Thinking the Thinking of Criticism

Review Articles Thinking the Thinking of Criticism ALAN KENNEDY Mary Ann Caws. Reading Frames in Modern Fiction Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985. 312 Peter Smith. Public and Private Value: Studies in the Nineteenth Century Novel Cambridge: Cambridge University Press '<)84. 244 Barbara Hardy. Forms of Feeling in Victorian Fiction London: Peter Owen '985.2'5. £'2.50 H. Porter Abbott. Diary Fiction: Writing as Action Ithaca: Cornell University Press '984. 228 The 'reading' in Reading Frames in Modern Fiction would appear not to be a verb, but an adjective, telling us what kind of frames are in question: frames infoftfor reading. The verbal form could be intended, though, so we would have a book of instruction on how to read frames. What are frames, at least what are frames in writing or reading? There seems to be no satisfactory answer to this question, but this does not stop Caws from pursuing her book. Her major thesis is simple enough: 'that often, in the most widely read and enduring narratives, certain passages stand out in relief from the flow of the prose and create, in so standing, different expectations and different effects.' There are, that is to say, what she calls 'noticeable passages,' amidst, we must assume, a lot of unnoticeable passages. How can we be sure that the case is as she says? Again because of a simple hypothesis; 'We perceive borders....' Now, a whole theoretical disquisition could be built on that last claim; before hinting at the shape it could take, let me add the words that complete the sentence: 'We perceive borders as if signalled by alterations of pattern and architectural, verbal or diegetic clues.' Dare we ask what is the function of the 'as if' in that sentence? But let us consider the problem of perceiving borders, since it is the problem of 'reading frames,' in other words. Why do we perceive borders? Are they perceivable because they are given? or because they are constituted by perception? We might notice that the alternatives we are forced into here are those so fully analysed by UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1987 444 ALAN KENNEDY William Ray in Literary Meaning. As he argues, any 'phenomenological' theory of meaning will tum on the opposites of 'intended meaning' and 'structural meaning,' or speaker's meaning and system's meaning. Caws spends no time clarifying the issue for us, but she is open to the inevitable (as Ray demonstrates) contradictions and confusions of a naive phenomenology. What then is a noticeable passage? It can be noticeable because there really is something put into the text by the author which both functions as a border and at the same time announces itself as a border. However, the phrase 'in the most widely read and enduring narratives' alerts us to another possibility. We notice, in passing, that Caws implicitly valorizes narratives given to .framing' by suggesting that they are the ones thathave endured and will endure.Why might it not be the case, though, that the frames that are perceived are part of a tradition of perception and interpretation, of a style and method of interpretation given to bordering, limiting, enclosing, summing up, totalizing in short? And why not? Surely a tradition of reader response is a worthy thing and deserves attention. Alas, Caws cannot add to our knowledge on such questions, because she is not really interested in the nature of the knowledge she claims to have and offer. Whether or not there are frames (intended by the author or the system), whether or not there is an implied reader for whom there is a posited perception of frames, orwhether or not frames are a matterofreader response, all such questions remain unexplored. We can only wonder then, if such an unexamined method is necessarily complicitwith whatever dominant ideology the age happens to offer whether or not, that is to say, such a practice is really critical. That Caws's treatment is insufficient does not mean, ofcourse, that there is not a significant subject here. We know that the whole deconstructive project can be thoughtofas ameditation onborders. Interestingly, Caws mentions Derrida, only to ignore him: 'The question as to where the frame is said to be, and its relation to Hegel's notion of the parergon, is of less concern to me here than the effect of the actual passages I read as framed within the texts and the recognition of their borders.' This is probably meant as a defence of praxis against theory: let me do it and see how the theory falls out. This too is not necessarily amisguided approach. We can, though, recognize the dismissive gesture, the appeal to the common reader's prejudice against mere notions, and Hegelian ones at that. We can also notice our author's assumption that the interests of her readers will naturally coincide with her own; so that what is of coneem to her has only to be announced, not argued. Passages are assumed to be 'actual passages' and they are passages that she reads as framed (which might mean that they are not framed, as such). So the major current thinking on borders does not concern her. Fair enough, perhaps. How rich then is her practice? She gives the following translation of a few lines from a sonnet by Heredia: And bending over her, the ardent emperor Saw in her eyes starred with flecks of gold A whole immense sea where galleys were fleeing. THINKING ABOUT CRITICISM 445 We are told that 'a cosmic vision' is captured in the woman's eyes; we see 'time and space gathered within the strictest possible limits. ' Now, it is not quite clear that when something is perceived as bordered within an eye, and when one comments on what is contained therein, that one is therefore analysing a phenomenon ofhordering, or containing. Caws sees these (poetic) lines simply as evidence of the 'fact' that writing borders. She does not pause to exercise perception, so it does not strike her as of interest that the lines from Heredia are unusual in that the container is smaller than the thing contained: that is, the finite eye(ball) apparently contains the uncontainable sea. Nor does she bother to commenton the fact that the lines from the sonnet do not even explicitly tell us that the sea is bordered inside the woman's eye(baU). They teU us only that the emperor saw the sea there, It seems that Her~dia might well have been toying with Hegelian notions of just where and what aborder is, and what perception is, The rest of the text is filled with diagrams, frames within frames, vectors, and so on, One example will have to serve: With the framed section set apart as conveying messages or signifying meaningful actions, the frame has to be read as part of the picture; one might read: this is play and the rest is not. Even this example, however, is not as clear as she thinks. It is not clear at all that the border is part of the play, if it is in the game or out. And to enclose writing within a visual representation does not get rid ofthe play ofwriting. Is it clear that the 'this' in 'this is play' has a clear referent? Is it self-referential? Does it indicate only the phrase of which it is a part? Does it refer only to the space which its letters occupy? Does it refer to all of the space enclosed within the line, or only part of it? 'Has to be read' is an overstatement. James is the origin and high point of Caws's study. He is a 'high modernist' in his framing - that is, he implicitly questions frames while using them. Caws puts things in neat historical boxes. So the pre-modernists can be seen to use frames, and they can be perceived. If a modem ironist unsettles the problems of framing, that unsettling cannot be used by a critic to reread'framed' narratives of the past. Only that which indicates (how?) that it can be read ironically can be so read. Then, what result do we get? Whatis the end of all this careful readingofframes in James? Can The Turn of the Screw be perceived in a new complexity? 'The whole tale, in its ironic catch and fall, its tightly screwed support of the story, is really about the play of the held and the fixated against the free. The frame is one of reception and interpretation, unusually participatory in its requirements and in all its endless turns, befitting a story taut and twisted to its end.' Unusually participatory? A tale that is tightly screwed in support of its story? If we were to 446 ALAN KENNEDY use language as lightly and wittily as our author does, we might ask is this a frame or a frame-up? Given a goal as unimpressive as her final words on that puzzling tale, one begins to wonder what is at stake in all this framing, if anything at all. The answer is not far to seek in fact. A 'pre-modem' concern with framing, such as that of Caws, which so nonchalantly tries to keep so much beyond its own borders, volunteers itself as nothing more than an unapologetic old-fashioned formalism. In a time in which arguments about the breaking of form are current, the choice of old-fashioned and unexplored formalism forces an author outside the boundaries of the important critical debates of the time. Such a gesture is evidence also, perhaps, of the inertia of the academic machine and establishment. When a particular set of critical motions has become so habitual, it takes a genuine critical effort to perceive what is framed in and out by literature. Peter Smith, in Public and Private Value: Studies in the Nineteenth Century Novel, seems at first sight to be the diametric opposite to Caws. His overt interest is certainly not in form, but in history. However, he tries to combine form and history in his speculations, by arguing that the novel in the eighteenth century (basing his claim on an idea from Ian Watt and the supposed interiorizing force of Puritan diaries) was primarily personal, interpersonal, interior. Tolstoy marks a watershed in that he articulated the dislocation between public history (war as an evil perpetrated by Others) and private happiness. What Tolstoy failed to understand (condemning him to polemic and sentimentality) was the interpenetration of history and personal life. Scott, in the first six chapters of Waverly at least, understands that public history is lived as personal fate. Scott's lasting contribution to the history of the novel has been ignored because of the ignorance ofcritics of his influence on Flaubert, Dickens, James, and Conrad. So this study focuses the development ofthe novel through the lens ofScott, and sings a hymn ofpraise to the Novel: 'only the novel possessed at once the amplitude and minute precision to articulate the sense of a dislocated public life simultaneously with the private quandary of those who tried to evaluate it.' Such general praise of one's chosen genre (chosen as a critic, that is) is not unusual in literary studies, although it might seem a little odd nowadays. Such sounding generalizations tend to go with careless use of language. One has been led to believe by Smith's comments on Tolstoy that the naive opposition of exclusive binary opposites was something that the Novel in its maturity had overcome; that the Novel moved on to a complex view of history as personal and the personal as historical. And yet the quotation above is based on a naIve assumption that the structure of social life and history can be 'dislocated' and yet at the same time the individual can be located enough only to be suffering from as minor an ill as a 'quandary' in efforts to evaluate history. If history is 'dislocated,' from where is it dislocated and why? and if she is not in history where is the individual located? If the individual is located in history, and therefore presumably also'dislocated: then her procedures ofevaluation would also be sufficiently dislocated as to make evaluation more problematic than the word 'quandary' suggests. THINKING ABOUT CRITICISM 447 Smith, as a critic, seems not to be in a quandary at aU, given as he is to sweeping, confident judgments: 'The second reason why these particular novels distinguish themselves is that the praxis they have in common is, quite simplyI the most significant of their age.' Quite simply. What is this praxis? Prior question: what does Smith mean by praxis? The index entry on Marx leads one to page 205, where there is a passing and undeveloped reference to '1848, the year of The Communist Manifesto.' And? 1848 is important to Smith, having been characterized on the previous page as ' the great bustling year of 1848.' There is a reference to a 'little hunchbacked communist' in Nostramo. There is a mention of the I gibe' in the title of The Eighteenth Brumaire ofLouis Napoleon, a gibe that we are assured must have been 'universally understood.' The index also contains an entry for Marx on page 222, where in fact he is not mentioned, but we do find the following: 'Even in the early days when Bolshevism was accorded a large measure of goodwill by observers in the West, he [Conrad] knew better.' So Marx equals Bolshevism, which Conrad saw through, quite simply. What then of praxis? Smith turns to praxis as a means to redefine plot: 'the praxis, the general deSign, the idea - in short, the thing by whatever name it is called in the service of which all the rest has been subsequently deployed.... ' Oh that. A Circumlocution Officer couldn't have put it better. Smith gets his sense of praxis from John Jones's 'brilliant reading' of the Poetics which tells us that an action 'is a form which the tragedian contemplates, and it stands logically and chronOlogically before the business of composition.' Jones also invokes 'an action - a naked essence, like all forms.... I No need to confuse ourselves with any Stephen Daedalus speculations about the potential actualizing. The Aristotelian praxis is after all a Platonic form, not only an essence but a naked one. So Smith too turns out to be a formalist after all; or at least historyin so far as it contains human actions is reduced to a matter of mere formal patterns. Novels too can be reduced to their essences: the novels under study 'share the same ultimate praxis, the same "naked essence" which each author contemplated in his mind's eye before ever he tried to devise a setting or plan a narrative: Smith never escapes his own reductive thinking in terms of the opposition between personal vision and public historical act (of composition). Why should Smith be thinking in such a sloppy fashion? Again, as with Caws, because there still seems to be a widespread assumption that the literary critic does not think. He judges, which is to say he is convinced that his opinion is worth having. Whence this conviction? From the critic's position of authority in a public institution? Barbara Hardy, in her study of forms of feeling in Victorian fiction, seems to believe that she is breaking new ground. At least she refers at one point approvingly to 'Robert Garis, one of the few critics to pay attention to the representation of feelings in fiction.... ' This seems to imply that along with Garis she is opening up a territory surprisingly unexplored before now. It seems a possibility hard to entertain, however~ since feeling has been the stock in trade of virtually every common reader for a considerable time. We don't even need to locate it as a critical principle in the doctrine of I.A. Richards. Ask any reader on 448 ALAN KENNEDY the street why best-sellers sell best: they pull our heart-strings, or otherwise excite feelings in other parts of our bodies. It may be fair to say, though, that the rigorous analytic study of feelings and their modes ofrepresentation still needs to be undertaken. Hardy. then, indicates a topic for us, but she does little to advance our understanding. It is never clear, for instance, whether she is studying the novel as a form for feeling (novels in the plural as forms of feeling), or whether she is studying kinds of feeling one finds in fiction. If the latter, it would have to be made dearer by some kind of taxonomy just what a 'form' of a feeling is. Similarly, she is not consistent in her focus either on the feelings that characters are supposed to be having, or that authors apparently intend, or that readers actually experience. If the latter, she would need some accountofreader response to convince us we are notjust hearingabout her own feelings on reading. If the aim is the representation of feeling, then some discussion oftheories of representation would be called for. The idea has occurred to HardYI since she does invoke a rhetorical tOPOSI the topos of inexpressibility, as a major device in the portrayal of emotion. Beyond that she does not go. Perhaps one ofthe blurbs on the jacketgives us a clue to herprocedure. Hardy, we are told, is a sensible critic. Sensible, of course, no longer means subject to a wayward sensibility, but rather having sense, good judgment. So, in English fashion, Hardy will stick to the empirical. She begins by telling us that 'The novel is an affective form.' Further: 'One of its great subjects has been the affective life: Does this seem self-evident, we might wonder? Bunyan is invoked as the initiator of a mixed form, narrative and discursive: 'A Pilgrim's Progress already offers a variety of emotional experience.' Already? If we ask 'Doesn 't Chaucer already offer a variety of emotional experience?' are we asking too much? Can we expect some analysis of what specifically in the novel makes it affective in some unique way that Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton are not? Fiction, we are told, I draws on the conscious and unconscious affective life ofits author.' However, 'If the author loses control of his feelings, as Dickens and Lawrence sometimes do, the result is unbalanced, or self-indulgent. ' Not a bad record, though, only two in the whole great calvacade of novelists who have blotted their records. Blubbered in front of the whole class. Surprising, because if the novel really does draw on the unconscious affective life of the author, then just how does the author also keep control of his feelings? This is another of those studies focus{ng only on the great, or the great English: 'The great English novelists move our feelings not through gross stimulus or the sentimental offer ofblanks for us to fill, but through impassioned particulars. ' The expression 'impassioned particulars' soon drops its mask, and becomes the 'objective correlative' it wants to be. Is it sophistical to ask: what of the non-great English? what of the great non-English? Just how do they differ? It must be sophistical to ask. What then of the central idea: that the novel always works by impassioned particuiarsl and not by blanks? (Critics are very anxious to deny the existence of blanks these days; it is also a concern of H. Porter Abbott, who believes he can differentiate a blank in Derrida from one in Beckett.) The claim THINKING ABOUT CRITICISM 449 about blanks is openly contradicted by another claim made only a few pages earlier: the effort of the great Victorian novelists 'can be polarized in terms of the figure ofpersonification, with its claim to definition and analysis, and its opposite, the figure of incapacity, or ... "the tapas of inexpressibility" ...' The tapas of inexpressibility is the tapas of the blank. Once or twice Hardy shows that the great novelists use this topas. So her thesis could have been that emotion is indefinitely located somewhere between the categories implied in personification and the impossibility of speaking implied in a blank. But that is not a consistent thesis she pursues. In fact, even the offering of as much theory as can be carried by a single tapas is only a gesture (an attitude, Anglo-Saxon perhaps), and is not apparently seriously intended. As a result, the studies which follow are best described as desultory. Sensible quotations from her pages will turn up as authority in undergraduate essays. Of the books under review, Diary Fiction: Writing as Action by H. Porter Abbott stands out in its attempt to be unpretentiously clear in its thinking. Abbott shows that it is not so difficult, afterall, to take care with definitions. He carefully delimits his subject and, alert to the paradoxes oflimits, shows howa limited subject carries itself beyond its borders to further significance. He too has his own limit, however, one that must always give pause for thought, and Abbott has clearly chosen which side of the post-structural limit he wishes he could stand on. He is with Saul Bellow and the need for character. Porter differentiates between I diary fiction' and the'diary novel'; his interest is in the former. He argues that the diary novel is a sub-category of diary fiction, and this allows him to make the telling claim that the genre is not the inclusive concept we might think it to be. Instead it is a later (chronologically and logically) development of a form of writing. So to focus on genre here would not be to widen a field, but to restrict it arbitrarily. So Abbott turns his attention to writing, especially the special reflexive form of diary fiction in which the writing of the diary plays an active part in changing the life of the writer of the diary - so that the writing of the diary influences the way in which the writing of the diary takes place, and so that one can no longer usefully distinguish between writer and written. Abbott begins his study with a distinction between several general functions of diary fiction: the mimetic, thematic, and temporal functions. It is perhaps the last that he sees as most important, in that the diary (with its formal illusion ofpresent action) not only allows the excitement of developing action but is also able 'to create an acute orientation toward the future.' We read on to find out how the action actively being recorded before our eyes will develop. Also, contrariwise, given over as it is to the present, the diary can give an effect of discontinuity: 'the diary structure in fiction can be used in the service ofopposite temporal objectives, suspense or timelessness.' In a similar paradoxical vein he notes that the diary method of fiction 'has been functionally linked to that collection of conventions that Ian Watt called "formal realism.'" The fictional diary is an artifice, claiming to be a real record, so that it is a 'formal attribute of the absence of form.' So far so good. Abbott knows himself to be on trickier ground when he wants to 450 ALAN KENNEDY argue that there is a special reflexive function for diary fiction. It is to this mode that he restricts his study, recognizing that this restriction'sharply reduces the field ,' But, as he says, this restriction reduces and broadens the field at the same time, since bythis restriction he is not limited only to recent times during which the diary novel has developed, but can range back into antiquity, if he wishes. The trickierground, of course, is simply that of reflexivity. Abbott's virtue is his clarity of conceptual thought. His problem is that he wants simple clarity of concept to cover reflexivity. He might have no problem with this, except that he wants to draw a line and establish a limit, and he represses his own activity ofthought. The problem is this (he develops it tellingly with reference to Alison Lurie's Real People): inside the fiction of the 'real' diary, the diarist (who is fictional) makes references to other 'people' (characters) who are 'real' for her. Similarly, her diary is real for her, in a way that it cannot be for us. So the diarist reads herrecord ofher real life in contact with real people, and on 're-reading' the diary sees it and the people in her life differently, and 50 begins to live and write differently. So, says Abbott, to be able to read the diary fiction in the way he wants to read it 'requires an acceptance of the principle of referentiality.' We have to believe that the fictional world the diary refers to is separate from the text; believe, that is, that part of the textual world is not textual. 'Only by assuming this basic distinction can we go on and speak meaningfully of the unique character of these reflexive texts.' Why, one wants to ask, those imperatives, those requirements, those rules? In order to play the game, one could say. But Abbott is not happy with the idea of games and play, and wants to be able to dismiss all the current faddish forms of frohliche Wissenschaft. It is not enough to have them as rules of the game; he wants them to be rules. Because if we insist they are rules, we might persuade ourselves that there really is a beyond of the text. How odd that critics, who lead textual lives (reluctantly?), are so desperate to prove that there is extra-textual existence that they try to show that it exists inside texts. Here, then, we come up against the arbitrarylimitAbbott gives himself.Since he is happy with Watt's 'formal realism,' why didn't he make use of a term like 'formal referentiality'? It is all he needs to make his argument about reflexive diary fiction. That Abbott has a motive beyond that of his carefully delineated topic becomes increasingly clear as his book develops. The early chapters on Lurie and The Portuguese Letters are perhaps the best in the book. One wonders why so much has to be made to reston Lurie's text, however, and it turns out that beyond these two very good examples, Abbott does not really have many texts that fulfil his restricted definition. Happy with his conviction of referentiality, he extends it to include not only the life of the fictional writer, but also that of the actual author. He regards diary fictions as laboratories for writers, and argues that they change the lives of their authors just as they change the internal lives of the fictional diarist. The argument is an interesting one, one that could open up. Unfortunately , the two examples given in conclusion, Bellow and Beckett, blow up the laboratory (the phrase is Abbott's). Joseph in The Dangling Man does not change. But the writing of the diary fiction changed Bellow. Bellow drew back from the PETER GAY 451 abyss (the mise en abime) his first novel opened up, and began to assert value, character, the value ofcharacter and role models. Abbott seems to argue thatwhen Bellow confronted Nothing, he made a choice - just as Abbott made a choice by backing away from the complexities of exploring the implications for reading of 'formal referentiality.' The choice appears to be an existential one, a free choice of values that flow from choosing. Why then, one wonders, the strained attempt to put Sartre in his place in the lengthy chapter on Nausea? By the time we reach the very last chapter on Beckett, Abbott has exhausted his ingenuity. The argument that Malone Dies is such a dead end (as diary fiction) that The Unnameable marks a radical break for Beckett (from writing to the voice) is totally unconvincing. Abbott's insistence that the writing of the final novel is not really writing but voicing again seems to want to draw some kind of line around the (disruptive) force of writing by trying to ignore that the voice of the novel is, after all, writing. Abbott's practice, then, somewhat disappoints, after his clarity ofreasoning has promised so much. On the one hand we have some critics practising inadequate reasoning, and therefore inadequate in practice, because they want to be able to ignore the challenges ofcurrent literary critical debate. On the other hand we have a powerfully logical critic unwilling to take that last step and ask Derrida's simple question: why not reasonably use reason to put the question to reason itself? What might we then not be capable of? The Happy Historian MICHAEL LYNCH Peter Gay. The Tender Passion. Volume II of The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud New York: Oxford University Press. 490. $34.95 In case the first volume of Peter Gay's study of bourgeois culture from Victoria to Freud did not, his second volume establishes The Bourgeois Experience as a remarkable contribution to social history. 'I am working to revise current views of the Victorian age, including some of Freud's,' he wrote in Education of the Senses (1984), 'not for the sake of revision but in an attempt to recapture the conflicts, the ambivalence, the diversity of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture.I The Tender Passion continues the agenda of the earlier volume, examining sexuality and love; future volumes will deal with conflict and aggression, since Gay assumes 'love, aggression, and conflict' as 'the fundamental building blocks of the human experience.' His revisionism, like that of most recent sodal histories of the Victorians, claims for them a complex knowledge of sexuality that simpler earlier versions denied. But he outdistances his contemporaries by mountingadefence of the nineteenth-century middling classes against charges of hypocrisy, repression, and prudery. Gay has set his sights on 'the bourgeoisophobes' diagnosis of prevalent UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 56, NUMDER 3, SPRING 1987 ...