January 23, 2023 Issue

Merve Emre, in her "Everyone's a Critic," in this week’s issue, bashes literary scholars. She calls them deformed. She quotes John Guillory’s new book, Professing Criticism: “If there is a thesis that unites the essays in Professing Criticism, it is that professional formation entails a corresponding ‘déformation professionnelle.’ ” She argues that academia has ruined literary criticism. She says that in university, criticism is "more interested in its own protocols than in what Guillory calls 'the verbal work of art.' "  

Well, all I can say in response is that, in a lifetime of reading, some of the best criticism I’ve read is by university scholars. Examples:

Sandra M. Gilbert’s Acts of Attention: The Poems of D. H. Lawrence, 1972 (Gilbert taught at Queens College of the City University of New York, at Sacramento State College, at California State College, Hayward, and at St. Mary’s College of California);

Bonnie Costello’s Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, 1991 (Costello is Associate Professor of English at Boston University);

Roland Barthes’ New Critical Essays, 1980 (Barthes was professor at the Collège de France);

James Wood’s Serious Noticing, 2019 (Wood is a professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard University);

Helen Vendler’s The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar, 2015 (Vendler is A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University);

B. J. Leggett’s Larkin’s Blues, 1999 (Leggett is Distinguished Professor of Humanities and professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville);

Dan Chiasson's One Kind of Everything, 2007 (Chiasson teaches at Wellesley College);

Bożena Shallcross’s Through the Poet’s Eye: The Travels of Zagajewski, Herbert, and Brodsky, 2002 (Shallcross is an associate professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of Chicago);

Eleanor Cook’s Elizabeth Bishop at Work, 2016 (Cook is Professor Emerita in the Department of English at the University of Toronto);

Robert Hass's What Light Can Do, 2012 (Hass teaches at the University of California);

Michael Wood's The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction, 1994 (Wood is Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English at Princeton University).

I'm just scratching the surface here. These literary scholars are interested in the verbal work of art, deeply so. I enjoy their writing immensely. 

Critics as Makers of Works of Art (Contra Colin Burrow)

Colin Burrow, in his absorbing review of Christopher Ricks’ new essay collection Along Heroic Lines (London Review of Books, October 7, 2021), says, “Critics see things, but do not make things.” Really? Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman isn’t made? T. J. Clark’s The Sight of Death isn’t made? Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment isn’t made? Howard Moss’s The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust isn’t made? Seamus Heaney’s The Government of the Tongue isn’t made? Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida isn’t made? I could keep going, but I think I’ve made my point. There are works of criticism that are as much works of art as the subjects they consider. It’s time to drop the condescension and recognize them as such.  

Camera Lucida

Illustration of use of camera lucida (from Wikipedia)

One of my favorite books is Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida (1980). The title comes from a nineteenth-century instrument called the camera lucida. Barthes doesn’t provide much information on it, other than to say parenthetically, “Such was the name of that apparatus, anterior to Photography, which permitted drawing an object through a prism, one eye on the model, the other on the paper.”

 

Gaby Wood, in her recent “Diary” (London Review of Books, June 18, 2020), describes using a camera lucida to etch an image of an albatross skeleton. At first, she struggles:

 

The first time I tried to use mine, dejection was swift. The 19th-century instructions weren’t much help in angling the prism. The image was disconcertingly doubled – more like a migraine than a magic trick. Even when you could focus, you couldn’t see your drawing hand, or you could one minute and not the next. If you blinked it was a disaster. I found the whole enterprise confusing and over-complicated. No wonder it never caught on, I thought.

 

But she persists and eventually achieves a result she finds “liberating.” She says,

 

By the time I used the camera lucida in the museum, I’d spent several months grappling with the strange proposition offered by its prism. I’d read that the image was sharper if you held it over a dark drawing surface, but that didn’t make any sense to me until the smoked metal etching plate was beneath my hand. Suddenly the albatross skeleton appeared on it: bright, spectral. The process was different from the way I’d imagined it. There was a drag, almost a dance, under the needle – a tiny jump of resistance in the copper. Without seeing what you were doing, you could feel it more keenly. It wasn’t like ice-skating at all.

 

That “There was a drag, almost a dance, under the needle – a tiny jump of resistance in the copper” is delightful. The whole piece is delightful. I enjoyed it immensely.

Mary Price's Excellent "The Photograph: A Strange Confined Space"

Recently, I read a book – Mary Price’s The Photograph: A Strange Confined Space (1994) – that immediately went into my personal anthology of great photography writing, joining Susan Sontag’s On Photography, Janet Malcolm’s Diana & Nikon, Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment, and Michael Fried’s Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before.

In her book, Price advances two main arguments: (1) that “language of description is deeply implicated in how a viewer looks at photographs”; and (2) that “the use of a photograph determines its meaning.”

She discusses Walter Benjamin’s description of Eugène Atget’s and August Sander’s photographs, George Santayana’s theory of photography, the nudes of Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, the comparison between Rembrandt’s paintings and Julia Margaret Cameron’s photographs, the notion of the photo as a transcription of the real, the notion of the photo as mask, Proust’s use of the photograph as metaphor, Barthes’ search for the photograph of his mother that captures her “essential identity,” “the aura of reality,” “the pleasures of factuality,” and many other illuminating ideas, as well.

What I relish most about Price’s view is her emphasis on description. She says,

Describing is necessary for photographs. Call it captioning, call it titling, call it describing, the act of specifying in words what the viewer may be led both to understand and to see is as necessary to the photograph as it is to painting. Or call it criticism. It is the act of describing that enables the act of seeing.

I agree. It’s tonic to read a critic who touts description as a form of meaning-making.

McPhee and Names

I crave specificity. No writer satisfies this craving more completely than John McPhee. One way he does it is by providing a wealth of proper names. The proper name is a form of specificity par excellence. “It is a voluminous sign, a sign always pregnant with a dense texture of meaning,” Roland Barthes says, in “Proust and Names” (New Critical Essays, 1980). McPhee is a compulsive namer; he names everything in sight – rivers, lakes, mountains, towns, valleys, rocks, geologic periods, rapids, dams, canoes, even such details as chocolate bars (“Militärschokolade, Chocolat Militaire”), lacrosse sticks (“Cyber head on a black Swizzle Scandium,” and Bubba Watson’s driver (“His 460cc Grafalloy driver has a pink shaft”). It’s an aspect of his phenomenal art of description. Here are a dozen passages exemplifying his use of proper names:

The canton is divided in language as well, part French, part German, and not in a mixed-up manner, which would be utterly un-Swiss, but with a break that is clear in the march of towns – Champéry, Martigny, Sion, Sierre, Salgesch, Turtmann, Ausserberg, Brig – and clearer still in the names of the hanging valleys that come down among the peaks and plummet to the Rhone: Val de Bagnes, Val d”Hérens, Val d’Anniviers, Turtmanntal, Lötschental, Mattertal. (“La Place de la Concorde Suisse,” The New Yorker, October 31 & November 7, 1983)

At Gornergrat one day, at the top of a cog railway five thousand feet above Zermatt, I was sitting in an almost windless stillness, slowly moving my gaze in full circumference from the Breithorn to the Matterhorn to the Dente Blanche to the Zinalrothorn to the Weisshorn to the Dom – all well above four thousand metres – and on to the Dufourspitze, the highest mountain in Switzerland. (“La Place de la Concorde Suisse,” The New Yorker, October 31 & November 7, 1983)

Twelve miles from Rawlins, the horses were changed at Bell Spring, where, in a kind of topographical staircase – consisting of the protruding edges of sediments that dipped away to the east – the whole of the Mesozoic era rose to view: the top step of the Cretaceous, the next Jurassic, at the bottom a low red Triassic bluff, against which was clustered a compound of buildings roofed with cool red mud. (“Rising from the Plains,” The New Yorker, February 24 & March 3 & 10, 1986)

From level to level in a drill hole there – a hole about a mile deep – oil could be found in an amazing spectrum of host rocks: in the Cambrian Flathead sandstone, in the Mississippian Madison limestone, in the Tensleep sands of Pennsylvanian time. Oil was in the Chugwater (red sands of the Triassic), and in the Morrison, Sundance, Nugget (celebrated formations of the Jurrasic), and, of course, in the Crataceous Frontier. (“Rising from the Plains,” The New Yorker, February 24 & March 3 & 10, 1986)

We shivered in the deep shadows of bluffs a thousand feet high – Calico Bluff, Montauk Bluff, Biederman Bluff, Takoma Bluff – which day after day intermittently walled the river. (“Coming into the Country,” The New Yorker, June 20 & 27, July 4 & 11, 1977)

They arrived in a pickup – with their axes and hammers, drill bits and drawknife, whipsaw; their new, lovely, seventeen-foot Chestnut Prospector canoe. (“Coming into the Country,” The New Yorker, June 20 & 27, July 4 & 11, 1977)

Above the line rise the Kennebec, the Penobscot, the Allegash, the St. John. Above the line is the Great North Woods. (“North of the C.P. Line,” The New Yorker, November 26, 1984)

Since 1960, some two hundred small-river dams have been removed in the United States, nowhere as feverishly as in Wisconsin, where the Slabtown Dam, on the Bark River, was destroyed in 1992; the Wonewoc Dam, on the Bark River, in 1996; the Hayman Falls Dam, on the Embarrass River, in 1995; the Readstown Dam, on the Kickapoo River, in 1985; the Mellen Dam, on the Bad River, in 1967. (“Farewell to the Nineteenth Century," The New Yorker, September 27, 1999)

After passing under three bridges, two of them abandoned, we would come to the end of our trip at A. J. Lambert Riverside Park, Hooksett Village, below Hooksett Dam – a spectacular scene colluding natural white cascades with water falling over the dam and plunging from the powerhouse. (“1839/2003,” The New Yorker, December 15, 2003)

From Breaky Bottom out through Beachy Head, under the Channel, and up into Picardy, and on past Arras and Amiens, the chalk is continuous to Reims and Épernay. To drive the small roads and narrow lanes of Champagne is to drive the karstic downlands of Sussex and Surrey, the smoothly bold topography of Kentish chalk – the French ridges, long and soft, the mosaic fields and woodlots, the chalk boulders by the road in villages like Villeneuve-l’Archêveque. (“Season on the Chalk,” The New Yorker, March 12, 2007)

Credit: The above photo of John McPhee is by Peter Cook.

March 7, 2011 Issue

Pick Of The Issue this week is unquestionably Elif Batuman’s wonderful “The View from the Stands.” From the moment I read its opening sentence - “One cold, wet morning in December, I headed into Istanbul to watch the Beşiktaş soccer team play a match against Bursaspor, a team from the city of Bursa, the original Ottoman capital” – I was hooked. The piece is filled with "thisness" - James Wood's great term for "any detail that draws abstraction towards itself and seems to kill that abstraction with a puff of palpability, any detail that centers our attention with its concretion" (How Fiction Works). Here are some examples of "thisness" in "The View from the Stands": the umbrella seller ("A gaunt young woman in a head scarf and a cheap trenchcoat stood pressed up against an embankment, selling Beşiktaş umbrellas"); tea-drinking ("Ayhan ordered another round of tea, and for a few moments the only sound was the clinking of spoons as the men stirred sugar cubes into their tea"); Ayhan's cigarette ("Eyes narrowed, lips moving silently, he watched the game with total fixity, the cigarette between his fingers turning into a column of ash"); a snack bar near Inönü Stadium ("Out front, under the stars, a young round-faced man was standing at a large charcoal grill, tending to kebaps, green peppers and tomatoes. The smell of grilled lamb filled the air"). And if you enjoy the poetics of place names ("signs always pregnant with a dense texture of meaning," Roland Barthes says in "Proust and Names"), as much as I do, you will relish the way Batuman plunges you into Istanbul's place names: Beşiktaş, Dolmabahçe Palace, Inönü Stadium, Kazan pub, Eagle Café, Üsküdar. Reading "The View from the Stands," I marveled at the variousness of its constituent elements - taxi-driver dialogue, Turkish soccer chants, iPhone news, sociology, history, poetry, the Carşi website, interviews, YouTube videos, all intermixed with Batuman's own vivid accounts of her time hanging out with Deniz, Ayhan, Autobahn, and others. The piece ends beautifully with Batuman imagining herself in the stands under Autobahn's new Beşiktaş banner:

Remembering the Rapid Wien game, I thought of how the new banner would come alive at the next match. It would unfurl itself over you and you would beat at it with your hands as it rolled over the crowd in a great wave, its slogan facing the floodlights and the night sky.

"The View from the Stands" is an inspired piece of writing. I enjoyed it immensely.