I’ve finished reading the book version of one of my favorite essays of the past couple of years, Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism & Truth. It’s got a lot of things in it that are very helpful to my ongoing work, including, well, on the work of literary studies, on the question of method, on the question of what counts as knowledge in literary studies and why, and for an essay I’m writing that tries to think through what we think we’re doing when we’re doing interpretation. So I’ve got a stake in this. Let me use this space to work through my thoughts.
Start with this: I’m on board with a lot of it, and even more of it I find fascinating to think with. My copy of the book is littered with little flags and marginal annotations, and I’ve already copied a few lines into ongoing projects here and there. So that’s good! On the other hand, I find myself uncompelled to assent to at least two of the largest theses Kramnick raises, although I’m sympathetic to where he comes from. That’s less good! Some of things I’ve read I don’t understand. Those are the worst!
Start with the good stuff, before I get to my quibbles and the places where I think I’m not getting it. Of the things I like, perhaps most importantly, like Kramnick, I think we need to champion close reading as a method. I’ve written about this before in a number of actually published, peer-reviewed things: as literary scholars, I think we kinda need to lean into close reading as our one and only method, not just because it works (for given values of that), but also because it is institutionally-politically useful and eminently teachable. Like Kramnick, too, I think we produce knowledge. Like Kramnick, finally, I think that there is a strong connection between our method, our claim to knowledge, and our institutional futures, indeed our justification as a discipline. So all of that’s good, to my mind, and Kramnick’s putting his points with exceptional economy and clarity. Quite the prose stylist!
I’m not sure how major my disagreement here will end up being. My quibbles may just be quibbles, but potentially they are more significant disagreements, or elsewise they’re moments where I’ve misunderstood him. I’ll basically interweave all of these below. Let me start with the first of my concerns, the idea that we’ve misunderstood the meaning of close reading. Of my initial quibbles, then, the most important may be that unlike Kramnick, I don’t think close reading is a version of writing. It certainly cannot only be a method of writing, much as it cannot only be a method of reading. Suggesting as Kramnick does that “Close reading isn’t reading. It’s writing” (22) is certainly an interesting, and I might even say useful, corrective to other takes that take more literally the idea of close reading. But it’s also far too absolute. “A close reading,” I would be tempted to agree, is a written thing, as anybody who’s ever tried to make their prose-making organs work in the classroom or discussion will know. But this written thing entails more than hand-eye coordination, obviously. Most importantly, I would insist, it does entail a specific form of attention to the text. Kramnick is right to say that close reading isn’t just reading; he’s wrong to say it’s (just) writing. Like all intellectual endeavors, it is bound up in the forms we do our work in, in the historically specific and contingent; and it doesn’t even exhaust the full spectrum of literary studies work. I write about Geistesarbeit below, and I recommend this as a useful corollary to Kramnick’s suggestion. Yes, close reading may be the most easily operationalizable version of what we do; but even so, it needs to be read in context.
Secondly, I think I disagree with what Kramnick posists our knowledge is, and how our knowledge comes about, although to be fair, I’ve yet to work out the whole of my counterargument, either because I’m spinning in a circle, or because Kramnick is (and perhaps both). There are two slightly separate issues I have here, let’s call them a & b. For a, I have a quibble with the way in which Kramnick’s examples of “apt” work all revolve around critics forging their language to the language of a writer. This is especially the case because, by tying his examples of close reading so closely to literary writers (William Cowper, Toni Morrison, Stephen Crane, Fred Wah, George Eliot, for instance), Kramnick seems to impose an a priori aesthetic judgment on close reading’s potential subjects—and to reserve close reading to aesthetic language. The problem here, it seems to me, is not just that literary criticism of writers whose writing may not as easily lend itself to this kind of word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase interaction, for instance those which may be more plot-driven or, for lack of a better term, “inartful” in their writing, may appear invalidated by this. One might counter that this is an artifact of terminology: that when you encounter these writers, you cannot perform a close reading of them, without prejudice to other modes of access. Fair. But here is where we return to my earlier concern: this really only is problem when you define close reading as the “deft treatment of language” (9). So, while I am unconcerned about Kramnick being coherent—he is—I am concerned about the fast limits of his axiological use of the term “literary” and the way in which this use would seem to include, say, a literary studies of popular fiction. Is that his point? I’m not sure. But I am quite sure that you can have a literary studies of popular fiction.
For b, the more fundamental issue I have is that the whole construction of “knowledge,” the claim that “aptness of style and dexterity of quotation have epistemic significance” (46), appears to lend itself to circular reasoning. For how, but for judging its epistemic significance (i.e., for having successfully argued a truth about a text, I think), can we adjudicate the aptness of the style? Any style that convinces must be “the truth” (62): “claims for truth follow from an apt negotiation with and adjustment to (again) the indissoluble grammatical epoxy before you” (63), Kramnick avers, but “apt” is made to heft such a load here. Aptness, Kramnick clarifies in a very Kantian move, is best understood as “aptness to compel our assent, our appraisal of it as well-formed, perspicuous, or adroit” (78). We’ll need to let slide the fact that defining a word with itself is generally not likely to help much. But I also don’t think the text really makes this stick very well.
The upshot of Kramnick’s argument, as far as I can tell, is that if it’s well done, it’s correct. I’m still not quite sure I disagree, since at least one obverse formulation is so clearly also correct (if it’s not correct, it’s not well done); but it smacks of circularity. Can there be claims that are correct, but not well done? Can there be claims that are well done, but incorrect—a tour de force of style and dexterity that nonetheless does not produce an intersubjectively valid interpretation? Is that not what (some might argue) Fish is doing?
Kramnick provides a single example where, apparently, he thinks this can be shown to have gone wrong: Stanley Fish’s reading of Samson Agonistes. That reading, Kramnick avers (I’m no judge of this, because I haven’t read the poem OR Fish’s argument), is wrong (I infer, from the earlier point Kramnick makes that the point of Fish’s critical work isn’t “getting it right”). Specifically, it is wrong, or (see the problem?) can be recognized to be wrong, because it sets “parts of speech inside and outside of quotation marks […] in deliberate abrasion with the larger pile from which the quoted material is taken [i.e., Samson Agonistes?].” Wait, so why does this not work? It’s dexterous, it’s creative, only (Kramnick says) it’s wrong. But that “wrongness” then cannot be located in the aptness of anyone’s writing: it must (must it not?) precede writing about Milton’s poem. Can something be correct, but not apt in style and dexterity? I think the choice of words basically precludes that: “apt,” after all, means “suitable or appropriate to express ideas, apposite, expressive” according the OED. In simple terms, then, to accept something as correct is basically to concede the aptness of the proof for the purposes of the proof. (You may still, I think, quibble with the style for reasons that don’t have to do with how convincing something is, but because the specific word choice does not fulfil the formal criteria of academic discourse, for instance. Can we say: “You’re right, but can you put this better?” I think we can.)
Here’s another thing: apt, notes the OED, also means “customarily disposed, given, inclined, prone” if used of persons, which is, for now at least, something all literary critics are. “Aptness” thus at least also comes with overtones of customariness. This is, obviously, implicitly and positively, acknowledged in calling the construction of close readings a craft skill, a know how. But it also points us away from epistemic significance towards mere custom and ritual.
There are two versions here, I think, of what’s going on: a) Kramnick doesn’t think the language Fish uses is “compelling his assent” sufficiently to assent to Fish’s reading (but the argument is clearly meant, in the Kantian manner, to compel assent; that’s what critical arguments do); b) Kramnick thinks Fish is misreading Samson Agonistes—Samson Agonistes does not in fact say what Fish says it says. That the language is “abrasive”, that Fish’s choice and reading of Milton’s text is in “abrasion” to the rest of Samson Agonistes (rather than in abrasion to the “grammatical epoxy” of Fish’s sentences, which are, in typical Fishian manner, deftly composed), that fact is only available to the reader who knows the rest of Samson Agonistes. To be apt, then, isn’t just to write well, it is in fact to have read well: to have understood what Samson Agonistes was trying to do, which was not what Fish says it was trying to do. The commingling of dexterity of prose-fashioning and being right about a text’s meaning is unhelpful here, I think. Kramnick isn’t saying Fish is writing poorly except insofar as he makes a poor argument; but that poor argument could not be helped except by making better choices about what to write, which in turn requires an understanding of what that “better” would entail that is clearly no coterminous with writing itself.
Do I get that wrong? It’s possible. I’m not sure. And as I say: I think that even a bad version of this is an interesting one to think with. The notion that we’re an arts-and-crafts discipline is compelling; I think it’s basically not correct, but it’s nonetheless compelling.
This is already getting too loose, and so in the fashion of bad essays everywhere, I want to slip in a more tangential issue. Kramnick avers that “the live presentation of literary criticism tends […] to be read out word for word from printed or digital copy […] because the argument is understood to be inseparable from the writing” (62). I’m not sure that’s true. I’ve certainly free-styled papers; I’ve also seen it done; I’ve been more convinced by papers that were free-styled than by interminable, 20-minute density-fests that were impossible to follow. Does anything hinge on this? Maybe in so far as Kramnick insists that there’s something about this that provides “evidence of [the] epistemic significance” of his version of close reading. Or maybe it’s because we’re shit at presenting? I’m not sure.
Where to end this? I really enjoyed reading Kramnick’s take, and I think there is a lot useful in this. I feel compelled to assent, and yet don’t, fully.
Hand Me the Platonic Monkey-Wrench! 