A humanist function for the academic literary critic
Over at Andrew Goldstone’s Arcade discussion of close reading, I made a comment about evaluation, one of the issues raised in the discussion. Here’s much of what I said:
Evaluation is a tricky business. I've recently been looking at Apocalypse Now and came across this 2001 review of Apocalypse Now Redux by AO Scott. To simplify a bit, what he says is: a) this is the greatest film since sliced bread, but b) the ending didn't make a lick of sense then (the 1979 'original' cut) and doesn't make any sense now, but at least there's proportionally less of it (because new footage has been added). So, how can it be great while at the same time having an ending, THE ending no less! that doesn't at all work? Sure, call it a flawed masterpiece. But that's an awfully big flaw in something you declare to be a masterpiece.
What I'm wondering is this: Did the ending fail for Scott in the theater, which is why he's mentioning it in his review? Or did it work for him in the theater, but, when he puts on his critic's hat, he can't for the life of him rationalize it. It doesn't fit any pattern of story logic that he knows so it must be incoherent.
There’s a bit more, but we can skip it for now. I want to dwell on the fact that evaluation is difficult. Actually, I don’t even want to get that far. I want to think about the fact that talking about texts, including, of course, movies, in a precise and apt way, is difficult. It’s a learned skill, preferably learned under the tutelage of expert teachers.
I remember how I felt in literature courses during my first two years at Johns Hopkins. I was lost when I came to commenting on the texts myself and amazed at the things my professors did manage to say. The fact of the matter is that, for any given text, I was pretty much at the mercy of the last thing I’d read about it or heard in lecture. Without those prompts I had no way in. Once someone else had taken me into the text, then I could begin to move around and see a thing or two for myself.
But it wasn’t until my senior year that I felt at all comfortable “breaking open” a text (almost, more or less) on my own. Of course it had taken me three years worth of literature courses—but also philosophy, psychology, and anthropology—to get there. During that time I learned about various things to look for in a text and I picked up a repertoire in conceptual tropes and moves to use in commenting about those ‘things’ I’d learned to see. Once my repertoire of things to see and things to say had grown large enough, and my command over the repertoire had become sure enough, then, and only then, was I ready to venture out on my own, as it were.
I learned the repertoire from my teachers, and from books and articles they assigned or that I found on my own. But how did they learn their repertoires? Well some of them, say Hillis Miller or Earl Wasserman, may have discovered a thing or two to see and a thing or three to say about it. But much of what they saw and said, they learned it from their teachers and from critical texts they’ve read.
That is to say, they inherited it. That’s how culture works. Some one invents something in one generation, say cogito ergo sum, or the distinction between fabula and sjužet. It cost them blood to do the inventing, but those who come after can acquire their inventions almost cost-free.
Now, returning to A.O. Scott’s problem with the ending of Apocalypse Now, perhaps he simply hadn’t learned, or inherited (through his own reading) a conceptual trope that would account for such endings. But what if he HAD learned such a trope, or somehow found one in the course of thinking about Apocalypse Now between the time he first saw the film and the time he reviewed Apocalypse Now Redux? Would he have used that trope and therefore written a different review of the film?
We don’t know, of course. Perhaps this imagined trope wouldn’t have made sense to him. Or perhaps conceptualizing wasn’t, after all, his problem. Maybe the movie just didn’t work for him, intuitively, on the screen and real-time in the theatre. And maybe things were somewhere in-between, it felt a bit flakey in the theater, but, if he’d thought about it in the right way . . .
The thing is, Scott is a professional reviewer. He reviews several films a week and is always working against deadlines. He doesn’t have time to pace the floor and raid the library in hopes of coming up with a way that would make a recalcitrant film make sense. He’s pretty much got to go with what he can come up with on the fly.
But we, the academicians, we’re not up against those kinds of deadlines. We CAN pace the floor, and we CAN search the libraries. That, in fact, is our job, our responsibility to society. Individually and collectively we read texts, watch films, and think and write about them. We teach about them too. And what we teach is going to end up in film reviews some day or another.
It takes, say, thousands of person hours spread over a handful of scholars to create and ‘debug’ a single conceptual trope. When that’s done the trope can show up in casebooks and undergraduate texts. And from there, it goes into the knowledge-hungry minds of our students. And when one of them writes reviews for The New York Times, BINGO! a conceptual trope enters the self-styled paper of record. And, from there, the world.
That’s how culture works.
* * * * *
As an exercise for the reader, consider this question: Has the trope manufacturing facility run out of steam? Is that the reason for the current malaise in the profession? Creating new conceptual tropes is exciting. Heck, it’s fun (but don’t tell the bean counters, who don’t approve of fun in the workplace). But when the old moves no longer turn up even the hint of a new trope, that’s a drag. Time to move on.
But, while moving on, be sure to harvest the good tropes from the last four decades or so and store them away for further use.
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