Tactical criticism: Leavis

I agree with Raymond Williams that F.R. Leavis makes close reading seem to positively require a very specific group of people: the small minority Leavis describes in Mass Civilization and Minority Culture, the most rudimentary community, that, merely by virtue of its small size and relative stability, would supposedly gain insight which remained closed to everyone else. Close reading becomes the practice of a seminar full of militants, thinking they are defenders of cultural tradition.

And, as Williams rightly says (in Culture & Society and elsewhere), this isn't elitism, at least in its usual form--despite what people still say about Leavis. For outside of the minority there is the entirety of civilization, on the one hand, and, on the other, individuals. Instead of the formation of a coterie, Leavis wants comrades. Criticism is criticism when something like intellectual guerrilla warfare takes place, not when a bunch of individuals decide they think others are inferior.

But where this warfare does indeed take place, and against whom, matters immensely for Williams and for me, and very little for Leavis. If such warfare only really makes sense at Cambridge (for it certainly can't take place in America: we barbarians have lost all hope of redeeming ourselves in such small communities with a tie to tradition) isn't this a little telling?

That is, in Leavis, I feel we have are the conditions of the struggle for Cambridge English universalized. And the very extent to which others recognized their struggles in this universalization testifies, not to the reality of the Cambridge situation, but to the appeal of an idea of a small community--which indeed, with Williams, I think is something to save. But if we save this idea, this does not in turn testify to the insistence that the small community of skilled readers is the only group capable of action, as Leavis would hold. In fact, the community itself becomes pointless if it is seen as the only community there could be. And, as Williams says, the position of the group against civilization leaves all sorts of questions about civilization unanswered, precisely in order to shore up the group.

On this point, it's probably good to get into the details of what Leavis calls "Judgment and Analysis" (and what others called "Practical Criticism"). For we have to see how Leavis's actual critical practice fits into his notions of this culturally informed minority, and allows this minority to sustain itself without any notion of a larger community into which it could eventually (after transforming this civilization) dissolve.

It might be helpful, then, to turn to America and the always illuminating W.K. Wimsatt. In "Explication as Criticism" (in The Verbal Icon) Wimsatt remarks that there are three forms of critical language. There is a sort of wide ranging positive and negative evaluation (good, bad). Then there is a sort of neutral technical language, where we label parts of the work in question (as well as label the "referential content," or "themes"--i.e. alongside "spondee" we also talk about "love" or "war" as what the poem interrogates, complicates, inflects). And finally there is a more complex, more subtle language that mixes the two others, a middle language where we get terms like "careful" "precise" "simple," "dreary"--terms that are used to evaluate while explicating. The third terms, Wimsatt says, are generally used because a positive or negative term has set off a train of evaluation that is being justified and expanded by the more neutral terms.

This surely has changed since Wimsatt wrote (1948): now we have new and more complex neutral terms to set off the process of justification by other, more technical neutral terms. But in saying this I should also mention that with the decline in outright evaluation there is a corresponding change in the function of criticism itself, such that it no longer explicates but organizes or describes a text--something overlooked by people who lament the loss of the evaluative function of criticism. It isn't as if criticism grew afraid of the positive and negative and only now substitutes an other, more neutral language for them--such that now, we're always only judging positively or negatively by other means (as Sianne Ngai and might claim). Rather, as I have said before and with reference to Leavis, literary criticism called into question the entire structure that Wimsatt outlines and which produces this first language (good, bad). If there is any error here, it is in seeing this first language as a mere symptom of the explicative structure, and not the integral moment that Wimsatt makes it.

Thus, perhaps more significant than the change in the ability of Wimsatt's structure to describe a state of criticism is the transformation that occurs in the use of structures like his in general. That is, while we also don't judge positively or negatively anymore, we also don't have any real faith in Aristotelian structures like Wimsatt's (my colleague Evan is fascinated with this). For, to bring us back to the actual three languages and how they bears on Leavis, Wimsatt wants to cultivate, not the neutral terms, but (and here's Aristotle) the middle terms. Why? What we do with middle terms is point, while explicating, to the larger "concrete universal" aspect of poetry at which the general evaluative terms can only sort of grunt.

And this sort of grunting "authoritarian bent" in criticism, caused by a lack in the cultivation of middle terms, characterizes Leavis from Wimsatt's perspective. Here, without middle terms, criticism becomes only provocation, only the exhortation that we ought to admire these passages. Or only somewhat more subtly, it becomes the insistence that we ought to plainly perceive how a poem is good, or part of the great tradition, if a particular poem's thought or viewpoint is something generally right or not--which is what Leavis's criticism does. For Wimsatt, all this is trying to get us to the concrete universal too quickly, and ultimately in a way that, even with its meticulous justifications (or rather because they are there only to painstakingly justify something so crass), ends up destroying our ability to apprehend that universal.

But there is also something to be said for Leavis's lack of cultivation of middle terms, as opposed to this authoritarian prodding in general. Because Leavis is always trying to show us how an author can be right or wrong in a general intellectual sense (and that his or her rightness or wrongness is what is valuable about his or her work), he never gets stuck judging merely the intricacies and complexity (tonal, structural, whatever) of a work. He always integrates this complexity into a sort of world view that becomes relevant for the possibilities of connections to other works that it produce, unlike a poem for Empson, which seems somehow to exhaust the world it comes from; to not offer anything to us by virtue of its coming from a history. But one also wonders whether considering a thought valuable to us if we ourselves were to take it up now is somewhat preparatory to the work of criticism--as preparatory as I would claim (perhaps somewhat scandalously) Empson's work is.

Only Leavis, then, could see the potential in reprinting something like John Stuart Mill's writings on Bentham and Coleridge--generally ignored at the time or, if read, seen only as "great essays." Leavis's introduction to the two essays makes the case for reissuing the little book (almost a pamphlet--a form with a history of subversion) quite well: one will get in Mill's writings a portrait of two intellectual tendencies that will dominate the 19th century, as well as a third tendency that would first recognize and isolate, and then try and reconcile them--and this is infinitely more valuable than the Carlyle that people read for the English Tripos. There is, in short, something to be said for such an effort, which makes possible alternate traditions, and actively opposes them to the established histories (like the tradition of the novel--the serious study of which he, along with Queenie Leavis, made possible). But as an effort, one also has to wonder, with Williams, whether it belongs to literary criticism and not to the sphere of Kulturkritik. Obviously, its aim is reversed, and it is not bourgeois, but it is a local effort that has no possibility of going further abroad except through a wide process of generalization, like those remarks on taste that such a bourgeois criticism constantly uses (allowing mass audiences to be better consumers).

Criticism, Leavis says in The Living Principle, is tactical. And I do think there's something to be said for that notion--if only because it make clear that practical criticism is undertheorized as tactical criticism. But a tactic is a limited effort, not a general one: it can gain its force through its ideal (tradition, living principle), but actually becomes cut off from its goals when it (without transforming itself) becomes generalized.