“The good critic,” wrote Anatole France, “is he who relates the adventures of his soul among masterpieces.” Even during its golden age, in the late 19th century, the Impressionist criticism that France, Walter Pater, Arthur Quiller-Couch, George Saintsbury, and Oscar Wilde practiced was already being challenged by the institutionalized study of literature. Newly created departments of English at Harvard (1876), Oxford (1894), and other universities insisted that the study of literature be a discipline: a rigorous, systematic, even scientific enterprise worthy of the same respect accorded the studies of physics and mathematics. Banished from college classrooms and scholarly journals, mere dilettantism did not qualify as Literaturwissenschaft, the science of literature. For much of the 20th century, English departments rejected France’s claim that “there is no such thing as objective criticism any more than there is objective art.” New Criticism, the dominant school of literary analysis, proclaimed the impersonality of both art and its interpretation.
To T.S. Eliot’s pronouncement “Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry,” the New Critics added that honest criticism is not directed upon the reader of poetry, either. Explicating John Donne’s “The Canonization,” Cleanth Brooks focuses on the poem and says nothing about himself; critics who record their own reactions to a poem commit the heresy that New Critics dubbed “the affective fallacy.” To them, both the poet and the reader were distractions from what should be the exclusive focus: the literary text. By the final decades of the 20th century, every critic was obliged to anchor analysis in theory. In some sense, it did not matter which — Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, New Historicist, reader-response, etc. Being able to “theorize” a text was a prerequisite for credentialing as a tenurable critic.
In a new book about the novelist and essayist Nicholson Baker, B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal (Simon & Schuster), J.C. Hallman defines reading as “a private encounter between two souls.” The book marks a return to the Impressionistic criticism of France. In his introduction to the first of two volumes he edited under the title The Story About the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature (2009), Hallman provided a manifesto for “creative criticism.” In the finely crafted essays that followed (D.H. Lawrence on Herman Melville, Virginia Woolf on Ernest Hemingway, Ralph Ellison on Stephen Crane, etc.), the author of the essay is as much its subject as the author the essay is ostensibly about. Through detailed speculation about the sort of insect Gregor Samsa is transformed into, Vladimir Nabokov’s essay on Franz Kafka offers more insight into Nabokov’s lepidopteran interests than into Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.
Of creative criticism, France proclaimed: “To be quite frank, the critic ought to say: ‘Gentlemen, I am going to talk about myself on the subject of Shakespeare, or Racine, or Pascal, or Goethe — subjects that offer me a beautiful opportunity.’ "
Creative criticism is the revenge of the nontenured on the coddled professoriate.
Hallman frankly acknowledges that Baker is no Shakespeare, Racine, Pascal, or Goethe. Nevertheless, Hallman believes that Baker is “on the canonical brink.” And B & Me offers Hallman a beautiful opportunity to talk about himself. His stated plan, to “tell the story of a literary relationship from its moment of conception, from that moment when you realize that there are writers out there in the world you need to read, so you read them,” derives less directly from Anatole France than from Nicholson Baker himself. In his 1991 book, U and I: A True Story, Baker did with John Updike what B & Me attempts to do with Baker.
Baker is just a distant rumor when Hallman, who has not read him, begins his project. For many months, he does nothing more than simply stare at the covers of Baker’s books before daring to open them. Though he is soon distracted and abandons his project of reading the entire oeuvre, he is at least more conscientious than Baker, who spends a couple of pages cataloging which Updike books he has and has not read. Baker boasts that he lacks direct acquaintance with most of Updike’s work, but it does not prevent him from proceeding to write U and I, a work that focuses more on I than U. Many light years beyond Franco Moretti’s “distant reading,” this is literary analysis so far from the star it is observing that the image is much fainter than the eye at the end of the telescope.
Hallman is drawn to Baker in part because he sees him as an older doppelgänger. Both men were serious students of music, and both are admirers of Henry and William James. Baker published a novel, The Anthologist, and Hallman actually is an anthologist. Both men are bookish stalkers. Though Baker shows up at a publishing party in hopes of meeting Updike, a chat with Tim O’Brien, who played golf with the literary icon, is as close as he gets. Hallman checks into a bed-and-breakfast in South Berwick, Maine, the town in which Baker happens to live. Invading the reticent author’s space, he is rewarded with a couple of unremarkable conversations. Hallman’s obsession with Baker, like Baker’s with Updike, should earn each the same rebuke administered to the most famous parasite in English literary history: Weary of James Boswell’s incessant efforts to shadow him, Samuel Johnson told his tail: “Sir, you have but two topics, yourself and me. I am sick of both.”
Basso Cannarsa, LUZ, Redux
Nicholson Baker’s book “U and I,” about the works of John Updike, focuses more on I than U.
After rambling on about how Ralph Waldo Emerson fetishized the self, Hallman begins a new paragraph with: “Which brings me back to Nicholson Baker.” Not necessarily. It is difficult to calibrate the tone in Hallman’s digressive method. Is he being obnoxiously whimsical? Is he mocking the blatantly erratic organization of his thoughts? Is he mocking his own mockery, when, pausing from his patter, he states: “I’m no good at small talk”? When Hallman claims that Baker’s Checkpoint (2004), a peculiar novel about an inept plot to assassinate President George W. Bush, is “perhaps the only book of that time that needs to have been published at all,” the statement is so preposterous that he seems to bring hyperbole to a satire.
The effect of following Hallman’s mind in action is at times droll and even exhilarating, but at other times it is merely irritating. “We never read outside the context of ourselves,” he posits as the premise behind his book. A Whitmanesque self that, containing multitudes, loafs and invites its soul would produce a fascinating reading of Nicholson Baker. Hallman is no Whitman. Amid remarks about selected Baker novels — The Mezzanine (1988), Room Temperature (1990), Vox (1992), The Fermata (1994), Checkpoint (2004), House of Holes (2011) — and Baker’s campaign to save card catalogs, books, and newspapers from destruction by libraries that should preserve them, Hallman tells us about his and his partner Catherine’s fluctuating sexual relationship; the endless woes caused by their ramshackle farmhouse; his attempt to shoplift a book in a shopping mall to protest its use as mere decoration; the cat named Baby that was run over by a car; the surgery to remove a tumor from Hallman’s back; and potty problems in the Paris atelier they rent, caused by the toilet’s being located in the kitchen.
Subtitling his book A True Story of Literary Arousal, Hallman insists emphatically and explicitly that the relationship between author and reader is erotic. There is precedent for this: In Camus: A Romance, Elizabeth Hawes, who never met the French author, recounts how her unrequited love for Camus led her, long after his death, in a car crash in 1960, to read all his work, visit his haunts, and meet his surviving acquaintances. Hallman dwells on details of Baker’s sexually graphic fiction and likens his own encounter with Baker’s books to receiving an ejaculation in the face, metaphorically speaking. … “Isn’t that all any reader should want, isn’t that the explicit lodged way deep down in the implicit?” When I read Mark Twain or S.J. Perelman, I need to wipe the grin off my face, but that is all.
Hallman absorbs Baker’s books while lying in a hammock, and his preference for reading, eating, and making love outdoors (“reading, like sex and eating, is better al fresco”) might be what leads him to disparage the indoor activity of classroom study. He summarizes “the state of modern literature in higher education these days” as “all about masturbation.” The kind of passionate creative criticism that Hallman champions is a way of mooning the measured, footnoted scholarship valued by literature departments.
It might strengthen his argument to portray the varieties of academic writing as invariably pedantic and tame, but an honest assessment would acknowledge that his straw men sometimes turn to gold. Hallman studied creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, Johns Hopkins, and Iowa, but, though he is now listed as an assistant professor at Oklahoma State, a long itinerary of other institutions he has taught at — the University of Pennsylvania, Bennington College, the University of St. Thomas, Sweet Briar College, Saint Joseph’s University — suggests the life of an adjunct: itinerant, underpaid, and resentful. Creative criticism is the revenge of the nontenured on the coddled professoriate.
It is also a throwback to the era when Malcolm Cowley, Dwight Macdonald, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, and Edmund Wilson — men and women of letters but not syllabi and grade books — were producing some of the most exciting literary criticism in America. Partisan Review, one of the most celebrated of independent literary journals, was already in decline when it accepted sponsorship by Rutgers University in 1963. It was only late in their careers, and often off the tenure track, that many of the public intellectuals who wrote for PR found jobs in academic institutions.
Unfettered by the conventions of scholarly discourse enforced by universities, writers are free to be original and brilliant. Sometimes they succeed. Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage is particularly effective because Dyer’s pervasive petulance — his admission that he cannot bear to read another page by D.H. Lawrence — is more faithful to the Laurentian spirit than a methodical report on the cantankerous novelist’s life could ever be. However, “creative criticism” can also be tendentious and tedious.
Hallman suggests that the alternative to the “masturbation” he sees as the norm for college study is to schedule classes alfresco (even at the University of Alaska?) and encourage students to write about themselves. Term-paper assignment: Write about your personal experiences as you leaf through Middlemarch. Following the examples of Baker and Hallman, it is not obligatory to read the whole thing. The result could be an essay that is itself a creative work of literary merit. More likely, it will be a form of self-indulgent fan fiction that teaches its reader very little about George Eliot’s novel. Self-gratification is not the most fruitful way for the soul to wander among masterpieces.
Steven G. Kellman is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio and the author of Redemption: The Life of Henry Roth (Norton, 2005) and The Translingual Imagination (University of Nebraska Press, 2000).
Correction (3/24/2015, 11:35 a.m.): This article originally stated incorrectly that J.C. Hallman graduated from Swarthmore; that reference has been removed. It also said that Hallman and his partner ran over a cat, when in fact the cat was killed by a passing car; that reference has been changed.
