They Don't Slap Scholars Anymore, Do They?

Of course they do . . . only not with "wit" they once did.  Reading '70s review literature on the longstanding Realism vs. Romance debate, it is impossible to mistake the grumpy old guard's contempt for the young proud and profoundly theoretical.  One reviewer remarks how in his newly tenured compatriot's

sealed world of romance, all reality is textual, and as theorists have taught us, when scrutinized closely textual realities unravel to reveal the void at the center, or, in some of the manifestations of the idea presented [in this book], a "discontinuously woven" text "may have no magic in its web"; an attempt at representation points to the "absence of the represented entity"; the "moment of origin" becomes the "sign of a loss"; the novel is "a record of an absence, a deferred and indirect account of a direct exposure.

Nothing unusual here.  A reviewer doesn't want to "do the deconstruction."  His reviewee most emphatically does.  All is well in academia.  Only as I continued reading the review I noticed something different about this criticism . . . something I wouldn't expect in contemporary.  The reviewer chides the reviewee for imputing to the authors whose works he studies an awareness of the deconstructive principle.  To wit:

Yet it is not the post-modernist critic who unties the twisted strands of codes and conventions . . . that compose these novels, but the romancers themselves, who, because they are deeply aware of the unstable verbal space of their texts, have already problematized the uncertain relationship between readers and writers.

You're more than welcome to gawk.  This reviewer complains that the book he reviews substantiates its claim via authorial intent instead of critical acumen.  What world did these two men live in?  One in which an awareness for the limitations of language belongs to author and critic alike . . . in which the critic finds in the words of the author evidence of theoretically applicability instead of forcing the author's words into some framework as becoming as an octogenerian in a thong. 

Not that the imposition is unwarranted at times.  Some authors un-self-consciously larded their novels with fine critical pickings.  Conrad may have thought about the implications of his dovetailed theories of race and colonialism but it took Said's perspective to snap them into place.  That is certainly true.  But sometimes in this field in which hyper-production has become the norm of necessity . . . and in which the path of least unproductivity contains critical jewels enough to write fifteen books . . . in such a situation the normative mode of analysis privileges the critic over the author every time.  The author is the base metal from which the critic will construct the ladder he'll climb up from promotion to promotion. 

At least that's how it sometimes seems.  Reading the same argument by the same critic in different articles about different authors will do that to a body. 

Comments

[jholbo]

I think we need more context here. Couldn't it be that the reviewer is, by implication, criticizing the author for IMPLAUSIBLY imputing knowledge of deconstructive principles to ... let's say, Shakespeare. You read Shakespeare in a way that makes it sound like "Hamlet" was just a crude first draft for "Of Grammatology". The reviewer could be ventriloquizing the author saying something of the sort, by way of bringing out that the reading is more contrived than clever. Just guessing. Like I said: could we get a bit more context?

[Belle Lettre]

What's interesting is that this problem crops up in my field too--

When you're a Critical Race Theorist examining the racist constructs in the law, you're being a rebel (a 20 year old rebel, but whatever). The law is supposed to be absent of politics or personal preference (justice is blind)--so it's supposed to be neutral legal principles handed down and applied neutrally, without regard to the race, sex, or creed of the defendant or plaintiff. BS, of course. The Legal Realists argued that judges are just politicians in robes, and whatever the black robes were supposed to suggest (a mantle of neutrality), they did not leave their biases at the door. The Critical Legal Studies movement went further, arguing that all law reinforced hierarchy and patriarchy. CRT argues that it does this and uses race as its focus. All of these movements attempt to explain what many are still not willing to accept: that authorial intent matters. I'm not talking about originalism (another debate for another day) but that you can read in the text of the opinion a judge's bias, which is sometimes outcome-determinative. Blasphemy, of course.

I imagine that the law is different from literature enough that this debate is not the same as the New Critics vs. the New Historicists, but it's kind of similar. We're all wondering who to ultimately trust--the author's intent, the plain text outside of the author, or the critic who reads the text and the author within it and the historical context surrounding it.

It's an old argument. One that crosses disciplines. Another tie that binds.

[Steff]

Does that debate not already play itself out (in a way) in Lukacs vs Brecht (is Kafka a bourgeois or a radical?) - and does this not belong into an even more archaic trend in the history of thought, the "real", "utility", "actual" vs "symbolic", "play", "mediated" debate?
It surfaces again in Derrida (of Specters) vs. Eagleton, Negri et al, but, I think, is present in iconoclasm already. In my view, it surfaces everytime any debate about "reality" is at stake, with the gruff realists staking out their turf. I'm thinking scientific world-view vs. 'hermeneutic'... But then, maybe not.

[Steff]

BTW, they don't slap scholars...they show them the instruments.

[Luther Blissett]

I think this was one of the surprisingly common moves in Theory-inflected criticism. American deconstruction was nearly always an alternate form of the cult of the artist, and most artists are well aware that their forms and structures and discourses and what not exceed the limit of what they may have consciously intended at the moment they were consciously intending. We see a similar move the major works of lit crit, such as *The Signifying Monkey*. Here, major works of Af-Am Lit are actively involved in trickster tropifying such that we can only use Derrida as a comparison rather than a road map for reading the work itself.

This led to the equation of Derrida *with* artists themselves in America, because in the context of New Criticism, it seemed that Derrida's thinking about structure and language had much more in common with how artists actually work than did certain New Critics' assertion of irony and formal balance.

Which is to say it's good to be aware of artists' perversity, no matter the period or the nation. People who tell stories and play with language are perverse, even if they're the sweet taxi driver who discussed the meaning of the word "snuggle" with me last night.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

John, I'm not sure a fuller context would necessarily answer your question. The comparison, as I see, is that the complaint once was, as you say, that the author is claiming that Shakespeare intended to write a crude rough draft of OG. At the time, as LB notes, Derrida's brilliance was attributed to the authors, whereas nowadays the brilliance belongs to the critics. Another way to say this:

Once upon a time people believed Derrida said something fundamental about the nature of language and were, surprisingly, surprised when they found the fruits of deconstructive insight in works of literature. But the orientation of the critic to theorist and the critic to the literary author has changed. LB and CR's contention that they're invested in producing "interesting" readings of literature informed by theory can put the critic above the author. Sure, this hierarchy's always implicit, since all criticism involves a know-it-all lording his or her brilliance over the texts interpreted . . . but sometimes it takes the form of critical hubris: the critic knows better than the author and the theorist (whose work they expand on via their explication of a literary text). I'm wandering, but my point above is that the orientation was healthier before critical sorts outgrew their britches.

That said, from what I can glean of LB and CR's scholarship from their postings, neither of them fits this model. Both of them express a respect for and valuing of the aesthetic qualities of the texts, which means I think they have what I'd consider an appropriate relation to the authors whose work they study. In fact, my historical or cultural studies orientation makes me much more inclined to commit this particular sin. Then again, many of the books I read are dreadful, so I have no compunction setting myself above those authors the way I would, say, Faulkner. I suppose I've completely undermined my original point now, so let me reiterate it:

I prodded those critics who think themselves superior every author they encounter. I think there's an intellectual honesty to the "crude first draft of Derrida" model so popular in the 1970s, since the critics who worked in it earnestly believed Derrida the end-all be-all of linguistic insight. Sure, the readings are derivative, but that's to be expected. (Many of them read like those first couple of "meat grinder" seminar papers everyone writes their first few quarters in grad school: "I will facilitate my reading of X with Y's theory of Z . . .")

Great, Scott. Why not just rename yourself "I-don't-think-you-need-more-context but-here's-four-paragraphs-of-it-anyhow" Man.

BL, the similarities are in part the product of shared sources, no? For some reason (and as I write this I can't access the internet, so I can't verify it) I associate Critical Legal Studies with Yale in the 1970s. That may be something I gleaned from an essay on the influence of theory outside English departments, which probably means that it was written in a triumphalist vein by Stanley Fish. Anyhow, I think the correspondences you point out are the reason why Law and Literature programs should be more prevalent than they are. I can see why they're underpopulated in English departments (of the three grad students I know of who do L&L here two of them have J.D.s from Georgetown . . . the other's a nice guy), but law schools should know that the skill-set required to deal with these types of problem are established in English and that they're taught on the undergradute level. I remember pre-law at LSU consisting of, well, pre-law. (They simply started memorizing earlier.) But the students I met in that program lacked the sophistication an English major at Irvine would have. I'd be interested to hear more about this, obviously, especially about how the conflicts between the legal realists and the CLT and CRT advocates curently play out. You have your assignment. I expect it on my desktop no later than Thursday. (Or whenever you want to get around to it. You don't have to cater to my interests. But it'll make you a better person.)

Steff, I'm not sure this debate aligns with the old debates over realism. To parrot John, I'd need more of your context to evaluate your claims. The realist would claim reality exists and is represented in realistic fiction, the mediative party would claim it is shaped by such things as realistic discourse, &c. I'm not sure how you're mapping these positions on this debate. (Plus I'm butting heads with eighteen different definitions of realism here: realism as the defining characteristic of the novel as a genre vs. fabulation and the fantastic as the defining characteristic of the romance as a genre, or Realism as a distinct literary movement of the sort Lukacs championed, &c. So I may be confusing myself here, as often happens when everyone has a slightly different idea of what the key terms in the debate mean to everybody else.)

LB, I think this was a common deconstructive move in the early years of its influence (as I said to John above), but I'm not sure I'd buy the statement that "most artists are well aware that their forms and structures and discourses and what not exceed the limit of what they may have consciously intended." I think they're often made aware of that fact, and here some of Mr. Roberts' statements during his still-to-be-continued-stoning obtain. Were I online, I'd quote them directly, but basically, I think authors are heavily invested in their works meaning what they think they mean, since the alternative would likely induce a massive work-stoppage. To think not only about what you mean but what other people will make of it seems to occur more regularly in poetry. I'm thinking of a Coleridge essay here, in which he discusses a wheel (being offline is citationally debilitating) and how the authorial investment is the (my metaphor now) the first of many dominoes to fall. So I think that may be true of certain highly symbolic works of literature, so maybe it only maps onto romantic and/or the exceedingly difficult.

All of that said, I couldn't agree with your last paragraph more.

[Belle Lettre]

I'll have my full assignment to you in two weeks, _after the bar_, but briefly:

Stanley Fish is so interesting. I don't dislike him, but I kind of hate/envy him for having such fluidity between literary criticism and legal criticism. I mean, the man attends the AALS conferences, and I can't figure out why he's such an authority there.

But briefly: every movement I mentioned is either "dead" (no present scholarship) or kind of getting old (CRT is almost 20 years old, and is trying to update itself to deal with issues of trans-nationalism, globalization, global feminism, sexual orientation law, transgender issues). No one theory is a good fit, but they do important work and lead to future movements. CRT would not exist but for the 1989 conference organized by scholars dissatisfied with the mostly white male, mostly about whites CLS movement (yes, 1970, Duncan Kennedy who has since shifted to CRT). There are hierarchies of every kind, CLS just focused on the hierarchy of learning (trashing legal principles), law, legal norms, white, privileged men. Legal realism was radical, radical--it repudiated Herbert Weschler's "A Theory of Neutral Principles," which is still the most cited work of law to this day, and is a favorite of the originalists and Federalist Society people.

W/R/T law and literature, it's not as big in law schools as you'd hope. In most of the big schools, you can still get a seminar every year or other year, but it's not an area of groundbreaking scholarship (tax is). I think the sources we share in common are in literary criticism and critical theory writ large. Deconstructionism, that whole subaltern thing from Spivak, Edward Said, semiotics, Althussurian structuralism--these are our shared sources, at least for those who are not originalists and "there is no living constitution" believers. So even though our sources are getting more dated by the day, they still seem fresh and revolutionary--mainly because there's such resistance from the other side.

I was both a poli sci major and an English major--I can say with authority that the English majors at UCI were a lot smarter, better critical thinkers (or maybe they just thought about stuff) and better writers. I say this as a person who's preparing to embark on 6 more years of political science study. I don't think I'd have hacked it in law school without the skills I learned in our English program. At the undergraduate level, political science is inferior to a rigorous English lit education. (I expect hate mail in the next hour)

[Luther Blissett]

Scott, I'd say we're both right about authors' attitudes toward the meaning of their work. So, for example, you discussed Nabokov's ire at that ridiculous Freudian reading. But this is the same guy who insisted that his characters write him, not the other way around. In the abstract, I think most authors recognize that there's stuff going on in their work that's both reasonable and unconscious to them. But I've also found that, when confronted by actual readings of their works, many authors simply bob and weave.

[onike babatunde]

i love to join upcoming seminar