analysis and rhetorical analysis?

Let’s say we have a text, maybe “This is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams. The first step should be to do an actual close reading, like this:

  
Post-It Note 1 (Line 1): This first line tells us a lot. First, we know that this is past tense, since it is “have eaten.” Second, this line is enjambed (it ends without punctuation in the middle of a sentence.). This suggests hesitation on the part of the speaker—the “I” of the poem. There is a clear sense of conflict in the speaker.

Post-It Note 2 (Line 2): Again, we have another enjambed line, putting special emphasis on the fruit itself. This choice seems very deliberate. The eating of forbidden fruit is a popular theme throughout Western literature (think Adam and Eve), and the speaker may be drawing that parallel.

Post-It Note 3 (Line 3): Line three, pauses again to emphasize the fruit’s non-existence and makes us consider its prior location as well.

Post-It Note 4 (Line 6): Here, the speaker introduces the second person, the “God” of the poem, who will, hopefully, forgive him/her.

Post-It Note 5 (Line 7): Notice that the line dwells on “saving,” which follows the line that introduces the “God” of the poem. Our speaker wants to be saved.

Post-It Note 6 (Line 12): This line which ends the poem may be a reference to the medieval view of hell. It was not a place of fire and brimstone, but a cold, cold home for sinners. The thinking was that the further away from God a person was, the further he/she was from God’s light.

This close reading observes the text itself and aims to decipher its “obvious” meaning. And since this is already a pretty simple poem, we know the theme is temptation. It is the tension between yielding and aversion. The privileged term here, seen through the speaker’s indulgence, is yielding, giving in. This, the poem tells us, is the better action. Of course, it is not that simple, since as we learn at the end that the act is both “sweet” and “cold,” signifying that has brought the speaker pleasure because it is delicous and pain because it has caused him or her guilt. The text is, therefore, in conflict with itself. 

But in my close reading, I have also made historical and literary connections, which are not self-evident, not explicit. So the question is why? Clearly, I have a bias. I have imbued the text with what I see in it. I am actively constructing it in reader response. So we can say I have been influenced by my cultural landscape, particularly the hegemony of Christianity, as I draw connections between what I observe and with what I associate with what I observe.  

And Williams has a bias too. His consciousness has also been shaped by the same cultural hegemony, corrupted by the institutional power of the Church, for the confessional nature of the poem highlights his own anixety over partaking in such a “sin.” Foucault, in his History of Sexuality, claims, “[O}ne does not confess without the presence or virtual presence of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires confession.” The poem’s speaker’s pleasure may be blissful in the moment, but afterward, it leaves him or her empty and guilt-ridden, for which the only solution is confession. Such an attuitude concerning pleasure is contrary to the speaker’s (and by extention, Williams’s) own biological impulses, trapped in a Pavlovian cycle of pleasure always followed by pain.

Lastly, we must examine the context, the time and place in which the text was composed. Published in 1934, the poem is a product of its era, when, for the decade prior, there was the unbridled hedonism of Prohibition lurking beneath the surface of “dry” America, as all kinds of sexuality was celebrated by those who engaged in the counter-culture, but with the repeal of the 18th Amendment, returned puritanical denial and self-flagellation.

This approach, even as rushed, sloppy, and simplified as it is here, is what we need more of, an observation of all the points of the triangle, one that presents a more complete, complex, and thorough portrait of meaning, which hopefully gets even more complicated when we factor in things like race, gender, class, et cetera. Some may claim this is tedious–and I think it is–but it is also necessary. Criticism is designed to be just that.    

Furthermore–and this should go without saying–this approach does not stake a claim on ultimate meaning. It is grounded in Cartesian uncertainity: It recognizes the subjectivity of experience. If anything, it is a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. But the important idea is that it demonstrates how the critic got to where they are. This idea is still very much in its infancy: There is more to be developed here, more to be scrutinized, more to be theorized, more to be tested, more to be investigated, more to be written and revised. But at least, it’s a start.

Kenneth Goldsmith and the Writ of Habeas Corpus

I know I’m late to this party, but The New Yorker just ran a profile on Kenneth Goldsmith, which many have stayed silent on–and when they have been willing to talk, it’s been outright hostile. The National Book Critics Circle Board retweeted one person’s plea to the editor of Poetry Magazine to retweet the article, which was followed by responses like, “So the lesson here is be a lazy racist and get a lot of press?” and “trash.” One response I found particularly disheartening came from Justin Daugherty, founder of Sundog Lit and editor of Cartridge Lit, who wrote in a now deleted tweet, “KG [Kenneth Goldsmith] is a garbage human.” Now maybe Daugherty and others have had a chance to meet Goldsmith in person and found him to be “trash” and “garbage.” It’s well within the realm of possibilty, but I think, more so, Daugherty is referring to Goldsmith’s poem “The Body of Michael Brown,” which remixes the autopsy report of the young man shot by police whose death served as a catlyst for activism and riots in Ferguson, Missouri. While I think there’s an argument to be made that such an act was “too soon,” social media and the literary blogosphere took a different approach: a shitstorm of moral outrage and indignation. Most arguments against Goldsmith’s performance, from Joey de Jesus’s essay at Apogee to Flavorwire, focused on the act itself, rather than the actual text. And you’re probably wondering: Where can I read/see this? The short answer, ironically during banned books week, is you can’t. And just about none of Goldsmith’s critics have had the chance either. So how, exactly, have so many determined so much based on so little? Don’t we need a text to criticize, to scruntize, to determine whether it was racist or not, as so many have claimed? Shouldn’t analysis and interpretation be based on textual evidence? Probably what I find most distressing is that these writers and editors, who have uniformly condemned Goldsmith and his poem, should know better. They are, first and foremost, artists, and we have all seen plenty of challenges to our freedom in the past and present. But also these are men and women with MFAs and PhDs from the best schools in the country, where the faculty are active scholars who have faced the rigors of peer review, who, presumably, expect the same focused, logical, detailed, thorough analyses from their students. So how, then, have things gone so wrong?

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In rhetoric and composition studies, we often talk about the rhetorical triangle, which is the connection between the writer, the audience, and the message. This, of course, is framed within a certain context. Most schools of literary criticism place greater value on one of these facets. The New Critic emphasizes intent. The Reader Response Critic focuses on audience. The Freudian psychoanalyzes the author. The New Historian privileges the context. None of these, I would say, are any more useful than the other. In fact, this is one criticism’s biggest flaws–especially as of late. These things, individually, don’t bring us any closer to meaning. They need to be recognized in concert with one another.

Unfortunately, things have only gotten worse.

Due to the increasing influence of identity politics, both the author and the context are all that matter. The text, it seems, has become irrelevant. We don’t care what was actually on the page. That should worry any serious artist or critic. As T. S. Eliot once wrote, “[A] critic must have a very highly developed sense of fact.” But this current trend ignores or disregards evidence which may be contrary to the critic’s conclusions, which often means the diction choices, the form, the imagery, the structure–all of it has been reduced to some irrelevant detail. Critics claim that a text is a vehicle through which our gender roles, class system, and structural inequalities are reinforced rather than challenged. When–and why the hell did this happen? To that, I don’t really have an answer, but I can say that such a trend should be unnerving to any artist, regardless of his or her politics.

First of all, what artist is a complete shill for society? I couldn’t give a fuck about how good or bad he or she may be: Artists are free-thinkers. We’re independent. We have empathy, logic, humanity. We recognize the beauty and benefits of all things–even those we hate. That’s our job. Otherwise, we’re not looking at a poem or a story or a painting, but a didactic piece of shit that our audience will find more alienating than enlightening. Isn’t it OK to be OK with some of the ways that society operates? (This is not a tacit endorsement of racism or sexism or anything of the like, but more so a way to say I don’t entirely mind free markets as long as they’re regulated pretty heavily.) Secondly, I’m not fond of the deterministic philosophy which underpins much of this approach. Whether it’s Tropes vs. Women or an article in the LA Review of Books, the assumption is that society is racist, sexist, and heterosexist, even when it’s actively fighting against it. They preach to us that it is inescapable, but they, of course, have the power to point it out. They are the Ones. They can see the Matrix that you and I can’t. Only they can see, as bell hooks puts it, “the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” And while I respect hooks as a rhetorican, I find her conclusion suspect. Let me say, there are absolutely inequalities that exist, problems that exist, but the suggested cause is far too simplistic, as, much like today’s literary criticism, it ignores a lot of contradictory evidence in favor of the ancedotal. Worse still, the solutions are far, far too vague (reform? revolution? change behaviors? change literature?). These issues will not be solved by preachy art: They are solved at the ballot box. (If you became a critic to “make a difference,” try running for office instead.) Art isn’t overly concerned with the right now: It uses the specific to tell us something about the universal.

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So where do we go from here? I think we need to return to the “scientific” approach proposed by Ransom all those years ago in “Criticism Inc.“–with some caveats, of course. We have to do a thorough close reading of a text in order to discover the intent, but we also need to stress the other points of the rhetorical triangle as well. The message is important, but so is the ways a text undermines its own theme, the constant battle of binary opposites. We, too, must recognize the biases of the reader and the author and the time and circumstances under which it was produced just as we recognize the importance of “the text itself.”

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So I’d like to leave you with a lie I tell my literature students every semester. I say: In this class, there are no wrong answers. I know that’s not true, but I say it because I don’t want them to be afraid of analysis, to fear interpretation. However, I realize there are “wrong” answers, invalid answers. You can’t just pull shit out of your ass and say it is: You must demonstrate it through a preponderance of textual evidence. This is the cardinal rule of criticism. Yet as my students’s first paper (on poetry no less) approaches, I let them in on this little distinction between valid and invalid arguments. It would appear that many of Goldsmith’s critics skipped that day of school.