by David Lodge
Roland Barthes suggested in a pregnant little essay called “Criticism as Language,” published in 1963, that
the task of criticism . . . does not consist in “discovering” in the work of the author under consideration something “hidden” or “profound” or “secret” which has so far escaped notice . . . but only in fitting together . . . the language of the day (Existentialism, Marxism, psychoanalysis) . . . and the language of the author . . . If there is such a thing as critical proof it lies not in the ability to discover the work under consideration, but on the contrary on the ability to cover it as completely as possible with one’s own language.21
Criticism must face the fact that it can only be “true” by being tautological—that is, by repeating what the text says in the text’s own words; and it can only escape from tautology by representing the text in other words, and therefore misrepresenting it. As Professor Morris Zapp says, in my novel Small World, “every decoding is another encoding.” But this need not entail surrendering all responsibility to the original text. Criticism can be a useful, as well as a merely playful, activity. For reasons I have already suggested, creative writers are apt to find the experience of having their language covered by somebody else’s language rather unsettling, and would prefer not to know about it; but for readers, especially of classic texts, this kind of criticism can do for literature, what literature does for the world—defamiliarising it, enabling us to see its beauty and value afresh.
Finally I come to criticism as a part of creation. This is something well-known to creative writers who are also critics. Wilde’s Gilbert, for instance, says: “Without the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all worthy of the name.”22 Graham Greene said, “An author of talent is his own best critic—an ability to criticise his own work is inseparably bound up with his talent: it is his talent.”23 T. S. Eliot wrote:
Probably . . . the largest part of the labour of an author in composing his work is critical labour; the labour of sifting, combining, expunging, correcting, testing: this frightful toil is as much critical as creative. I maintain even that the criticism employed by a trained and skilled writer on his own work is the most vital, the highest kind of criticism; and that . . . some creative writers are superior to others solely because their critical faculty is superior.24
Like so many of Eliot’s critical pronouncements, this one puzzles as well as illuminates. In saying “the criticism employed by a trained and skilled writer on his own work” did he mean published criticism of this kind, such as Henry James’s Prefaces to his collected novels? If so, Eliot gave us remarkably little of such criticism himself. If he meant the “critical labour” involved in creation, then it would seem that the “most vital, the highest kind of criticism” is for the most part only experienced by writers themselves. Perhaps that is why, as readers, as critics, we are so interested in the genesis of works of literature, in authors’ notebooks and draft manuscripts, and in their comments on their own work—it is a way of reconstructing and sharing the “critical labour” that is part of creation.
But Eliot’s main point seems to me entirely right. Most of the time spent nominally writing a creative work is actually spent reading it—reading and rereading the words one has already written, trying to improve on them or using them as a kind of springboard from which to propel oneself into the as yet unwritten part of one’s text. There are exceptional writers who seem able to produce high-quality work very quickly, with hardly any hesitations or revisions, but for most of us writing is an absurdly labour-intensive activity. Few modern novels, for example, take more than ten hours to read, but the novelist will work for hundreds, perhaps thousands of hours to make that experience enjoyable and profitable, and most of those hours will be taken up with work that is essentially critical, as Eliot describes it. It is not work that necessarily goes on at the writer’s desk, but at all times and places: in bed, at the table, while showering or cooking, or walking the dog.
Does this mean that writers are always the best critics of their own work in a public sense? No, of course it does not. They are far too involved to assess the value of their work, or to generalise about its meaning and significance. Where the writer has an advantage over her critics is in explaining how a book came to be written, what its sources were, and why it took the form that it did. But few writers are eager to use this privilege. Even Henry James, in his famous Prefaces, conceals much more than he reveals, as does Graham Greene in the introductions to his books gathered together in Ways of Escape. Eliot always politely declined to reveal the sources and describe the genesis of his notoriously obscure poems. Personally, I rather enjoy explaining how I write my novels, and have published a number of essays describing the problems, choices, revisions, and discoveries involved. But I would not claim that this is the most vital, the highest kind of criticism that I or anyone else could write, nor would I claim that the picture of composition it gives bears more than a highly selective and artificially tidy resemblance to the actual process. There are many facts about the composition of my work that I could never recover and many that I would never divulge.
There are several reasons why writers are generally reluctant to engage publicly in analytical criticism of their own work. They may fear they will lose their gift if they analyse it too closely. They may be reluctant to restrict the reader’s response by imposing an “authorised” interpretation on the text, knowing that sometimes works of literature mean more than their authors were conscious of. Very often, I believe, the motive for silence is that the writer has tried to give his work the effect of an effortless inevitability, and is understandably reluctant to destroy that illusion by revealing too much about the choices, hesitations, and second thoughts involved in composition. As W. B. Yeats put it:
A line will take us hours maybe
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.25
The paradox is not confined to poetry. The American short story writer Patricia Hampl has written:
Every story has a story. This secret story, which has little chance of getting told, is the history of its creation. Maybe the “story of the story” can never be told, for a finished work consumes its own history, renders it obsolete, a husk.26
One reason why literary creation continues to fascinate us and elude our attempts to explain it is that it is impossible to, as it were, catch oneself in the act of creation. It is not as if one just comes up with an idea for a poem, say, and then puts it into words. The idea, however vague and provisional, is already a verbal concept, and expressing it in more precise, specific words makes it different from what it was. Every revision is not a reformulation of the same meaning but a slightly (or very) different meaning. This was one reason why Wimsatt and Beardsley questioned the idea that a work of literature is the realization of an intention that exists prior to it.
There is a sense in which an author, by revision, may better achieve his original intention. But it is a very abstract sense. He intended to write a better work, or a better work of a certain kind, and now has done it. But it follows that his original concrete intention was not his intention. “He’s the man we were in search of,” says Hardy’s rustic constable, “and yet he’s not the man we were in search of. For the man we were in search of was not the man we wanted.”27
Writers discover what it is they want to say in the process of saying it, and their explanations of why they wrote something in a particular way are therefore always retrospective extrapolations, working back from effect to cause—wisdom after the event. It is this inevitable deferral of meaning in discourse that the deconstructionists seized upon to destabilise the whole concept of meaning.
The difficulty of understanding the nature of literary creation is part of the larger problem of understanding the nature of consciousness, which is currently preoccupying specialists in a wide range of disciplines—philosophers, linguists, cognitive scientists, sociobiologists, neurologis
ts, zoologists, and many others. It is said that consciousness is the last great challenge to scientific inquiry, but if you browse through the more accessible literature in this field it is interesting to note how often it touches on questions and phenomena that concern literary critics. For example, I came across Patricia Hampl’s suggestive quote about the “story of the story” in a book by the philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained. Dennett relies heavily on the analogy of literary creation for his model of consciousness. He used to believe, he tells us, that there had to be “an awareness line separating the preconscious fixation of communicative intentions from their subsequent execution,”28 but he came to reject this idea on grounds similar to those on which Wimsatt and Beardsley rejected the intentional fallacy. In its place he formulated the “multiple draft” model of consciousness, which proposes that all thought is produced through a process of expansion, editing, and revision, like a literary text, although unlike literary creation it is so fast that it seems experientially to be instantaneous. To Dennett the mind is like a hugely powerful parallel-processing computer that operates itself, and this is his description of how a particular thought or utterance is produced:
Instead of a determinate content in a particular functional place [in the brain], waiting to be Englished by sub-routines, there is a still-incompletely-determined mind-set distributed around in the brain and constraining a composition process which in the course of time can actually feed back to make adjustments or revisions, further determining the expressive task that set the composition process in motion in the first place . . . It’s just as possible for the content-to-be-expressed to be adjusted in the direction of some candidate expression, as for the candidate expression to be replaced or edited so as better to accommodate the content-to-be-expressed.29
This is a phenomenon familiar to anyone who has tried to write formal verse: the search for a rhyming word, or a phrase with the required metrical structure (the “candidate expression”), will affect the semantic development of a poem, and since this happens many times in the process of composition, the final version of a poem may be almost unrecognizable from the first draft. It is rather unsettling to imagine that this may be equally true of every utterance we make, and yet the more one thinks about it the more intuitively plausible it seems.
Dennett pursues the analogy between consciousness and literary creation even further. The very idea of the individual self, he argues, is constructed, like a novel. Unlike other animals, we are almost continually engaged in presenting ourselves to others, and to ourselves, in language and gesture, external and internal. “Our fundamental tactic of self-protection, self-control and self-definition is not spinning webs [like a spider] or building dams [like a beaver] but telling stories”—especially the story of who we are.30
There are many different competing theories of consciousness, and Dennett’s is only one of them. Basically, if I understand him correctly, he thinks that consciousness is the accidental consequence of homo sapiens developing through evolution a huge brain and vocal organs which allowed the species to acquire language, and making selves is what we do with this equipment, which is much more than we need for mere survival. At the opposite pole are religious theories of consciousness, which identify the self with the individual immortal soul which derives from God. Philosophically this is regarded as dualism—the fallacy of the Ghost in the Machine—though the idea of an immaterial self is so deeply ingrained in our language and our habits of thought, whether we are religious believers or not, that it seems to me doubtful that it will ever be completely expunged. Somewhere between the two poles are those thinkers who reject the Ghost in the Machine but deny that the concept of mind can be equated with neurological brain activity, and suggest that consciousness will always be ultimately a mystery, or at least not explainable by or reducible to scientific laws.
The distinguished neurobiologist Gerald Edelman, in his book Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, says: “We cannot construct a phenomenal psychology that can be shared in the same way that physics can be shared”—because “consciousness is a first person matter,”31 because it exists in and is conditioned by history and therefore every individual’s consciousness is unique, because linguistically based consciousness is “never self-sufficient, it is always in dialogue with some other, even if that interlocutor is not present.”32 These observations will ring all kinds of bells with anyone who is familiar with modern literary criticism, notably the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. It is not therefore surprising to find Edelman saying, towards the end of his book: “what is perhaps most extraordinary about conscious human beings is their art.”33
chapter three
DICKENS OUR CONTEMPORARY
CHARLES DICKENS IS arguably the greatest of all writers in the English language after Shakespeare, and so has attracted almost as much critical and scholarly attention; but whereas, for historical reasons, comparatively few facts are known about Shakespeare, which places severe constraints on the biographical approach to his work, Dickens lived at the beginning of the Industrial Age, when information itself became industrialised—recorded, reproduced, and (even when hidden) preserved for recuperation by subsequent generations. We know more about Dickens’s life, especially his early life, than his own family did, because he concealed from them facts of which he was ashamed, or which he found distressing to contemplate, but which were disinterred posthumously. There have been at least three major biographies published in modern times—by Edgar Johnson, Fred Kaplan, and Peter Ackroyd—and the multi-volume edition of Dickens’s letters is approaching completion. But as Jane Smiley observes in her short biography of Dickens in the Penguin Lives series, although “the literary sensibility of Charles Dickens is possibly the most amply documented . . . in history,” his character and genius remain almost as mysterious and difficult to comprehend as Shakespeare’s.1
Although new facts are still being discovered about Dickens, it seems unlikely that any such discovery will fundamentally alter our view of his character and work. The only significant originality attainable by the biographer or critic, and the only excuse for adding to the mountain of secondary literature already heaped on his reputation, is in interpretation of the given facts. Jane Smiley, however, explicitly dissociates herself from those critics and biographers who claim to understand an author and his work better than he did himself. “Writing is an act of artistic and moral agency,” she asserts firmly, “where choices are made that the author understands, full of implications and revelations that the author also understands.” If this attitude somewhat underestimates the contribution of a writer’s unconscious in the creative process, it also enables Smiley to make us see Dickens’s achievement afresh without deploying any of the heavy theoretical artillery of modern academic criticism. What inspires her book is her ability to identify professionally with Dickens, drawing on her own experience of writing and publishing fiction. Its foundation is her acute perception that Dickens was “a true celebrity (maybe the first true celebrity in the modern sense)”—the first writer, therefore, to feel the intense pressure of being simultaneously an artist and an object of enormous public interest and adulation. In this, and in other related respects, his life and work prefigured much in our own literary culture. If Smiley’s book had a title other than the bare name of its subject, it might be (by analogy with Jan Kott’s influential study of Shakespeare, though for very different reasons) Dickens Our Contemporary.
Celebrity is not the same thing as fame. There were English writers before Dickens who were famous in their own lifetime—Samuel Richardson, Dr. Johnson, Lord Byron, for example. But they did not cultivate or exploit their fame, nor did it take over their entire lives as celebrity always threatens to do. Celebrity entails a certain collaboration and complicity on the part of the subject. It can bring great material rewards and personal satisfactions—but at a cost, a kind of commodification of the self. It requires conditions which did not exist before the Industrial Revolution
got into its stride: fast and flexible means of production, transportation, and communication, which circulate the work widely and bring the author into actual or virtual contact with his or her audience.
The two greatest novelists of the generation before Dickens, Jane Austen and Walter Scott, both published their novels anonymously: “By the Author of Waverley” and “By the Author of Pride and Prejudice Etc. Etc.” Scott achieved fame (and a baronetcy) as a poet, but he did not avow authorship of his novels until relatively late in his career; Jane Austen’s identity was known only to a small circle of family and friends until her death. How unthinkable such self-effacement seems in our own personality-obsessed, publicity-conscious age! Even Dickens began by writing under a pseudonym (“Boz”), but he discarded it fairly quickly. It is Dickens who stands symbolically on the threshold of the modern literary era, and whose career embodies the difference between being famous and being a celebrity. The very word “celebrity” as a concrete noun, applied to persons, only entered the language in the mid-nineteenth century. The first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is dated 1849, the year when Dickens published David Copperfield and stood unchallenged as the greatest and most popular writer of his age.
