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Literary criticism is fundamentally the estimation of the value of a
particular work or body of work on such grounds as: the personal and/or cultural
significance of the themes and the uses of language of a text; the insights and
impact of a text; and the aesthetic production (or, performance) of the text;
particularly as these areas are seen to be mutually dependent, supportive or
inflective. The word 'criticism' has ordinary-use negative connotations, and to
an extent that is right: for literary criticism is part of the disciplining of
discourse generally and of what is considered literature in particular. One
patrols the boundaries of good writing, admitting or excluding, determining what
should be thought about a text, and why, what personal and cultural value should
be placed on it.
Judgments of value are not simple, however. They require that one consider
what constitutes value, what the personal and social value of literature is,
what the value of 'the aesthetic' is. And they require that one interpret the
text. As texts judged to be of high literary value tend to be marked by
complexity and even ambiguity, and to yield diverse interpretations, judgment
may ultimately require a theory of interpretation, or at least careful attention
to the question of what constitutes, guides, and legitimates interpretation.
Theory is the process of understanding what the nature of literature is,
what functions it has, what the relation of text is to author, to reader, to
language, to society, to history. It is not judgment but understanding of the
frames of judgment.
Theory, however, particularly as "a theory of X," tends to operate
within a frame of values and expectations itself. Full understanding requires
one think as fully as possible about the sets of expectations, assumptions and
values of theory and theorizing, and this (always incompletable) exercise I
think of as theory itself.
IV: Literary Studies
In this discussion, I skip consideration of literary studies, which Roman
Jakobson I think rightly in his famous essay "Linguistics and Poetics"
insists must be differentiated from literary criticism. "Literary
studies" refers to knowledge about the facts of the case as they illuminate
the meaningfulness of texts -- facts of authorship, biography, influence,
aesthetics, the pressures and modulations of contexts, rewriting and
publication, historical interpretation, and so forth.
In looking at the piece on Heart of Darkness by Edward Garnett reproduced
below as literary criticism, we can discuss whether he is right about the value
of the work and about the themes of the work. Is Garnett's judgment correct? Are
the bases of his judgment an accurate description of the qualities of the text?
The text in question is an unsigned review by Garnett in Academy and
Literature 6, December 1902.
["Youth"and "The End of the Tether," stories published
with "Heart of Darkness"] will be more popular than the third,
"Heart of Darkness," "a study of the white man in Africa,"
which is most amazing, a consummate piece of artistic diablerie.....
We...hold "Heart of Darkness" to be the high-water mark of the
author's talent....
"Heart of Darkness," to present its theme bluntly, is an
impression, taken from life, of the conquest by the European whites of a
certain portion of Africa, an impression in particular of the civilizing
methods of a certain great European Trading Company face to face with the
"nigger." We say this must because the English reader likes to know
where he is going before he takes his art seriously, and we add that he will
find the human life, black and white, in "Heart of Darkness" and
uncommonly and uncannily serious affair. If the ordinary reader, however,
insists on taking the subject of a tale very seriously, the artist takes his
method of presentation more seriously still, and rightly so. For the art of
"Heart of Darkness" -- as in every psychological masterpiece -- lies
in the relation of the things of the spirit to the things of the flesh, of the
invisible life to the visible, of the sub-conscious life within us, our
obscure motives and instincts, to our conscious actions, feelings and outlook.
Just as landscape are implies the artist catching the exact relation of a tree
to the earth from which it springs, of the earth to the sky, so the art of
"Heart of Darkness" implies the catching of infinite shades of the
white man's uneasy, disconcerted, and fantastic relation with the exploited
barbarism of Africa; it implies the acutest analysis of the deterioration of
the white man's morale, when he is let loose from European restraint,
and planted down in the tropics as an "emissary of light" armed to
the teeth, to make trade profits out of the "subject races." The
weirdness, the brilliance the psychological truth of this masterly analysis of
two Continents in conflict, of the abysmal gulf between the white man's system
and the black man's comprehension of its results, is conveyed in a rapidly
rushing narrative which calls for close attention on the reader's part. But
the attention once surrendered, the pages of the narrative are as enthralling
as the pages of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. The stillness of the
sombre African forests, the glare of sunshine, the feeling of dawn, of noon,
of night on the tropical rivers, the isolation of the unnerved, degenerating
whites staring all day and every day at the heart of Darkness which alike
meaningless and threatening to their own creed and conceptions of life, the
helpless bewilderment of the unhappy savages in the grasp of their flabby and
rapacious conquerors [note the use of Conrad's language and imagery] -- all
this is a page torn form the life of the Dark continent -- a page which has
been hitherto carefully blurred and kept away from European eyes. There is no
"intention" in the story, no parti pris, no prejudice one way
or the other; it is simple a piece of art, fascinating and remorseless, and
the artist is but intent on presenting his sensations in that sequence and the
arrangement whereby the meaning or the meaninglessness of the white man in
uncivilized Africa can be felt in its really significant aspects....
This is literary criticism in that it is a valuation of the writing and the
subject matter. It is the high-water mark of Conrad's talent, Garnett says, and
along the way he attempts to explain why this is so. The style, the subject
matter, and the treatment of the subject, are described. This is a
"masterpiece," and Garnett tells use wherein the "art" lies.
It lies in the qualities of perception and of writing, in the analysis as well
as in the presentation of the subject. It is a psychological masterpiece, an
enthralling representation of reality, a rapidly rushing narrative, and an
astute treatment of a cultural phenomenon. Garnett classifies it by comparison
with a work which had (in Constance Garnett's translation) recently burst on the
English cultural scene, and was acknowledged to be a work of great psychological
and dramatic power, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment; and he contrasts
it implicitly to less powerful descriptions, and to descriptions which have
political or social rather than simply representational motives. As literary
criticism, one can contest his valuation, and/or the grounds of his valuation,
of the work.
It should become clear, however, that Garnett is also operating with certain
theories of literature. No criticism is innocent of theory, and what is at times
called 'literary criticism' is often largely theory (Sidney's Defence of
Poetry, Pope's Essay on Criticism, Wordsworth's "Preface"
to the Lyrical Ballads, and so forth).
- Garnett believes that art is an exact representation of life, however one
that is selected and arranged to elucidate truths. He praises the work for
the precision with which it portrays what is, but also for a 'method' which
brings to light that which is hidden. There are apparently two views of
representation here, and of the nature of 'art': art represents, or art
uncovers. It is not unusual for a critic to operate from different, even
conflicting, theoretical positions, and in this case the conflict is as
Flaubert long ago pointed out endemic to Realism: realism claims to
represent the truth but in order to do so it necessarily selects and
arranges, hence distorting the world as empirically experienced, and
inflecting the 'truth' (as empirically conceived) with certain criteria of
selection and arrangement.
- As an elucidation of things hidden Garnett sees this text as a
psychological masterpiece, also as an astute analysis of a cultural
conflict. There is a theory of the social function of literature here, and
(as an enablement of that function) of literature as heuristic: literature
does not merely teach by delighting (Horace, "Epistle to the
Pises") or by saying "what oft was thought. but ne'er so well
expressed" (Pope, "Essay on Criticism"); rather it discloses
truths which otherwise would not be available but which are necessary if we
are to live justly and to understand ourselves.
- In understanding literature as having heuristic powers Garnett reads with
a certain model of human nature in mind, and with a certain model of social
order. Were the article to be read by someone who did not understand the
emerging theories of psychoanalysis, for instance, the ideas of the relation
of our conscious and unconscious life (or even the existence of our
unconscious life), the idea that we are governed by instincts and motives we
only obscurely understand, then the Garnett's reading, and his grounds for
valuing the text, might not be understood or accepted as valid.
- Similarly there is a politics in Garnett's reading, and a position in
relation to imperialism; in fact he claims, and claims it apparently as a
strength, that there is no political motivation to the text. This leads us
to the perception that Garnett does not read literature of colonization with
suspicion, does not think in terms of the language and sensibility of the
Other, does not interrogate imperialist values -- or gender values, for
another. Reading Heart of Darkness in that manner requires of set of
theoretical conceptions and assumptions Garnett did not have.
- To return to the heuristic value, while Garnett does not claim that
literature is the only way this uncovering of truth can be achieved, his
faith in the eminence of this function is implicit, as are some of the
reasons for this eminence (its representational power, its rhetorical force,
its freedom from any interest other than the truth). There is an implicit
valuation of literature as as means of conveying truth, that is to say.
- Garnett sees the work as proceeding from the intention of the author, and
its effects as relying on capacities and attentions (hence the intention) to
the audience. While this may seem unexceptional, there are operative
assumptions here which could affect his reading, and his valuation. Garnett
does not ask what psychic complexities allowed Conrad to see what he sees,
he does not ask if the discursive formations which Conrad occupied inflected
or occasioned his text, he assumes that language is responsive to the
author's wish, that the reader receives the message the author sends and
hence the reader's reception is conditioned only by a willingness to attend,
he assumes that while there are hidden meanings in personal and social
formations, there are none in textual formations, so what the text means is
itself unproblematic and its representational power is unblemished.
- As well, an understanding of Garnett's theoretical position will
comprehend why the review should have been taken seriously at the time, and
so seriously since as to be often reprinted. Part of this will have to do
with the institutions which regulate the publication, promotion, sales and
valuation of texts, so that the reader of the theoretical assumptions of
Garnett's piece will see that Garnett, a socially and culturally influential
literary figure, is publishing in a review which proclaims the relation
between the institutions of education and of 'literature,' Academy and
Literature. Only a certain audience would have read this, and why
Garnett chose to publish there rather than in the popular press, as well as
the title of the publication, are themselves important statements about his
understanding of what 'literature' is and ultimately about what its social
functions in society are.
Consequently one can simply critique or approve Garnett's literary criticism and
feel one has done one's job, but only if one chooses to ignore (or simply so
fully agrees with as not to perceive) the theoretical position(s) on which his
reading is based. Otherwise one must begin not with a critique of the criticism
but with an attempt to understand and to articulate its theoretical assumptions.
While interrogating the theoretical assumptions, however, one ought to be aware
of the difference between "Literary Theory" as a subject, and
"theory itself." Literary Theory is, as Deleuze and Guattari remark in
A Thousand Plateaus, an arrangement of ideas within a demarked space: one
has the author, the reader, the text, society, etc, and a theoretical position
will articulate the importance and the nature of the various relations among
them. This is disciplined and disciplining theory, theory ready to hand for the
practice of literary criticism, theory as practiced and approved by the
regulatory bodies of the 'discipline.' One then has a 'theoretical position'
from which, or through which, one acts, as a 'reader-response' theorist, or a
'psychoanalytic' theorist, or whatever. Theory Itself, on the other hand, is
always one step off, is not to hand for criticism, because it is attempting to
assess the assumptions and implications of the demarked space (why it is
demarked, by what process, what the demarkation suggest, on what grounds and for
what reasons these are authorized, and so forth). The practice of theory itself
is self-reflexive, for it includes an examination of the grounds of one's own
practice, authority, and goals.
The study of literary theory as I understand it occupies a site of struggle
between these two locations, "Literary Theory" and "theory
itself," between the attempt to locate literature in relation to its
'components', on the one hand, and an attempt to understand the ontological,
epistemic, axiological and praxic nature and implications and assumptions of the
very phenomenon of 'literature' as a cultural formation and practice. One can
read Garnett's piece as a valuation of the text, one [must?] can read it for its
theory of literature, and/or one can [must?] read it as an exercise of theory,
in which case one must interrogate one's own assumptions, the very act one is
engaged in, the categories one applies, the significance of the act.
© 1997, 2000 John Lye.
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