Some Thoughts on Kramnick’s ‘Criticism & Truth’ (2023)

Kramnick’s new book is short, well-written, thought-provoking and, I think, wrong. But I’m sure I’m in the minority in thinking so. I should add: it’s good that it’s wrong. Reading a critic with whom you agree is less generative than reading one with whom you disagree, such that you have to work out why you think they’re wrong, and what the right line is. Anyhoo:

Does literary criticism offer truths about the world? In Criticism and Truth, Jonathan Kramnick offers a new and surprising account of criticism’s power by zeroing in on its singular method: close reading. Long recognized as the distinctive technique of literary studies, close reading is the critic’s way of pursuing arguments and advancing knowledge, as well as the primary skill taught in the English major. But it is also more than that — a creative, immersive, and transformative writing practice that fosters a unique kind of engagement with the world. Drawing on the rich and varied landscape of contemporary criticism, Kramnick changes how we think about the basic tools of literary analysis, including the art of in-text quotation, summary, and other reading methods, helping us to see them as an invaluable form of humanistic expertise. Criticism and Truth is a call to arms, making a powerful case for the necessity of both literature and criticism within a multidisciplinary university.

I also think both literature and criticism are needful within a multidisciplinary university, by the way. But in other respects I disagree with the eminent Yale professor.

Kramnick thinks literary criticism is about getting at the truth, and that the best thing we can say about a critic’s engagement with a text — beyond the fact that it is well-written, knowledgeable, thoughtful and so on (though he quotes and praises various contemporary literary critics more-or-less in those terms) — is that it is true. He doesn’t get overly bogged-down in the metaphysics of what ‘truth’ means, something philosophers have argued over for ever, of course. Basically, he takes his line from Frege: truth is ‘aptness’ and ‘rightness’, verified by ‘institutions of verification’ (so, we might say, academic Shakespearian experts adjudicate whether this or that piece of Shakespearian criticism is valid or not — yes to readings of Othello in contexts of sixteenth-century representations of racial difference, no to The Earl of Oxford Wrote Shakespeare) (these aren’t Kramnick’s examples, I should add).

On the Frege front, it may be that this is the problem, or my problem, because I’m not sure I’m convinced by Frege. I don’t eat in the Frege Bodega. I prefer Suzanne Vega to Gottlob Frege. Frege-rl! Frey Boy! Superstar DJ — here we go! Doubtless that’s just me.

So, Kramnick does not suggest that all criticism can be reduced to close reading and summary, although close-reading and summary are what he focusses on in this book. He gives lots of examples of critics neatly suturing-in quotations from literary texts into their critical prose, and says various praising things about them. But the crucial thing is the truth-function of these engagements. So, for instance, he gives us this bit of Geoffrey Hartman:

When Wordsworth opens ‘Tintern Abbey’ with ‘Five years have past; five summers with the length/Of five long winters …’ the drawn-out words express a mind that remains in ‘somewhat of a sad perplexity,’ a mind that tries to locate in time what is lost, but cannot do so with therapeutic precision.

Kramnick likes the elegance with which Hartman folds-in the lines from the poem into his analysis (‘like a seasoned gardener, Hartman knows how to graft the lines from “Tintern Abbey” precisely where the prepositional phrase slides into its subject’) something he considers expressive, a creative as well as a critical act. But more important than that is the truth of it.

Does the sentence assert a truth? It seems peculiar to ask this, but the answer, I think, is, yes, of course it does. There is an implicit ‘it is true that’ hovering over the sentence, as there is in almost all criticism. To say “it is true that when Wordsworth opens ‘Tintern Abbey’ and so forth, would seem peculiar because saying so doesn’t add anything to the rest of the sentence. The rest of the sentence remains true or false in virtue of its aptness to compel our assent, our appraisal of it as well-formed, perspicacious, or adroit. [78]

This is Frege, as a footnote spells out:

The idea of placing ‘it is true that’ in front of a proposition in order to deflate the meaning of truth derives from Gottlob Frege: ‘it is worthy of notice that the sentence “I smell the scent of violets” has the same content as the sentence “it is true that I smell the scent of violets”. So it seems that nothing is added to the thought by my ascribing to it the property of truth.’ [119]

Nothing? Surely “I smell the scent of violets” is different to “it is true that I smell the scent of violets”. On the level of semantic content they are allied, but they are different in emphasis, idiom, affect, and they suggest rather different contexts of utterance, and indeed meanings. It seems to me that only a tone-deaf reader could claim otherwise. A formative moment for me, as a literary critic (which I guess is what I am) happened when I was doing Macbeth for O-level at school. My English teacher, a man called Derek Meteyard (a great, if grumpy fellow, who had a profoundly shaping effect upon me) pointed to two statements by Lady Macbeth, one from early in the play and one from late: ‘what’s done is done’ and ‘what’s done cannot be undone.’ Frege might say these communicate the same semantic content, but as Meteyard said to us: if you can’t see how radically different these two lines are, how profoundly they delineate the shift in Lady M’s character, then there must be something wrong with you. As I sat there, the penny dropped. Because: of course.

Anyway: Kramnick’s there is an implicit ‘it is true that’ hovering over Hartman’s sentence, as there is in almost all criticism, despite its havering ‘almost’, seems to me wrongheaded, liable to rule out large swathes of good and even great criticism. Do we really think criticism can’t be ironic, or satirical, or parodic in mode? That G K Chesterton or Derrida’s literary engagements, Empson, Carey on Dickens — than any and all criticism that reads polemically or playfully against the grain is not actually criticism? Sucks, to that.

Kramnick also takes his truth criterion to mean that some critical engagements are ‘right’ and others ‘wrong’. He gives an example: Anne Whitehead’s discussion of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, an essay that opens with a quick summary of the novel. The summary is accurate, insofar as compression permits accuracy. Then Kramnick says:

As with quotation, the compression and ordering of the plot could always have gone otherwise within limits placed by the work itself. Never Let Me Go might be told as an allegory about race or a reflection on counterfactual history but not as a consideration of the wool industry or video gaming. [79]

Well: the wool industry in Britain — the setting of Ishiguro’s novel — is, historically, bound-up with the Enclosures Acts, the dispossession of people from their land, with alienation and dissociation: with the subordination of human beings in their fullest humanity to profit and the desires of the wealthy: all relevant Never Let Me Go issues. And video games, the moral panic they occasion, the dissociation of young people from reality — I mean, this stuff writes itself. The problem I suppose is with the ‘aptness’ criterion of JK’s notion of truth. But I don’t see that the untruthful counter-examples he tosses-in here are less appropriate than reading Ishiguro’s book as ‘an allegory of race’. I guess everything is ‘about’ race in North American academia in ways that aren’t quite true of Britain. What I’m suggesting is that to ask the question: ‘is Paradise Lost “about” association football?’ — a specific question I chew-over at some length in this old blogpost — can at least be answered: in a sense, yes it is. This isn’t to suggest that anything and everything goes where criticism is concerned, but it is to say there’s considerably more leeway in critical interpretation than a procrustean ‘the critic is obliged to articulate the one true reading of a text permits. Is Keat’s ‘Ode to Autumn’ a purely aesthetic work, a well-wrought urn removed from politics and history, an eternal object of beauty, as B C Southam and Helen Vendler argue? Or is it a political poem, situated in and expressing the concerns of a highly politicised period, an era of revolution, upheaval, deprivation and social unrest, as Jerome McGann and Nicholas Roe argue? The answer is: yes. It’s both. Or some other third thing. The poem can be about Peterloo and the Corn Laws even though it doesn’t specifically mention Peterloo and the Corn Laws. That’s how literature often works. I have measured out my life in coffee spoons doesn’t specifically mention trivial banalities of a life lived by polite but empty vapidities, yet that’s what it means.

Anyway: Kramnick spends most of the book on close-reading, a textual strategy I myself use a great deal. Close reading is great! Kramnick thinks criticism is a craft — which it is — and a creative activity to boot: yes indeed, though I don’t think he goes far enough in that direction.

The practice of in-sentence quotation I spent some time with earlier is distinctive and special because it so demonstrably embodies the re-creating act, in which a new object emerges from the apt spinning of two orders of language. What is required for the spinning to be apt is that it “be accurate because adroit, successful because competent.” In-sentence quotation demonstrably embodies this quality because it puts the limits on and spurs to creativity so clearly in view as nothing less than units of composition itself. [71]

I mean, folding quotations into one’s discourse is, as it were, a straightforward definition of speech as such. For all of us, communicating via speech means both shaping our individual words and folding-in quotations, figures of speech, clichés, memes, calcified expressions. If we speak a sentence that includes the phrases ‘break the ice’ or ‘bated breath’ we’re quoting Shakespeare, seamlessly incorporating Shakespeare into our speech. It happens all the time. It’s not just academic critics who talk this way. But this is a small point.

Kramnick thinks lit-crit is unique in the way what is being explained happens in the same register as what is doing the explaining (‘the explanandum becomes in actual, literal fact, incorporated as expressive parts of the explanation’):

Literary criticism is unique among interpretive practices in this regard, a crucial and relatively unexamined feature of the discipline I have referred to as medium coincidence. Art historians don’t paint about painting nor do musicologists write music about music … [literary criticism’s] ordinary mode of creativity depends upon sharing a medium with its object. Art historical writing and criticism along with other forms of film and media studies, in contrast, have ekphrastic modes of explanation whose method and creativity depend upon translating features of nonverbal artifacts into the language of academic argument. [72]

I don’t think this is right, though. Which is to say; it surely assumes too narrow a sense of what constitutes the language of critical argument. Critical engagement entails multiple cross-currents and varieties. Of course it’s true that musicologists write words about music, just as composers compose about written words (as Schumann turns Byron’s Manfred into a three part musical suite, or Led Zeppelin work Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings into their rock songs) — but composers also compose about music. Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis is a creative work but also a critical engagement with Tallis’s music, an unpacking and exploration of its tonalities and form, its sonorities and contexts. When Marcel Duchamp paints a moustache on the Mona Lisa he is making a new artwork but he’s also commenting, critically, upon the original painting. Don Quixote is a novel, a story, a disposition of characters into action, a work of literary art, but it is also a critical engagement with medieval romance and narratives of knight errantry. Coetzee’s Foe is inter alia a critical commentary upon Defoe. The Houses of Parliament comment upon medieval Gothic architecture as a style, as well (by rejection) upon the neo-classical style hitherto prominent: the Palace of Westminster burned down in 1834 and was rebuilt in its current form; the White House in Washington DC burned down (was burned down) in 1814 and was rebuilt in its current, neo-classical style thereafter. Both these buildings are in practical dialogue with other buildings, in northern and southern Europe. In these cases the engagement is, we could say, deliberate: motivated by the artists (the architects, the writers, the musicians) but it need not be so. Two literary works that came out in the same year — 1954 — were written without knowledge of one another: Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. Yet they seem to me works in dialogue with one another, works of specific parochial eloquence to do with community and secrecy, blindness and insight, poetry and myth and place. This is more than just the happenstance of them appearing at the same time, or by the consideration that — as it might be — Tolkien thought Welsh and Finnish the two most beautiful sounding languages on Earth, and based his invented Elvish languages Sindarin and Quenyan respectively on them (though that is true): it has to do with a deeper connections. I go onto this matter in this blog post: a critical engagement with precisely this question that works via pastiche and humour rather than a string of ‘it is true that…’ implicities. But I stand by that post as criticism.

Kramnick wouldn’t agree, I think. He thinks that transposing the visual or musical artwork into words is ‘the only way to bring [them] into a field of enquiry’ [72]. I disagree with that only. He also claims that ‘no one writing criticism feels like they are just making stuff up’ adding: ‘I don’t have a survey to support this claim, but my guess would be that most believe they are getting at truth and so contributing to a project of knowledge’ [83]. He may well be right about that ‘most critics’ — although I wonder: mightn’t most critics think they’re doing something else? Celebrating excellence, maybe; notating subjective responses to things? — but he’s certainly not right about me. I very often write criticism that is making stuff up. Which is to say, I don’t consider making stuff up the same as trivialising, or as a mendacity. Its Deleuze’s definition of philosophy rather than Frege’s ruminations on truth: philosophy as inventing cool concepts. But perhaps this is an agree-to-disagree divergence here.

I do think that Kramnick confuses register with jargon. He bolsters his case by ‘comparing literary studies to other disciplines that work on language’ [73]. He selects a paper from a linguistics journal, examining ‘headless ellipsis’: ‘what happens when a predicate phrase gets elided in response to an indicative sentence. One person says “Mary has started dating someone” and another responds “Who?” As that occurs, an implied “Who has Mary dated” gets shortened in an act of “headless ellipsis” that moves the stranded “who” (the head of the phrase) to an interrogative position. Only certain kinds of head can move like this, but why that is the case is a puzzle.’ He then quotes the article in question.

But I think this is not making the point about register Kramnick claims. There are lots of ways of ‘doing’ linguistics, including a discursive one that include the explanandum in the same idiom as the explanation; it’s just that some linguists prefer the quasi-mathematical jargon as, presumably, more laconic, a more efficient use of space. Some philosophy also uses quasi-mathematical expressivities

… and the like. But lots of philosophy doesn’t. Lots of philosophy is written in easily-read discursive prose. We might say the best philosophy is written this way. Darwin’s Origin of Species is a rigorous and hugely influential work of biology, but it’s also elegantly and compellingly written, and makes for an excellent read.

I’m not dismissing truth as a criterion for criticism entirely, of course — not doing a Jesting Pilate. Truth matters, of course. But I’m not convinced it’s the only or even the main one. When Matthew Arnold’s On Translating Homer (1861) roasts Newman’s version of the Iliad, he may be right to do so (his criticism may be true, his take on Homer might be true — though that’s more questionable) but that’s not the crucial thing. The crucial thing is surely that he’s hilarious.

Mr Newman does not leave us in doubt as to the general effect which Homer makes upon him. As I have told you what is the general effect which Homer makes upon me, — that of a most rapidly moving poet, that of a poet most plain and direct in his style, that of a poet most plain and direct in his ideas, that of a poet eminently noble, — so Mr Newman tells us his general impression of Homer. ‘Homer’s style’, he says, ‘is direct, popular, forcible, quaint, flowing, garrulous’. Again: ‘Homer rises and sinks with his subject, is prosaic when it is tame, is low when it is mean’.

I lay my finger on four words in these two sentences of Mr Newman, and I say that the man who could apply those words to Homer can never render Homer truly. The four words are these: quaint, garrulous, prosaic, low. Search the English language for a word which does not apply to Homer, and you could not fix on a better than quaint, unless perhaps you fixed on one of the other three.

Or more pithy, and perhaps funnier: Richard Porson on Robert Southey’s stodgy Romantic epics: ‘they will be read when Homer and Virgil are forgotten, but — not till then.’ That’s almost as good as Jasper Carrot’s line, often misattributed to John Lennon: ‘is Ringo Starr the best drummer in the world? He’s not even the best drummer in The Beatles.’

But since I have quoted, with approval, Porson, I might add that he would not have agreed with me, and would have agreed with Kramnick.

Porson greatly admired and used often to repeat the following passage from the Preface to Middleton’s Free Inquiry: “I persuade myself that the life and faculties of man, at the best but short and limited, cannot be employed more rationally or laudably than in the search of knowledge; and especially of that sort which relates to our duty and conduces to our happiness. In these inquiries, therefore, wherever I perceive any glimmering of truth before me, I readily pursue and endeavour to trace it to its source, without any reserve or caution of pushing the discovery too far, or opening too great a glare of it to the public. I look upon the discovery of any thing which is true as a valuable acquisition to society; which cannot possibly hurt or obstruct the good effect of any other truth whatsoever; for they all partake of one common essence, and necessarily coincide with each other; and like the drops of rain, which fall separately into the river, mix themselves at once with the stream, and strengthen the general current.” [Samuel Rogers, Recollections of the Table-talk of Samuel Rogers: To which is Added Porsoniana (1856), 329]

So, there’s that.