Will Self’s LRB diary on video games epitomises some typically slippery reactions to the new media. Whilst superficially it seems to be an honest and admirable attempt to explore the value of the video games that he watches his sons play, underpinning it are some basic but unspoken assumptions about the more affirmative qualities of literature.

Self’s essay opens with a literary point of reference. Self wonders what the American critic Northrop Frye would have made of video games. He proposes that he would have observed approvingly that video games embody a mythological cast of characters, archetypes in Northrop Frye’s sense. Based on this tradition, Self acknowledges that he is happiest about games “when the kill zone is decked out in the furniture of established Nordic folklore – dragons, frost giants, axe-wielding berserkers.” In the likes of Skyrim or World of Warcraft, at least, the enemies are clearly fictionalised representations. By contrast, Call of Duty dresses up in graphically realist terms a pastiche of historical and embodied reality. As a consequence:

even perpetrating the second death of a [Nazi] zombie diminishes the game-player, because it necessarily exposes him to all the grotesque nonsense the game’s writers have cooked up out of Third Reich horrors – the concentration camps, Mengele, the Mittelbau-Dora rocket factories and so forth – and then spiced with anachronistic steam punk conceits.

Self takes his kids to the National Army Museum and futilely tries to explain the true impact of a .50 calibre machine gun on human flesh. So far, then, Self seems quite discriminatory, acknowledging that the different formal expressions of video games give rise to different ethical responses. He evaluates more positively those which lack “the Hitleriana or queasy overlapping with real-time conflicts that make Call of Duty so disturbing.” He does not impulsively lump all games together as a medium, each equally as bad as the other because they all involve killing, whatever guise the victims take.

This is a nuance that we might expect from an author who has made some quite strident formal judgements in his literary career. Most recently his novel Umbrella has proposed, through its assertively modernist technique, that the most important project of literature is to represent the human mind in a way faithful to its subjective meanderings and obscurities. Not all games are equally dubious merely by virtue of the fact that most involve violence, just as not all literature is equally good merely because it involves the representation of people. Style is everything.

However, Self then makes a different and unexpected turn, looking at Paul Trout’s work on Deadly Powers: Animal Predators and the Mythic Imagination. Trout argues that the human experience of predation provided the “selective pressure that led not only to mimesis – and hence narrative – but even to language itself.” Fictions (whether literature, religion or games) reproduce predatory, flesh-ripping beasts in mythic form, the better to save us from actual confrontations in the wild. Style is only one element of artwork; biological adaptation is another significant one.

Games now seem to fit within the one evolutionary rubric. Self argues that even those games like Skyrim or World of Warcraft, which are superficially and even cartoonishly mythical, are also subversively structured to reward killing. Doubly dangerous is the fact that the player is let off with the lesson that killing does not really have consequences for themselves: “the fact remains that these players – unlike the poor infantrymen at the Battle of Mons – rarely encounter their own death, and if they do they’re speedily and electronically resurrected.” Games thus fail to inculcate important moral values about the true significance of war. At the same time, because of the perpetual threat of death imminent in all games, these fictions offer universal lessons in Trout’s evolutionary terms. Games are both formally distinguishable – hence Skyrim is better than Call of Duty – and adaptively identical.

This is an interesting double-standard, and it is one we see in contemporary literary criticism also. For better or worse, literary theory has become dominated by evolutionary psychology or literary Darwinism, which attempts to explain the instrumental function of literature. Far from being “cheesecake for the mind,” as Steven Pinker famously construed the arts, literature came about and is still valuable because it offers a self-contained model of human behaviour that allows us better to prepare for real-world interactions. Literature is intrinsically purposeful, a "motivational guidance system" as Joseph Carroll has it. At the same time, traditional literary criticism teaches us that certain books are better than others in aesthetic terms. As many critics of literary Darwinism have pointed out, it is not at all clear that aesthetic and evolutionary criteria are correlated. A book may be artistically well-constructed, but offer few readily-available pointers for life in reality (Self’s own Umbrella might be one such work). Conversely, a work of literature that is judged weaker on aesthetic grounds may be more useful from an evolutionary point of view (presumably borrowing Paul Trout’s perspective, the array of ghoulish figures in J.R.R. Tolkien makes him a more adaptively valuable author than Geoffrey Chaucer with his pilgrims).

So both games and literature can be attacked from two non-exclusive points of view. On the one hand, they may be aesthetically more or less pleasing, so that the mythical world of Skyrim is, for Self, preferable to the historicist Call of Duty, or the stream-of-consciousness of Umbrella preferable to the conventional realist novel. On the other hand, all media are universally tapping in to some basic evolutionary instincts. If this same dualism applies both to games and literature, what then is the problem with Self’s position on games?

The issue here lies in what precise evolutionary instinct the two media are being defined against, as the penumbra for what they always do, regardless of how well – aesthetically – they individually set about doing it. For literature, the consequences of it being good or bad aesthetically, and good or bad evolutionarily, can be construed by negation. At worst aesthetically a bad book is a waste of the reader’s time, and at worst evolutionarily we have not learnt from it how to function in the social world. Indeed, we may read an aesthetically good book in spite of the fact that it does not seem adaptively useful. Whatever books are for in an evolutionary sense does not immediately impinge upon our aesthetic evaluations.

Games, however, have their aesthetic merits undermined by the reference to violent evolutionary values which they inculcate in a positivistic fashion. A game like Call of Duty is, according to Self, worse than Skyrim because it dresses up history as realism whilst eliding the ethical truth. However, once games are placed generically beneath the evolutionary umbrella, both can cause or encourage violence in their players because they are underpinned by the same adaptive motivation – of escaping or defeating the predator. In achieving this, all games demonstrate a flippant type of violence in which it seems only to have cartoonish consequences. Games, in other words, do just enough to act as simulations of violence to help us in an evolutionary sense, but not quite enough to make the consequences sufficiently severe so that we realise the dangers of being violent in the real world. Games, then, are pinched uneasily by this evolutionary standard, whereas our critical evaluations of good or bad literature can escape its clutches.

In his article, Self makes no direct reference or comparison between games and literature, save indirectly via Northrop Frye, which perhaps makes my accusation that there are two different measures at work across the two media somewhat unfair. But I think actually this proves a useful point. Literature always provides the baseline by which we assess the newer media, and as a consequence it can remain implicit or unmentioned whilst still having a logical impact on the argument. Here the fact that Self chooses to think of games with reference to a work of evolutionary theory that explains narrative in terms of violence is surely significant; had he wanted to treat literature with reference to biology, he would almost certainly have turned to numerous other texts which connect it to other adaptive traits such as empathy, social modelling, and emotional robustness. Indeed, even readers who are not aware of evolutionary literary theories will be intrinsically familiar with and accepting of the register of basic human sympathy which runs through this type of criticism, whilst intuitively rejecting the lexicon of violence used for games.

The best evidence for Self’s underlying literary presumptions comes in the following paragraph. Again, Self is observing his son playing Skyrim, a game which he wants, despite his impulsive resistance, to comprehend because it seems to draw on Frye’s mythic archetypes:

Even after my son’s proxy resurrected the bogie – “I do that a lot. I bring him back and then I punch him to death again” – I still kept faith with the game, which also involves the reading of quite large chunks of runic text.

Notice how his “keeping faith” is vindicated by the fact that the game involves text, thus construing his momentary effort to come to terms with games as something he almost has to justify or explain to his presumed reader. Self goes on:

I was right to, because eventually, once we had defeated various frost trolls and sex-changing lizard men, and reached Windhelm, it transpired that my son had built a gabled house in this Arctic community, and even acquired a wife. “My wife is a very nice lady,” he told me, as a rather cowed-looking figure in a rough woollen dress shuffled about in the background. “She runs a store and gives me money every few days.” “Oh, really,” I said, desperate to clutch at these straws of domesticity. “And what’s your wife’s name?” Without pausing in the ceaseless toggling of thumb-on-lever he said: “I don’t know.”

Labels: English Literature, evolution, Game Studies, literary theory, video games, Will Self

As regular readers will know, in my daily research I undergo something of a continual crisis of confidence, as I try to work out why literary studies is worth pursuing, in comparison to sciences which seem to produce so many technological and social benefits beyond the internal logic of their research. Several of my posts and essays have explored the "value" of literary criticism, and of doing a literature PhD, and one of my regular moans is that literary criticism is often intended to reach a limited spectrum of readers. So it was with a mixture of delight and deflation that I found one of my pieces receiving the following comment from a reader, Vincent, who blogs at A Wayfarer's Notes:

I was interested to see your piece on The Secret Agent, as I wrote one today on my blog, specifically not as literary criticism, for reasons which I summarise therein:

"Literary criticism, if I am not mistaken, analyses texts as objects with intrinsic qualities. I don’t take that view. Texts are nothing without the reader, who alone constructs the meaning. They are dishes served up to a person, preferably hungry, on a particular occasion. By this, my book-reviewing is a subcategory of memoir-writing. Here’s my bit of cooking for you, my reader. I have to guess your taste in spices for I don't know you that well."

I did literature at university but it was before the days of this new criticism, so I wasn't trained in it at all. I therefore have no idea as to what it's for, other than to keep academics busy.

The Secret Agent is subtitled "A Simple Tale" and while it is of course permissible for any individual to extract from it material to support any thesis which appeals to them, it would make more sense in my view if they took complete ownership of it, for example to start with a "claimer" (as opposed to a disclaimer) saying "I read this novel as one generally reads a novel, that is for fun and not work; and these are the thoughts which inspired in me personally. These are the things which I consider are most important to say about it."

I would also consider it perfectly valid to try and guess, from evidence available, why the author wrote what he did and so forth.

I have come across many essays in a similar style to yours on Conrad, when I used to contribute articles in a literary review on John Cowper Powys, but I have never had the chance to ask anyone "Why?"

Naturally, if I was a university student today, and asked to write such essays, I should, especially if young, just do it, as a rite of passage, the necessary if painful price of earning my degree.

But I am not young any more. I am not in thrall to the approval of academics, though I have children and grandchildren who will be embarking on their journey through the universities in due course.

I once was employed to edit some essays of students at the local college in the Crafts department, about ceramics, tapestry and the like. They used this same style, which I take to have emanated from some post-modernist general criticism. OK, it is academically fashionable. Perhaps if you train as a nurse nowadays you have to learn it too, for any essays you may have to write.

But still I don't know why.

If ever you feel inclined to respond I should be most grateful and enlightened. I'm pretty sure it is my ignorance which makes me so sceptical. I'm going to read some more of your work in case it throws any light.

With best wishes & thanks for your generous display of original web pages

Naturally, I could not let these comments pass without response, but happily I think my email - dashed off in the space of an hour - has provided my strongest and simplest articulation yet of the value of literary criticism. For this reason, I reproduce it below.

I am not sure if you read about V.S. Naipaul's comments the other week, but he argued - in his typically subtle way - that all literature departments should be shut down and its professors go and work on buses, whilst universities get on with teaching practical science. If you are questioning "what literary criticism is for, other than to keep academics busy," then you are not the only one. And I have asked similar questions myself in the context of my literature PhD (see links below).

Actually, though, Naipaul is being thoroughly naive of his literary history. Who was it who showed us how English literature was ignoring postcolonial writers like himself? Precisely the literature departments (e.g. Edward Said). Likewise, 1960s feminism was bound up with rediscovering a feminine style of writing (Simone de Beauvoir, Elaine Showalter, Susan Sontag), and again it was through and from literature departments that the politics of 1960s feminism originated. Likewise, if you agree that language is central to all the activities of all aspects of culture - from politics, to computer games, to film, to science - then literature departments have a key role to play in understanding and interpreting how we make ourselves understood by other people, and how groups of people (such as men, or scientists) write in a particular way to the exclusion or inclusion of other groups (such as women, or laypeople). In my own specific field, which involves analysing the way in which scientific ideas are understood by scientists and transmitted to culture, literature departments have been central and these things do matter: it's surely significant in judging, say, the ethics of current stem cell research that we understand through a reading of Frankenstein and the historical conditions in which it was produced that reactions to new life sciences tend to be similar across the ages; thus a knee jerk, tabloid reaction today that demonises stem cell scientists is only to be expected.

If you agree with Naipaul, it appears OK to turn million pound telescopes to the heavens as if we'll see a cure for cancer etched upon the cosmos, but not a valid activity to turn the tools of literary criticism to examine the words in novels, poetry, film etc, as if language has, after all the human effort that goes into its making, no point beyond its immediate meaning. I am not a romantic believing in ars gratia artis or knowledge for the sake of knowledge; as a left winger, I have to be also a pragmatist and admit that literary criticism in the university, paid for by the taxpayer, ought to justify its own existence and hence why it deserves funding rather than that new hospital. But that utilitarian principle - which Naipaul holds in extremis - does not mean I think literary criticism has no value at all.

Rather, the value of literary criticism lies in exploring the contexts around a text, the frameworks in which the novel or poem was originally produced: history, philosophy, politics, science etc. By doing this, such a form of criticism can help us to understand about ourselves, evaluate how "good" or "bad" our current society is - and you pointed out the obvious connection between Conrad's novel and the war on terror. My essay was admittedly more esoteric than this, in that it was about how the changing Victorian notions of time and relativity could affect Conrad's literary style. This may have been a prosaic piece, but if you agree in principle that it is worth being interested in novels because they show us connections across time (e.g. in notions of "terror"), then you ought to allow some room for studies such as my essay. If you agree that it is worth understanding history if nothing else but for the sake of it, because it is (was) there, then understanding literary sty
le can offer a route into this sort of knowledge.

Of course you may not agree. If you are a Naipaul, and think that universities (and the accumulation of human knowledge they represent) should just be producing applied sciences, then OK, lets do away with literature departments...and telescopes. And if we ever do live in that brave new world, I may just have to overdose on soma.

So I hope that this makes the case for my sort of essay, beyond it being (originally) the "painful rite of passage" of having to pass an exam (and, incidentally, English Lit students are among the most employable graduates around, so clearly literature departments are doing something right, given the quality of the students who emerge from the other side of its mill).

And now comes the twist. As I understand your email your problem, and the issue I do have with literary criticism myself, is not whether literary criticism is valid given the innate human desire to produce knowledge, and to understand the linguistic terms in which knowledge is produced and expressed, but the way in which that practice is carried out - its style.

You suggest that your piece on your blog - which I liked very much - was written "specifically not as literary criticism." But if not literary criticism, then what on earth was it? It certainly wasn't a mathematical appraisal of the number of words in The Secret Agent. It was, rather, an attempt to elucidate what to you seemed to be some of the key themes and interesting characters of the novel, comparing its urban themes to the maritime ones of Nostromo, and your placing the novel in an aesthetic rank along with his other works (e.g. his later writing is better than his earlier). It was critical in that you picked out some aspects and excluded others from your focus. It was literary, in that it studied literature, and was in its own way creative (a sort of memoir-writing). But your style of literary criticism (if you will allow me to varnish it as "literary criticism") is very much sympathetic, appreciative of the novel in question, self-reflexive in describing your own reactions to Conrad's work. In a word, your literary criticism embodies...passion.

It is passion which is lacking from contemporary literary criticism, including, I admit, my own. In an attempt to position itself alongside the sciences in the university - given the existence of views such as Naipaul's that the sciences alone have social value - literary criticism has systematically developed a more elevated, jargonistic manner; it has adopted some of the conventions of scientific writing, such as analysing the text from the perspective in the passive, third person. Thus, it writes "the text says this in such a way" rather than the (your) first person "I read this in such a way."

So here we find ourselves in a funny position. We hardcore literary critics admire novels for their historical transmutability, their ability to embody multiple themes simultaneously; the way they revealingly say different or similar things to different people. But we analyse them in a way that - as you observe - does away with the reader and constructs an artificially objective perspective which implies that "the text says this," definitively. Should we then produce a "claimer" which admits that we have complete ownership of the text, in spite of apparently arguing for the texts as objects with intrinsic qualities?

Well, herein lies the second problem to emerge from literary criticism's current style. If you were to read lots of contemporary literary criticism and theory, or if you were based at a university, you would not need a "claimer" to know full well that personal opinion still counts; that we all appreciate the aesthetic qualities of particular works and play authors off against each other; that in literary journals and monographs debates about the meanings of particular works bounce furiously around; that postmodern literary theorists dispute the possibility of there being a final meaning in any text, and propose that meaning is in a sense constructed by the reader, depending on their gender, race, age etc.

But if you haven't read lots of contemporary literary theory or criticism to allow you to realise this - I don't blame you!

Especially in the latter postmodern guises, it's hard, littered with jargon, full of dense and often turgid prose, clever references to other philosophers or theorists no one else has ever heard of. Sadly, then, what emerges is the impression you have got. That "texts are objects with intrinsic qualities"; that these intrinsic qualities rather than the passionate reader "construct the meaning." As a PhD student, I'm still very much trying to find my voice in this scenario. I am totally confident that I have (like all literary critics) something worth saying by placing novels and their language in a broader human context. The question is what tone I can adopt to say this message.

Have I got to succumb to the occlusive, difficult style of much current literary theory in order to get ahead in the university? Or can I find a way to be accessible, without "dumbing down" the intellectual content of what I've got to say?

At this point, I'm not sure it is possible to reconcile these competing needs within the academic context. What it is possible to do is to "do the police in different voices" (to cite T.S. Eliot, a great critic, great poet, who was accused in his own time of being irrelevant). Hence the blog is one of my most powerful outlets, because here I can write in a fluent way that expresses passion, but also points towards some of the more specialised elements of my discipline. Meanwhile, whilst some look down upon publications such as the Guardian Review or London Review of Books, most of our best critics write there (and, incidentally, many of the best critics happen to also be literary authors e.g. A.S. Byatt, John Lanchester, Tom Paulin). I would jump at the opportunity to contribute to any of these pages, alongside writing for academic journals (you don't happen to have their phone number, do you?!). I also engage heavily in interdisciplinary work, particularly explaining the language and history of science to scientists themselves, who have rarely reflected on the issue but who are always interested when described to them sympathetically.

It is sympathy for the reader, and a lack of passion in the writing, that leads to accusations that literary criticism lacks validity in the current culture. But - young and idealistic as I am - I do not see that this means we should give up on an activity which is as old as literature itself (think Aristotle's Poetics).

I hope this diatribe and polemic has not put you off reading more on The Pequod, or of letting me know how you feel about my arguments and about literary criticism now. If you do respond, I'd be grateful; and if you want some more existing material that I have written on this issue, then the following selection may be of interest:

• What Difference Does Difference Make? The Creative Deconstructions of Jean Rhys and Aimé Césaire - On the problems I have with literary criticism that imposes meaning on a text:
• The Political Art of Criticism and Quarks: An essay on the political value of literary criticism (my thinking on the subject has changed somewhat since I wrote this a couple of years ago)
• A Critical Highlight: Literary criticism at its passionate finest
• The Idea of a University: More on the "value" of literary studies

Labels: English Literature, literary theory, the idea of a university

In Italo Calvino's famous meditation on the relationship between novelists and readers, If On a Winter's Night A Traveller, comes a warning about the fundamental trap of a literary research thesis:

A girl came to see me who is writing a thesis on my novels for a very important university seminar in literary studies. I see that my work serves her perfectly to demonstrate her theories, and this is certainly a positive fact - for the novels or for the theories, I do not know which. From her very detailed talk, I got the idea of a piece of work being seriously pursued, but my books seen through her eyes seem unrecognisable to me. I am sure this Lotaria (that is her name) has read them conscientiously, but I believe she has read them only to find in them what she was already convinced of before reading them.

In science, you carefully choose the dataset on which you will run a test for a hypothesis, selecting a target which will provide results most efficiently and with the minimum of uncontrolled variables. But, ultimately, the dataset chosen by the scientist should be entirely irrelevant: the data must be independent of the conclusion if the scientific theory is valid. In the apocryphal story, Newton may have been standing under an apple tree when he reasoned the theory of gravity, but that theory applies equally whether the observational data is falling apples or dropped bombs. Were the theory to stop being applicable in a comparable situation - under a plum tree, for example - then the theory would have been falsified, such that we would need to recognise either that the theory must be fundamentally wrong, or that it requires modification in order that it apply (or appreciates why it cannot apply) equally for different varieties of fruit (or, more realistically, in the extreme conditions of entities such as black holes).

In literary study, however, the division between theory and data is less clear cut, as the Calvino passage makes clear in its parody. Currently researching some of Umberto Eco's semiotic theories, I notice that although deconstruction claims itself as a method applicable across all texts and language - since it places language as the very centre of our way of being in and knowing the world - most often the texts to which it is applied are always already open to deconstructive readings: works that are self-referential, embrace paradox rather than conclusiveness, are conscious of their being as texts. Thus Barthes examines some stories by Edgar Allan Poe, but not the editorial correspondence from the New England Magazine in which many of them were published.

And literary writers such as Italo Calvino (or A.S. Byatt, Umberto Eco, John Fowles), conscious of the ways in which the academy will appraise their texts, deliberately pre-empt and parody those modes of criticism. Thus texts such as If On a Winter's Night adopt what I call the critically sarcastic attitude. A Lotaria, or other academic reader, comes to the work from a pre-conceived theoretical angle, finds that the text deconstructs itself (or performs according to the predictions of some other theory), and thus the text can do nothing but applaud that critic ironically: "Well done," it says, "of course such and such a theoretically knowing symbol/structure/tone/philosophy etc. was there. I put it there. I knew you would come looking for it."

I am not a poststructuralist myself, though I am aware that I regularly (often subconsciously) dip into its toolbox in my analysis of texts, just as I do Marxism, psychoanalysis, historicism, or the close readings of new criticism. However, though I do not have a single preconceived critical angle, in my research I still risk falling into the Lotarian trap.

Without giving my game away too much (anonymity matters, as does the intellectual property of my original idea in my thesis), I am examining the use of a particular metaphor in literary fiction and science. Now hovering on the brink of its third year, my research is well-developed, most chapters are drafted or written, my ideas are well-honed and focused. Among other things, I am going to be looking at four novels and a couple of films which use my metaphor. However, to select these - effectively my dataset - I discarded tens of other novels which I read over the previous two years which did not happen to contain the image or symbol for which I was looking. It is therefore inevitable that I will give the impression that I "read them only to find in them what [I] was already convinced of before reading them." This is where Chapter One: The Introduction comes in, and I realise only now that in spite of it being only a small component, it is probably the most important single chapter of my thesis, since it is this that will make-or-break it in a viva.

If I fully admit the qualifications, and paradoxes of my research there, then what follows will stand or fall by the internal logic of the framework I publicly have set myself; I admit my theory works only within the orchard of texts in which I have chosen to wander. If I fail to recognise the inherent limits of my methods, however, then a single plum dropped by the examiner will falsify it, showing my data to rely wholly on my theory, rather than existing independently of it. The moral of my experience, and Calvino's story, and The Lotarian Trap, is that literary theory becomes a bad pseudoscience when it seems to explain both apples and plums.

Labels: If on A Winter's Night a Traveller, literary theory, Postgraduate Diary, Science and Culture

Johnathan Wolff has a very astute article about the innate dullness of much academic writing in the Education Guardian. In the midst of a PhD crisis at the moment deriving from precisely my feeling that a thesis should be engaging and interesting (perhaps even in the loosest sense "tell a story"), his article hits home. I will say more about how my writing is going when I am less fraught.

Labels: literary theory, Postgraduate Diary

Seen on a toilet door in the gents' toilets of my esteemed university - next year's literary theory exam question:



I'm actually rather proud that our institution produces such a high calibre of graffiti artist. Perhaps this could go forward as evidence of our Teaching Quality scores...?

Labels: English Literature, graffiti, literary theory

I remember in primary school being tasked to write a description of our house. Believing myself at that early age to possess a creative imagination (I no longer have such presumptions – I am a critic, after all), I started my piece: “A small, red brick house. A narrow path. A blue door. A kitchen, in which I am surrounded by wonderful smells.” I can recall the passage so well because of the response of my teacher when marking this, which was to cross out the first three phrases and to write at the bottom: “Verbs!” In retrospect, my teacher had probably been marking them late at night after a couple of whiskeys, and so was not in the best frame of mind to judge fairly what I thought to be a piece of literary innovation. The phrase circulating photographic circles is that all ordinary photographers know the rules, but the great photographers know when to break them, something I was naively doing with prose in these early years (and something I manage to do only occasionally with my photos).

Perhaps in what follows, then, I am missing the point much as my English teacher did back then (though I have a mug of tea in hand to my teacher’s whisky), but reading Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations I am sorely tempted to break my personal rule never to write in the margins of books. For it seems that once one attains the status of a French theorist, the rules of grammar go out the window and, unlike in my childhood story, there seems to be little aesthetic reason for it.

Master of the aphorism, his sentences regularly lack verbs, as if dispensing advice from a French Sinai: "The hatred by an entire civilisation for its own foundation." "The vertigo of a flawless world." It's all very lulling, and I could cope with such conclusions if they were used sparingly, but as it is, sprinkled like pepper across the pages, I sniff with the suspicion that these rhythms of decisiveness are being used to close down a paragraph, in the hopes that the reader will forget that there has been little by way of logical argument to substantiate that conclusion. Statements are thrown in without any empirical (in the loosest sense of that word) justification. For example, summing up a thousand years in a single sentence, Baudrillard tells us that in the medieval period “There is no such thing as fashion in a society of caste and rank, since one is assigned a place irrevocably, and so class mobility is non-existent.” Try telling that to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, who, though a mere cloth cutter, has married so cunningly that she is able to display her dress in gaudy show of her new social status:

Hir coverchiefs ful fyne weren of ground;
I dorste swere they weyeden ten pound
That on a sonday weren upon hir heed.
Hir hosen weren of fyn scarlet reed,
Ful streite yteyd, and shoes ful moyste and newe.

Should Baudrillard have told her that she was not subject to fashion, nor socially mobile, I know who would have won the war of words (just look at what happened to the pardoner).

Then, in the manner of a scientific paper, metaphor is cut from a language which instead seeks to create logical and contingent links between a hypothesis and its outcome. So we are told that “concrete is a mental substance; it allows, just like a concept, phenomena to be organised and divided up at will.” No, Jean, concrete is not a mental substance. Would you buy a house made from Builder’s Qualia? Is my brain pebbledashed and my psychology sand and stone? The analogy, if one were explicitly made as analogy, might be valid, even interesting. Concrete might for the postmodern architect be the building material which finally allows him to develop the abstract designs that act as physical correlates for the intellectual activity of the people who inhabit them. However, this insight is one I can decipher only by overcoming that comic hurdle, in which Baudrillard appears to claim, in a magician’s illusion of a radical, provocative analysis, that concrete is mind, rather than is like mind.

But whereas this connection may be incidental (the sort of thing contemporary novelists such as David Lodge and A.S. Byatt have manipulated in their parodies of such academic writing), other connections – or, rather, elisions of connection – are more morally suspect. For example, we are told that Watergate is not a scandal, but a "scandal effect concealing that there is no difference between the facts and their denunciation (identical methods are employed by the CIA and the Washington Post journalists)." In one sense, that placed in parentheses, he is right, and the recognition that the methods of investigation and dissimulation were essentially the same is a potent one. However, there is a moral difference which is blurred here, and in this case it is the moral dimension which is the most important: the journalists were performing the role they were expected to play in society, a role they had worked hard to fulfil, whilst Nixon abused the role society expected of him, the role to which society elected him. It is too easy to read postmodern cultural analysis like this, and to jump to the conclusion that since everything is relative then there can be no ultimate value systems or scales.

But since everything is relative according to the poststructuralist, then by their own logic they should make clear what things are relative to what, something Baudrillard does not do. The methods of Nixon and the journalists are relative to each other, but the morality of method employed by Nixon is relative to his position as President, and has not the same moral status as that of the work of Woodward and Bernstein. It is this sort of category mistake which leads people into the belief that science is only one narrative – a story about climate change or the development of species – relative (and relation of) others, such as the creation myth or that of a left wing conspiracy to undermine capitalism. They suggest that because Einstein overturned Newtonian mechanics that this shows all science is relative, and therefore just as inconclusive as more metaphysical ways of interpreting the world. But Einstein supplied a suite of theories that applied in very special circumstances relative to Newton's; his theory does not open out in a way which shows all science to be relative to everything else (though naturally science works under conditions of probability rather than absolute certainty). It is this misconception, one which arises from postmodern theory such as that practiced by Baudrillard, which lies at the heart of many of the misrepresentations of science that I have commented on before:

• A Polarised PhD: The Creationism and Science of Marcus R. Ross
• They Call it Science
• Dawkins' Dilemma

Labels: Baudrillard, literary theory, postmodernism, Science and Culture, simulations

Now back to writing after Christmas, I am working on my second chapter on A.S. Byatt, this time looking at her Booker Prize winning novel, Possession. This is a work with an encyclopaedic scope, with its themes ranging from the romance of love to the romance of the quest, its plots derived from the detective story and the romance and the Victorian epic; it is a palimpsest of letters, journals, poetry and fairy tales. And in the process of all these it takes a fairly hefty swipe at the more dogmatic aspects of literary academia, from the biography industry to postmodern psychoanalytic feminism (try saying that with your mouth full). Thus it might seem surprising that those in the establishment it critiques chose to bestow upon it a series of welcome reviews, as well as British literature's top prize. On the other hand, postmodernist critics like nothing more than to be critiqued themselves. See, for example, the following statements: "postmodernism contests culture from within its own assumptions"; "postmodernism literally names and constitutes its own paradoxical identity"; "postmodernist discourses need the very myths and conventions they contest and reduce" (all quotes taken from my current "read," Linda Hutcheon's The Poetics of Postmodernism). Postmodernist criticism erects a facade not unlike those energy-absorbing shields so loved by starship captains, in which anything which attacks the postmodern paradox simply feeds in more powerful evidence of the contradictions and destabilisations of culture that are postmodernism.

All this debate places me in a thicket of language and terminology, and I need to cut my way through it before I can start to tackle Possession on my own terms. Happily, however, Byatt herself comes to my rescue. Asked by Nicolas Tredell about her novel's attack on poststructuralism, Byatt acknowledges "Possession is a postmodernist, poststructuralist novel and it knows it is. It does present itself as a piece of Victorian melodrama, but of course it's no such thing.” However, she goes on, “within that, it is also a sort of passionate plea for readers to be allowed to identify with characters...Most postmodernist fiction cuts out any emotion very much earlier on. It doesn't allow the reader any pleasure, except in the cleverness of the person constructing the postmodernist fiction. I think that's boring. I think you can have all the other pleasures as well.” And very enjoyable the novel is too, without the need for it to be acknowledged as belonging to one category or genre, or to say that its critical work is more significant than the wave of the plot of romance and detection on which that critique rides.

I suspect that Byatt, like myself, finds the term postmodernism a somewhat necessary irritant. Necessary because it allows us to place a particular text in context; an irritant because we can become so bogged down in determining and defining precisely what that context is that we ignore the immediate pleasures of reading the text itself. In developing a "poetics" of postmodernism, we forget to read the poem. I am therefore unwilling, let alone unable, to answer the general questions "what is postmodernism" and "what is a postmodernist text," which lead to my more immediate concern which is "is Possession a postmodern text and, if so, why?"

In looking at the first two questions, I use the analogy of evolution. One of the fundamental errors made by creationists is that they argue that since we cannot see evolution happening in the present, or even in the (incomplete) fossil record, then there is no evidence for evolution at all. However, as Richard Dawkins dismisses this fallacy in The Blind Watchmaker, the error is really one of scale. Wander around any modern zoo, and you will see lions and tigers, and you will go home and talk about them to your domestic tabby. All three seem to be distinct sub-species of the cat family. Surely the creationists cry, since they are distinct, this implies they were created in one moment, by a discrete process, rather than by the continuous development argued for by evolution. However, imagine now that you are visiting a virtual zoo, in which a representative of every cat family currently on this earth are prowling in one large cage. Now, imagine every individual in every cat sub-species is present in one enormous cage. And, finally, imagine every individual of every cat sub-species which ever lived in one gargantuan cage. Now, looking at this last enclosure, it would be impossible to define where the group of "tigers" starts, and the group of "tigers" gives way to "lions." There would be clusters of individuals more tiger-like and less-lion like, and some small ones who bear some resemblance to your pet cat. The idea of a species or sub-species is in some senses a completely false one. Darwin himself did not like the term species - which implies a discrete group of individuals with particular characteristics - preferring instead the term variation, for reasons that should be obvious from the analogy. Nevertheless, without the concept of species, the art of taxonomy (and it is in some senses an art) could not exist; producing nature programmes would be impossible; and knowing on which species to perform experiments which relate to humans could not happen. The term species is a necessary irritant.

So it is with postmodernism, or, indeed, with any form of generic categorisation we use in literary theory: the Chivalric Age, Renaissance period, Romanticism, Victorian period, Modernism, Postmodernism. If you were to line every literary work (indeed, what is a "literary" work, for that matter? The Origin of Species has its own beautifully creative eloquence.) ever written on your long, long shelves, then pinpointing precisely the "species" that is the Romantic poem or the postmodern novel would be impossible. Deciding when the Victorian period gives way to Modernism (other than by using the strict dates of Victoria's reign) is an entirely arbitrary one, and results in debates around transitional figures such as Thomas Hardy or Hopkins. In my opinion, and in the guises in which I use it, postmodernism is a unit of terminological currency, one which enables me vaguely to locate a text in time and style, and then to move on and study the text itself.

All this might seem a somewhat aimless argument. However, in an unexpected way, deciding whether A.S. Byatt is a postmodernist writer, feeds nicely in to the more holistic framework of my thesis. I am looking at the role of metaphors of the "demon" in science as well as literature: Maxwell's demon, Descartes' deceiving demon, Daniel Dennett's "pandemonium" model of consciousness, and others less well known. So often, these strange beasts - given legitimacy in science by being called "models" rather than "metaphors" - are used to allow thinking to continue in a hypothetical sense, a future tense, even as the empirical evidence supporting the theory of the moment remains elusive. For example, Maxwell suggested that a demon could circumvent the second law of thermodynamics; however, he had no idea how this might manifest itself in a practical, working device (others such as Wojciech Żurek in the twentieth century have been able to create computer simulations, however, and point to potential applications of Maxwell's demon in medical nanotechnology). Daniel Dennett argues that consciousness works through a series of competing "demons" chattering together and, out of the chaos, a consensus emerges which we think of as a thought. Neuroscience has yet to develop the sorts of brain scanners that might allow "demons" (which would be called something different when they are found) to be pinpointed, but by positing that term, he enables his thinking to move on, rather than getting stalled simply because the technology has not caught up with the hypothesis.

When I first entered the debate around postmodernism, I rather like Charles Newman's denunciation of post-modernism as "a dash surrounded by a contradiction." However, conjunctions of competing terms - demons and science, species and evolution - are often highly productive.

Labels: A.S. Byatt, English Literature, literary theory, postmodernism

Having at long last rounded off my chapter on A Whistling Woman, I am moving on to look at A.S. Byatt's Possession (although with only a week before I go home for Christmas, I am trying productively to procrastinate and to re-edit existing chapters, rather than starting a new one now). Among its many other subjects, this Booker-winning novel provides a parody of postmodern literary criticism. At one gloriously anarchistic moment in the novel, Maud (the heroine) stands in the shower and thinks about Fergus, an arrogant, academic anti-hero with whom she had a brief fling at a conference. Maud is a feminist, psychoanalytic critic, a form of analysis Byatt mockingly plays up to here:

Freud was right, Maud thought, vigorously rubbing her white legs, desire lies on the other side of repugnance. The Paris conference where she had met Fergus had been on Gender and the Autonomous Text. She had talked about thresholds and he had given an authoritative paper on 'The Potent Castrato: the phallogocentricstructuration ofBalzac'shermaphroditehero/ines'. The drift of his argument appeared to be feminist. The thrust of his presentation was somehow mocking and subversive. He flirted with self-parody. He expected Maud to come into his bed.

The passage reminds that we are addicted to jargon and conjunctions as evidence of our own cleverness. But, as Maud rubs her legs, naked in the shower, it lays bare through the puns that our vocabulary provides a screen of language which conceal s the fact that, behind it all, we are, simply, obsessed about sex. (See Acephalous for some unfortunate, hilarious proof).

Byatt is herself a former institutionalised literary critic (as opposed to the public intellectual she is now). However critical, her writing also indicates that we do have a sense of humour, able to mock ourselves even whilst taking and presenting ourselves seriously and (perhaps incongruently) sexily as well. Given the passage above, Byatt would probably have approved of The Amazing and Incredible, Only-slightly-Laughable Politically Unassailable, PoMo English Title Generator. Here, you type in an author and a novel and let the generator produce a clever sounding title, for use by the undergraduate in his dissertation topic, or by the professor "trying to obtain department funding to go to that high-flying, hard-drinking conference." Try Balzac, and what emerges is not unlike the title Byatt invents for her fictional characters. From "Collusive Relic and the Dis-ease of Masculist Dualism in Balzac's La Comédie humaine" to "Merging Seduction: Testicular Capitalism in Balzac's La Comédie humaine," the generator produces titles which, worrying, would be quite feasible in some of the postmodern literary journals and conferences of the sort the two fictional academics attend. For myself, I am not sure that I dare write on "Complicity and Feminism in Possession: A.S. Byatt Visioning Orgasmic Discourse," though it remains a possibility if the current theme of my chapter proves unproductive.

We are driven by sex, and as part of that impulse we show off our learning with the pretentious peacock feathers of language (an ostentatious piece of alliteration and metaphor if ever there was one). Literary criticism has thus become something of a cult, with its own morals and codes of discourse. Perhaps, therefore, not every reader of this blog will appreciate the humour derived from intense anthropological observation of our group that goes into Jorge Cham's comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD). If you are lucky enough to have escaped academia for the real world, the subtleties of some of these may pass you by. If you are yourself a postgraduate, however, you may be able to comment on whether, since I dare not use a randomly generated title in my PhD, I dare at least show this or this to my supervisor, as I fail to get my writing on Possession off the ground?

Labels: A.S. Byatt, literary theory, Postgraduate Diary

I posted a few days ago in praise of Barbara Everett's delicate criticism of Philip Larkin. Now to the opposite end of the spectrum, with some gloriously self-contradictory postmodernist literary theory, that made me throw down the book when I read it. This is Steven Shaviro:

Language is one of these mechanisms of reproduction. Its purpose is not to indicate or communicate any particular content, but merely to perpetuate and replicate itself...language, like a virus or like capital, is in itself entirely vacuous: its supposed content is only a contingent means (the host cell or the particular commodity form) that it parasitically appropriates for the end of self-valorization and self-proliferation. Apart from the medium, there's no other message.

Perhaps I am misinterpreting or misrepresenting Shaviro here, in which case both of our arguments are actually winners. My inability to comprehend this passage endorses Shaviro's thesis that language is meaningless except as a self-perpetuating system. And my argument that his language is obfuscatory and, where it communicates at all, it undermines itself demonstrates its purposeless nature nowhere better than in the reflections of his literary theory.

But if language really does not communicate any particular content, what is the point of his writing and my reading him (or indeed, you reading this blog) at all? The answer is for the glimpses of those moments that capture in glorious and repellent detail the absurdities, inflected with psychoanalytic symbolism, that abound in readings of the body that are such a popular topic in English studies at the moment:

My "innards" are really a hole going straight through my body; their contents - shit and tapeworm - remain forever outside of and apart from me, even as they exist at my very centre. The tapeworm is more "me" than I am myself.

So far as I know, I don't have one of these egocentric parasites within me. Does this mean I have been thoroughly deconstructed...

Labels: English Literature, literary theory, postmodernism, Steven Shaviro

Anyone believing all modern literary criticism to be as artless and occlusive as the texts it analyses are artful and popular could do worse than to look at Barbara Everett's essay on Philip Larkin in this month's London Review of Books.

Taking the trope of "high windows" from Larkin's last collection, which is named after that image in a poem of the same title, she uses the symbol as itself a window onto Larkin's work and its complex moral psychology. In her study, Everett does as E.M. Forster once requested, and only connects: biographical history with the poetry, late works with early poems, images embedded within poems. But that "only" underestimates the skill of the task she achieves, which is to do as all great criticism can and to convince in its arguments and to widen one's appreciation of the art it scrutinises, through a combination of careful research, empathic close readings, a keen eye for ambiguities and ironies others might miss. She also realises the other potential outcome of critical writing, which is to give voice to what one might not have missed and always sensed, but which even the alert reader is unable precisely to describe. She uses a key adjective that pinpoints perfectly how I have always felt, but never been able to articulate about Larkin, when she finds a characteristic Larkinian humour in the last lines of "Send No Money": "A splutter of laughter, rage, misery, expostulation, acceptance, 'truth.'" That word "splutter" is every bit as artfully chosen as the words of Larkin's original poetry.

As she draws together the web of inferences and influences Everett's essay takes on some of the same qualities of satisfying resolution that are more commonly found in the thriller or detective story. That I feel able, without stretching my point too far, to make that connection between the most populist of literature, and its most prosaic branch in the extended essay, is testament to the exemplary nature of this piece of writing that is more than "only" academic, and which instead assumes some of the qualities of the art it values so highly.

Labels: Barbara Everett, English Literature, literary theory, Philip Larkin