It is a privilege enjoyed by bloggers that they can wander from the point. In previous instalments, I have been discussing ‘the interesting’; I am postponing further discussion of this topic for the moment. I am also postponing any discussion of Existentialist literary theory, at least until I have finished reading Satre’s “What is Literature?”
The topic of this posting is literary criticism itself. What is literary criticism? When I studied literature at school and university, I believed that serious literary criticism was necessarily interpretive. That is to say, I believed that serious literature ‘communicated’ particular ideas, themes and statements, and that the purpose of literary criticism was to elucidate these ideas, to disrobe the originating text and reveal nakedly its core message. The tenets of my faith were as follows. A text consists of two layers, ‘form’ and ‘content’. The form of the test is the material work itself, the words; the content, mysteriously contained inside, within, the text, is the author’s intentions, he meaning that he or she means to convey. Although I never seriously identified content as being identical to intention, I was committed enough as a student to this depth-model of literature that I founded my earliest aesthetic theories on it.
Does the merit of a piece of literature derive from its form or from its content? It could not, I reasoned, be that the aesthetic value of a piece of literature resides in its form. This would render interpretation redundant. Nor could it be that readers value literature for its content, because the content of a literary work can just as easily be found in a good interpretation as in the original, and in a more easily digestable form. If the aesthetic value of a work resides neither in its form nor in its content, it follows, I reasoned, that its value lies in the RELATIONSHIP between the form and the content. It does not matter what in particular the author wants to say, it is how he says it that counts.
The theory sketched out above has a certain architectonic grandeur, and has a number of things going for it. For one thing, it puts interpreting right at the centre of the aesthetic experience (a reassuring idea for an English student whose main occupation is interpretation). The pleasure readers derive from reading, it suggests, originates from the active uncovering of a substructure of meaning, in the discovery of a thematic endoskeleton that the author has skilfully concealed. It explains why one might write interpretive criticism: such writing can be considered a form of reading, a part of the same process of mastering the text. It also explains why we might want to read interpretive criticism. The secondary literature that surrounds an originating work functions effectively as an extension of that originating work; when we read criticism of a literary work, we are engaging with the same sematic-complex found in the original. Interpretive criticism is effectively a supplement to the interpreted work.
The theory, as I have said, is attractive, and I shall develop some of these ideas in more detail later. However the theory as it stands suffers from at least three serious problems. The first is that it assumes that the content of a work is coherent and univocal. In reality, critics can disagree about the meaning of novel or poem; if we assume that the essays they write are an extension of the original work (as I argued above), we must assume that the composite-text has not only more than one author but more than one ‘message’. Exegetical essays and books, furthermore, do more than simply reformulate the central concerns of novel or poem; they present arguments, arguments in favour of particular readings. This implies, of course, that meaning is contestable and other readings are possible.
The theory says that the pleasure we have from reading is based on the uncovery of a hidden structure of meaning. If we abandon the notion of a coherent content however, we have to assume that this structure will differ from reader to reader. What then is the raison d’etre of interpretive criticism? This leads directly to the second objection: the theory focuses solely on one type of criticism. Book reviews, for example, are evaluative rather than interpretive. The theory as it stands marginalizes this form of criticism. What status does this form of criticism possess? The third, and most serious objection, privileges obscure, difficult literature and does not explain why we can enjoy literature that is ‘transparent’.
I am going to go out on a limb here and assert a positive thesis. The problem with the form/content argument is the metaphor that is used to present it. This metaphor is the idea that form/content corresponds to surface/depth, outside/inside. In opposition to this metaphor I would present the following alternative: the form is the inside of a work, the content is on the outside. Rather than containing a message, a novel points to something in the World of the reader
This way of looking at the form/content dichotomy leads us to another idea, that we should abandon the vertical metaphor of interpretation, where a critique is digging into, excavating, a buried meaning, in favour of a horizontal metaphor. Criticism exists alongside the original work, has the same status and should be subject to the same critical. Every text is interconnected to every other text and is connected to a World which is itself a kind of text. Everything has the same existential value.
These thoughts are for the moment necessarily vague but I hope to make this clearer in the future.