24,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
A Future for Criticism considers why fiction gives so much pleasure, and the neglect of this issue in contemporary criticism. * Offers a brief, lively, and accessible account of a new direction for critical practice, from one of Britain's most prominent literary theorists and critics * Proposes a new path for future criticism, more open to reflecting on the pleasures of fiction * Written in a clear, jargon-free style, and illustrated throughout with numerous examples
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 263
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010
Ähnliche
A Future for Criticism
Blackwell Manifestos
In this new series major critics make timely interventions to address important concepts and subjects, including topics as diverse as, for example: Culture, Race, Religion, History, Society, Geography, Literature, Literary Theory, Shakespeare, Cinema, and Modernism. Written accessibly and with verve and spirit, these books follow no uniform prescription but set out to engage and challenge the broadest range of readers, from undergraduates to postgraduates, university teachers and general readers – all those, in short, interested in ongoing debates and controversies in the humanities and social sciences.
Published
The Idea of CultureTerry EagletonThe Future of ChristianityAlister E. McGrathReading After TheoryValentine Cunningham21st-Century ModernismMarjorie PerloffThe Future of TheoryJean-Michel RabatéTrue ReligionGraham WardInventing Popular CultureJohn StoreyMyths for the MassesHanno HardtThe Future of WarChristopher CokerThe Rhetoric of RHETORICWayne C. BoothWhen Faiths CollideMartin E. MartyThe Future of Environmental CriticismLawrence BuellThe Idea of Latin AmericaWalter D. MignoloThe Future of SocietyWilliam OuthwaiteProvoking DemocracyCaroline LevineRescuing the BibleRoland BoerOur Victorian EducationDinah BirchThe Idea of English EthnicityRobert YoungLiving with TheoryVincent B. LeitchUses of LiteratureRita FelskiReligion and the Human FutureDavid E. Klemm and William SchweikerThe State of the NovelDominic HeadIn Defense of ReadingDaniel R. SchwarzWhy Victorian Literature Still MattersPhilip DavisThe Savage TextAdrian ThatcherThe Myth of Popular CulturePerry MeiselPhenomenal ShakespeareBruce R. SmithWhy Politics Can’t Be Freed From ReligionIvan StrenskiWhat Cinema is!Andrew DudleyThe Future of TheologyDavid F. FordThis edition first published 2011© 2011 Catherine Belsey
Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.
Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom
Editorial Offices350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UKThe Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book, please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.
The right of Catherine Belsey to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.
Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Belsey, Catherine.
A future for criticism / Catherine Belsey.
p. cm. – (Blackwell manifestos)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4051-6957-8 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4051-6956-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Fiction–History and criticism–Theory, etc. 2. Criticism. I. Title.
PN3331.B35 2011
809.3–dc22
2010034985
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs [978-1-4443-9339-2]; Wiley Online Library [978-1-4443-9341-5]; ePub [978-1-4443-9340-8]
Contents
Preface
1 Pleasure: Have we neglected it?
Fiction for pleasure
The case of tragedy
The English curriculum
Cries of joy
‘Aesthetic’ pleasure
The Pleasure of the Text
Modernist unpleasure
Gaiety
2 Piety: Haven’t we overdone it?
Criticism on the defensive
Classic defences
The advent of theory
Law
The superego
Neurosis
Complacency
Culture and Anarchy
Artefacts and pleasure
Critical writing
3 Biography: Friend or foe?
Life and art
Biography in theory
What the authors say
New Historicism
Shakespeare’s life
Fact or fiction?
Shakespeare’s memory
Romance
The death of the reader
4 Realism: Do we overrate it?
A disputed value
The default genre
Imitation
Insight
Totalization
Suspicion
Objections
The radical view
Recuperation
A counter-example
5 Culture: What do we mean by it?
Cultural criticism
Twin perils
Culture as meanings
Meanwhile, in Paris …
Anthropology
Another culture
Perils circumvented
Work to do
6 History: Do we do it justice?
Official usage
Cultural difference
History and criticism
Customary knowledge
Dissonance
An example
The old historicism
Criticism as cultural history
The uses of criticism
Critical skills
7 Desire: A force to reckon with
Pleasure revisited
Orpheus
Loss
The desire of the protagonist
Stand-ins
The desire of the reader
The desire of the text
Substitution
Pacification
Defiance
Breaking the rules
And so …
Criticism
Notes
Index
Preface
This book is about the criticism of verbal artefacts. I suggest that in its current form criticism leaves something to be desired and I go on to sketch an alternative way forward. I should like the book to be useful: it is not a work of theory but rather of reflection on practice.
Readers may find it unfashionably combative. We live in anti-intellectual times and it might seem that the humanities need all the help they can get. In such circumstances, shouldn’t a beleaguered discipline concentrate first and foremost on mutual support? Not, I believe, if the results are increasingly bland. Arguably, we learn most from our disagreements, from thinking out why a given case is misguided or wrong. I shall be happy if I provoke such constructive dissent.
This is not a book about literature. There are a good many of those already – as if the input of criticism were invisible. Instead, the book concerns that input, our current critical priorities, and some possible alternatives to them. While the primary texts stand ready to be read and reread, what we make of them – and encourage others to make of them – depends to a high degree on the prevailing values and assumptions of criticism. These may do more or less justice to the experience of reading, and more or less justice to the cultural knowledge reading makes available. I believe we could do better.
In the course of writing I have encountered a number of problems. First, there was the question of scope. I set out resolutely to reflect on the critical process wherever it occurs – in English departments, reviews in the Sunday papers, culture programmes on television, reading groups. But my plan came to grief almost at once. Although they are sure to overlap, and although many readers and reviewers derive their assumptions from their education in English, the projects are in the end different enough for a critique of one to look like a celebration of another. For instance, reviewers probably feel some obligation to evaluate the work in question. Is this book or play a good buy, they implicitly ask; will it give pleasure? Culture programmes tend to follow the practice of reviewers, though in the form of debates. By contrast, academic criticism these days is more interested in making sense, explaining, or connecting than in judging. My case is that we academics have for too long neglected pleasure; at the same time, I am convinced we should divorce enjoyment from the appraisal of value, whether monetary or aesthetic. Meanwhile, it is not for me to interfere with the preferences of reading groups. So with some regret I have in the end concentrated my observations on the kind of work based in or on English departments, though I should be delighted if they also had a broader interest and appeal. Most native speakers of English will have studied the subject at school and perhaps beyond, and they often have strong views on its strengths and weaknesses.
I have taken criticism, then, to mean systematic analysis, including interpretation, exposition, and commentary of all kinds on literary or fictional works. Sometimes it is imperative to be very precise. In other instances, however, I have aimed at inclusiveness. If there are debates to be had about how criticism differs from scholarship, on the one hand, or reading on the other, they do not concern me here.
In another effort to avoid distinctions that do not affect the case, I have tried to minimize allusions to literature. The problem with literature is that it still tends to imply a value judgement: classics are literature; blockbusters are not; and literary novels are somewhere in between. But there is no clear consensus on the proper basis for such judgements and no shared conception of the benefits of making it. I mean to be polemical here, but not about which works we (ought to) value and, for that reason, I have wanted to bracket the issue. Despite centuries of deliberation on written texts, however, we have no single non-judgemental word for an artefact made of words, or a verbal structure not designed in the first instance to convey information. Creative writing and imaginative writing are no more neutral than literature. Baffled by this problem, I have settled uneasily for fiction.
It doesn’t work perfectly. Opera, films, and comic books may be fiction without being primarily verbal. On the other hand, I shall be glad if some of what I say turns out to be relevant to forms of storytelling not confined to the printed book. Conversely, memoirs and essays are not obviously fiction, and some people think lyric poems tell the truth about the poet’s state of mind. I want what I say to embrace all these genres. There are other borderline cases: autobiography, docudrama, religious works. But arguably there are fictional elements in all these, and the term has the advantage of encompassing plays, narrative poems, novels, and short stories without excluding any instances a priori. Fiction also serves to differentiate the material of our study from reality. However convincingly they depict a world we recognize, both stories and lyric poems are finally instances of representation; however persuasive their image of life, they are not the thing itself.
Even so, the term is untidy. And yet I’m not entirely sorry about that. If much of life is untidy, writing is especially so, to the degree that it has the power to break rules and defy existing conventions. Attempts at classification or definition simply challenge writers to overturn them. The structuralist experiment of the twentieth century led us to suspect the effects of undue systematization as the suppression of difference, when in practice the field of fiction is full of differences. In the absence of a comprehensive term, should I, perhaps, invent a new one? Anxious to be exact where I can, I have been compelled to recognize the degree to which language is not at our disposal. Coinages and neologisms, however dazzling, may obscure as much as they clarify and I have tried to minimize them here. Fiction it is, then.
Current criticism, I propose, neglects the pleasure of fiction. Busy devoting our reading skills to worthy social causes, we have failed to give an account of the motives for reading in the first place. My complaint is not that we don’t experience pleasure but that we don’t analyse it – or, on the rare occasions when we do, we too readily revert to the old Kantian vocabulary that allies pleasure with judgement and virtue. I have tried to start again, not with a critique of Kant but with an alternative way of looking at the seductions of fiction. In the process, I set out to challenge some of the prevailing obstacles to a fuller understanding of textuality, among them the substitution of morality for reading, the distraction of biography, and the narrowing of attention that comes from privileging realism. Criticism, I go on to suggest, can afford to be more ambitious. It offers a valuable knowledge of culture, past and present, where culture is understood as profoundly formative for the human beings we become. The cultural history revealed by fiction is differential and nuanced, vindicating the view that there are always other options, always choices to be made. If fiction were not so pleasurable, however, its representation of the social issues that concern us, among them race, gender, or ecology, would matter much less than it does. Fiction both yields insights and exerts influences to the degree that it engages the desire of readers and audiences.
I have tried wherever possible to draw on mainstream examples. My hope is that their familiarity will help to make the case, since my first purpose here is to substantiate the argument, not to impress with new readings. If Shakespeare features disproportionately in what follows, that is partly because I know his work best and partly because it is reasonable to hope that he still represents common ground. As specialization increases, and with the (proper) dismantling of the canon, the territory critics can be counted on to share has grown perceptibly smaller.
I have incurred debts in the course of writing to the Raymond Williams Society, and to the PhD students of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture, Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen, who let me try out parts of the argument. Michael Minden and Lucia Ruprecht got me started when they held a conference on Cultural Pleasure at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. I have turned for advice or references to Neil Badmington, Andrew Belsey, Betsy Ermarth, Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Derek Matravers, Catharine Stimpson, and Yoko Takakuwa. Others have helped without always knowing it, among them Ivan Callus, Simon Christmas, Catherine Dahlström, Robert Kapadia, Pamela McCallum, Sebastian Murray-Baert, Jürgen Pieters, Neil Reeve, Richard Robinson, Mark Robson, and Stuart Sillars. Hugh Mellor must be credited with War Horse, Harry Potter, and a succession of round anatomical expletives that have repeatedly given me pause for thought. Three generous and astute Blackwell readers remain anonymous, but they have helped me clarify parts of the argument. I am very grateful to them all.
Chapter 3 is a revised version of ‘The Death of the Reader’, first published in Textual Practice.
Catherine Belsey
1
Pleasure
Have we neglected it?
Fiction for pleasure
This evening I am going to see Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia. All day long I feel perceptibly cheerful. There will be good jokes, clever word play, the interaction of past and present, and a satirical portrait of a literary critic for good measure. My comprehension will be stretched to breaking point by the effort to grasp the reasons why time runs forwards but not backwards. It won’t entirely end well. Knowing all this, I look forward to the moment, now and always thrilling, when the house darkens and the stage lights up. I anticipate pleasure.
To judge from the packed auditorium that night, I was not alone in my expectations. And it’s not just Arcadia. Drama plays to full houses in London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, and Beijing, as well as any number of other towns and cities. All over the world people choose to watch stories performed on stage, at the cinema, or on television. We seem to like fiction on the page as well. In a study conducted in the UK in 2003, over half the sample of 6,000 people reported that they read fiction for pleasure. Only slightly fewer had bought themselves a novel, play, or poetry in the previous year. Nearly 50 per cent of the population makes use of libraries. In 2007 British publishers sold 162 million works of fiction.1 British theatre was largely unaffected by the recession of 2008–9, while book sales declined by a smaller percentage than other retail goods. Outside English departments, no one has to read novels – but they evidently do, and some go on to form book clubs and reading groups to discuss them. Far from giving way to the screen, as so widely predicted, the written word has held its own to the point where specially designed screens now mimic the book.
How should we account for the delight we evidently derive from the depiction of invented experiences, imagined events, and counterfactual worlds? And why has criticism so little to say about the nature of this enjoyment? To be sure, book reviewers in the press commonly assess the pleasure quotient of the work in hand, but generally without any sense of obligation to analyse it. Indeed, the Sunday papers tend to reiterate a naive set of more or less tautological phrases to indicate approval: ‘a good read’, ‘a page-turner’, or, when it comes to literary novels, ‘beautifully written’. Academic critics, on the other hand, prefer to evade the issue altogether. On the rare occasions when the question is posed, most of us shy away like wild things startled by a human intruder: our work is made of sterner stuff, we protest.
It is not as if the pleasure is open to serious doubt. All known human societies have stories and songs, even if the narratives found in the rain forest no more conform to the patterns familiar in Western fiction than the music observes classical Western harmonies. Ancient epic connects narrative with celebration: the warriors of Beowulf relish tales of heroism told by night in the mead hall. Not that the content is necessarily triumphal. At the banquet she gives for him, Virgil’s Dido begs Aeneas to recount the sad story of the wooden horse and Troy’s fall. This same tale, narrated from the Greek point of view by a skilled minstrel, once reduced Homer’s Odysseus to tears at a Phaeacian dinner. Women have for centuries relieved the tedium of repetitive household tasks by spinning yarns that absorb the attention of their listeners: it is while they make cloth that Ovid’s daughters of Minyas tell some of the most familiar stories in the Metamorphoses. Chaucer’s Host takes it for granted that the pilgrims will want to shorten their journey to Canterbury with tales; many of us today would hesitate to set out on a long journey without packing a novel.
Harry Bailey knows his pilgrims are expecting ‘to talen and to pleye’.2Telling stories, in other words, is linked with recreation. When Shakespeare’s Duke Theseus looks for a way of passing the evening on his wedding night, he asks for ‘some delight’ to while away the lazy time: ‘What revels are in hand? Is there no play / To ease the anguish of a torturing hour?’3 His request comes as no surprise to anyone in the audience, of course: the working men of Athens have been rehearsing for exactly this purpose. So common was the association between narrative enacted and festivity that many Shakespeareans have believed A Midsummer Night’s Dream itself was composed for a similar occasion, probably an aristocratic wedding. The etymology of the English word play, paralleled in German (though not in French), links drama with amusement, relaxation, the temporary suspension of duty and responsibility.
Is it because the pleasure of fiction is too frivolous, then, to merit serious attention that criticism backs away from it? If the joys of reading corresponded only to joy narrated, or the depiction of delight, the answer might be yes. In such circumstances an interest in pleasure would confine us to romantic comedy and, in my case, detective stories. Intrigue and misunderstanding offer excellent entertainment from a knowing distance; happy endings fulfil elementary wishes; murder mysteries solved promise that justice can be had. But, as the durability of the Troy story shows, enjoyment does not in practice depend on a good outcome. Moreover, narrative has proved its fitness to tackle more elevated issues. While epic defined heroic virtue, Greek and Roman myths gave bodily form to the unaccountable in human life – love, wisdom, art. Fiction is able to make the inchoate take shape: desire finds definition in love stories, sad as well as happy; the unknowable exerts a pressure on the everyday in tales of the uncanny. Fictional form invests serious matter with pleasure: Plato dramatized philosophy in dialogues; Jesus taught ethics by recounting parables. The Judeo-Christian Bible is one long and winding story; Islam also has its narratives of heroic struggle and martyrdom. Evidently, delight need not depend on escape into a carefree world, or the promise of a satisfying conclusion.
The case of tragedy
On the contrary, the most distressing events seem to give intense pleasure in tragedy. How odd that people should be glad to watch Oedipus remorselessly insist on his undoing, Lear misjudge others to the point of madness, or Hedda Gabler pursue a deliberate path to destruction. In the case of tragedy, then, the question of pleasure surfaces after all, but in the form of a puzzle. The sheer unexpectedness of such a widespread inclination is so striking that a number of writers have been provoked to consider why people enjoy the dramatic representation of suffering, reflecting on the paradox from a range of perspectives. If spectators are not all closet sadists masquerading as lovers of theatre, what can it be that draws us to plays we know in advance will dramatize disaster?
Curiously, while it is enjoyment that provokes the question, pleasure itself is commonly sidestepped in the answers, replaced with something rather different. Aristotle maintained that the appeal of tragedy resided in pity and fear depicted in order to achieve catharsis.4 His term has generated considerable discussion, but the consensus is that it means purgation, by analogy with the physiological process of excretion. Tragedy, in Aristotle’s view, at once portrays and excites emotion in order to expel it, as if to rid the community or the individual of excess passion, and evidently such relief does them good. The implication must be that, if strong feelings are themselves enjoyable, it’s even better when they stop. Aristotle’s account offers the dramatists a defence against Plato’s plan to exclude writers of fiction from his ideal Republic, allowing them a worthy purpose in the commonwealth after all, but he has little to say about what happens to the audience in the theatre. His emphasis is on the benefits experienced once the play is over.
Two thousand years later the pleasure of tragedy remained a riddle. Friedrich Schiller, for instance, shares the view that emotion is delightful in itself. Indeed, he declares, the more painful the feeling, the more captivating the experience, even if the distress is one’s own. But this interesting possibility is not left to stand alone. Surely in these cases it cannot be the sheer agitation that gives pleasure, Schiller reflects; instead, it must be the freedom to exercise a rational control over its intensity. Pleasure is, in Schiller’s view, the supreme purpose of art, and tragedy fulfils that purpose by presenting moving events which prompt the mind to assert the independence of a ‘sublime spiritual disposition’.5
Schiller was among the first to appropriate a Kantian distinction for criticism. In the Critique of the Power of Judgement Immanuel Kant explicitly engages with the question of pleasure, dividing his attention to begin with between the beautiful and the sublime. The beautiful, he concludes, is inviting, playful, vital, while the feeling of the sublime, by contrast, is at first only a ‘negative pleasure’. The sublime involves an initial sense of inadequacy, as the mind acknowledges its own limitation in the face of unlimited grandeur, until reason steps in to permit an apprehension of the infinite. Sublimity is not to be located in the object itself but in the mind excited by the object to activity on its own account.6 When he brings the Kantian sublime to bear on drama, Schiller too locates the pleasure of tragedy beyond the negative experience of the work itself, in the playgoer’s mastery of the tragic occurrences depicted on the stage. Attention shifts from the relationship between the performance and the audience to an action exerted on this exchange by the spectator alone. Pleasure is redefined as the assertion of mental sovereignty over both drama and self, and it entails the deliberate establishment of a distance from the immediate response to the theatrical event.
More than a century later, and starting from a very different theoretical base, Sigmund Freud would also locate his explanation of the predilection for tragedy just outside the experience. Noting the continuity between children’s play, itself by no means always joyful, and grown-up plays at the theatre, he comments that tragic events may present the opportunity to recollect and work over in the mind what is in itself painful in the first instance. Tragedy can thus yield the pleasure of reflection after the event as its ‘final outcome’.7
Here the distance between performance and the so-called pleasure is still more readily apparent: once again, enjoyment is equated with mastery and it comes later, when the play is over. And in this respect, if in no other, when A. D. Nuttall devotes a short book to the question Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure?, he turns out to agree with Freud. ‘In the tragic theatre suffering and death are perceived as matter for grief and fear, after which it seems that grief and fear become in turn matter for enjoyment.’8 Nuttall’s case is that we experience tragedy as practice for disaster, a hypothetical rehearsal for our own death. Theatrical sufferings are not real but, in entering into them sympathetically, we reach a true knowledge of the worst that may come. The satisfaction resides in that understanding. Once again the enjoyment is located outside the experience of the play itself, and here too it consists in something more high-minded than pleasure as we normally conceive it.
In an ultimate example of pleasure moralized, Roger Scruton calls his response to tragedy awe, and finds this feeling redemptive. ‘The tragic hero is both self-sacrificed and a sacrificial victim’ and ‘when sacrifice is present and respected, life redeems itself’.9 Here pleasure is renamed as reverence and tragedy leads to an analogue of religious experience. In every instance, it seems, the surprising fact that tragedy pleases is interpreted in terms that replace delight with another, more solemn, state of mind, a condition we might identify as akin to pleasure, perhaps, but not the thing itself.
There is palpably something in each of these arguments – and most, to my mind, in Nuttall’s. But, in the end, with the possible exception of Scruton’s, which rewrites drama as divinity, each succeeding explanation bypasses what takes place in the theatre in favour of the playgoer’s presumed intellectual processes after the event, a transformation of enjoyment into earnestness that surely fails to do justice to whatever it is that impels us to watch tragedies. Do people genuinely see Antigone to feel purged, or Othello to master the emotion it excites? Does Hamlet really entice us as a rehearsal for death, or Miss Julie with a promise of redemption? In my view, the pleasure is more immediate than any of these accounts allow, more a concomitant of the performance than its after-effect. Perhaps that is why the appeal of tragedy is hard to discuss without betraying it: analysis by definition comes later. But we impoverish criticism, nonetheless, when we fail to reflect on the nature of the power that is exerted in the moment when we hear and see them by words and images combined as stories.
The English curriculum
And yet we do all too commonly fail – and not only in the extreme case of tragedy. When most English departments give an account of their work, the pleasure that might be thought to belong to the students’ prime activity turns out to be too incidental a matter to elicit any formal attention whatever. In 2007 the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education in the UK revised its benchmark statement for English, defining the nationwide framework for first degrees in the discipline. This document, drawn up by academics after wide consultation with the subject community, is designed to appease a surveillance culture bent on transparency. In response to this pressure, it wisely discloses as little as possible, for fear of giving offence to potential students, their parents, employers, taxpayers, the government, or any other conceivable source of support or funding. Even so, it cannot fail to include some pointers to the range and scope of the prevailing practices of English departments. The ‘subject knowledge’ inculcated there apparently includes a familiarity with authors, texts ancient and modern, and global literatures in the English language, as well as a grasp of genre, historical context, critical traditions, and critical vocabulary. There is not, as far as I can see, one word in the entire document about accounting for or analysing the pleasure that sustains reading and playgoing.
I am not, of course, proposing that English departments should be responsible for producing a comprehensive theory of pleasure. We can leave that to the philosophers. Nor is it quite a question of why fiction pleases: that is one for the psychologists. Still less is it a matter of prescribing enjoyment (‘I like the theatre, so you should too’): not everyone has to enjoy fiction; some people would rather watch football or go rock-climbing. Instead, the issue for criticism is a textual one: what feature or features of a form of telling that initially caught the attention of some part of the public on the basis that it pleased them is responsible for the pleasure it gave and perhaps continues to give?
Cries of joy
Pleasure does not always go entirely unnoticed, of course: many critics ‘love literature’, especially those who see emotion as a weapon in their struggle against theory. The trouble with unreflecting rapture is that it enlightens no one who doesn’t already share it.
A year or two ago I had a letter from a schoolteacher reproaching me for the damage we theorists had done to the study of English. It was not the first such letter I had received, but it was more thoughtful and more fluent than many. Its author, he told me, had grown up with the ideological criticism of the 1980s but had undergone a transforming experience when he went on to read Harold Bloom’s bestselling book, The Western Canon. This work had made him recognize the joylessness of much contemporary critical writing, by contrast with Bloom’s own obvious pleasure in reading, and my correspondent quoted some of the vocabulary in which this pleasure is inscribed. Bloom’s terms of endorsement are resolutely derived from the Romantic movement. He credits his favoured authors with ‘cognitive acuity, linguistic energy, and power of invention’; they are sometimes ‘vital’ and regularly ‘sublime’. He applauds ‘exuberance’, ‘originality’, and ‘universality’.10
In other words, Bloom is excited by lively ideas and the fresh, vigorous deployment of words, especially when these virtues can be shown to have widespread appeal. It’s a start, certainly, but not quite what I have in mind in proposing the analysis of pleasure. The problem with Bloom’s vocabulary is that it does little more than register
