We don’t always know what intimate life consists of until novels tell us.
Those words from the writer Lorrie Moore made me wonder: Could the same be said about literary criticism? Can it help us discover something new about life? The gist of those questions inspired me to begin my graduate studies in literature in the 1990s. From the moment I set foot on the Yale campus, I felt I had been granted the keys to the kingdom. I would learn from the greatest minds, as the high priests of their field guided me through Leopardi’s metaphors and Boccaccio’s narratives, along with their intense emotions and rarefied concepts. I would develop the tools to unpack even the most opaque works — not even a Deleuze would resist my parsing.
I scoured the classics of criticism, from Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence and William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity to the more arcane reaches of hermeneutics, reader-response theory, and something provocatively called the New Historicism. I learned the jargon, made the convoluted syntax my own, and scorned the Old Ideas — no more authorial intent or biographical criticism for me. Like all ambitious literature students, I devoted my deepest thoughts to theory, which was hung over from its structuralist and deconstructionist heyday and breathing its last gasp in the American academy. Bataille and Blanchot, Culler and Greenblatt, Derrida and Kristeva, Gilbert and Gubar — they all taught me what it means to think about literature.
Fast-forward 20 years. My passion for my work has only intensified with time, as has my belief in the mission of literary study. But some things have changed. I no longer devour the latest issues of Critical Inquiry and PMLA. I assign little criticism in my classes, and I no longer read books of literary criticism for fun. I once found myself in a sprawling used bookstore with thousands of titles on everything from sailing to Cicero. The section on literary criticism was a rickety wooden bookshelf in the corner. Was this the image of my field, I wondered — an afterthought, even in the world of words it calls home?
Discovering ‘new relations’ between the books we read and ourselves helps us connect literary criticism to life, as we discover truths felt in the blood.
This is not the place to revisit the oft — indeed, overly — invoked mantra of the crisis in the humanities and its effect on literary studies. We have all heard the public outcry questioning their value. Instead I will discuss how we literary scholars might take a proactive role in these public debates and lead by example — through the writing we do.
Few would dispute that literary scholarship has become so specialized that its discoveries are often inaccessible to outsiders. Some would argue that this is not necessarily a bad thing: The difficulty of modern critical language reflects progress over earlier, more accessible generations — especially when that specialized language seeks to push our thinking on social and political issues in new directions.
I see two problems with what we might call this Critical Progress model. First, it relies heavily on the language of the sciences and social sciences, and so fails to capture a major — perhaps the most important — element of literary expression: linguistic beauty. Those of us who teach and write about literature probably do so because from a young age we were enthralled by the words of a favorite author or haunted by a literary voice. We critics will probably never rival the grace and power of the books we interpret, but it seems misguided to respond to these works in an abstract jargon completely out of tune with the gorgeous originals. One often hears that a scholar will “interrogate” a literary text, an ugly term that suggests the aggressive, inquisitorial spirit of a critical approach deaf to the delicacy of expression and emotional resonance of the source.
My second reservation is more philosophic than stylistic. If history teaches us anything, it’s that we never get close to “solving” the meaning of a literary text. As Shelley wrote, the openness of interpretation remains a constant over time:
A great poem is a fountain forever overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight; and after one person and one age has exhausted all its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight.
On the surface, these words feel chastening, perhaps even depressing: The literary scholar who devotes his life to studying an author or book finds that in due course his work will be superseded. But this warning against critical hubris also carries with it an invitation to something increasingly rare in professional criticism: a sense of joy. Discovering “new relations” between the books we read and ourselves helps us connect literary criticism to life, as we discover truths felt in the blood.
The intellectual diversity of contemporary literary scholarship is something to be celebrated; by no means am I arguing for one particular mode of reading as the be-all of criticism. For example, more explicitly engaged political and ideological criticism has produced some marvelous results, such as wisely expanding our notion of the canon to include hitherto excluded, often minority voices. My goal is not to discredit other forms of literary interpretation but instead to propose that we reclaim a way of reading that is often overlooked or diminished because of its relative simplicity and resistance to any label. Since the texts we study are worlds in themselves that are likely to outlast us, we would do well to approach them with a corresponding sense of wonder and mystery that can lead to Shelley’s “unconceived delight” — as a scholar writing 80 years ago did in a work that would be inconceivable today.
The earth itself must now be the scholar’s home; it can no longer be the nation.
Erich Auerbach wrote those words years after his exile from Nazi Germany, in 1935, when he was dismissed from his position at the University of Marburg because he was Jewish. He fled to Turkey, where he became a professor of literature at Istanbul University and wrote Mimesis, a sprawling book that seeks no less than “the representation of reality in Western literature,” as its subtitle proclaims. Beginning with the Bible and Homer and running all the way to Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf, the 20 chapters in Mimesis cover a range of genres — epic, romance, theater, the novel — and an array of linguistic and national traditions, from Greek and Latin to Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English. By the author’s own admission, the book was written during a time of war that limited international communication and access to scholarly material, cutting him off from the vast, potentially overwhelming bibliographies on his texts: “If it had been possible for me to acquaint myself with all the work that has been done on so many subjects,” Auerbach notes, “I might never have reached the point of writing.”
The original, intensely personal structure of Mimesis inspired Geoffrey Hartman to call it a “first-rate historical novel.” Edward Said described it as the “greatest literary humanist work,” with an “essayistic style of criticism.” Said’s words warrant quoting at length:
In order to be able to understand a humanistic text, one must try to do so as if one is the author of that text, living the author’s reality, undergoing the kind of life experiences intrinsic to his or her life, and so forth, all by that combination of erudition and sympathy that is the hallmark of philological hermeneutics.
For Auerbach, inhabiting his authors’ reality entailed living inside their language. He begins each chapter in Mimesis with an extended quotation from the text under discussion, in its original language and followed by his own translation. The presence of the quoted material — through a seemingly humble, almost scribal act — signals that the undiluted language of the source text will drive Mimesis. It also reveals arguably the highest function and skill of a literature professor’s training: close reading, the ability to interpret complex rhetorical structures and tease out their often hidden meanings.
Hewing to the source is not just a protocol for Auerbach; it’s a profession of faith. Because so much of his attention is on original literary documents, they become the means by which he makes sense of other texts. He does not “position” himself vis-à-vis other critics and scholars, the way many today do in a rush to establish professional bona fides. Nor does he allow any single critical paradigm to speak through his writing and limit his reading as belonging to this or that school of thought. Auerbach emerges from the inquiry not only as a scholar or critic, but also as an author in his own regard, with his own unique voice and intellectual personality.
In lockstep with his focus on primary texts, Auerbach courageously steps outside his specialist fields of Romance philology and medieval literature. The breadth of his inquiry jars against today’s academic practices, in which the need to carve out one’s scholarly niche has become increasingly pressing. Too often, the notion that one could write as an informed generalist on a range of writers and books across the ages is regarded as amateurish or popularizing. The message now is clear: Serious scholars must be seriously focused.
There’s no better way to share our passion for literature than to write in a way that invites readers inside the texts we are commenting on.
Yet no less than Said observes that Auerbach’s work is indeed “disciplined,” as the thread of his argument runs fluidly from its ancient beginning to its modern end — showing, as one of his colleagues put it, his ability “to weave ample fabrics from a single loom.” The analysis in Mimesis, however capacious, is held together by a heavily ballasted center — in Auerbach’s own words, “the interpretation of reality through literary representation or ‘imitation,’ " as his chapters chart how realism came to mix literary styles as diverse as the lofty rhetoric of the Bible and the rich descriptiveness of ancient epic.
The argument proves that you don’t need to be a specialist to speak with intelligence and insight about a literary work. More important, and less obvious, Mimesis reveals the limits of specialization: How can one be an expert in, say, Victorian literature, without also grasping the centuries of literary expression that preceded it, as a Victorian writer herself would have? We must resist the temptation to isolate literary expression on a continuum. Each text comes into the world with a rich history behind it; each work in the present could have ripple effects on future writing separated from it by huge swaths of time. Period specialization certainly has its place, but Auerbach shows how we also need works of broad scope that ambitiously chart literature’s transhistorical effects — the cosmic time of literary form that confounds human chronology.
Perhaps most surprising, Mimesis proves that you don’t have to be “right” when writing about literature — that it is just as effective to be interesting, even provocative. In one of the book’s more extraordinary moments, Auerbach writes that the pathos of Dante’s hell is that the sinners do not change: They enter into a “changeless existence” that condemns them to inhabit their suffering forever, just as the timeless afterlives of the blessed in heaven guarantee them an eternity of bliss. It is difficult to imagine such an insight appearing in a contemporary critical work on Dante, a field I specialize in. To write academic criticism on Dante today entails referencing a mountain of secondary literature and positioning one’s work accordingly. The global meaning of the poem — ultimately unknowable, but a holy grail whose pursuit can lead to fascinating insights — has disappeared in the mist of specialized inquiry.
For Auerbach, Dante was controversially a poet of the “secular world,” whose sense of human history and culture could overpower the poem’s stated Christian content. One could counter that Auerbach, by privileging the concrete details and remarkable personalities of Dante’s poem — particularly its psychologically complex sinners — is missing the point of Dante’s emphatically religious poem, whose greatest beauties arguably lie in its celestial realm. But even in disagreeing with Auerbach’s reading, one cannot deny his precious insight. His willingness to risk being wrong is part of what makes his reading so powerful. Nothing stands between himself and Dante’s words: He brings to bear his erudition and rigorous training in trying to make sense of the original, and he does not rely on any secondary literature to put words in Dante’s mouth. Insights such as the following are Auerbach’s and Auerbach’s alone:
We behold [in the sinners of Inferno 10] an intensified image of the essence of their being, fixed for all eternity in gigantic dimensions, behold it in a purity and distinctness which could never for one moment have been possible during their lives on earth.
In a reading of such emotional depth and intellectual subtlety, something magical happens: The contour of the critic’s soul emerges. Auerbach leaves behind the security of merely rational critical analysis and brings his reading into a life-giving essayist space, reminding us of the etymology of the French essayer as something “to try” or, in the word’s Italian form, even “taste” — not simply to know.
In a soaring meditation from “The Use and Abuse of History for Life,” Friedrich Nietzsche warned against seeing works of art as merely something to be cataloged or crushed by historical analysis:
The historical culture of our critics will no longer permit any effect at all in the proper sense, that is an effect on life and action: their blotting-paper at once goes down even on the blackest writing, and across the most graceful design they smear their thick brush-strokes which are supposed to be regarded as corrections: and once again that is the end of that.
It’s dangerous to think that we know more than the works we are considering. By reducing them to the parameters of a prepackaged critical paradigm, we may do violence to the originality and often genius it took to create them; as Wordsworth warns, we may murder to dissect.
Wordsworth closed his great poem on the poet’s mind, The Prelude, with a simple explanation of what he had tried to do with his roughly 10,000 verses:
what we have loved,
Others will love, and we may teach them how.
Like so many, I was moved by love of books to make teaching and studying them my career. We may be scholars, but Wordsworth reminds us that we are teachers as well, and there’s no better way to share our passion for literature than to write in a way that invites readers inside the texts we are commenting on. Yes, to answer Moore, literary criticism can discover something about life we had never known before — if we find the courage to risk writing about literature with what Dante called lungo studio e grande amore — the “long study” that helps us explain what makes a work tick and the “great love” that inspires us to keep that work alive.