“Review, v.t. To set your wisdom (holding not a doubt of it, Although in truth there’s neither bone and skin to it) At work upon a book, and so read out of it The Qualities that you first read into it.” Ambrose Bierce, ‘The Devil’s Dictionary’ “. . . criticism is as inevitable as breathing.” TS Eliot, ‘Tradition & the Individual Talent’ “Only the superficial look beneath the surface.” Oscar Wilde “ . . . have you ever noticed that instructions from one who knows the country get you more lost than you are, even when they are accurate?” John Steinbeck, novelist, ‘Travels With Charly’ Everyone has opinions. So everyone can be a literary critic. And I hope by this stage you feel you can be one too. Why shouldn’t you be? It’s not like setting up as a surgeon or a lawyer, jobs which require formal qualifications and years of study. Anyone can just read a book and speak or write about it, whether they’ve any training in the subject or not. And there’s a lot of people making a decent living from doing this, some brilliant, some who shouldn’t be allowed near a text. But whether they’re “officially” qualified to write criticism or not, the currency of the language is OPINIONS. This book is filled with opinions. Bar the factual content, none of it is copper-bottomed KNOWLEDGE. It can’t be. Because as I said right at the start when I mentioned the possibility of “nailing” Proust, there’s no such thing as a wholly objective interpretation of art. There’s concensus, where a number of opinions converge, but that still doesn’t produce changeless knowledge. There’s no proof anyone’s ABSOLUTELY right about meaning, no matter how many letters they’ve got after their name, or how prominent they are in the arts establishment. So, bearing that in mind, why not join in the fun? Don’t be backwards in coming forward. Make your voice heard! It’s time we opened up the market to a broader variety of opinions so we can all read in a saner critical environment. And if you’re still not on board, perhaps feeling a bit shy or lacking in self-confidence, just take a look at this and be convinced you need to get involved: . . . it is argued that this poetic work develops a powerful ethical vision as a lexical and political counterbalance to the rhetoric of poetic modernism which has hitherto emphasised formal linguistic play and epistemological preoccupation. Refracting this poetic work through Emannuel Levinas's and Julia Kristeva's philosophies of ethics, it considers how this poetry is informed by a matrix of ideas which include responsibility for otherness and a recovery of the past through memory, and how it ultimately seeks to construct an ethics of history. Oh, brother. Let’s reclaim our beloved literature, starting now. But before we unleash the revolution, let’s define what we don’t want to happen - taking for granted, of course, that the pretentious bollocks in the above paragraph won’t survive the regime change. CAVEAT ONE: Let’s not entertain the idea of unitary interpretations, even assuming such a thing were possible. Criticism which files meaning to a point rather than letting it fan outwards ultimately does literature no favours; it stifles debate, and this in turn causes meaning’s gene pool to stagnate. As in literature, as in life; always seek a second opinion. If, as I’ve just argued, interpretations are nothing more than opinions, it makes more sense to shop around, or you may end up trusting the first viewpoint you hear, or believing the voice that shouts the loudest. And if you don’t challenge received wisdom, you’re effectively being told what to think - which indicates low levels of self-esteem. Don’t allow your taste to be bullied; meaning doesn’t come inscribed on tablets of stone these days. And Melvyn Bragg isn’t God. Trust your instinct, and don’t be afraid to discuss your views with others. So what if they don’t agree? You probably don’t like the same sorts of music either. Or support the same football team. CAVEAT TWO: Let’s not buy in to the heresy at the other end of the spectrum that claims there’s just as much meaning in the nutritional information on a Corn Flake packet as ‘King Lear’. It may sound attractively emancipated and democratic (particularly when compared with Caveat One), until you take a closer look at its implications. Using this model, the status of our opinions still counts for zip, because no one reading is more ‘right’ than another. Hierarchies of meaning can’t exist, so every road is the right road to meaning. But, as a reader, you’re denied the option to choose the best road - or at least a road that suits you. No values allowed. So, avoiding the two critical extremes above, let’s try to take the best out of Meaning (Value) and Significance (Pluralism) to create meaning that; Þ is broad-based without being meaningless (so there’s plenty of varied input); Þ has an empirical ambition, rather than an empirical imperative (meaning is preferable to meaninglessness, but not at any price - i.e. we won’t try to create meaning for its own sake, or force significance into boxes that are too small for it just to have a neat and tidy argument). Basically, all we’re doing is chopping the two ends off our Meaning Line, leaving most of it intact, and within these only slightly narrowed parameters, there’s a whole world of meaning to be discovered and enjoyed. Unitary Interpretations Meaninglessness -------------Meaning-------------------------------------Significance------------------- Never mind the Deconstructionists call you an “aesthetic fascist” or some such for wanting value in your meaning; or the authoritarian who’ll slag you off for not wanting enough value and being broad-minded. They’re extremists, and there’s no room for them in the future of criticism. So how do we set about constructing an ideal school of Lit Crit? First, we have to decide what we want from our criticism, no matter what its provenance, by addressing the following two questions: Þ How far do we favour authoritative readings that tell us as unequivocally as possible what literature means? Or do we want a range of alternative meanings? And if the latter, how many? Þ How far do we want to work meaning out for ourselves, or will we need some help? And if so, how much? And that’s what this final section’s all about; what we should reasonably expect from literary meaning, and how that dovetails with what we’re actually being given by those whose job it is to act as intermediaries between the reader and the text. It’s going to be a short section, because what I’d prefer is for you to have the necessary data and confidence to go it alone, bearing in mind all we’ve looked at in the last umpteen hundred pages. But if you’ve now got the tools to do the job of criticism (and I sincerely hope you have, or this book will have failed), it might help, before you wipe the slate clean and start for yourself, to find out where criticism has been, and where it currently stands with regard to meaning as we enter the 21st Century. That way you can be mindful of the successes and failures of those (mainly) self-appointed arbiters of meaning, those guardians and gatekeepers of our literary heritage - THE CRITICS. So with this in mind, I propose we conduct a master class in Lit Crit, using the best and worst of what’s available as models of good practice and how not to do it, with a view to getting what you need out of a text, but extracting that meaning in sympathy with the way it was put in there by the writer. There really is no need to vandalize a text or trample over authorial intentions to get at meaning. Criticism’s not like coal mining or robbing a bank. Ask it nicely and it’ll announce itself. But you’ve got to approach it armed with the right questions. Before you start quizzing the text, however, you yourself need to answer . . . 6 Questions Every Critic Should Ask Himself Before Embarking On His Glorious Career: Critic Know Thyself “They say anyone who tells you what a Dylan song is about is only really telling you about themselves.” Jamie Catto, musician - a statement that could be amended to; “any literary critic who’s telling you what a text means is only really telling you about himself”. And criticism reveals a hell of a lot about what the critic is actually like, and whether an evening in the pub with him would be time well spent. But it does stand to reason that the critic has only two major inputs into his work; his research, and himself; stuff he’s learned, and the stuff he’s inherited in his genes. And the latter, being bound up with his personal disposition, will inevitably have influenced his chosen course of study, what attracted him to it, and how he’s pursuing it. There’s an awful lot of personality in criticism, whether it’s out in the open, as, say in Doctor Johnson’s ‘Lives of the Poets’, or whether it’s buried beneath layers of references and hermeneutical verbiage, as in the examples at the start of Part 1. There’s simply no disguising it: even something as balanced and non-commital as Keats’s concept of “negative capability” speaks volumes about Keats; he was either a ditherer or scrupulously fair-minded, depending whether you think it’s helpful to suspend judgement about meaning or not. So before a critic sets pen to paper, and begins the job of filleting great works of literature for our amusement and edification, I feel he ought to ask himself a set of 6 related questions that will help determine the direction his criticism is going to take. There are no correct answers; but once the responses have been collated, the aim is to predict what the would-be critic will find in the texts he’s looking at. Because most critics tend to find what they’re looking for, whether it’s there or not, and whether or not they realize the pre-programmed elements in their personalities are influencing their conceptions of meaning. So my first contention is that there’s no such thing as an objective quest for truth, because critics are, for the most part, human. And that goes for this book too. Bearing that in mind, let’s hit question 1.