Death comes to the Critic

In an idle moment (of which I have few, these days), I reread Terry Pratchett's Reaper Man, in which Death is fired and becomes a farm labourer while the universe tries to cope with an absence of expiration. It's funny and of course rather tender. Death himself is faced with the difficulty of understanding humans and they ways we cope with the knowledge of permanent oblivion, and he comes to admire us. He also has a keen eye for human nature:

There was never anything to be gained from observing what humans said to one another - language was just there to hide their thoughts. 

Which is rather perceptive literary criticism. Who'd have thought Pratchett was a Derridean post-structuralist?

I also remembered another good line from Miéville's Railsea, which uses Moby Dick to explore narrative and obsession, but with trains - it follows rather nicely from Pratchett's point. Here's Captain Naphi explaining her obsession with catching the giant mole:

'You know how careful are philosophies', Naphi said. 'How meanings are evasive. They hate to be parsed. Here again came the cunning of unreason. I was creaking, lost, knowing that the ivory-coloured beast had evaded my harpoon & continued his opaque diggers, resisting close reading & a solution to his mystery. I bellowed, & swore that one day I would submit him to a sharp & bladey interpretation'.

Which is funny because Moby Dick's whale is a symbol onto which multiple interpretations are cast, and because it's what we literary critics do. Well, others do. I stay in port telling people that my last interpretation was THIS BIG.

Books in the post today? Glad you asked. Pratchett's children's book The World of Poo, Alan Warner's new one (again about trains, but also a Scottish bildungsroman), The Deadman's Pedal. Another Scottish classic, Kelman's The Busconductor Hines, and Sheila Rowbotham's history of radical industrial-period women, Dreamers of a New Day.

No books today

I think the flood of books may be ebbing. Time to read some.

Meanwhile, I read Sean O'Hagan's review of Saul Bellow's Letters today. His point is essentially that there were two Bellows: the great author and the petty man, to whom we are introduced in the letters. To O'Hagan, the publication does Bellow and us a disservice to some extent: the letters don't illuminate the literature in any way.

I can see what he's getting at. Bellow wasn't writing with an eye to publication as many authors do, and wouldn't have subscribed to the idea that anything from the author's pen deserves to be published and pored over.

There's a wider angst in literary circles about the decline of the letter. In an age of text messages, tweets, emails and Facebook pages, the author's ephemera aren't likely to survive. Previously, an author keen on posterity kept copies of his letters (when would one start? doesn't this imply huge self-confidence or arrogance) or his recipients would do so. There was a fair chance that notebooks and diaries would be found, preserved, sold (usually to the Harry Ransom Center). Now, so much of this is on a vulnerable hard drive or left to the tender mercies of The Cloud. The author could, if s/he wanted, delete or alter much of this material.

I'm not so concerned. Yes, it's interesting to learn that Saul Bellow wasn't a wise, generous, confident intellectual outside his writing, but it's not essential. I read the letters between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin and found them fascinating, provoking and hilarious but they don't help or hinder my interpretation and enjoyment of the texts, though they may add context. A degree of background knowledge is often useful, but fetishising an author's shopping lists is part of an outdated critical practice. If you link every line in a poem to the author's diary entry ('bad hangover today; wrote depressing poem'), you limit the meaning of that poem to a particular person, moment and mood. You assume that the poet's consciousness at that moment fully controls what he wrote.

That's not the current critical approach. To us, any text is a process of active creation. It's a product of the poet, and his background and cultural position, but it's also influenced by the circumstances of production, by the reader's cultural position and outlook, and by the reader's context. Essentially, meaning is created in a space between the reader and poet, crystallised round the words. The reader can't just dream up meaning: s/he should be looking for significance, and have a sense of the poem's origin, but should also be alive to it's current status. You can't read a Rupert Brooke war poem, for instance, without being aware of your own attitudes to war, and of the various wars which have occurred in the intervening period. The poet can't restrict the work's meaning, and the reader's knowledge of the poet's dinner the day it was written shouldn't reduce the text's scope.

So I'm not actually that bothered about losing the diaries and tweets of authors. They're always interesting, but they're literary history rather than literary criticism. Just think: we manage to produce many thousands of critical articles and books on William Shakespeare, the Beowulf author and the Mabinogion each year, without having a clue what those authors thought of their work. We have no idea whether Shakespeare liked the versions of his plays we've inherited. Did he intend them to mean what we think they mean? No clue. Did he alter them as part of the theatrical process, or to sell more tickets, or to avoid getting his head chopped off? Search me. Did he think of himself as the Immortal Bard, or as a jobbing writer making a living? Who knows? Are we poorer for not having his teenage diaries? I don't think so. It would be fascinating to know all this stuff, and his draught manuscripts could clear up a lot of ambiguities, but it would reduce the texts to biographical evidence to some extent.

It's time to bury the cult of the individual.

What critics do

One of my favourite writers is Gwyneth Jones, who writes sophisticated, feminist, politically complex literature which some people might call fantasy or speculative fiction or science fiction. She also writes SF and horror for teens, under the name Ann Halam, and has published a volume of critical essays.

She blogs here, and you can find some free e-books of her work here.

This is how she describes her critical work in a fascinatingly weird interview, and it resonates with me.

“I’m an intellectual. I can’t help it, I was born that way. This doesn’t mean, alas, that I’m highly qualified or highly intelligent, it just means when I see something made of words (or images, or ideas) I just have to take it apart, to see how it works, to see how it evolved; how the different parts are joined up. Exactly the same as some geeky kid who has to take the back off his or her toys; ruins watches, tinkers with the software and hardware of any hapless useful appliance. Ever since I’ve been a writer, I’ve been a critic, which is not the same as being a reviewer, because usually I’m not really interested in whether the book should sell or not. I just find the activity of dissecting all kinds of narratives (trashy or literary, I don’t care), completely fascinating. I keep trying to give it up, because it’s trouble. You take somebody’s treasured novel, some revered best-seller, apart, you put it back together not exactly the way it was before, naturally readers and writers are going to get annoyed. . . But somehow criticism keeps sneaking back into my life. I really must quit. 

I'm no great thinker, far from it, but I've always wanted to work out the how and why of a text. I remember graduating, and people saying things like 'I can never enjoy a book again, because now I can see how they work', or 'I can't switch off and enjoy a book'. I can see their points, but I always loved the kind of detective work of tracing how a collection of words becomes a character, how a plot hangs together or falls apart. I'm still capable of reading and discarding a book without a moment's thought, but I do like to re-read, to discover the deep structures and significances I missed before.

RIP Frank Kermode

It's difficult to get much work done, what with England wickets falling every twelve seconds. I do want to note Frank Kermode's passing though.

He was, until yesterday when he died at 90 years old, one of the most prominent and interesting British literary critics of the twentieth century. Never the most innovative personally, he was one of the very first to take continental literary criticism and theory seriously, introducing English speakers to deconstruction, psychoanalysis and post-structuralism at a time when British criticism seemed to be based on rudely rejecting any new ideas by Johnny Foreigner. His work was always thoughtful and he was a beautiful prose stylist.

He was also one of the last big generalists - while Shakespeare was his primary focus, he wrote on every period and genre of literature.

If a student asked me for a good starting point in literary criticism - which hasn't happened yet - I'd point them in Kermode's direction.