New Criticism, 2

3. “Human nature is itself unchanging, and it is because of this that certain works have a timeless and universal appeal, since they issue from and appeal to this unchanging human nature. We each have our own unique individuality or unique ‘essence’, yet there is also a common store of ‘humanity’ which we all share.”

This tenet attempts to negotiate between a sense of common humanity and a sense of the individual…and thus the age-old question of the One and the Many enters into literary study. With some of the insights offered by reader-response, one could also add that a reader brings both her humanity and her individuality to a text, rather than just her humanity alone, and the two interact together in the reading act (as, presumably, they do in all other human acts). “Unchanging” is the flashpoint here, especially if you feel you must link up a discussion of human nature to a Darwinian model of speciation. However, it should be noted that one can take human speciation on board without dumping human nature into the primordial slop; see Leon Kass’ work for an example of retaining both. Without a relatively stable human nature, though, it seems to me at first glance that only radical individuation remains, and the reading encounter becomes yet another chimera to disguise the self.

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4. “The best literature carries its meanings within itself; the ‘words on the page’ are enough for a true appreciation of a literary work. We do not need to know about an author’s life or intentions or about the historical or cultural context of a work to appreciate its literary value.”

Let’s set aside the way this statement assumes that a major reason to read is to appreciate literary value, which in turn is predicated on the idea that literary excellence exists (see previous post) and can be apprehended as such. Thus we’re back to the issue of evaluation with this one.

Of all the statements so far, this is the one I would most readily part company with. In an attempt to avoid biographical or intentional fallacies, it thoroughly isolates the text from both author and reader (whether that reader be the author’s contemporary or no). Such a strategy is perhaps partly indebted to a certain sort of modernist attempt at scientific objectivity, which separates the object of study from its environment and reduces as much as possible the variables at play in order to get at the ‘object in itself’ (e.g. the self in Descartes Mediations). What I find problematic with this approach is that understanding this ‘object in itself’ does not also give one an understanding of the objects’ being in relation. It is of course the temperment of our age to emphasize the object/text’s place in a network of relationships, contexts, etc., and this so even in theology with the advent of personalism. I personally find this to be a healthy correction of New Criticism. The opposite to the fallacy of ignoring the relational aspects of a text—its context, intertexts—is taking one of those aspects, say material circumstances or power relations, and making that the sole key to unlock the significance of the text. Both oversimplify.

We should not regard the text as a gnostic might, radically separating it from its embodiment in this time and place, speaking with and to this culture and textual antecedents, by this author (when known); nor should we come to it as materialists, subsuming the text (and its ideas) to its material and social con-texts. Embodied imaginations is what we have before us, not disembodied minds or infinitely permeable bodies.