Wisely and Well

In The Rachel Papers, Martin Amis portrays an Oxford entrance interview that takes an unexpected turn. The hero, Charles Highway, has planned every aspect of his application carefully. On discovering that his interviewer is young and politically active he quickly adapts his outfit and prepares to be as left-wing as possible. After the tense opening pleasantries the first question is, however, ‘do you like literature?’ Dr Knowd then dissects his pompous essays, pointing out the way they flaunt their cleverness while taking writers to task according to spurious and self-serving criteria. Just when the outcome seems inevitable, however, Charles is offered a place, because of the danger he might get worse if he was taken elsewhere. The parting advice is to do a lot of hard thinking, to ‘read the poems and work out whether you like them’.¹

The hero is only temporarily chastened, and is soon wondering whether he might be better off at another college. The scene is neatly judged, though, and it turns away from a more predictable version of the interview encounter and the course of study beyond, where the naive enthusiasm of the young bibliophile runs into the harsh judgement of the professional critic, and is gradually tamed. (One of my friends tells his own story of this sort, wherein his attempt to attribute beauty to a poem was met with a derisive two-word snort of which the first word was indistinct but the second word was definitely ‘construct’.) Dr Knowd, for all his commitment to radical causes, maintains what must have seemed, in 1973, like an unfashionable commitment to pleasure and evaluation as two fundamental parts of literary study. They may be merely an apprenticeship – he suggests that ambitious theoretical perspectives could come later – but the scene’s surprise value resides nevertheless in the endorsement of a love and respect for literature as the most important things an aspirant student might cultivate.

‘Love’ is not a straightforward synonym, or an inevitable elaboration, of Dr Knowd’s ‘like’. They are, however, connected, in directing attention towards the pleasure and sense of intimate connection that literature causes in its readers. The questions addressed in Deirdre Shauna Lynch’s Loving Literature emerge from anxieties in contemporary literary criticism that share some key qualities with those underlying the scene in The Rachel Papers. She observes an environment where professional standards, protocols, and obligations, and developments in critical theory and practice, have made it much less easy, or common anyway, for critics to talk about whether they like or love the things they have read. She also observes that despite efforts to consolidate a sense of a discipline, and disciplinary standards, literary critics feel beleaguered and undervalued, their funding under threat, their rigour unrecognised. The book takes a quick first step, to the idea that perhaps reinstating an explicit, committed, but thoughtful love of literature would inspire those involved, and communicate the necessity of the subject better. Rather than pausing on this, however, it then moves on to its real issue: that loving literature is not, and has never been, a simple or unifying thing. The subsequent exploration, of the love of literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is consistently engaging and insightful. The indirect approach to criticism’s modern predicament proves rewarding.

Early in the book the relationship between the eros of loving literature and the agon of competition is briefly considered. She quotes Coleridge declaring his allegiance to Milton (p. 11) and then immediately asserting that no Frenchman’s soul could soar high enough to manage anything equivalent. Literary love can be egotistical, a proof of one’s own merit. A lot of people love Jane Austen, but scholars might feel they love her work for special reasons; or they might pursue instead a love of Sterne or Joyce or experimental poetry, a rarer love with which to distinguish something refined and special: caviar for the anything-but-general. All these loves are good...