Dwelling in/on Reading

At the beginning of his exciting and unusual new book, David Fuller makes two claims about academic literary criticism in contemporary Anglo-American universities. First, he says, the sceptical detachment with which literary scholars have approached their objects of study, ever since Wimsatt condemned 'affective fallacy' in scholarship, is indicative of a lack of humility towards art, a vice that's born of an unsatisfiable desire to establish criticism as scientific knowledge. 'Real encounters with art involve an emotional openness which is the reverse of [the] professional', he writes, and '[c]riticism needs to be more humble about the pretensions of intellect in relation to the splendour of the mysteries of art' (p. 2). Fuller's second claim follows from this one, and it's just as bold and controversial. When literary criticism severs the link between experience and meaning, it extinguishes the conditions of its own possibility.

In a passage that reopens the question of scholarly truth's relationship to aesthetic experience, Fuller writes that 'it is essential to bring personal experience into criticism if criticism is to be a worthwhile activity' (p. 12). Thus is a breach created in the long-standing barrier between professional and amateur forms of interpretation. Experience rushes in to be criticism's grounding and its goal. Negative capability replaces 'getting it right' as the raison d'être of critical activity, and criticism is free to contemplate its image in the mirror not of science but of art. 'One value of writing criticism should be like one value of writing a poem', writes Fuller, 'to deepen and clarify one's feelings, and to make beautiful and expressive verbal structures' (p. 13). In other words, critics should feel a lot and write well, be self-reflective and not insist on being right. As a remedy for what ails literary scholars now, it's not the worst prescription. Happily, it's also no recipe for solipsism. In Fuller's expansive vision of criticism as an open-ended, inter-subjective activity, the importance of the critic's experience is balanced by an acknowledgement that there is something in addition to that experience that is worth trying to understand. 'Properly engaged reading both draws on the real perspectives of the reader and recognizes the otherness of the work', he writes. 'It negotiates the Scylla and Charybdis of opposite errors – reading that is too much self-reflection; reading that is too objectified to be emotionally-imaginatively-intellectually real' (p. 14).

Shakespeare's sonnets are not mentioned until the final paragraph of Fuller's prologue, so it does not seem appropriate to describe this initial text as an introduction to the pages that follow, stricto sensu. Instead, it's a provocation, intended to dislodge us from normative expectations about critical reading, and to change (or begin to change) the way we feel towards literature, each other, and the profession of literary studies. Fuller's prologue is also a clearing away of our expectations about the book itself: about its rhythm, scope, order, and intentions. I imagine that appraisals of The Life in the Sonnets will depend, to a great extent, on one's ability to relax in the presence of critical writing that makes a habit of suspending many of criticism's most familiar rules.

Following the prologue, Fuller embarks on two experiments (his word): 'Dwelling in the Feelings' and 'Dwelling in the Words'. In the first of these texts, which runs to sixty pages (or roughly one-half of the book), he aims 'to inhabit imaginatively a fundamental emotional area of the Sonnets', and the only method that he says he uses is 'the intelligence, intellectual and emotional' (p. 15). I understand the word 'feelings' in the title of this section to refer both to the feelings that Shakespeare represents in the sonnets and to the feelings to which the sonnets give rise, through aesthetic experience. The ambiguity underscores the idea that interpretation is a relationship of affinity between subjects, rather than a procedure that subjects perform upon objects...