The True Vocation of Criticism

The True Vocation of Criticism

A commentary to Bill Benzon's post "Beyond Close Reading", on naive and sophisticated criticism:

You seem to argue that in the case of "'rithmatics", i.e. sophisticated criticism like structuralism, semiotics, etc., criticism which examines the text so to speak in spite or in disregard of its own knowledge about itself, "the delight is in the ‘rithmatic, not the text one is examining through the ‘rithmatic. One must cut the cord and take responsibility for one’s delight." Someone said that we should not read criticism in order to increase our enjoyment of literature (although that may happen too), but rather the other way round: we read literature so that we can enjoy the higher intellectual pleasures of criticism, which understands literature in a way it does not understand itself. This is a rather Wildean paradox (the mistress as servant to the maid, or life of the intellect considered as the most active form of life), but while it may be alien to the views of the New Critics, it is much more akin to deconstructive views on the autonomous dynamics of criticism. As a matter of fact one might argue that the practice, if not the theory, of criticism has always worked on this assumption: that the literary text is only a means or excuse the critic uses to have us read his own text. According to Anatole France, critics (should) say "Gentlemen, I am going to speak about myself on the subject of Shakespeare, on the subject of Racine, or Pascal, or Goethe, who provide me with a beautiful opportunity". Criticism, not to mention theoretically inflected criticism, is always a change of subject.

We are mysterious to ourselves