Abstract
This chapter discusses Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography in relation to the institutionalized New Criticism, which Said described as a waning formalism. Tracing Said’s line of thought I discuss the institutionalization of the New Criticism and its method of ‘close reading’ to reveal that the movement emerged as a worldly and humanistic formalism that treated literature as an organic whole, and evolved into a dogmatic and dehumanized textual practice of ‘cold reading’ that isolated literature in the postwar period. Then, I analyze how Said’s approach to Conrad reinstates the severed bond between literature and agency by breaking with the New Critical ‘fallacies’, not by refuting them but by returning to the older, more eccentric models of criticism of R.P. Blackmur and Harry Levin.
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Notes
- 1.
For a comparative study that contextualizes the New Criticism and the Russian Formalism with respect to their philosophical backgrounds, main concepts, and the practical application of their general principles, see Ewa Thompson’s Russian Formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism: A Comparative Study (1971).
- 2.
In the first postwar decade (1946–1957), 2,232,000 veterans benefited from the G.I. Bill to attend colleges or universities (Olson 1973, 596). The total number of students in higher education in the United States rose from 1,677,000 to 3,138,000—a trend that cannot just be explained by the effects of the G.I. Bill alone, but also by the large amount of students who enrolled in higher education to avoid military service in the Korean War (1950–1953). As a result, in that same decade, the amount of professorships surged and the number of faculty nationwide more than doubled, from 136,000 to 344,000 (Leitch 2010, 130).
- 3.
Said probably exaggerates when he says that all of his fellow students felt the passivity propagated by the literary program to be problematic. Many veteran students wanted to continue with their war-interrupted lives and were rather indifferent to social and political issues, let alone academic or societal change (Leitch 2010, 130). Aware of the unique opportunity provided by the G.I. Bill, they were of good will and tolerated many ordeals, such as crowded classrooms, inadequate student accommodations, and overworked and understaffed faculty (Olson 1973, 596). Said’s experience is therefore probably more representative of that of nonveteran students.
- 4.
Most critics who have attempted to contextualize the movement have done so by deducing that context from the theoretical positions of its identified members, leading them to believe that the movement was originally uninterested in history, society, and politics. Though there are earlier attempts at contextualizing the New Criticism (most notably Fekete 1977, 61–84), Mark Jancovich’s The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism (1993) is an exceptionally rich work of scholarship that illustrates the way in which the cultural politics of the New Criticism were deeply implicated within the right-wing political movement of Agrarianism.
- 5.
Born in Vienna and having graduated from the Charles University in Prague, Wellek was of course never a member of the Southern Agrarian Movement. However, as a result of writing Theory of Literature (1949) with his New Critical colleague at Iowa, Austin Warren, his name has over the years been connected to the New Criticism as movement (Searle 2005, 692). This association ignores the fact that Wellek worked closely in the philological tradition of his contemporary Erich Auerbach and was foundational for the discipline of comparative literature in the United States.
- 6.
In the eyes of the New Critics, ‘literature’ slides over into ‘poetry’. I am on firm ground with Terry Eagleton who argues that “literary theories … unconsciously ‘foreground’ a particular literary genre, and derive their general pronouncements from this; it would be interesting to trace this process through the history of literary theory” (2008, 44). In the case of the New Criticism and its isolating approach to literature, the coincidence of ‘literature’ with ‘poetry’ is significant, as will become clear later, because “poetry is of all literary genres the one most apparently sealed from history” (Eagleton 2008, 44).
- 7.
While not an original member of the Southern Agrarian movement, Brooks had close ties with its founding members. He had studied at Vanderbilt with Ransom and Tate in the 1920s and became good friends with Penn Warren during a stay at Oxford University in the 1930s where they encountered the arch-Practical Critic I.A. Richards. Though he never argued as forcefully on behalf of the conservative Southern traditions as Ransom, Tate, and Penn Warren, he did admit reading the Southern Agrarian manifesto “over and over” and trying “to assimilate the whole position, philosophical and political” (Brooks cited by Leitch et al. 2001b, 1350).
- 8.
The New Criticism successfully established the assumption, which still holds sway in literary departments, that ‘good’ or ‘innovative’ literary criticism should not only produce new and richer interpretations of particular literary works but also more compelling ones (Culler 2007, 226). The historical result of this assumption was that interpretations of literary works were considered to be a new kind of knowledge that, unlike previous historical or philological investigations, was not only positive but also decidedly rhetorical (Thompson 1971, 37). Literary criticism produces a kind of knowledge that is a form of writing in itself, not just something that is written up. As such, Jonathan Culler stresses that the result of interpretive criticism—just like literature according to the New Critics—is not something that can be summed up or paraphrased, but a text that tries to render explicit the poetic structure that is deeply woven in a particular literary work (2007, 226).
- 9.
In spite of what is often believed, the New Criticism did not propagate the idea that a particular literary work could have only one, definitive meaning waiting to be unearthed and explained by the critic (Jancovich 1993, 144). On the contrary, New Critics such as Tate, who was intensely interested in the linguistic processes that generated meaning (1952), believed it to be reductive and misleading to impose a single reading upon a text.
- 10.
This idea echoes that of the so-called ‘Great Books Courses’, originally initiated at Columbia by John Erskine in 1901, then gradually established in numerous colleges across the United States and now even in honors programs or lifelong learning programs worldwide. The belief of these courses is that reading so-called literary masterpieces in 1 week and then criticizing them one evening in group, instead of attending lectures by some authoritative literary scholar about them or rigorously studying the critical literature on that particular literary masterpiece or the oeuvre of its author for weeks on end, would contribute to a general education of readers and counteract the individualizing and alienating forces of scientific positivism and vocationalism (Graff 1987, 133–135). The result of such courses seems to be that they invite readers to talk about literature without having to reckon with dense archives of scholarship and thus, in short, produce amateur critics. These ideas still hold sway in popular literary culture and have found additional, contemporary expression in social media and (televised) book clubs, which have turned the once solitary and print-based experience increasingly into a commercialized social activity enjoyed on the screen as much as on the page (see Collins 2010).
- 11.
Precisely one of the factors that contributed to the institutional success of the New Criticism was that, although it was a right-wing conservative ideology and some of its members unabashedly pronounced themselves to be anti-Marxist (Leitch 2010, 18), during the Red Scare of the 1940s and 1950s many left-wing intellectuals who were unable to openly adhere to Marxist theories of literature embraced its methods. The New Criticism offered them an opportunity to criticize capitalist society and its bourgeois ideology without the risk of being accused of Soviet sympathies (Jancovich 1993, 18).
- 12.
On this point, Brooks, again, differs from Wimsatt and Beardsley. To stress the importance of indirect, connotative meanings for a correct interpretation of literature in general, and modern Western poetry in particular, Brooks coins the principle of rich indirection, which burdens the reader with the responsibility for finding meaning: “The reader must be on the alert for shifts of tone, for ironic statement, for suggestion rather than direct statement. He must be prepared to accept a method of indirection” (1947c, 61). This should make clear that, for Brooks, analyzing a poem entails more than assessing the poem’s direct, denotative meanings. Connotations too are vital, because they give the poem “meanings which no dictionary can be expected to give” (Brooks 1947c, 59). Contrary to Wimsatt and Beardsley, Brooks considers these meanings not to be imports but integral parts of the literary work as a linguistic fact that can be unearthed if one reads it with careful and close attention: “this too is part of what the poem says, though it is said indirectly, and the dull or lazy reader will not realize that it has been said at all” (1947c, 59).
- 13.
Terence Hawkes also describes how “by the mid-1950s” the New Criticism “had become, in the English speaking world at any rate, an established orthodoxy” (2003, 126). I have borrowed the phrase ‘critical dogma’ from Murray Krieger’s “Critical Dogma and the New Critical Historians” (1958) and Gerald Graff’s Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma (1970). According to Graff, the New Criticism, like the autonomous literature it celebrated, itself became an autonomous theory rife with dogmatic contradictions that was a law unto itself (1970, 24). The religious imagery these theorists use to describe the state of the New Criticism is telling and might explain Said’s judgment of the movement as losing its critical edge. Given his resultant conceptualization of secular criticism as a countermovement to all critical orthodoxies and religious forms of thinking (see Said 1983), it gives us another possible reason for his reaction to the New Criticism.
- 14.
When Oppenheimer witnessed the first nuclear explosion over the New Mexico Desert near Los Alamos, he is famously claimed to have thought these words derived from the Hindu Bhagavad-Gita: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds”. Oppenheimer was of two minds about his creation and wrestled with giving mankind the possible means for its own annihilation (Hijiya 2000).
- 15.
The role of Partisan Review cannot be overemphasized. As Greif points out, the journal of the New York intellectual scene played a pivotal role in disseminating existentialist ideas in the culture at large: “it brought existentialism out of literary and avant-garde circles in the United States … and into American intellectual life” (2015, 70). This effectively changed the position of France in U.S. intellectual life. Where before 1945 philosophy in the United States did not come from France, now it seemed to be the only place it could be found. Sartre’s visit seems to have inaugurated the important cultural transfer and one-way exchange of French philosophy on American intellectual life of the second half of the twentieth century. My discussion of the influence of existential phenomenology on Said’s book on Conrad in Chap. 3 illustrates how his critical practice is a late product of this postwar transfer.
- 16.
It is important to stress that a Gestalt is not only greater than but different from the sum of its parts. As Carroll Pratt writes in the introduction to Wolfgang Köhler’s The Task of Gestalt Psychology, it is a common error to leave out the word ‘different’ and simply define a Gestalt as “[t]he whole is more than the sum of the parts” (1969, 9). This definition mistakenly ignores that a relationship between the parts is itself something that is not present in the individual parts themselves (1969, 10). If all the parts of a bike are laid out on the floor of a bike shop, for instance, they still do not make up the bike. Only when the parts are assembled and come to take up a specific relation to each other, do they become something different, that is, a bike.
- 17.
The metaphor of unity under tension is a popular image in prewar New Critical writings. Brooks and Penn Warren described the literary work as a psychological unity in which “not even the simplest metaphor fails to violate a logical unity” (1937, 442). Their readings show that logical unity is not a necessity to create psychological unity.
- 18.
Again, de Man does not argue that the totalizing principle is a part of the text but rather that it is a perception of and even a projection by the reader or critic. His seminal essay on the rhetoric of blindness makes explicit that any such totalizing principle precisely forms a reading’s blindness which enables critical insight (de Man 1971b, 104–105, 109–110, 139).
- 19.
Little has been written on Said’s revised doctoral dissertation on Conrad. Beyond the initial, and rather negative, review articles that appeared shortly after the book’s publication (Donoghue 1967; Hewitt 1968; Hynes 1969; Knapp Hay 1967; Lodge 1968; McDowell 1968; Rose 1968; Tanner 1966; Vidan 1970), most monographs on Said’s career either seem to ignore it (Ashcroft and Ahluwalia 2009; Marrouchi 2004; Pannian 2016) or routinely mention and pass over it quickly (Kennedy 2000, 7–8). In this way, these studies contribute to the popular image of Said as poststructuralist at birth and Beginnings (1975) as the foundational work that already expresses in nuce all of his later critical preoccupations (see Brennan 1992, 75). Lately there has been a revived but—compared to the thousands of pages written on his more well-known works such as Orientalism (1978)—still limited interest in his book on Conrad (Hussein 2002, 19–52; McCarthy 2010, 14–20; Veeser 2010, 25–33).
- 20.
- 21.
In 1890, Conrad spent a couple of months in command of a steamer of a Belgian trading company on the Congo River bearing the majestic name Le Roi des Belges (Najder 2007, 159), where he witnessed the brutal oppression of the Congolese in the name of commerce and civilization. Biographers seem to agree that these experiences, and his subsequent moral shock and indignation, directly inspired the narrative of Heart of Darkness (Najder 2007, 163). For a recent compelling biography of Conrad, see Maya Jasanoff’s The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World (2017).
- 22.
The structure of the book reflects this. Following a brief outline of the book’s methodology in the introduction (1966, 3–28), the first part discusses Conrad’s correspondence of 1896–1924 in chronological order (1966, 29–83). The second part addresses his shorter fiction, and builds up to an analysis of Conrad’s 1917 retrospective novella The Shadow Line (1966, 87–197). In so doing, the book’s structure rhetorically reinforces the argument that the letters serve as the necessary background to the fiction.
- 23.
“We might as well study the properties of wine by getting drunk” (Eduard Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, quoted as motto by Wimsatt and Beardsley 1949, 31).
- 24.
By introducing Conrad to Madox Ford, Garnett helped facilitate the production of their three collaborative novels. Tellingly, Said does not discuss or analyze these novels because it would complicate his model of criticism of consciousness too much. Instead of the meeting of two minds—that of the critic and that of the author—in the reading of a single-authored novel, the reading of a collaborative novel would result in the meeting of at least three consciousnesses, or four even, if we do not rule out the possibility of a collaborative, common consciousness. In such a case, it would perhaps be too difficult to tell for the critic whose consciousness he or she is encountering and exploring.
- 25.
Though Said’s stance vis-à-vis the work of Blackmur is quite frankly one of admiration, this does not mean that he thinks Blackmur to be above criticism. Said feels Blackmur’s postwar criticism to express a sense of American responsibility for the postwar world and the dismantling of the old imperial and colonial structures, which he praises in what he calls Blackmur’s “most extraordinary essays” (2000a, 261) in 1986. But sometimes these politics of responsibility lead the self-avowed amateur critic to ironically take on a position of authority symptomatic of an “astonishing ignorance and condescension about the non-Western world in his worst ones” (2000a, 261). Blackmur seems to have fallen prey to postwar American imperialism, therefore had little sympathy with the postcolonial problems of the newly independent states in Asia and Africa, and was completely blind to the excrescences of European and American colonial rule (Said 2000a, 261).
- 26.
Blackmur’s idea of poetry marks the difference which I have outlined between a New Critical and an existential-phenomenological conceptualization of experience. Saying that poetry is “not life lived but life framed and identified”, as Blackmur does, is of course altogether different from saying that it embodies le vécu or ‘lived experience’, which as the original French term suggests is really ‘life lived’. Blackmur considers the human experience of poetry in impersonal and universal terms; existential phenomenologists do so in personal and concrete terms.
- 27.
I would like to remind that Wimsatt’s remarks in the introduction to The Verbal Icon highlight that the goal of his codifying attempts with Beardsley in the fallacy-essays was “to lay hold of the poetic act to comprehend and evaluate it” (1954a, xvii; my emphasis).
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Vandeviver, N. (2019). Cold Reading. In: Edward Said and the Authority of Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27351-4_2
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