2.2.5 (a) Analysing Childs critical essay by further levels/stages Literature Genre

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1 2.2.5 (a) Analysing Childs critical essay by further levels/stages Literature Genre Here we look more closely at what this piece of critical writing does with and to literature, and how the various genres on which it draws are blended so as to make it not only a composite intertext but a cohesive text in its own right. For this is writing about literature and it includes literature in the form of quotation; but it is not itself a literary piece in the sense of being fictional though it is clearly literary in the sense of being highly literate. Generically, then, this is a literary critical essay. It is worth unpacking each of these terms literary, critical and essay because they carry a lot of heterogeneous baggage that often passes un-inspected. Carefully re-packed them will serve you well on whatever journeys in reading and writing you have to undertake. Critical writing can include commentary on a specific text as well as general theorising about literature. It can therefore range from close reading and stylistic analysis of individual passages and words (Childs concentrates on names ) to overarching observations about language, literature and culture, often identified with a particular approach or theorist (Bakhtin s approach to language in terms of power, specifically his theory of heteroglossia, serves that purpose here). Meanwhile, to recall the point at which Childs comes in, criticism embraces whatever it is that [c]ritics habitually analyse (we go the rounds of this circular logic later). The main thing to grasp is that the critical in critical writing covers three kinds of activity: analysing in detail; commenting at length and theorising at large. These are the things we do when criticising, and the best criticism involves combinations of all three. Importantly, being critical also involves evaluating and judging. But in the event that usually takes place more or less implicitly while doing the other three: drawing out distinctions and making further discriminations in the course of analysing, commenting and theorising. Conversely, being critical in an academic and intellectual sense is almost never a matter of baldly declaring I like this and I don t like that or reducing value to a blank good or bad though these may supply provisional points of departure

2 or arrival in the writing of literary reviews in journalism (part of the express purpose of which is to guide readers in what is and is not worth reading). But still, in both academic essays and literary reviews, there is no place for being critical in the colloquial, casual and usually negative sense of doing down, rubbishing. With all this in mind, look through Childs s account again: you will nowhere find an overt term of approval or even appreciation: no good, bad, like or dislike. But you will find abundant evidence of close attention to textual detail, and care in finding and refining appropriate concepts and terms. In fact, literary criticism as currently practised in the academy is all about understanding literature in a variety of contexts and of exploring the nature of evaluation (and ongoing acts of re-valuation) and not at all about airing casual opinion and making snap, once-and-for-all judgements. So the literary in literary criticism is far more concerned with an understanding of the qualities of reading and writing (plural) than with the absolute quality (singular) of something pre-valued as literature. It has very little to do with the crude and monolithic notion of quality control (separating the good from bad, passed from rejected) but a great deal to do with the perception of plural qualities : nuances of texture, complexities of structure, sophistication of understanding. To be sure, there is an initial premise that Wuthering Heights, the Brontës and Mikhail Bakhtin are worth talking about; and a pervasive sense that it matters to make connections and distinctions, to know more and understand more fully. What s more, these are nowadays classics of the literary and theoretical canons, with all that entails in terms of built-in prominence and promotion. In that sense they are privileged and promoted, if not pre-valued. But they have not always been classics and literary and theoretical canons are from fixed; this is evident here from the Brontë sisters diffidence about their names and identities (their anxiety of authorship ; see above 2.7) and we pick up Bakhtin s changing and contentious reputation in the next section. For all these reasons, the literary in literary critical is itself neither fixed in reference nor settled in value. But it can be read and constantly rewritten as a pledge of commitment to the activities of grasping subtlety, complexity and sophistication in reading and writing. Appreciating and celebrating them, too but not through acts of casual reverence or automatic adulation: rather, through sustaining the activities themselves contributing to the ongoing critical and creative conversation that we call culture. This means being mindful of what others have said and are saying and yet also conscious of the right and responsibility to see and say it

3 afresh from one s own perspective, with one s own resources and values. Literarycritical reading-writing is a continuum to which we along belong and each of us helps move along. That finally brings us to the essay in literary critical essay. Essays are attempts as well as proofs, tentative try-outs not foregone conclusions. Either way both ways the essay in the richest and most flexible sense is about experiment. Essay-writing is experimenting. Indeed, the best often combine a sense of immediate experience with established expertise. The leading lights of these two approaches are the Renaissance essayists Michel de Montaigne and Francis Bacon; and in their best essay these lights converge and cross. (For further explanation and examples, see Writing an essay, 1.2.7). The latter Action also includes an exposition of the standard diamond model for essay-writing along with some non-standard attachments. The core of that diagram, you will recall, are around half a dozen linked yet distinct topics each with its topic sentence, illustration, explication and link back to the main argument. Transitions between topics, meanwhile, are usually effected, as we have seen, by explicit and regular sign-posting. Childs s essay observes this diamond principle in outline, as we have already seen in Language Text. Opening out from a point and closing to a point, it is filled out in the middle with some half-dozen other points. But the delight as well as the devil is always in the detail and we need to look closely at precisely which kinds of material are in play, when, where and why. Typically this comes down to a switch in genre covered by a shift in discourse: another text-type is accommodated in the process of building a continuous, variously textured and broadly based argument. Thus, fastened together by Childs s own staple critical discourse of exposition and explanation, we have, a paragraph-by-paragraph progression that is well worth detailing: 1) passing quotations from primary text (Wuthering Heights) and introduction of critical authority/theorist (Bakhtin); 2a) development of theoretical idea supported by extensive indented quotation from secondary critical authority (David Lodge s After Bakhtin);

4 2b) further clarification of application of these theoretical frames and critical ideas and promise of application to primary text (Bakhtin/Lodge applied to Wuthering Heights); 3) biographical and bibliographical information (unascribed) relating to the androgynous names chosen by the Brontës at the date of first publication in 1847; 4) historical information comparing the socio-economic position of women and orphaned/illegitimate children in 1847 (unascribed), coupled with detailed attention to the names Heathcliff and Wuthering ; 5) Final extensive quotation from primary text (within main text) leading to summary inference about the novel s cyclical shape and its overall progression from secular struggle to a supernatural struggle. THE NET RESULT is that this critical essay as a whole represents a weaving together of literature, theory, biography, bibliography, history and other criticism. Those kinds of material (representing related genres and discourses) are what it is basically made of; though, importantly, how precisely they all actually come together and are built up to what particular ends and with what particular effects is a matter for this particular writer in this particular instance of writing. In other words, the materials may be more or less distinct and generically various (i.e. in a strict sense heterogeneous ) this is a composite intertext, drawn from many sources and resources. AND YET the precise realisation and particular instantiation, the specific permutations and pointings, are unique this is a singular text, this text and no other. In short, it is literary and it is critical but it is also a unique essay, attempt, proof in short experiment. To develop this argument further, we too must draw on and in other sources and resources. Culture Context

5 This is where we push the present text into a variety of contexts and cultures, there and then and there and then (there are at least two past moments in this case) as well as here and now (the present time of writing). The situation is so complex and multilayered because, as is usual with criticism, we are dealing with writing on writing; that is, by analogy with meta-language, language about language, this is meta-writing. Further, adding in the present text and moment into the equation we get something as apparently bizarre yet in reality perfectly routine as meta-meta-writing writing on writing on writing. Though in fact this is no stranger than hearing someone say: I m telling you: I heard that he told her all about it. Three moments of saying so three context in play. In the case of Childs s essay as reproduced above, we can therefore begin by putting names and dates to each of the main moments of (re)production: Wuthering Heights (1847); Opening the Text (2001); The English Studies Book (2012). Obviously and importantly each of these involves various people as writers and readers: from the Brontës through Childs and me to you. The present text of the essay is therefore best seen not only as in some measure an intertext but also a kind of palimpsest : a palimpsest was a manuscript where the original writing had been rubbed out but could still be faintly seen through the writing over it. In the Middle Ages, before printing on paper, when manuscript was precious and thick, this might happen to manuscripts several times over. Most critical texts are palimpsests in this sense: they carry the visible traces of earlier texts embedded within them. Wuthering Heights is at some remove where I am writing and you are reading; yet it is still visibly legible being read. As a result, when we wish to take a fully contextual view of its actual and possible meanings, we have to take all sorts of cultures on board and interpret them at various levels. In this case, if we concentrate on say, gender, there is firstly the culture round 1847 when Emily and here sisters felt they should obscure the fact that they were women; and here there would be a further distinction between gender conditions in rural Yorkshire where much of the book was set and some of it written and those in the capital London. Secondly and thirdly, there are the cultures round 2001 and 2011, which might seem to be virtually identical except that there were a lot of things that happened in that decade: the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, increased sensitivity to global warming and pollution, a vast oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, world trade recession, riots and revolutions in North Africa and

6 the Middle East,.... (And much more then and since than can be possibly gestured to by the three dots of a single ellipsis.) More generally, to take just one of many potentially significant dimension: Ho have attitudes to gender what it means to act as a man or woman changed in those years? The answer would greatly depend where and who you are. Between white academic males at universities in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire (just 40 miles apart) perhaps not much. But for women and men, academic and otherwise, within and outside the UK in India and China, for example arguably quite a lot. In short, when and where are always tied up with who and how. Moments of re/production embracing writing and reading, production and reception are widely variable as well as constantly changing. Dealing with the fact that culture(s) and context(s) always turn out to be plural on closer inspection and further reflection is a major part of the fascination as well as potential frustration of reading and writing critically anytime. But even then there are obviously other texts in play and contexts that must be added to the mix. For one thing there is the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin. His early years spanned the Russian Revolution of 1917; he was out of official favour for most of his academic life, when he was published sparingly or not at all; and he only came to prominence, first in the West and then in the East, from the 1970s onwards. He was, in short, for a long time neither a classic nor part of any critical canon. In fact, while Bakhtin s work was known and respected amongst specialists for a long time, it was only with the advent of such popularising critical works as David Lodge s After Bakhtin (1990) cite and quoted by Childs that Bakhtin s work became widely known and, indeed, has become fashionable. David Lodge, himself a novelist and critical theorist, was at that time a professor of English at Birmingham, since retired and, now profoundly deaf, has written a witty and poignant novel round the subject. So he clearly needs to be added to the con/textual and cultural mix too. Though the fact that Birmingham is about 80 miles from both Cheltenham and Oxford Gloucester and he too was a white male academic and lecturer of English is a further reminder of just how convergent even without collusion or conspiracy certain kinds of institution, community and culture can be. (What no black women social scientists, or people who are not academics or English in any sense?!) And yet such apparent narrowness and homogeneity can itself be an illusion. For not only are Lodge, Childs and Pope actually different people, any one of them had or has a potentially multiple identity and drawing ideas and inspiration from

7 heterogeneous sources. In fact, taking the cue from Childs on Lodge on Bakhtin, we might properly look for a kind of heteroglossia a linguistic variety expressive of struggles over power within the writing on prose fiction as well as the fiction itself. And that, indeed, is precisely what we find in Childs s essay. It is woven not just from a variety of named texts and authors but also from a variety of critical discourses. Attentive re-reading with these in mind turns up traces of a different one in virtually very paragraph, often two or more combined. In fact, there are palpable verbal signs of at least half a dozen of the Theoretical positions and Practical approaches featured in Part Two of the present book. What s more, though Childs s is evidently an enquiring and eclectic critic he is not that unusual in principle. All writers combine two or three favoured approaches; many combine more though always more or less distinctly in their own particular critical and theoretical essay. Here then, again paragraph by paragraph, are the traces of the various critical discourses that move into the foreground over the course of Childs s essay. They are here keyed to the various approaches in Part Two: o Paragraph 1 Contrasts and oppositions are indeed what critics habitually analyse, and not only in Wuthering Heights; they are a common concern in New Criticism (2.3), often in the form of tensions, and the particular emphasis on oppositions... in terms of language especially aligns this approach with Formalism (2.4) as it leads to Structuralism (2.8), where binary oppositions are often the starting points. o Paragraph 2a/b expressly invokes Bakhtin who was influential in pushing Formalism towards Functionalism (2.4); Childs s attention to those aspects of his work associated with language in terms of power and ideology, discursive struggle and how subordinated classes... use language subversively concentrates on its political rather than philosophical dimension. In so doing it emphasises its relation to Marxism (2.6), with which, as a theorist operating in the Soviet Union, Bakhtin had a complex, vexed and productive relation. This political emphasis is sustained in the quotation chosen from Lodge s After Bakhtin, which in turn has a complex relation with Bakhtin. Lodge is an eclectic critic (2.10) he edited a couple of widely ranging and highly influential anthologies of Theory and Criticism (Lodge 1972, 200) and his work carries the

8 trace of many approaches. He too engages with Formalist and Structuralist debates and is not in any sense a Marxist critic as such. o Paragraph 3, Feminist and Gendered approaches (2.7) move to the fore in the emphasis on the androgynous names chosen by the Brontës as female authors. In this respect they exactly illustrate and indeed are central to the argument in Gilbert and Gubar s (1979) now classic Feminist work on female anxieties of authorship. The attention to names has many possibilities. Here it also carries traces of work round names, identities and subject by a number of influential theorists spanning political and psychoanalytical approaches: Althusser on the interpellation (addressing and labelling) of subjects ideologically (see 2.6); and Lacan on the name as sign inscribed in consciousness and contested by the unconscious (see Psychological approaches, 2.5). This dual influence and emphasis is confirmed in paragraph 4 when the argument is developed in terms of a kind of external-internal, political-psychological struggle over kinds of naming and identification. This is expressly gendered and tied in with the family, parentchild and especially father-son relations as a source of both inherited personality and property. So more issues to do with Feminism and Gender (2.7) are picked up again and added to the political-psychological mix. Further, Childs is careful to tie all this back into the detail of the text; his insistence that there is also an important semantic point in the similar meaning of the names Wuthering and Heathcliff not only explicitly recalls and quotes Brontë s narrator s observation on the former being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult ; it also returns the analysis to a firm base in the kind of critically sensitive and linguistically precise close reading promised at the beginning. This is sustained into the last paragraph, which begins with detailed comment on a lengthy quotation. o Paragraph 5. In conclusion Childs moves towards a capacious summary gesture of critical review as well as textual overview. For he concludes by confirming both the cyclical shape of the novel and the convergence of his various approaches: he draws together the argument in terms of names and narrators, characters and plots, and people in history. In other words, he finishes on a richly con/textual note paying equal attention (like the present section) to

9 the importance of reading texts in a variety of contexts. His key coordinating term his final rallying call is evidently revolutions, for he chose to emphasise it with italics. Thus even an apparently slight stylistic decision on the part of the writer (a change of font on a single word) can serve to clinch an overall argument. All these analytical observations on reading have powerful implications for writing one s own as well as others. These issues are picked up in the final section on