Re-reading Poets: The Life of the Author

Chapter 1. The Life of the Author

1 I read the poets that concern me most in this book both before and while I became a practicing professional myself, over a long period of time. The advantage of this is that I have come to understand in a direct way the ultimately casual and temporary nature of the critical preferences that happen to be currently dominant and the modes of reading they promote. Criticism, it is clear to anyone who practices it over more than a generation or so, is always a historically produced, and therefore ideological, construction with a definable (in retrospect at least) life cycle (a period of gestation, a period of production, and a period of decline). It is all too easy, from outside the institutional matrix that generates and promulgates critical ideologies, to be blind to these machinations and to erroneously presume that the practices in vogue at the moment are in fact the natural ones by which humans are meant to process literary texts or, if not that, a better set than any of the recent competitors. While there may be no way to get fully outside of whatever happens to be the currently dominant system, we do not have to follow its precepts docilely and blindly. History is replete with One 3 The Life of the Author kameen pages3.indd 1 9/1/10 3:32 PM 2 / The Life of the Author alternatives to the currency at hand. My course description for a History of Criticism seminar says this explicitly: “So, no matter how dominant the current critical system might seem to be, it is necessarily temporary, in process , always already well on its way to being replaced by the next new thing, before we even finish thinking and talking about it.” I have comparable language in my entry-level Critical Reading course description. Such statements get at what I see as the crux of the problem both of what poets have to teach and how they help us to learn it. The whole system of “close reading,” for example, which dominated the way I learned in school to approach poetry, remained largely invisible to me (as system, that is) while I learned to practice it. That I found the way school read poets so boring and unprofitable, from early in my high school years and on through my college years was typical (everyone else in my classes did, too, as far I could tell) and understandable, given the difficulty of the method and the quotidian tedium of the environment. The fact that it didn’t ruin poets as figures of lifelong value for me was due to the happy accident that I started to read them before we began to study poetry in earnest . And I had already come up with another way of doing it. It is not impossible to privately ignore the dominant system and cobble together a more agreeable alternative. It is, though, hard to become conscious of the current system as system—to see it in a broadly orchestral historical frame, as one option among many that are comparably powerful. From this perspective one can become vigilant to the potential limitations and excesses of criticism’s constitutive practices not simply at the transitional junctures, when the extant system begins to fray and fall apart as it is being replaced by a contrary alternative—all the seams become quite visible , then—but during the heydays, when the machine is powerful, seemingly faultless, and almost universally endorsed. One way to reach such a consciousness is to be around when one of the sea changes takes place. In the case of literary criticism, such upheavals took place in the 1920s (when text-based theories began to emerge) and the 1970s (when reader-based theories began to replace them), among others. Since the original and previously presumed-to-be natural system remains, in a sort of disabled state of partial erasure, as the new system replaces it, the duplicity of theory is forever exposed . One can, then, begin to study such ideological movements from a sort of anthropological perspective, which is what I’d like to do a bit of next: a quick sketch of one aspect of the last eighty years of critical theories and the methods of reading they promoted: the way the author, the poet, was sent to the sidelines of the reading process. kameen pages3.indd 2 9/1/10 3:32 PM [3.141.8.247] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 03:24 GMT...