My long held view is that novels, novellas, short stories and dramas project worlds and can be seen as integrated wholes. Lyric poetry is an exception in typically projecting a glimpse of something, say a slice of experience, or some things that make up a singular experience. They too can be seen as integrated wholes.
Where any genre fails in that, it’s a flaw the verges the work on incoherence. Incoherence is btw to be distinguished from purposeful hence artistically controlled ambiguity or ambivalence typically expressed in a fundamental structure of literary art, paradox and its necessary distinguishing feature, tension, emerging from conflict.
In Michael Oakeshott’s book, Experience And Its Modes, he argues that we organize events into patterns, see experience as patterned that we to try to see whole. A useful metaphor for the result of this effort is “world.” Worlds are marked or bound by what makes them cohere, to which there is no singular answer. It depends on the world.
So, continuing my view, it’s insufficient for literary criticism just to note events or sequences of events, a comedic plot or a tragic one. In any good work, any self conscious work, worlds cohere. What makes them cohere is a matter of the work. Could be an angry God, could be evil as metaphysical force in the world, could be contingency, could be something in the depths of human nature.
Identifying the what and the why gets you to the heart of the work.
Ideas about what drives events and conduct in any particular work can differ for all the reasons you can imagine, which gives literary criticism and discussion endless richness.
I have noted that Wellek and Warren see the underlying causes as the transcendent stratum of literature, its metaphysical quality, which they encapsulate as “attitude toward life.” And I’ve noted that Frye called these causes or principles themes, “holding the ‘poem’ together in a simultaneous structure.”
They are hard to discern and state and argue for clearly. They require hard, disciplined work. They require thinking things through to a resolutIonary conclusion. They demand a searching confrontation with the work, plumbing its depths to get to its essence.
Criticism and reviews that fall short of accomplishing this do exactly that, fall short. Doing it, or trying to do it, is thematic criticism. It’s an exercise that will most engage students as it’s an exploration of what great writers illuminate in their work as to what life is like.
I don’t say, as you may think I’m suggesting, that a writer sits down and says, “I’m going to write something that shows the world’s futility.” I don’t prescribe or hold to any particular process or presupposition. I just theorize from what I see as the results.
As for poetry, I don’t ask myself, “Why did the poet choose that word?” There’s an arbitrariness to the words chosen, which means that other words might have done just as well. I rather ask, “What work does this word do in this poem given everything else that’s going on? How does it help lead up to, along with everything else, what makes the whole thing fit together, expressible as an idea or ideas that express the whole, IE, what is the poet saying?”
The question of why a poet chooses a certain word, as opposed to the question that should be asked—what work does the word do in the poem?—strikes me as a non- starter. Who know why? Who cares why? The answer can only be unprovable surmise and speculation. But the answer to the word’s effectiveness in the poem is concrete and specific and textually supportable, ie supported with evidence.
You continue to speak as though interpretation is like a treasure hunt or something external and detached from the work and imposed upon it, often as not to show how clever one is. And as I keep saying, bad interpretations can be like that but they don’t exhaust the exercise, which at its best is a genuine, good faith effort to come to terms with a work and then go to the world with one’s thoughts in the hope of contributing to and enriching the ongoing discussion. Particularly when in relation to great works, it’s an especially worthwhile activity.
Finally, people don’t normally read to get at a work’s bottom. Nor need they. People normally read for pleasure and often end up with a specific set of responses that they don’t think through. Nor do they pay attention normally to style and technique. That is all fine as the way things are. What I’m talking about when taught leaves students better able to engage what they read and so enter into closer relation with the art that some of our greatest writers and poets have created. Which makes fine even better.
To reduce what I’m arguing for to getting the moral of a fable or applying only to didactic works is to fail to grasp my point or is self-consciously to evade it.
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