Literary criticism applies the character, plotting, genres and pacing found in literatureto real life and is scrupulously objective in doing so.
The modern age of literary criticism, which consists of providing commentaries and close readings of literature, begins with Samuel Johnson, in his brief comments, aphoristic-like, on Shakespeare. Previous to that there were commentaries and close readings of sacred texts but there was scant attention to particular texts, there being treatises on poetry, as in Sidney’s “Art of Poetry” and Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism”, which are theories of aesthetics, as when Pope says that poetry is something said as best it can, unless one includes Atistopones comments on three great tragedians. Nor is literary scholarship, which authenticates texts, to be considered criticism, nor are literary biographies or histories, which show the context of literature rather than attend to literature itself as the object of attention. Rather, the term became frequently and well known during the generation following Johnson, the Romantics, such as Lamb and Hazlitt and , all of whom thought literature itself worthy of comment and who developed techniques from getting into the text so as to elaborate morals, psychology, society and even the forms and genres of literature itself as ways to understand the human condition. The proper word is “criticism”, as a distinctive method in that it looks to find what there really is in the texts, no matter how arcane or abstracted it may become and so is properly applied to Kant’s magisterial critiques of pure reason, judgment and practical reason, these particularly abstruse, but insisting that what is being said is implicit in what is clearly there in the subject matter, which in the case of Kant is reality itself, revealing that volition is indubitable, just part of the nature of things, because people cann ot do without the word “should” or that judgment concerns less than certainty that nonetheless operates as a process in the world.
All disciplines, including literary criticism, generalize themselves to imagine all of life is subject to the discipline in question. A professor of marketing, who specialized on what packages to put their product into, what were the colors and the copy, just like Lucky Strike cigarettes liked and bought tier gold foiled packages, discovered as a graduate student that everything was packaging: to make voters attractive so people will vote for you and girls will find you attractive. The same is true with literary criticism, which applies directly to the subject matter of literature but can be applied as well to all of life. Everything in life just falls into the terms of literature.
First of all, the various genres of literature, each of which has its own parameters, characterize what happens in the world. Farces are plays and movies where people are hurt but it is pleasing because, as in The Three Stooges, no one gets hurt. So Charlie Chaplin imagined the Hitler Muissolini duo and the farcical undertakings of Dr. Strangelove except that both had bad endings which could leave you with despair as happens in any number of apocalypse movies which grapple within doomsday scenarios projected onto the political and environmental situation. We know tragic politicians like Brutus so we can imagine how conspirators motivate themselves and so feel unarmed to confront real life assassins who had no motive but madness, like Hinckley who attacked Ronald Reagan so he could impress an actress, and so people look to find underground conspiracies that make sense. Then, sometimes, life seems melodramatic, an exaggeration of pathos and clear evil, as when Norman Rockwell displays a Negro child hounded by bullies as she is escorted to school. The impeachment of Bill Clinton is either farce because it is about nothing but a White House dalliance or a melodrama whereby a President is untracked from his agenda by opponents who find salacious and demeaning off the record antics of a politician. From any politics or your own life into the genre that suits you.
All literary critics are experts on character, more, they dare say than psychologists. Critics have analyzed hundreds and hundreds of characters while therapists may number a hundred patients in their lifetime. Critics see characters as having contradictory or parallel disparate feelings or matters at the same time to which they are indifferent. Emma Woodhouse is at the same time imperious, naive, prejudiced, open minded, occasionally nasty. And subservient to her father and her moral exemplar who she eventuall;y marries. She claims to understand everything while others claim she knows nothing when she does know just something, which is true enough about all of us. She sees an obvious marriage accomplished and a match she designs as ill suited to one another when a more realistic one is available and is successfully accomplished. Such is the way with human nature and so that complexity or more limited figures from real life can be understood in their dynamics. Richard Nixon thought himself an honorable man who was statesmanlike in domestic and in tern national politics but also understood electoral politics to be a dirty business where he had to go low so as to rule high, and that was his undoing about which he felt guilt at the time he resigned and until his dying day. His was that of a tragic figure,
Critics are also deeply aware of the dynamics of rhetoric, of how a person sets a tone through the way they express themselves. So it is not to the point whether Hamlet is mad or not, though he might well be, because he makes incisive remarks that should not be told in polite society, such as when he asks Polonius to think whether the counselor can plumb his character, or when Hamlet makes obscene remarks to his mother, or when in public talks dirty to his girlfriend, and then becomes subdued when he returns from England and acts as if he could resume life at the Danish court. Is he impervious or out to commit suicide? All the possibilities are available, just as people speculate about what a narcissist like Trump will do if he is ever cornered or capable of recognizing that. Will he continue with always blaming others or still claim great success or bring down the temple? This is a dramatic expectation in that it is easy to guess and the drama could unfold in any number of ways, the rhetoric the characteristic way of expressing the response, even to the silence at the end of Samson and Billy Budd.
Samuel Johnson also uses the subtle qualities of words to notice what is going on in social life. He shows in his dictionary that technical words are straightforward and that older words are adapted to new situations. Johnson was a poor dramatist in that he could not create plots that engaged action and surprise. “Rasselas” is a set of opposing factions. But he is aware of how new words can be associated with changing social mores as when wives should be picked for being companionable rather than wealthy because you will be spending so much time with them, perhaps because the model of marriage is not aristocratic, which means each one, before the modern age, having other courtiers and handmaidens to deal with while bourgeois marriage means a couple spends a good time alone together in their abodes.
Painting also has resources whereby to recast reality. John Singer Sargent is inventive in that he portrays not just a face where the dresses and posture are subdued or irrelevant to the person portrayed. To the contrary, he shows his subjects in full regalia as expressions of who they are. That means the finery they display enhances and elaborates their character, their body shapes accompanying rather than contrasting the entire assemblage. Mrs. George Swinton is heavyset even if she is elegant and pretty, her full cheeks accompanied by an ample bosom covered in a nicely designed bodice to flatter her shape. She wears a sash across her bodice, as if it were a military decoration, as if she had earned an award such as a tiara for becoming Miss America.. Not just her face requires attendance, as would seem to be the case of people seen in real life, and so the way a subject is portrayed tells what people really are.
A more elusive quality of literature applies to real life is pace. Some soldiers move slowly, like a Chekhov play of move very quickly, like a Dickens novel, however long it might be, because it is so chock full of incident, and some literature changes its pace, as when the events in Austen’s “Mansfield Park” move at great neck speed as it moves to its conclusion as the entire family seems to fall apart towards the end. Similarly, politics during Theodore Roosevelt’s era, what with its boaters and button jackets, seem leisurely however much TR was becoming an international power and dealing with the burgeoning of the cities. Also, there is in literature changes of pace, so that a dramatic event intrudes and is expected to intrude into a seemingly placid situation, and so the viewer of the news reports expects that something will come up that amounts to breaking news, like Pearl Harbor or the advent of the Trump presidency even if the events to that have been building, such as the protracted negotiations between the United States and Japan on surplus steel and the rise of the Populist right all the way back to Newt Gingrich and Pat Buchanan. Something is going to happen, some bubble will burst but we don’t know it will happen and the drama of it is that it always seems like a surprise. An historical event is like a performance or dramatic event in that it is like a break in billiards where one or another of the balls are cartoons so that each of them are dispatched into a patch and that happens all over again, not knowing which will be dispatched first except as a guess or a judgment, or like a ballet where a separated grouping turns around and rejoins its separated group, but the drama of politics, these distinct characters and related but distinct situations, occurring without a playwright but in the nature of thighs, full of surprises as well as echoes, as when Macbeth learns that his antagonist is not born of normal kind and so can fulfil his destiny.
Think of Watergate which a few days afterwards was regarded by the White House as “as third rate burglary”, but which I thought at the time and therefore many other people thought could result in impeachment even though that had happened only one time a hundred years before. Something impeded but it could have quickly died if Judge Sirica hadn’t insisted that the burglars who had White House identification didn’t come clean or else have the book thrown at them, and so they did. Or the lucky appointment to the Watergate Committee of Sam Erwin, the “country lawyer” as the Democratic head of the committee and Howard Baker, a no nonsense upstanding Republican Nixon supporter as the lead Republican on the committee which in the course of deliberations found that Alexander Butterfield revealed that Nixon had taped Oval Office discussions and so what was said was not left to a he said-she said controversy. And then, Nixon on the defensive, matters crowding close around him, offering to let Strom Thurman look at the tapes and see if there was anything incriminating about them, and then Nixon leaving on the helicopter with a gesture of defiance or maybe accepting his fate as being a humiliated President and then in his remaining years writing books about foreign policy to rehabilitate himself as a statesman.
Then think of the Vietnam War, prophesied in the failure of the French to triumph over General Giap during Dien Bien Phu and then the refusal by Eisenhower to allow for the proposed election throughout the country because the Communists would have won and then Madame Nu insisting the chickens would come home to roost after the assassination of her husband which happened a year later when Kennedy was assassinated, and then the debates, like a Greek chorus about why Vietnam was a misguided war that might turn to grief but used by an incident in the sea to get the Bay of Tonkin Resolution passed and Sen William Fulbright declining to be Secretary of State and an opponent of the Vietnam War but only as a chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee because he had signed hearts before to the Southern Manifesto whose slogan was “Segregation Now and Forever” because he could not effectively deal with African leaders, and a President who thought that negotiating with Ho Chi Minh was like negotiating with Walter Reuther: you could always make a deal. Oh, real plots are so intricate, intertwining the coincidental with the fated!
Similarly, there is no telling how Trump’s second term will end, with lawsuits over people being fired and agencies dismantled or opposition by Congressional Republicans over tariffs and stock market declines or a midterm election for any number of reasons, those counterforces racing against the President and his people to dismantle the American government and change it irrevocably. Just like tragedy, where everything is inevitable or fated while every person makes their own decisions, like Macbeth, over and over again.
A second object of literary criticism is to be fiercely objective about literature, a topic the responses to which are considered subjective or matters of opinion because literature engages the emotions, is culturally biased and is a matter of taste, which means a fancy rather than a truth. Objectivity is regarded as a quality of science in that people are indifferent to the particulars, not having a fancy for helium or radium, though Primo Levi, who was a chemist, had a differential fondness with some elements weather than other ones, and physicists claim they have a feel for how forces will bounce, as if they had a will. But clearly, it seems, that the first call of literary criticism, which means newspaper reviewing, is to judge what books and plays are good and bad, what ones worth it because the objects are entertaining or horror evoking if that is to your taste, rather than an assessment of what the book or performance is really saying orf accomplishing never mind the pleasantries, so as to gain the vicarious experience of its time and theme for what it is worth as part of the culture whereby people can become wise and broadened rather than limited to their own inevitably narrow personal lives.
The object of literary criticism is to as fully as possible appreciate the piece subject to analysis and not at all possible to read the piece in accord with what you would like it to say. So criticism, as that is applied to art or film or philosophical discourse, is an attempt at objectivity about matters that are contentious and emotionally inflected. A critic notices that “Triumph of the Will” finds its appeal in looking at healthy and handsome bodies organized with purposefulness and good order and discipline; however appalling may be the goals of National Socialism. It is, however, very easy to fall off the wagon of objectivity. It may be that there are alternative valid interpretations of a text but it is also the case that there can also be multiple incorrect explanations and so much of criticism is ridding texts of the clutter of mistaken interpretations. I attended an after performance discussion of the actors who participated in Shakespeare’s “Measure For Measure”. An actress who very well embodied her role, conveying considerable emotion and nuance, observed that she could not understand how, at the end of the play, the nun married the Duke. That seemed like a forced marriage. I was not so rude as to chime in as a critic and note that it would not have been a bad deal to marry a comfortable husband. Not all nuns were devout but arrangements of convenience. Moreover, Shakespearean comedies always wind up with couples marrying one another off. That is one of the pleasures of comedy and still holds true to that genre of literature. The three nerds in “The Big Bang Theory” find their spouses and some have children. That is satisfying as an ending.So history and the nature of genres rescue texts from being seen through the lens of the present.
It would seem that Conservatism as a point of view would not be so foreign to Liberals that they would be misunderstood so as to make them compatible with their own point of view, but the two major points of view these days have a great deal of understanding how the other side is even comprehensible much less plausible. A bit ago, AOC said that everyone must agree to provide the poor with their wherewithal, and Chip Roy said in response that he was perfectly willing to cut those benefits. The two cannot even acknowledge their differences.
The same is true with the stellar examples of Conservatism that I am offering. Dr. Johnson famously remarks that the poor should be allowed their gin so that it deters their suffering lives. This can be treated as an offering of a humane gesture to the poor but it is to neglect any attempt to alter the situation of the poor, either directly by controlling or outlawing gin, or by finding work for the poor. Dr. Johnson thought it utopian, a bad thing, to try to significantly alter social structure. The poor will always be with us. A misreading so as to make a work palatable to contemporary taste occurs in Jane Austen’s“Mansfield Park” where Mr. Bertram is away from his estate so as to manage his Jamaican plantation. Liberal critics of Jane Austen try to find her to be in their camp. The plantations are taken to show he is a bad guy because he owned slaves. But that is not to be inferred from the book. It only shows the more important point that Mr. was not a lord and so did not have an inherited estate or no need to work, but that he had to earn considerable income to uphold his establishment and so a man of some perspicacity even though Fanny Price, his ward, schemed against his wishes. Also, recent scholarship reveals how John Singer Sargent was engaged in the Paris gay life, as if to suggest his feelings contrary to conventional life. But the plain fact is that the greatest accomplishments of Sargent are his portraits of grand ladies all dressed up to show off themselves and their spouses and parents, allowing their high condition to allow them to gleam and flourish and be treasures to all of us. Sargent only rarely finds beauties from outside their ranks. Class is necessary for such splendor, such a grand and rare thing it is.