In short, it would be possible to demonstrate that, given its premises, the New Criticism was necessarily an interpretive criticism. But in fact it is scarcely necessary to make out such a case, for the most important and insidious legacy of the New Criticism is the widespread and unquestioning acceptance of the notion that the critic's job is to interpret literary works. Indeed, fulfillment of the interpretive task has come to be the touchstone by which other kinds of critical writing are judged, and reviewers inevitably ask of any work of literary theory, linguistic analysis, or historical scholarship, whether it actually assists us in our understanding of particular works. In this critical climate it is therefore important, if only as a means of loosening the grip which interpretation has on critical consciousness, to take up a tendentious position and to maintain that, while the experience of literature may be an experience of interpreting works, in fact the interpretation of individual works is only tangentially related to the understanding of literature. To engage in the study of literature is not to produce yet another interpretation of King Lear but to advance one's understanding of the conventions and operations of an institution, a mode of discourse.-Johnathan Culler, "Beyond Interpretation," in The Pursuit of Signs, originally published around 1976.
"Insidious" is a bit much, though the saturation accurately (though not wholly) described here somewhat merits it. Whether this is due solely to New Criticism (an abstraction of some kind--it would be nice to know what, more specifically, Culler means by this) is also a question. And the last point, in its tired tone regarding "another interpretation" is a bit suspect. But the point concerning what the study of literature entails holds up. I would put it more modestly (that is, without suggesting what, instead of interpretation, this study actually is (for Culler, the "understanding of the conventions..." etc.))--like this: the study of literature is not necessarily the production of interpretation. There is something beyond, or, better, beside interpretation: namely, a whole array of other modes of study. That is, if necessity has to enter in anywhere, it is more likely the study of literature is necessarily not limited to interpretation.
4 comments:
Hi Mike,
Thank you for posting this. I've taken a quick look at the Culler chapter from which you excerpt. My knowledge of the context in and to which he is writing is not thorough enough to venture a proper response; still, the quotation raises a number of questions that have been troubling me.
I suppose I've yet to see that the interpretative strategies of New Criticism are left behind by things like deconstruction or by studies of the "institution of literature." This is not only because New Critical keywords like irony and ambiguity appear to some to be forerunners of irony and undecidability as they interest de Man, nor is it only because the de Manian motif of privileged moments of aesthetic recuperation in face of the "random power of death" seems sometimes not terribly far from the Basic Human Facts on which the New Critics ostensibly rely and summarily dismissed by Culler. If we take some of the main terms Culler uses to capture the New Critical standpoint -- autonomy, unity, atomistic, thematic -- is it then so very easy to say that, at least as far as the first two are concerned -- the notion of literature as an "institution" has a much different conception of its object? If literature is to become at all discernible as an institution -- that is to say if it is not simply to dissolve into ordinary language or political language or a national language or into whatever you choose as pre-determining -- then some measure of unity and autonomy need to be ascribed to it. That is, a set of rules, practices, forms, conventions, etc. In this way “autonomy” as used by someone like Adorno is almost identical to what Culler here describes as “institution.” Because what Culler is certainly not talking about is inscribing or subordinating literary discourse to some other, prior and presumptively "dominant" discourse. At most the question might be one about what kinds of forces determine literature - from without - as an autonomous, separate institution, something Adorno is in his way interested in doing, and how one is to reconstruct this exchange of forces: where is the boundary between literature and other discourses, how stable is it, how noticeable is it, what does literature say about this boundary, what do non-literary institutions say about it, what kinds of things can cross it, what happens to things when they cross it, what kinds of things can't cross it, and so on. Working through these questions in different contexts has certainly been productive, though I believe that the theoretical presupposition of such questions is a far more naïve notion of autonomy than that elaborated by deconstruction or Adorno or Bloom, all of whom understand, in their way, inter-institutional boundaries are always intra- as well, internalized and processed by the institutions themselves. Historical contextualization is, on my view, tacitly more committed to literary autonomy than literary history as practiced by Bloom or de Man, both of whom begin with the impossibility of autonomy. In any event, as long as we are committed to the idea of literature as a institution, however fragile, however porous its boundaries, are we not also in some sense committed to notions of literary form?
The notion that New Criticism is confined to thematic readings seems to me perhaps the most egregious simplification here. It is a convenient emphasis, of course, because it suggests a crude mode of interpretation we are being cajoled, I think, to associate with New Criticism: one which seeks to turn literary objects into propositions ("It means: A is B,"), or into the recovery of the theme ("It is about: x, y, or z," where these are death, nature, and so on.) The question interpretation would answer is "what does the text mean?" But surely this is to ignore the great emphasis New Critics already placed on literary form as something quite distinct from thematics: on structure, on metaphor, etc. The best New Criticism I am familiar with (though I am not familiar with much) is powerful not inasmuch as it produces readings, but inasmuch as it identifies formal and stylistic innovations within certain works, which, in a certain sense, take the place of, subsume, or sublate meaning.
That needs clarification I am not sure I can provide here. But one way to get at it is to point out that the "basic facts" allegedly invoked as extra-literary constants by New Criticism, need be neither extra-literary nor constant. There is no reason the seasons can't be understood as tropes of English literary history, for instance. Death itself could be understood by criticism as a certain type of literary trope. This is the power of Bloom and de Man's criticism. (But it is foreshadowed in New Criticism, and in Northrop Frye.)
Yet another turn to Bloom and de Man. Ah well.
The central thesis of "Rhetoric of Romanticism," that Romantic poetry is in some sense the tropological record of its failure to originate "wie Blumen entstehen," as flowers originate, looks from this perspective almost indistinguishable from the series of revisionary rations outlined by Bloom in the Influence books: ascesis, emptying out, etc. The point is: the wish to assimilate to the given (i.e., to nature) cannot be directly fulfilled, because doing so would be to renounce immediately the very virtue of spontaneous self-generation which inspired our wish to assimilate to the given in the first place. Indirection and mediacy are forced upon us if we wish to avoid losing everything in the moment we thought to gain it: this is the moment of trope or turning, which opens a kind of dialectic. (The question of origins here, i.e. how a poet-nature dialectic was transumed into a poet-poet dialectic, is a meaningless one in this case - the only answer to the question of the origin of the given is "before you," "always already" - whether it's nature, as in de Man, or the precursor poet, as in Bloom, the point is that a kind of antagonistic troping is there from the beginning). Poets turn to winter and death not because they are "basic human facts" but because they are ways of avoiding assimilating to the given and therefore failing, as I said, to achieve the very quality that makes the given seductive: originating, spontaneous, self-generating life. The terms are reversed, in the kind of aporia that was very familiar to Shelley: death becomes life because life would mean death.
There are a number of difficult questions that emerge from such an account. Where does style fit in, for instance? Is style simply "re-troping," as Bloom would have it? And what is this re-troping, if it is not simply the proliferation of new images and metaphors?
But I don't, actually, think that "make it new" is a very good account of what Bloom thinks or what anyone interesting thinks about art; the whole point is that generation "wie Blumen entstehen" is a necessarily unattainable model of production. Thus Yeats' bird is not the object of an originating vision but of a kind of encounter with Keats' bird, one that opposes to the naturalism of Keats' poem (which already, of course, powerfully identifies nature with death rather than life) an artifical, golden death.
This excursus sort of became its own point. But I think my purpose was to say that I don't believe that that seasons, death, life, and so on, ever function in literature as content, and that the New Critics were already moving towards this insight. Furthermore their "atomism" returns, I think, (of course much more powerfully) as an emphasis on "singularity" that is shared by Bloom, de Man, and Derrida. But already the New Critical interest was not simply in applying some vaguely defined method to "decode" every poem they came across; it was about identifying and engaging with the works that transcended the conventions of a particular era or genre or tradition. The later readers I mention are much more sophisticated, and work with a history of tropes, in particular of images, rather than with vague invocations of Tradition and Individual Talent, with source studies, stylometrics, etc. But this later criticism, perhaps beyond interpretation, is still not concerned with institutions. To the extent that institutions are by definition governed by rules, pro-grams, etc., Derrida et al. are interested not only in the rules but in an aporetic, sovereign moment of undecidability in which the rules that make the institution function are suspended; the point is then to show that this happens somehow both internally and externally, such that the system in some way contains -- and yet cannot contain -- its own excess. De Man and Bloom would have done something analogous for literature, where figurative language provides the "givens," the system of rules, which then certain moments of extreme, dialectical figuration "inscribe" and transcend through a kind of extended moment of indecision and decay.
The notion of "autonomy" doesn't cover this very well, since for Derrida, de Man, Bloom, and Adorno, it is only out of a confrontation with a dependence and secondariness that autonomy, or the illusion of it, emerges. I think "origination," de Man's translation of Hoelderlin's "entstehen" is, like Bloom's notion of firstness, a more flexible term. But the notion of institution seems to me ultimately too rigid to capture that ongoing, doomed dialectic of autonomization, that yearning for self-generation, of which tropes of death, etc., are all instantiations. Likewise the corresponding critique of New Critical "atomism" ignores the power that the notion of the singularity -- of that which gives itself its own law, that which is only comprehensible according to a concept that it itself has furnished -- continues to have in our readings, whether we call them interpretations or not.
Giulio--there is so much to enjoy, in your posts! So many points! Let me just extract one, then, since actually after posting this I found myself thinking very similar thoughts regarding what Culler says here. I even was thinking of the same word: singularity. What Culler misses here in the critique of the New Critics is, as you say, the fact that they were developing some sense of the singular. Thus he tellingly (and mistakenly) characterizes them as "thematic" critics.
There is the question though of how far this singularity spreads, and in what way it spreads. I feel like Culler has in mind when he opposes New Criticism are the various planes of discourse, the wide surfaces of texts, that we find analyzed in more structuralist investigations of poems, like those of Jakobson and Todorov: large units of language, or the poetic seen as the function of sprawling, prosaic structures (and singularity seen in the way Barthes analyses textual events--de Man's notion of rhetoric still seems oddly too limited, too small in a way--and thus still, at times, too phenomenal, to use his word--even if it is more rigorously getting at the singular). What you rightly suggest (with your focus on the seasons) is that certain New Critical terms which Culler calls thematic also function in similar ways: indeed, what other than a sort of progressivism, and an unfair prejudice against the New Critics (which is, oddly, shared by nearly everyone, as if it were a point of pride to bash the New Critics), would make one interested in arguing the difference? The need to create some sort of break is just too strong here.
Nevertheless, I posted it because the sense of something besides the work of interpretation is so concrete here--and it is concrete for Culler in 1976. In a certain way you could grow up still and not have any sense of alternatives, let alone of the necessity of seeing these alternatives already at work back in the work of the New Critics. Of course, this latter possibility precisely means that the alternatives aren't so clearly distinct from interpretation itself to begin with--and thus in a sense the ignorance of alternatives isn't ignorance at all, but precisely a consciousness of the flexibility of interpretation. What is at issue is the value of some consciousness of a clear line dividing interpretation from something else. It might not be worth drawing. Culler draws it, but does to both along the wrong path and too thickly (if you'll pardon the metaphor). But have we redrawn it since the days of de Man and Culler? If so, how? If not, why not? If no (which I'm not sure about), it is probably because, as you see, it becomes a mere game of where to put the lines--or, rather, mere debate over the names, semantics.
But the question you bring up is actually different, or inflects mine in the right way, beyond all these games. Where is the consciousness of the function of singularity? Where has that gone? Was it higher then, in Culler's time? Did discourses like Culler's precisely cover up this consciousness? The latter might indeed be a real possibility.
One last reflection--I have to run, this is so sad I can't reply more to such great writing--on the question of institutions and singularity, you might want to pick up something I just read recently: Niklas Luhmann's critique of Derrida in Theories of Distinction--might be real fun.
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