Back page
Irreducibility and criticism
An unusually frank excerpt from Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (Picador Vol. I, 1979, pp. 300–301; trans. Wilkins and Kaiser):
The translation of the word ‘essay’ as ‘attempt’, which is the generally accepted one, only approximately gives the most important allusion to the literary model. For an essay is not the provisional or incidental expression elevated to the status of truth or that might just as easily be recognised as an error (of that kind are only the articles and treatises, referred to as ‘chips from the their workshop’, with which learned persons favour us); an essay is the unique and unalterable form that a man’s inner life assumes in a decisive thought. Nothing is more alien to it than that irresponsibility and semifinishedness of mental images known as subjectivity; but neither are ‘true’ and ‘false’, ‘wise’ and ‘unwise’, terms that can be applied to such thoughts, which are nevertheless subject to laws that are no less strict than they appear to be delicate and ineffable. There have been quite a number of such essayists and masters of the floating life within, but there would be no point in naming them. Their domain lies between religion and knowledge, between example and doctrine, between amor intellectualis and poetry, they are saints with and without religion, and sometimes too they are simply men who have gone out on an adventure and lost their way.
Nothing, incidentally, is more typical than one’s involuntary experience of learned and rational attempts to provide a commentary on such great essayists, to transform the living wisdom, even as it is, into a theory of life, and so to extract some ‘content’ from the motion of those who were moved: what is left over is about as much as remains of a jelly-fish’s delicately opalescent body after it has been lifted out of the water and laid on the sand. The teachings of the inspired crumble into dust in the rationality of the uninspired, crumble into contradiction and nonsense; and yet one cannot actually call them delicate and of unstable vitality, for in that case one would have to call an elephant delicate because it cannot survive in a vacuum, an environment that does not answer its vital needs.
The last part of this — the poor elephant — recalls Frost’s “poetry is what is lost in translation”. It’s a compelling synecdoche. The conflation, either Musil’s or Frost’s, of an ineffable quality with its entire parent artform, has an aphoristic air that is effective because it seems both plausible and paradoxical, which is a seductive combination, and has ineffable in a position of determination, which makes it difficult to pin down, let alone contradict.
By making the context or what might be said to be the internal operation of the poem into its definitive condition also threatens any distinction between form and content, and therefore discourages analysis, which it might be said, in taking its subject apart, obliterates the only vital part of it. (Whereas criticism that rejects analysis in favor of a more generalized reaction, or record of a response, risks becoming solipsistic. Criticism, then, falls somewhere between those extremes: either destroying the very essence of its subject by rough handling, or failing to ever actually get a hold of it.)
If we take art to be in this way to be effectively irreducible, and, if we adhere to a relatively pure aesthetic standard for criticism, we may encounter difficulty avoiding the conclusion that the whole operation is impossible. Whatever each of these critical modes — analytic or ‘impressionistic’ — produce, may still be interesting, but it won’t be criticism. T.S. Eliot has it that
‘Historical’ and ‘philosophical’ critics had better be called historians and philosophers quite simply,
but I suppose we could be worse off than having historians and philosophers quite simply.
Remarks: 5 of 5
Remark · Justin Mitchell · 27 June 2007
I only like solipsistic criticism. I don’t want anyone telling me how a work of art can be resolved into a hermeneutic circle. I prefer to hear about an individual’s encounter with the work. This, for me, is the difference between a Bill Pritchard and a Matthew Arnold. Have you ever read, for example, Pritchard’s essay on his discovery of Raymond Chandler? As you know, an assessment of a work has as much to do with what the reader/viewer brings to it as the work itself. It is this gap that criticism fills. Any criticism that purports to do otherwise is disingenuous. You fail to point out the advantages of this solipsism. It does, in fact, prevent one from trying to consciously “best” or reduce the work by making a bridge between the work and the uninitiated. It goes back to perspectivism (forgive me for resorting to modernist terminology): an object can be seen from many sides. Some sides, like critics, are better than others. But there is certainly no definitive side. Trying to escape this is futile. In pursuing the individual perspective you make something akin to the essay Musil describes—something irreducible and a work of art in its own right.
Remark · zbs · 27 June 2007
I don’t point out the advantages of ‘solipsistic’ criticism; but I also do not say anything advancing analytic criticism. What I meant to bring up – and as usual managed to convolute beyond comprehension – is the question of whether analytic criticism is even possible, given you are sympathetic to these claims about the ineffable.
Personally I have become wary of signing over entirely to solipsistic criticism. If it is purely solipsistic, then it isn’t taking a side on the work at all, and would then seem to not be criticism at all, and best called something else. And I agree with you about this perspective dissuading plot-summary or the understanding of criticism as a digestive aid; and also about the lack of the ‘definitive side’, which was a point, it seems to be, settled pretty well by Formalists and repackaged for mass-distribution by Poststructuralists.
Remark · Justin Mitchell · 29 June 2007
Possible how? Possible without doing the subject “noisy harm,” as one critic says, or possible in the sense that one may assess the qualities of an object that may or may not exist apart from the mind that encounters it? This is a trick question.
Remark · zbs · 29 June 2007
Yeah it becomes clear that if the important thing is intangible, you wouldn’t seem to be able to take it apart very well. But I bet we could number several prominent analytic-types who seem to agree at intervals with this sentiment.
Remark · zbs · 29 June 2007
‘This sentiment’ being the gist of the Frost / Musil claim.