‘In our world,’ said Eustace, ‘a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.’

‘Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of.’

—C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Do not be alarmed by the title of this essai. The problem I propose to discuss is a problem only for critics; though for them, I contend, it is critical. For the past century at least, literary criticism has been going up a blind alley; or, put less charitably, contemplating its own navel until it falls right in.

The influential critics, the ones who establish critical schools and write textbooks and contribute to learned journals, are too often pure academics with no experience of writing literature, and the literature they actually read is only a tiny subset of the available universe of fiction and poetry, consisting mostly of technical exercises written to exemplify the very theories by which the critics propose to ‘explain’ them. (If you want to sell a story to a literary journal, you had better write in the editors’ preferred code, so they can decode your story and feel clever doing it.) In my time I have seen various theories come and go. They all have this in common, that they are very good indeed at analysing texts written explicitly with the theories in mind, but when they are applied to older or more popular works, they reveal anything and nothing: chiefly, they reveal the critic’s own biases, and conveniently allow him to find in the text the very worst things that he expected to find.

The ‘New Criticism’ was already old when I was young, and the Freudian and Marxist schools are older still. Since then we have seen the rise, and in most cases also the fall, of the Structuralist, Postmodernist, Feminist, and Critical Theory schools, among many others. Every one of these schools has the same weakness and is open to the same objections: they all attend exclusively to the text of a story, and puzzle it out as if it were a linguistic riddle or a cryptic crossword, and not at all to the experience that the story conveys to a reader. It is true that this experience is subjective, and the text is objective; but the text exists only to induce that subjective experience in the reader, and as far as possible, to recreate in the reader something of the writer’s own subjective thoughts and feelings, and communicate some facet of the writer’s understanding of the world. It is ‘objective’ to measure a sunset with a spectroscope, but that does not get you any closer to understanding how ordinary people experience sunsets.

[Read more…]