Читать книгу Doing Criticism - James Chandler - Страница 11

These are the sorts of questions that will be familiar enough, I suppose, to anyone who has taken even an elementary course in the subject we call “English.” It has, however, grown fashionable in recent decades to think of them as questions not particularly essential to the great issues of the modern world, or even to the hard work of getting on in life. At the outbreak of the Second World War, W. H. Auden famously wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen,” and even Wordsworth, for all his faith in the mission of the poet, confessed that he sometimes felt that his attempt to address the great problems of his time by resort to poetry might seem merely a “feeble effort.”¹⁵ Questions of social efficacy aside, however, there has been a clear demotion of the study of poetry since the decades when it was enshrined at the heart of liberal education, an essential part of what it meant to learn to read well. This book can be thought of in part as resisting that demotion.

An initial response is simply to declare that engaging with poems in the way I have begun to do with Williams, Dickinson, and Brooks is a pleasure in itself; that the sheer joy of articulate response, as we put our pleasures and our puzzles into words, is already a great deal. The drive to do criticism, H. L. Mencken wrote, “is no more and no less than the simple desire to function freely and beautifully, to give outward and objective form to ideas that bubble inwardly and have a fascinating lure in them, to … make an articulate noise in the world.”¹⁶ One might go further to claim that this sort of activity opens the mind and liberates the spirit; indeed, that its interplay of analysis and judgment brings, as I put it earlier, new value into the world. In our engagement with Williams, Dickinson, and Brooks, to be sure, the question of value is dynamically in play: the poems seem to analyze and judge us even as we attempt to analyze and judge them.¹⁷ The guiding assumption behind Richards’ influential program in practical criticism is that the organized and “articulate noises” of a lyric poem provide a particularly good—even paradigmatic—starting point for this activity.

Two questions thus emerge here and now. First, how do we extend the scope of criticism’s subject matter beyond the lyric poem—the poem itself—so as to identify a range of things that might serve the work of practical criticism as well as the lyric poem does? Second, how do we extend the benefits of critical engagement beyond the circumference of personal growth and gratification? Both are important questions for addressing the question of how to do criticism at the present time.

To the question of extending the scope of practical criticism’s subject matter, at least two important lines of response have been pursued in the past. Both will be familiar enough, but one is more limited than what I propose here, the other more expansive. The former approach is to extend the subject matter of criticism to include a domain called “literature.” Indeed, when the subject of “critics and criticism” arises in academic circles, the default understanding is that the object in question is in fact “literature.” This is easy to see in a quick sampling of titles, as in the case of the volume bearing that very title, Critics and Criticism, in which the Chicago Aristotelians produced one of the most weighty essay compilations of the mid-twentieth century.¹⁸ We might also think of landmark books such as Georg Lukács’ Writer and Critic or Edward Said’s The World, the Text, and the Critic; or the major anthology by Elaine Showalter, Sandra Gilbert, and Susan Gubar, New Feminist Criticism; or Barbara Christian’s Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers.¹⁹ In every case, “criticism” means by default “literary criticism.” This explains why, when commentators like Eagleton speak of the death of criticism they tend to mean, specifically, “literary criticism,” even as they take poetry as its primary concern.²⁰

One important support for this familiar disciplinary category is a developed notion of “reading” that is assumed to be foundational for all literature. On this understanding of things, the practice of criticism teaches us to read better, to read on a higher level than even that of an advanced literacy. It enables us, as well, to produce “readings” of the works we engage. A major Black feminist critic of our moment, Hortense Spillers, also betrays an assumption that criticism means literary criticism but does so in a way that also helpfully makes the link between reading and producing a reading. Addressing “the relationship between the critical work and that which it contemplates,” Spillers contends that “the literary work describes, or carves out, an arena of choices, and in doing so, the writer suspends definitive judgment.” Conversely, she continues, “the critic’s task, as Northrop Frye observes, is to speak or explain where the work does not, to supply the right questions for a proffered riddle.”²¹ This “speaking” or “explaining” is the production of a reading, and Spillers’ and Frye’s emphasis on the role of questions in that process points to an issue for the doing of criticism that will be central to my discussion in this book.

Spillers’ book, which addresses fiction by Tony Morrison and Ralph Ellison, drama by Langston Hughes, and the poetry Gwendolyn Brooks, also dramatizes the point that, within the conception of criticism that takes “literature” for its default subject matter, there is nonetheless a considerable range in what counts as literature. And the reasons for this range of understandings are not far to seek. Consider the cases of poetry and drama. Within the discipline of literary criticism, as practiced in the wake of Richards’ New Criticism, the lyric poem often retains a central place and paradigmatic role: one need only think how often a poem like Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” becomes the occasion for an illustrative exercise for what criticism can do or how it should be done.²² Yet there is something odd about this development at the heart of Richards’ reinvention of literary criticism, since poetry in its origins is anything but literary in the strict sense of the term: occurring in the medium of letters. Poetic composition, as has been amply demonstrated in the anthropology of nonliterate societies, does for such cultures the work of mnemonic codification and conservation that would be taken up by writing itself in the transition to literacy. Some of the most significant features of written or printed poetry—its constitution by rhyme, by rhythm, by sound—are residues of an oral function, a sign of the fact that poetry is precisely not literary in its origins. Poetry, after all, is intricately connected with song, and this is true for both lyric and epic poetry.

Much the same could be said about drama, which has long since come to be considered as central to what we count as literature. If plays like Hamlet or King Lear do not lie at the heart of the field we have long called “English literature,” then what does? Drama, however, is no more reducible to “literature” than poetry is. The very urtext of the Western critical tradition, the one that tends to appear at the beginning of any historical anthology of “literary criticism,” is Aristotle’s Poetics. Yet Aristotle’s primary objects of consideration in that pioneering treatise—the plays of Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy, for example—were theatrical works composed and staged in Athens in the decades before he wrote. Moreover, the categories of “rhythm,” “song,” and even “spectacle” were explicitly used to identify the basic “parts” of tragedy as Aristotle analyzed it (along with plot, character, diction, and thought).²³

Clearly, this expansion of the scope of Richards’ approach to practical criticism beyond the paradigm of the poem on the page had ample precedent, and it was conceptually important for shaping the discipline of “English” in the twentieth century. A second, much broader expansion of the scope of practical criticism would draw on the post-Enlightenment discipline of aesthetics, in which criticism was understood to extend beyond “literature” (even in its broadest sense) to the wider range of what we sometimes call “the fine arts.” In the eighteenth century when both the category of the fine arts and the discipline of aesthetics began to take shape, these other arts included painting, sculpture, architecture, and music. Each of these arts boasts a considerable—in some cases even venerable—body of critical commentary. The criticism of painting developed rapidly in Arnold’s nineteenth century. Among English critics who excelled in it we might think of Walter Pater (whose book on the Renaissance remains a classic), but literary types like William Hazlitt and Charles Baudelaire were also drawn to the criticism of painting.

Architecture criticism in English also boasts a rich tradition of writing that includes such minor masterpieces as John Ruskin’s “The Nature of Gothic.” In that brilliant analysis, Ruskin took issue with the view that classical architecture, with its salient regularity and unity of design, should be considered superior to the medieval style of cathedral making, with its equally conspicuous idiosyncrasy and asymmetry. He argued the case on the grounds that classical architecture enslaved the worker’s imagination to a master plan, while the Gothic approach allowed different levels of relative autonomy to local guilds and to the craftsmen who work in them. That, he explained, is why not all gargoyles on a medieval cathedral look alike, nor even all porticos or spires. Beyond his influential work on architecture, Ruskin himself wrote extensively about poetry, prose, and painting.

“The Nature of Gothic,” a chapter from an extraordinary book about late Renaissance Venice, is often included in anthologies devoted chiefly to literary criticism.²⁴ At a certain level of abstraction, of course, some principles or tendencies of criticism can be said to obtain across a wide spectrum of the arts. Such generalizations might be loosely grouped together under the category of aesthetics, understood as the study of what it is that constitutes something as a work of art in the first place: the presence of made beauty, for example. Aesthetics, Ruskin showed, can have a political or ethical dimension, and his concern for the role of labor as a decisive consideration in critical judgment survives into the present. We encounter it again just below in the unlikely setting of a New Jersey convenience store in an argument favoring one Star Wars sequel over another on the basis of the fate of the laborers in each plot.²⁵

This more generalized idea of criticism, as practiced across many art forms, emerged forcefully in the movement known as Aestheticism, an important forerunner to the Modernism that brought with it such influential critical voices as Roger Fry in Britain and Clement Greenberg in America. Criticism is still understood in many contexts as a category that embraces all the arts, including the arts that have developed since the mid-nineteenth century such as photography, cinema, and the new media arts of our own moment. There are in fact good introductory books to be found—such as Noël Carroll’s On Criticism—that deal more generally with music, painting, and sculpture, as well as literature, drama, and cinema.²⁶ However, as will become clear, the scope of the term criticism for the present book is not as broad as what is implied in aesthetics generally, nor yet limited to literary criticism in the narrowest sense of the term. To explain what it includes and why, I turn to the second of the two questions raised by Richards’ guiding program for practical criticism: how to generalize the benefits of criticism beyond personal pleasure and moral profit.

This second question requires that we consider how the practice of criticism matters to the practice of a given art in society at large. Looking thus broadly at culture, we might observe that a public that has developed a competence for doing criticism with (say) a lyric poem is likely to enhance the overall condition of the art—just as a critically sophisticated audience for theater in a city like London goes hand in hand with great productions and lively performance. Here is one of my favorite formulations of this point by the influential Canadian critic Northrop Frye, framed as a negative hypothesis about the consequences for a society that might seek to do without criticism:

…the fate of art that tries to do without criticism is instructive. The attempt to reach the public directly through “popular” art assumes that criticism is artificial and public taste natural. Behind this is a further assumption about natural taste which goes back through Tolstoy to Romantic theories of a spontaneously creative “folk.” These theories have had a fair trial; they have not stood up very well to the facts of literary history and experience, and it is perhaps time to move beyond them.²⁷

Some years ago, the witty musical parodist and comedian Tom Lehrer made the same point more starkly when he quipped that what makes folk songs “so atrocious is that they’re written by the people.”²⁸

Lehrer’s comment may sound harsh, but even some cases that seem to be exceptions to this rule actually prove it. Wordsworth started a revolution in English poetry around 1800 by attempting to return poetry to its sources in “low and rustic life” and by using the “actual language of men.”²⁹ But the enormous sophistication that this program demanded both from its poets and its reading audiences alike is evident in the rich critical writings that supported and explained the enterprise: including Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads and Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. Much the same can be said about the critical sophistication of recent Nobel laureate Bob Dylan. I don’t need to make this argument, though, because the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) already has, with its portrayal of Dylan’s immersion in the knowing musical and intellectual milieu of Greenwich Village in the early 1960s.³⁰ “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” did not itself fall from the sky but emerged from an environment rich in critical ideas, as Dylan’s autobiography also attests.³¹ In the second half of this book I address several cases in which criticism has mattered to creative production, sometimes quite explicitly, as in the example of Patricia Rozema’s film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, which relies heavily on an essay by Edward Said about Austen’s handling of slavery in the novel.

This way of generalizing from the personal benefits of criticism to its advantages for a culture writ large underwrites a certain understanding of art and society that extends from Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy through the work of the great Modernists. Indeed, Northrop Frye’s position, thus stated, might itself seem too caught up in a Modernist point of view—too committed to a notion of art defined as an elitist project supported by a critical establishment, a game played between alienated artists and the knowing few, both sides deeply suspicious of the popular and the commercial. As it happens, though, Frye anticipates this objection. Here is the rest of that paragraph from his Anatomy of Criticism:

An extreme reaction against the primitive view, at one time associated with the “art for art’s sake” catchword, thinks of art in precisely the opposite terms, as a mystery, an initiation into an esoterically civilized community. Here criticism is restricted to ritual masonic gestures, to raised eyebrows and cryptic comments and other signs of an understanding too occult for syntax. The fallacy common to both attitudes is that of a rough correlation between the merit of art and the degree of public response to it, though the correlation assumed is direct in one case and inverse in the other.³²

There is nothing radical about what Frye is claiming here, but there is something attractive about his double formulation of criticism’s role, mediating between populist or consumerist tendencies on the one hand and recherché aesthetic mystification on the other.

It is at this point that we can bring together the two kinds of responses that I have been developing, both answers to the question of how to generalize beyond Richards’ efforts to ground “criticism” in the study of lyric poetry. One involves a middle way between restricting the relevant sense of criticism to “literature” and extending it across all forms of “art.” The other involves a middle way between populism (or consumerism) and aesthetic mystification. Both have some relation to the limits of Modernism and to the enterprise of practical criticism that was partly circumscribed by these limits. I can clarify what I mean by returning to Richards, who was writing in the heyday of British Modernism. Here is what he wrote in 1924, the year before he launched his project in practical criticism at Cambridge:

For many reasons standards are much more in need of defence than they used to be. It is perhaps premature to envisage a collapse of values, a transvaluation by which popular taste replaces trained discrimination. Yet commercialism has done stranger things: we have not yet fathomed the more sinister potentialities of the cinema and the loud-speaker…

[PC, p. 31]

It would be unfair to say that Richards was interested in sustaining mystification, as Frye suggests some Modernists were. Indeed, Richards’ relation to Modernist aestheticism was complicated. It is certainly true, however, that Richards was relentlessly focused on the lyric poem as both bearer of culture, in something still close to Matthew Arnold’s sense, and as the paradigmatic object of criticism. At certain moments, Richards actually talks about cinema as if it were equivalent to, as he puts it, “bad art” (PC, p. 189). For Richards, we might say, cinema represented the cultural problem for which the proper study of the poem on the page—practical criticism, in his narrow sense—is the solution.

In retrospect Richards’ position seems quite extraordinary. Writing across the years of the transition from silent cinema to sound cinema, with three full decades of cinematic art behind him, he treats cinema indiscriminately as though it were simply a source of mass distraction and manipulation. Even setting aside the pioneering work of Georges Méliès and the Lumière Brothers and of D. W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin, it must be remembered that the great art films of Fritz Lang (in Germany), Abel Gance (in France), and Carl Dreyer (in Denmark) had all already begun to appear when Richards was working. Indeed, Jean Epstein, the French filmmaker and cineaste, had already developed his notion of a poetics of film.³³ And Eisenstein, in the Soviet Union, was already theorizing an art of cinema by 1929.

When current critics worry about the death of criticism, then, their outlook is often limited to something like what Richards, and even Frye and Spillers, understood as criticism in the first place. Meanwhile, much critical interest—much critical energy—seems to have migrated to those domains that Richards disparaged in the cultures of film and the moving image. It’s not just that one can find thriving academic programs in cinema and media studies across the world, even at Richards’ Cambridge. Drop by any coffee shop or office lunchroom, or just pay attention to the transactions of daily life in and out of universities, in and out of domestic circumstances, and you will find that film and television make for energetic ongoing critical conversation. And before the advent of online streaming, cinephiles had begun to relish “extra features”—including critical commentaries—on material media such as DVDs and BluRay disks. In short, practical criticism is not dead. It is just showing more vital signs in some places than in others, even or especially in the scenes of everyday life. The philosopher Stanley Cavell anticipated such new directions in criticism more than half a century ago, in The World Viewed, when he noted that the example of cinema poses a special problem for Modernism and can help to expose its aesthetic limitations partly by virtue of the connection between cinema and the ordinary.³⁴

This shift in critical energies has itself been registered with increasing prominence in the way motion-picture media themselves represent the place of criticism in everyday life. Certainly, the cinema of the last thirty years has often preoccupied itself with dramatizing acts of criticism that range from the crudest kind of judgments to the most refined. It is possible, without much effort, to name a score of such examples over the last couple of decades, especially if we extend the scope of criticism to include music criticism. The sophistication of critical judgment represented in such films varies accordingly. It can range from Ed and Shaun choosing which records they will hurl at the zombies in Shaun of the Dead (2004) (“Purple Rain, no … Dire Straits, throw it”) to more considered performances of aesthetic judgment of the sort offered in John Cusack’s character’s top ten rankings in High Fidelity (2000).³⁵ Many films feature critical commentary, sometimes extended and quasi-academic commentary. Think of Woody Allen’s Bullets over Broadway, with Chazz Palminteri playing the sophisticated gangster-critic who gives detailed technical advice to the John Cusack character about his screenplay.³⁶ In Lisa Cholodenko’s 1998 film High Art, a Brooklyn woman trained in “critical theory” delivers a critical analysis on her upstairs neighbor’s photograph and invokes Roland Barthes’ account of the “punctum.”³⁷ The figure of the critic has been fully embodied in the character played by Dustin Hoffman in Stranger than Fiction (2006), where Emma Thompson plays an author trying to kill off a character (played by Will Farrell) who doesn’t want to die, and also in Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s complex film Adaptation (2002), when the Kaufman character (Nicolas Cage) seeks advice from a screenwriting guru played by Brian Cox.³⁸

It also seems clear enough, for example, that the films of Quentin Tarantino and a television series like The Sopranos would not be what they are without their characters’ explicit and recurring acts of critical commentary on objects in a contemporary cultural scene in which these works themselves have come to gain a place of iconic centrality. Consider how often characters in Tarantino’s films or David Chase’s episodes become preoccupied with critical reflection on objects and events in contemporary culture: the bank robbers at the start of Reservoir Dogs (1992) discussing a Madonna song or Tony Soprano commenting on American war films.³⁹ Sometimes the chain of reference can be extensive, as I suggest in Chapter 3, running through several works for the screen, and it can even involve cinematographic techniques that likewise, on another level, offer pointed commentary on prior works. There is such a sequence that runs from Jon Favreau’s appearance on The Sopranos back to his film Swingers (1996) and from there to the opening of Reservoir Dogs and Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990).⁴⁰

One measure of how criticism has migrated to the screen can be found in the television series that Spike Lee has recently adapted from his own first commercial film, She’s Gotta Have It (1986). In the television series launched in 2017, as in the original film, Nola Darling (DeWanda Wise) is an African American artist with several lovers. Also set in Brooklyn, now gentrified, the series is more topically relevant than the film was: characters discuss the election of Donald Trump when it happens, for example. It is also far more discursive about matters of criticism. Nola discusses the influence of Chicago painter Kerry James Marshall on her work. She is a film buff and often frames situations by way of cinematic references, annoyed when a friend or a lover cannot keep up with her. In direct address to the camera, she likens her own story to that of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), a film narrated by multiple narrators in a way that doesn’t quite add up. Literary arts also come into play. Early in season 1, Nola and one of her lovers have a meeting of minds over a book of poetry, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. In the three decades or more between Spike Lee’s film and his series, clearly, the relationship of criticism and the screen has changed and, as I discuss in this book’s final chapter, he is an artist who helped to change it. Indeed, already in his 1995 film Clockers, discussed at some length in Chapter 6, we find an opening sequence in which young drug dealers in the Brooklyn projects discuss the merits of various rappers, in some cases according to the criterion of whether they are “hard” enough ever to have killed someone.

I turn now to look in some detail at a particularly telling example of how the function of criticism can be internalized in a screen narrative, the pioneering 1994 independent film Clerks, directed by Kevin Smith, now something of a cult classic, but noted chiefly in its moment for having won two awards at the Cannes Film Festival after being made on an absurdly small budget of less than $27,000. Like “This Is Just to Say,” this film gives us a moment of critical reflection in a world of everyday consumption. It is not exactly Williams’ kitchen this time but a site just as ordinary—and also, as it happens, in New Jersey.