Compositionist Literary Studies

Back in the day—and I do mean back—I thought of myself as doing cognitive science and literary criticism. So crazy was I, way back even before when in 1985 Hillis Miller lamented the death of deconstruction before the MLA, that I even thought others would be itching to jump aboard the cognitive bus.

Wrong.

Along come the mid 90s and lo and behold! others had declared themselves to be cognitivists, even as evolutionary psychology was looking good to still others. Things were moving, at last.

But alas, these literary cognitivists knew little of my work—after all, how could any literary scholar possibly have committed to cognitive science in the 1970s?—and their work was quite different in style from my own. If you came to my work after having read this newer stuff, you wouldn’t recognize it as the same. And it isn’t. Same with evolutionary psychology. Though I began incorporating primate ethology into my work in the 70s, the literary Darwinians were barking up a different tree.

In THIS newer context, how was I to brand myself—and make no mistake, it is about branding in the Madison Avenue sense. One’s got to sell oneself in the marketplace of ideas. “Ideas” is, of course, a term of courtesy. Ideas are secondary to this marketplace. What matters is whether your book is on a front shelf, cover out. Product placement.

After thinking things through, I produced a quasi-manifesto for naturalist criticism. Here’s a paragraph:

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 drawing, 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.

Now I find that “natural” is not so good a term, though not quite for the reasons I was imagining in that paragraph.

What to do?

What I’m considering is adopting Latour’s term, “compositionism”, from his recent manifesto (downloadable PDF, video). To be sure, it appears to be a new coinage and I tend to be suspicious of new coinages. But, if so, it’s not MY new coinage, so I’m off the hook. Latour glosses the term as follows:

Even though the word “composition” is a bit too long and windy, what is nice is that it underlines that things have to be put together (Latin componere) while retaining their heterogeneity. Also, it is connected with composure; it has a clear root in art, painting, music, theater, dance, and thus is associated with choreography and scenography; it is not too far from “compromise” and “compromising” retaining with it a certain diplomatic and prudential flavor. . . . Above all, a composition can fail and thus retain what is most important in the notion of constructivism (a label which I could have used as well, had it not been already taken by art history). It thus draws attention away from the irrelevant difference between what is constructed and what is not constructed, toward the crucial difference between what is well or badly constructed, well or badly

composed.

That is all quite congenial, for it’s all about how things are constructed, and that’s what most interests me as a literary critic: how these things, these works of literary art, how they are constructed.

Not only is it that literary works are constructed, but, as a thinker, I construct apparatus for describing those works. That’s most obvious in the elaborate diagrams I’ve used in my most recent work on “Kubla Khan,” “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” and in my essay on the self in life and fiction, but a constructive component is always there. Beethoven’s Anvil, my book on music, sailed under the flag of speculative engineering and had nine explicitly formulated principles (e.g. ensemble state collapse, group substitution), each of which was about one facet of how musical culture is constructed in human groups. My nine propositions for a literary morphology are similar in spirit. When I talk about the need for better description of literary texts, I’m asking for descriptions that name the parts and the relations between them – not to mention the fact that Latour is a fan of description as a basic mode of intellectual activity.

No, this compositionism is looking most congenial: Compositionist Literary Studies. The thing is that the term “compositional” or “compositionist” implies a way of thinking, whereas “natural” or “naturalism” does not and never did. “The natural” is a locus, a posited ground of explanation, not a mode of thought.

Then too there’s Latour’s emphasis on “the crucial difference between what is well or badly constructed, well or badly composed.” Yes yes yes! I’m interested in objective accounts of literature: objective descriptions of texts, objective models and theories of literary processes. You don’t obtain objectivity by thinking good thoughts and keeping your heart pure; objectivity cannot be achieved by earnest intent. You can obtain objectivity ONLY by using appropriate methods. We need to create those methods, not from scratch, but substantial new construction is necessary.

* * * * *

So, if compositionist it is, where should one start to get a grounding in compositionist literary thinking?

Is that not obvious, grasshopper? With Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics.

Understanding comics? I thought this was about literature? Comics aren’t literature.

Assuming you’re not just being snobbish, grasshopper—you’re not, are you?—you know perfectly well that literary studies has been bleeding into film studies and cultural studies for decades. So let’s not be parochial.

But why THAT book?

Because it’s about stories visually told. You can see the constructions there on the page, page after page. In comics there’re more parts and relations fully visible and thus amenable to analysis and description.

But, are not words and sentences parts? There’s tens and hundreds and thousands of them in each and every text. And the relations between them.

Ah, grasshopper, you got me there. I can see this is going to go on all night and into the text day. Let me get a quickie off so we can break for dinner, and then we’ll continue.

OK.

To a first approximation, the visible part of literary text are much alike. We’ve got letters grouped into words, words into phrases, and phrases variously grouped into larger and larger units. Not much more than that.

And you can’t get very far by analyzing and describing these visible structures. Just large and small and what’s inside what.

Right. But with comics you DO have words, at least in most comics. So there IS that. AND there’s all the images of different kinds of objects and events. There’s the foreground and background.

And the thought balloons and speech balloons, and their placement on the page.

Yes. And the structure of panels on the page. And the transitions between them, too. McCloud’s very good on that. As he is on so much else. You’re so much closer to the mechanisms of story telling, they’re so much more visible.

I see.

* * * * *

At which point they broke for dinner.

And they didn’t even get around to the fact the Understanding Comics is itself written in comic book form. To be sure, it’s something of a stunt. But it’s a stunt that works.

The idea is to read, no study, McCloud and take his sense of construction, of composition, and apply it to works of purely literary art.

* * * * *

ADDENDUM: Here’s a post I wrote on Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and literary studies. As ANT is about social relations, that post is about the social relations of literary actants and says little or nothing about compositionist work on the texts themselves.

I note also that, in the context of literary studies, “compositionist” conjures up the teaching of composition. That’s what pays the bills of many a literature department, but the study of composition, and certainly the teaching of it, is a poor step child to capital “L” literature and its study.