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Authors: Marjorie Garber
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“fresh approach which we can then follow up ourselves” 37 and “reassur[ing] us” if we are repelled by novelties or obscurities. 38
Above all, “one of the greatest services a critic can perform” is “to enable us to recognize [a work’s] coherence,” since “a work of art needs to be seen in its unity.” 39
Having cataloged these useful “uses,” Brooks moved on to enumerate some “pitfalls for the critic and his reader.” 40 It becomes clear that there are more potential abuses than uses, and that the abuses are more appealing than the uses, for the same reason that Milton’s Satan in
Paradise Lost
is a more interesting figure than his God, or Falstaff (to some people) a more engaging character than Hotspur or Prince Hal.
These included
“the half-baked interpretation formed by attending to only part of the evidence in a text”; 41
“hurrying on to say how good or bad a work is, before taking enough trouble to understand it”; 42
“being too keen on ranking works of authors in order of merit”; 43
running down one author in order to exalt another; expecting from one author or work what we admire in another;
“the treatment of literature as no more than the raw material of sociology”; 44
a skepticism that makes the critical “unable to believe that a great author … can have depicted a noble character or given a story a happy ending, without, as the fashionable phrase goes, ‘undercutting it’ ”; 45
the Musical Fallacy, which claims that literature “works by direct appeals to the ear and to the mind’s eye, rather than to logic and the reasoned progression of ideas,” and that literature is an “impure art” because ideas get in the way of sensation and affect; 46
the Lyrical Fallacy, which holds, following Poe, “that a long poem is a contradiction in terms”;
the Anti-Historical Fallacy, whose adherents “take as their standard simply what the uninstructed modern reader can see in a work”; 47
its twin, the Historical Fallacy, “where the critic’s interpretation is governed by what he thinks an average audience of the author’s day could have seen in the work”; 48
and finally,
the abuse performed of the critic who takes the critical enterprise too seriously. “The final abuse of criticism … is to put its analysis in the place of the experience of art itself.” 49
For Harold Brooks, the “intellectual interpretation of imaginative literature is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end; and that end is the heightened and more finely tuned response to the work of art in its wholeness.” 50 He was willing to acknowledge the possibility of both conscious and unconscious meanings—perhaps surprisingly, the first footnote (of only three) in this published lecture comes on the penultimate page and points the reader to Jung on phantasy and symbol—but he warned against “educating the intellect alone,” rather than “the education offeeling, and of the sensibilities of the complete human being, which is the education offered by works of art.” 51
I find little to fault in this polished and gracious account, except to say again that it would be possible to reclassify the abuses as uses, and the uses as abuses, and to emerge with an equally viable and persuasive argument. In fact, the history of literary analysis from 1974 to the present may be seen to have followed all of these diverse “abusive” paths, from the sociology of literature and various avatars of historicism to a renewed interest in the passions, emotions, and positive and negative affect. The tendency to list and rank authors and works—as I will have occasion to discuss later—is a marketing device (for critics and for publishers) and a nostalgia for a literary canon. Skepticism, a resistance to closure (the happy ending), what Brooks called a “half-baked” interpretation “attending to only part of the text” but what might be as readily seen as a “strong reading,” a reading
Above all, “one of the greatest services a critic can perform” is “to enable us to recognize [a work’s] coherence,” since “a work of art needs to be seen in its unity.” 39
Having cataloged these useful “uses,” Brooks moved on to enumerate some “pitfalls for the critic and his reader.” 40 It becomes clear that there are more potential abuses than uses, and that the abuses are more appealing than the uses, for the same reason that Milton’s Satan in
Paradise Lost
is a more interesting figure than his God, or Falstaff (to some people) a more engaging character than Hotspur or Prince Hal.
These included
“the half-baked interpretation formed by attending to only part of the evidence in a text”; 41
“hurrying on to say how good or bad a work is, before taking enough trouble to understand it”; 42
“being too keen on ranking works of authors in order of merit”; 43
running down one author in order to exalt another; expecting from one author or work what we admire in another;
“the treatment of literature as no more than the raw material of sociology”; 44
a skepticism that makes the critical “unable to believe that a great author … can have depicted a noble character or given a story a happy ending, without, as the fashionable phrase goes, ‘undercutting it’ ”; 45
the Musical Fallacy, which claims that literature “works by direct appeals to the ear and to the mind’s eye, rather than to logic and the reasoned progression of ideas,” and that literature is an “impure art” because ideas get in the way of sensation and affect; 46
the Lyrical Fallacy, which holds, following Poe, “that a long poem is a contradiction in terms”;
the Anti-Historical Fallacy, whose adherents “take as their standard simply what the uninstructed modern reader can see in a work”; 47
its twin, the Historical Fallacy, “where the critic’s interpretation is governed by what he thinks an average audience of the author’s day could have seen in the work”; 48
and finally,
the abuse performed of the critic who takes the critical enterprise too seriously. “The final abuse of criticism … is to put its analysis in the place of the experience of art itself.” 49
For Harold Brooks, the “intellectual interpretation of imaginative literature is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end; and that end is the heightened and more finely tuned response to the work of art in its wholeness.” 50 He was willing to acknowledge the possibility of both conscious and unconscious meanings—perhaps surprisingly, the first footnote (of only three) in this published lecture comes on the penultimate page and points the reader to Jung on phantasy and symbol—but he warned against “educating the intellect alone,” rather than “the education offeeling, and of the sensibilities of the complete human being, which is the education offered by works of art.” 51
I find little to fault in this polished and gracious account, except to say again that it would be possible to reclassify the abuses as uses, and the uses as abuses, and to emerge with an equally viable and persuasive argument. In fact, the history of literary analysis from 1974 to the present may be seen to have followed all of these diverse “abusive” paths, from the sociology of literature and various avatars of historicism to a renewed interest in the passions, emotions, and positive and negative affect. The tendency to list and rank authors and works—as I will have occasion to discuss later—is a marketing device (for critics and for publishers) and a nostalgia for a literary canon. Skepticism, a resistance to closure (the happy ending), what Brooks called a “half-baked” interpretation “attending to only part of the text” but what might be as readily seen as a “strong reading,” a reading
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