Literary criticism is, to me, a literary form: a type of writing that uses language to reveal the mind at work in reading and interpreting a text. George Steiner, William Gass, Kenneth Burke, Susan Sontag, and Robert Boyers, among others, strung together stunning combinations of words in order to describe their response to books. Perhaps that’s why I’m surprised by the complaints about an absence of rigorousness in contemporary critique? How we measure rigor, or what constitutes rigor, is often evaded in these complaints, many of which emerge as “thought-pieces” laden by a rigorous vapidity calculated to solicit the viral attention of the hot-take.
If rigor reflects the satisfaction of certain intellectual form, we should remember that an episteme is desirous: it tells us about what a mind wants to know as well as the way in which it wants to know such things. Epistemic desire is satisfied differently and what is interesting is not being convinced of one’s desire—not being convicted (the judge), condemned (the priest), or sold (salesman)—but being expanded to fathom the possibility.
Rigor is close attention to the shape of possibility, a shape that is frequently foreclosed by policing the boundaries of how thought should look. A critic whose focus is policing the borders loses the opportunity to think about how borders are constituted, and what it means to be constitutive. There is more intellectual labor at play in tracing the entrails of one’s personal misogyny through a New Critical reading than in denying such a thing could be possible. Or tucking one’s shirt into neutrality. Denial is easy but it isn't interesting or difficult, though templates abound.
According to proponents of the liberal arts, literature produces empathy in the reader. How can we, as writers, evaluate a book while speaking as if the critic is not, herself, another reader whose emotional experience and socialization determine her interpretive dance?
While trying to find words for the difference between studying the self and inhabiting the implicated subject, I came across a 2016 article that reads as if written in the present. In the year when the final videocassette recorder was manufactured, writer and editor Jason Guriel howled his lament against nefarious tendencies in contemporary criticism from the pages of the Canadian Walrus, bringing nothing short of his full-throated, first-person pronoun to bear on the excessive indulgence of what he calls “confessional criticism.” Launching his argument from the titular claim “I Don’t Care About Your Life”, Guriel immediately offers us a glimpse of his own in the first sentence:
Browsing the arts and culture pages of various websites recently, I kept running smack into it: the first-person pronoun, as conspicuous as a Corinthian column.
To note, that's an "I" in the title and an "I" in the introductory sentence.
"Surely he's attempting to poke fun at his own title," I thought. An "I" for an "I" leaves a cool (if slightly hysterical) ripple on the surface of the opening, and ripples are not uncommon in preludes, but then, while re-reading the tail end of that big-engine yacht: I kept running smack into it: the first-person pronoun, as conspicuous as a Corinthian column.
One could blame the Corinthian column’s splendor for Guriel’s fumbling of this opening. One could blame me for writing any of this as I sit on hold with our health insurance company to find out if the medication my child needs to live will be covered this year. One could accuse me of ruining the effect of an serious essay by mentioning the personal conditions under which thinking, or the act of surveying possibility in relation to logic, is conducted. I would not deny it; ruins and their ruinscapes fascinate me.
Giovanni B. Piranesi, Seven columns of the Temple of Juturna with Corinthian capitals . . . (18th century)
What I appreciate about Guriel's essai is the fact that he articulates it from behind the very first-person he derides. What I depreciate is Guriel’s failure to acknowledge that the essay reads like that of one who assumes his own authority and reliability can be proven as a subject where he glides above the “messily human” like a god in one of those temples with Corinthian columns and whatnot.
Readers more luminous than I have celebrated the shift towards epistemic exposure where the critic doesn’t hide behind the presumption of neutral scholarship. If we like something, we speak to the liking self. A preference is always personal, even if it is popular, even if it becomes canonical and adored by infinity.
At present, the human condition is still relational. One can imagine a day when this will not be the case, but as yet, in the moment, the writer addresses an audience while expressing their relation to a text. Meaning is negotiated between the text, the audience, and the speaker. Thus, interpretation depends on what is claimed in relation to what has been read. (And if this claim changes in relation to what has been "said" or elocuted.)
The "I" is always there, however hidden: the critic is neither ghost nor godhead. What Guriel holds against this visible 'I' is that it doesn’t "guarantee more honest criticism." Surely carrying this thought directly to you, his readers, would involve defining “honest." For there are many ways of being honest, and the insurance salesman believes he is giving me the honest truth when he barters his wares.
"What do you think this editor means by honesty?" I asked my friend Radu.
To his credit, Radu gnaws his bone and pretends as if I do not exist. As for Guriel, he takes issue with "first-person pronouns, micro-doses of memoir, brief hits of biography," critics who "wrestle with themselves" rather than sticking to "their assigned cultural object," critics who "embrace sincerity and locate cultural objects in relation to their own lives," critics involved with the Internet, critics with high "regard for pop culture," critics that exhibit a "declining belief in tradition or canon" and "David Foster Wallace," in general.
What Guriel likes is unclear–he doesn’t name names–and the closest he comes to expressing favor is when he nods towards Virginia Woolf in order to warn us that "the confessional voice is dangerously attractive." This dangerous attractiveness stems from a moral issue, namely, it enables the writer to 'indulge' their "egoism to the full."
Immediately, I began to suspect that such a dangerously attractive voice, such an indulgent and limitlessly-egotistical voice, would refuse to define the terms upon which it based its argument. Such a voice might assume, instead, that the emphatic tone of communication validates the emotion and frees the speaker from the labor of developing an argument.
But is it unreliable? Apparently, it cannot be because "the unreliable narrator is a cliche, and such confessions have long since become codified and suspect," Guriel adds. Codified, suspect, confessions, cliche: the words begin to smack of a courtroom drama with its stacks of legalistic cliches and evasive hyperboles. But Guriel is just getting started with the legal undertone, for soon he demands "a temporary moratorium on the memoir" in order to protect readers from his own disdain for the fabulous Geoff Dyer.
"Good criticism, like good films, will always give the impression of depth, of a presiding, trustworthy personality," Guriel concludes. To be fair, the Cambridge Dictionary defines the adjective 'trustworthy' to mean "able to be trusted"; "reliable"; "honest"; "straight"; "sincere"; "truthful".
Fortunately, after being on hold for 38 minutes, the insurance specialist has appeared on the phone. She is ready to discuss payment plans. Having exhausted my time on hold, I return to the work at hand. But not without noticing that Guriel's ideal trustworthy personality seems oddly unsettled by its own sincerity. In the "depth" of that "presiding" persona on the page, the critic fails to notice his own I lumbering grumpily across the page. The chastising tone and the argument from personal feeling makes Guriel sound a tad cliche, a bit like that unreliable narrator he chides— a mistake that the brilliant Geoff Dyer would never make.