Stakes¹ and Stakes²
Reading notes: Wood, James (2020). Serious noticing: Selected Essays, 1997–2019.
Reading notes: Wood, James (2020). Serious noticing: Selected Essays, 1997–2019.
[Introduction]
Wood begins by recalling an old literature teacher who liked to pose the question:
‘what’s at stake in this passage?’ He meant something more specific, professionalised and narrow than the colloquial usage would generally imply. He meant something like: what is the dilemma of meaning in this passage? What is at stake in maintaining the appearance of coherent meaning, in this performance we call literature? How is meaning wobbling, threatening to collapse into its repressions? Dr Heath was appraising literature as Freud might have studied one of his patients, where ‘What is at stake for you in being here?’ did not mean ‘What is at stake for you in wanting to get healthy or happy?’ but almost the opposite: ‘What is at stake for you in maintaining your chronic unhappiness?’ The enquiry is suspicious, though not necessarily hostile.
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deconstruction proceeds on the assumption that literary texts, like people, have an unconscious that frequently betrays them: they say one thing but mean another thing.
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figures of speech (metaphors, images, figurative turns of phrase) are the slightly bent keys to their unlocking.
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The critic can unravel – deconstruct – a text by reading it as one might read a Freudian slip.
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awareness of how people unconsciously defend and betray themselves enriches our ability to comprehend them, so a similar awareness enriches our comprehension of a piece of literature.
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Instead of agreeing with people’s self-assessments, we learn how to read them in a stealthy and contrary manner, brushing them against their own grain.
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a poem or novel might be self-divided, that its intentions might be beautifully lucid but its deepest motivations helplessly contradictory.
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ways in which texts contradict themselves: how, say, The Tempest is at once anti-colonialist in aspiration and colonialist in assumption; or how Jane Austen’s novels are both proto-feminist and patriarchally structured; or how the great novels of adultery, like Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary and Effi Briest, dream of female transgression but simultaneously enforce punishment for that transgression.
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literature is an always-frail ideological achievement, only ever a sentence away from dissolution. Stakes¹ and Stakes²
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meaning has to be earned, that a novel or poem creates the aesthetic environment of its importance.
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A novel in which the stakes are felt to be too low is one that has failed to make a case for its seriousness. Writers are fond of the idea of earned stakes and unearned stakes; a book that hasn’t earned its effects doesn’t deserve any success.
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Stakes¹ (let’s call it), the text’s success is suspiciously scanned, with the expectation, perhaps hope, that the piece of literature under scrutiny will turn out to be productively unsuccessful. In Stakes², the text’s success is anxiously searched for, with the assumption that the piece of literature’s lack of success cannot be productive for reading, but simply renders the book not worth picking up. The first way of reading is non-evaluative, at least at the level of craft or technique; the second is only evaluative, and wagers everything on technical success, on questions of craft and aesthetic achievement. Stakes¹ presumes incoherence; Stakes² roots for coherence.
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Not to think about literature evaluatively is not to think like a writer – it cuts literature off from the instincts and ambitions of the very people who created it. But to think only in terms of evaluation, in terms of craft and technique – to think only of literature as a settled achievement – favours those categories at the expense of many different kinds of reading (chiefly, the great interest of reading literature as an always unsettled achievement).
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read only suspiciously (Stakes¹) is to risk becoming a cynical detective of the word; to read only evaluatively (Stakes²) is to risk becoming a naïf of meaning, a connoisseur of local effects, someone who brings the standards of a professional guild to bear on the wide, unprofessional drama of meaning.
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each kind of reading tends to exclude the other.
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nowadays even non-academic literary criticism (I mean criticism written for a general audience) has been shaped and influenced by formal literary study.
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rise and steady institutionalisation of academic literary criticism means that the long tradition of literary criticism is now really two traditions, the academic (Stakes¹) and the literary-journalistic (Stakes²), which sometimes flow into each other but more often away from each other.
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Stakes¹ imagines itself in competition with, disdainful of, or simply inhabiting a different realm from Stakes², and vice versa.
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I like the idea of a criticism that tries to do three things at once: speaks about fiction as writers speak about their craft; writes criticism journalistically, with verve and appeal, for a common reader; and bends this criticism back towards the academy in the hope of influencing the kind of writing that is done there, mindful that the traffic between inside and outside the academy naturally goes both ways. Edmund Wilson stole the phrase ‘triple thinker’
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Stakes¹ and Stakes² have no need to look down their noses at each other.
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The journalistic review-essay differs from the academic essay in the amount and quality of this sameness, the amount and quality of Cavellian ‘pointing at the artwork’ that has to be done. After all, the review-essay involves not just pointing at something, but pointing at it while re-describing it.
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re-voicing takes the form, overwhelmingly in book reviews, of paraphrase and quotation.
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quotation and re-description are at the heart of the book review and at the heart of that experience that Cavell calls ‘creative’.
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passionate re-description is, in fact, pedagogical in nature.
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Academic criticism is wary of what used to be called ‘the heresy of paraphrase’.
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we should encourage students to do it better, for there is a quality of implicit intelligence in subtle paraphrase that is itself an act of analysis. And besides, doesn’t much academic avoidance of paraphrase have to do, really, with anxiety or snobbery? Scholars don’t want to be caught in the act of primacy when they are supposed to have read the book a thousand times; God forbid that anyone should think we are encountering a text for the first time!
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journalistic review is an act of primacy; to paraphrase is to dare a kind of innocence; subtle paraphrase is a kind of wise unlearning. And paraphrase is witness.
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critical re-telling a way of writing through books, not just about them.
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using the language of metaphor and simile that literature itself uses. It involves a recognition that literary criticism is unique because one has the privilege of performing it in the same medium one is describing.
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we perform in proximity, exulting in the fact that, dolphin-like, we are swimming in the element that nourishes us.
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All the critic can hope to do is, by drawing attention to certain elements of the artwork – by re-describing that artwork – induce in his or her audience a similar view of that work. This way, in Isenberg’s phrase, the critic can achieve a ‘sameness of vision’ in his or her audience (i.e. a sameness of vision between audience and critic).
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if this ‘sameness of vision’ is effectively metaphorical, then the language of metaphor – the writer-critic’s own use of metaphor – must be the embodied language of that process, the very enactment of it: a sameness of vision which is in some ways a sameness of writing.
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criticism condemned to exteriority, a writing-about rather than a writing-through the text, a flat commentary, banished from the heart of the creative
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inability to quote without also recreating, stand for the kind of criticism that is a writing through a text, the kind of criticism that is at once critique and re-description: sameness.
P. S.
Here are the critical assumptions and procedures for Stakes¹ and Stakes²:
Stakes¹
* Critical Assumptions: Literary texts have an unconscious that frequently betrays them. Their figures of speech are the keys to their unlocking.
* Critical Procedures: Critics unravel a text by reading it as one might read a Freudian slip. This is a deconstructive way of reading.
Stakes²
* Critical Assumptions: Meaning has to be earned. A novel creates the aesthetic environment of its importance.
* Critical Procedures: The text’s success is anxiously searched for, with the assumption that the piece of literature’s lack of success simply renders the book not worth picking up. This way of reading is purely evaluative.