Astronomy? Astrology? & Literary Studies

Cross-posted at The Valve.

In a recent post at The Valve, Aaron Bady quotes from Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, published in 1947: “The poem, if it be a true poem, is a simulacrum of reality . . . an experience rather than any mere statement about experience or any mere abstraction from experience.” My own favorite expression of such a sentiment dates from 1926 in Archibald McLeish’s “Ars Poetica”:

A poem should not mean
But be

Some such distinction seems to recur time and again.

Northrup Frye presents his version in the “Polemical Introduction” to his 1957 Anatomy of Criticism, where he distinguishes between the silent and incommunicable act of reading (“like prayer in the Gospels”) and the noisy business of criticism (Frye’s complete text is available online here; I discuss that passage in an old Valve post). In the title essay of his 1975 collection, The Fate of Reading, Geoffrey Hartman frets that “modern ‘rithmatics’-semiotics, linguistics, and technical structuralism . . . widen, if anything, the rift between reading and writing,” apparently believing that the noisy business of criticism is an attempt to enter into, or at least recover, the silent act of reading. Perhaps a little noisiness is just what the doctor ordered, but the new ‘rithmatics are too noisy. More recently, Hans Ulrich Gumbrich has launched a full-scale assault on meaning in the name of presence: Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford U Press 2004).

Why does this discussion of experience vs. criticism (of this or that sort) come up over and over?

Let me offer a suggestion. For some time now I have felt literary studies to be in the process of differentiating into one set of discourses that, like astronomy, seek objective knowledge of literary phenomena, and another set of discourses that, like astrology, are more concerned with the meanings texts have for us. Many of my old Valve posts are, in whatever particular terms, about such a distinction, though I have never before used the astronomy/astrology analogy. I’ve avoided it because, in a more or less academic intellectual context, it is a deeply loaded and potentially incendiary analogy, but not one that affords understanding sufficient to offset that loading.

The loading is obvious. For those on the side of astronomy, such as the vast majority of the academic intelligentsia, astrology is mere superstition, best forgotten. The universe is so constituted that the positions of the stars signify nothing about the fates of individual humans nor about their personalities.

The world of human desires and affairs, however, is different. That world is, in effect, the world of astrology. The experience of texts is often profound and, profound or not, it is ineffable. Talk about that meaning, and about which texts are good, which are not, and why, such talk is central to the social circulation and sharing of literary texts and culture. It is what we are.

Thus, as we differentiate literary astronomy from literary astrology, we cannot, we must not slough off and abandon literary astrology. Nor, for that matter, should we decry literary astronomy as scientistic work of the devil. As individual critics we may opt wholly for astronomy or wholly for astrology, or we may even chose to play the astronomer on one occasion, the astrologer on another. Collectively, we must go forward with both.

The question of experience vs. criticism, then, is a rhetorical device we use to negotiate our way through the process of differentiation. Experience is always astrological in character and criticism, by its ineradicable nature as a discourse other than literary experience, will always be attracted to astronomy. The terms of our discussions will change from one decade to the next, as will institutional structures and affiliations. But both discourses are inescapable and necessary. The recurrence of experience vs. criticism is a token of that necessity.