“NATURALIST” criticism, NOT “cognitive” NOT “Darwinian” – A Quasi-Manifesto

Time to once again bump this to the top of the queue. 

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Reposted from The Valve, 31 March 2010, this is an informal manifesto for whatever it is I'm up to, and why I'm come to think of it as naturalist criticism. I could link a lot more into this piece now, especially my recent work on ring composition and digital humanities, but I won't. It's a decent map to my work in literature, a place-holder until I have time to do something a bit more formal.

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You mean a quasifesto?

Shoo, get out . . .

Fact is, if I’d known then what I know now, I’d never have thought of myself as being in the business of bringing cognitive science to literary criticism much less represented myself to the world in that way. But I didn’t (know) and I did (represent), so now I seem stuck with the moniker. I’d like to shake if off.

When I finally decided to publish a programmatic and methodological statement, “Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form,” I adopted naturalism as a label. Fact is, I’d just as soon not think of it as anything but the study of literature. But we live in an age of intellectual brands, so I chose “naturalism” as mine.

Yes, I know that “the natural” is somewhat problematic, but you’ll just have to get past that. No label is perfect and I’m not about to coin a new term. Assuming you can struggle past the word, what does naturalism suggest to you? To me the term conjures up a slightly eccentric investigator wandering about the world examining flora and fauna, writing up notes, taking photos, making drawings, and perhaps even collecting specimens. That feels right to me, except that I’m nosing about poems, plays, novels, films, and other miscellaneous things. Beyond that I’d like the term to suggest some sense of literature as thoroughly in and a part of the world. There’s only one world and literature exists in it.

Beyond that, what does the term suggest? . . . Nothing, that’s what I’d like it to suggest, nothing. But whatever this naturalist criticism is or might become, that it has some kind of name suggests that it’s probably not myth criticism, New Criticism, Marxist criticism, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, archetypal, phenomenological, reader response, or any of the other existing critical brands.

What do the terms “cognitive criticism” or “cognitive rhetoric” suggest? Like many of those other labels, they suggest some body of supplementary knowledge and practice that one brings to the study of literature. Just exactly what the supplementary body is, that may not be terribly clear. But that doesn’t matter. The terms emphasize and draw your attention to the supplement. The same with “Darwinian literary criticism,” only vaguer. The only thing that’s clear about that label is a towering intellectual figure whose work had nothing to do with the study of literature.

None of this should be taken to imply that I’ve lost interest in the newer psychologies, as I like to call them. I haven’t. I believe that future literary studies must take them into account, and other theories, concepts and models as well. I just don’t want to stick those names in my brand label.

Anything else?

Yes, I put the study of form at the center of the enterprise.

So why not label yourself a formalist?

Because that’s already of term of art, and it’s too strongly identified with approaches that treat the text as an autonomous object more or less independent of reader, author, and the larger world. For that matter, many formalist critics are more interested in textual autonomy than in systematically analyzing and describing the manifold formal aspects of literary texts. In the end, they’re as greedy after meaning as most other critics are.

OK, so what do you have in mind with this naturalist criticism that emphasizes form?

Good question. And I’m afraid my best answer is a bit embarrassing. I figure the best way to scope out any literary program is to look at practical criticism. What does it do with an actual text, in some length and detail. And the best examples I know are, umm, err, from my own work. And that, as I said, is embarrassing. I’d rather point out someone else’s work.

Really? There’s nothing else? Your work is de novo, so to speak?

Well, everyone has precursors and models. I was certainly influenced by the structuralists, Roman Jakobson, Edmund Leach, Jean Piaget, and Lévi-Strauss above all. For that matter I should probably know narratology better than I do. And I’ve enjoyed the detailed analytic work that David Bordwell’s posted on his blog, though I’ve not gotten around to reading any of his books except Making Meaning, which is an analysis and critique poststructuralist film criticism. If more people analyzed literary texts like Bordwell analyzes film, that would be good.

[More specifically, check out, e.g. Bordwell’s post on “Tell, don’t show,” or this post on “Kurosawa’s early spring,” other posts tagged as “Film technique,” and this essay, “Anatomy of the Action Picture.”]

OK OK, I get the idea. I’m skeptical, but go on. What’s your best analytic work?

I suppose my recent essays on “Kubla Khan,” and “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” but they’re a bit of a slog, long and detailed, and lots of diagrams. I like this old piece on Sir Gawin and the Green Knight too, and this Shakespeare piece, which looks at three plays, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, and The Winter’s Tale and even uses evolutionary psychology.

Perhaps the best place to start would my recent post: Two Rings in Fantasia: Nutcracker and Apprentice. It focuses on form and it’s got some nice screen shots too. It’s relatively short and pretty much free of abstract critical apparatus, though there’s an addendum that heads off into the abstractosphere. Yeah, it’s about film, not literature, but that’s a secondary issue that has no bearing on my main point.

As the title suggests, I consider two episodes in Disney’s Fantasia, the Nutcracker Suite and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. There are three things going on in that post: 1) the analysis and description of so-called ring forms in the two episodes, which is my main focus, 2) a brief characterization of the spatial worlds in the two episodes, and 3) some informal remarks on what those episodes might mean.

A ring form is a text in which episodes mirror one another around a central point or episode, thus: A, B, C . . . C’, B’, A’. One of these episodes has a conventional narrative (Sorcerer’s) while the other does not. But both are rings. Pending strong arguments to the contrary, I regard that as a fact about them. The ring structure really is there; it’s not something I’m reading into the episodes. The core work in the post is to report the relatively straight-forward analytical work needed to establish ring structure as a descriptive fact.

In the course of looking at the ring structure I also offer some remarks on the structure of the visual worlds in the two episodes and how the virtual camera moves through them. This plays no role in my argument about ring structure, but it is a formal feature of the episodes and is important in the larger scope of the hole film. Each of the eight episodes has a different theme and subject matter, and each has a different animation style. Somewhere “between” the style and the subject matter you have visual space and movement through it.

Finally, I offer some interpretive comments, some observations about what these episodes might mean. In the case of Nutcracker those suggestions lean toward the Freudian, though I suppose some might argue it has no meaning at all, that it’s just a bunch of pretty pictures set to music. Sorcerer’s is a different case, because here we have a actual story. I suppose I could’ve gone Freudian and worked on Father and Son, but I got stuck on all those industrious brooms parading across the screen and ended up giving a nod toward the Marxists.

Well, OK, OK. I’ve read the paper and it’s a nice piece of work.

Thank you.

But I don’t see anything new in kind.

Well, yes, I didn’t invent anything, but . . . .

Anyone could do it. It’s well within range of a good undergraduate . . .

And did you notice it’s not jam-packed with a lot of conceptual apparatus?

That’s what I mean, it’s almost as if anyone could do it.

Well, I rather doubt that. You do have to have a “feel” for the job, and that takes time and experience. You have to work with texts (or films) to learn how to work with them. You can’t get it by reading books and articles. But the absence of a lot of apparatus, that’s a feature, not a bug. In any event the thing to notice is that formal analysis and description is at the center of the piece.

But that’s not a central focus of practical criticism in the discipline as it is currently practiced. Nor does it seem to be on radar screen for the cognitivists and the Darwinians. They still treat meaning as the main event.

A Naïve Reading of Naïve Reading

Robert Pippin in The New York Times, “In Defense of Naïve Reading.” He notes that “it is still the teaching of literature that generates the most academic, and especially non-academic, discussion.” Part of his discussion notes that the teaching of vernacular literature in higher education is relatively new and that, consequently, “we have not yet settled on the right or commonly agreed upon way to go about it.” And so:

Clearly, poems and novels and paintings were not produced as objects for future academic study; there is no a priori reason to think that they could be suitable objects of “research.” By and large they were produced for the pleasure and enlightenment of those who enjoyed them. But just as clearly, the teaching of literature in universities ─ especially after the 19th-century research model of Humboldt University of Berlin was widely copied ─ needed a justification consistent with the aims of that academic setting: that fact alone has always shaped the way vernacular literature has been taught.

That is to say, in most times and places literary culture got along just fine without the benefits of learned study and commentary on the texts, though I will note that, in contrast, religious texts have attracted enormous bodies of learned commentary, elaboration, and exegesis.

Getting back to Pippin’s argument, the proper academic study of literature required a means of creating and transmitting knowledge and encouraged collaboration with other disciplines. At the same time it also required a way of evaluating student performance: “Students’ papers must be graded and no faculty member wants to face the inevitable ‘that’s just your opinion’ unarmed, as it were.”

Pippin goes on to note that, in the first place:

Literature and the arts have a dimension unique in the academy, not shared by the objects studied, or “researched” by our scientific brethren. They invite or invoke, at a kind of “first level,” an aesthetic experience that is by its nature resistant to restatement in more formalized, theoretical or generalizing language.

This is, of course, a traditional and venerable observation, often invoked in arguments against academic criticism or, indeed, criticism of any kind whatsoever. Pippin also suggests that

such works also can directly deliver a kind of practical knowledge and self-understanding not available from a third person or more general formulation of such knowledge. There is no reason to think that such knowledge . . . is any less knowledge because it cannot be so formalized or even taught as such. Call this a plea for a place for “naïve” reading, teaching and writing — an appreciation and discussion not mediated by a theoretical research question recognizable as such by the modern academy.

He rightly observes that this is a controversial claim, but I’m willing to grant it. For example, current arguments about whether or not literature (or the arts more generally) are biologically adaptive speak to this point. As far as I can tell, such arguments are about naïve reading, though they don’t use that term. They do not say that the value of literature requires explicit interpretation. And a good thing that they don’t, because, as we know, explicit interpretive activity is relatively new in human history. Homer's audience, and Dante's and Shakespeare's and Austen's, and so forth, they're all naïve in Pippin's sense. And if one doesn’t like these arguments – I certainly have doubts about them myself – other arguments are available (I’ve made some myself). Biological adaptiveness is by no means the only theoretical approach.

Pippin then goes on to grant that, of course, “we certainly need a theory about how artistic works mean anything at all, why or in what sense, reading a novel, say, is different from reading a detailed case history.” And so forth. In this I, of course, concur. My suspicion about Pippin, given what else he has to say, is that he doesn’t have any particular suggestions about how we ought to go about this, how we can improve current thinking on such matters. Maybe he thinks we have such matters well in hand (if so, I disagree); maybe he doesn't. There's no way to tell from what he's written here.

But he does go on to observe that, while there is developing interest in using neuroscience and evolutionary psychology to such ends, “such applications are spectacular examples of bad literary criticism, not good examples of some revolutionary approach.” He doesn’t even so much as hint at the possibility that the problem is not inherent in neuroscience or evolutionary psychology, or, for that matter, the cognitive sciences more broadly considered, but simply in what has been most readily done to date. He doesn’t seem to allow for the possibility that good use can in fact be made of these newer psychologies. On that point, of course, I believe he is wrong. I’ve argued the matter informally here, in this “quasifesto” for a naturalist criticism, and more formally in this long programmatic article on literary morphology and this somewhat shorter piece on cultural evolution and the human sciences.

Which is to say, he offers no positive program beyond advocating “naïve” reading. What does he think should be taught in undergraduate literature courses? Is he simply saying, drop the ‘Theory’ and do what they did in the golden days of yesteryear? If not that, then what? Surely he isn’t suggesting what one might call The New Naïveté, for, if he is, what’s to distinguish it from the Old Naïveté? Wouldn’t those distinguishing marks constitute some kind of theory, and wouldn’t that theory need justification and elaboration? And wouldn’t that, in turn, end up, in effect, reprising the last 50 years in literary criticism? And what about the research program? I don’t see that naïve reading has any, not as Pippin describes it.

He wants us to stop doing something – though just what isn’t entirely clear – and do more of something that’s been going on all along. By all means, naïve reading, yes. People do it all the time. It goes on in reading groups, off-line and on-line. It’s all over the blogosphere. And I’m sure the non-academic literary blogosphere thanks Pippin for his endorsement.

But really, I’m afraid this academic mandarin, this Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago, this panjandrum supreme, has no clothes. It would be naïve to think otherwise.