The Way We Read and Write Now: The Rhetoric of Experience in Victorian Literature and Contemporary Criticism

Abstract

The Way We Read and Write Now: The Rhetoric of Experience in Victorian Literature and Contemporary Criticism Timothy Peltason The subtitle of this essay may seem contentiously unfashionable, especially if I go on to specify that it is the experience of individual persons that I have in view, taken as both the chief vehicle of demonstration and persuasion in the major writers of Victorian prose, and as the most attractive and appropriate object of contemporary critical attention. The persons in question might be those of fictional characters, or of the author, the narrator, or the reader, but in any or all of these events, the criticism that I am seeking to practice and to recommend—and to trace in its development through a series of Victorian writers—will be interested in complex characterizations of the experiences both witnessed and offered by written texts, characterizations which can hardly be complete without some language of evaluation. And such accounts of literary experience will thus participate in several forms of discourse currently under suspicion, not least by believing that literary experience is a distinctive and valuable kind, and furthermore that the kinds of attention-paying and judgment-making often associated with the New Criticism in America and with the practical criticism of I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis in England (and now thought to be outmoded) are, in fact, essential to any critical practice. In addition, such a criticism will speak readily of subjects, selves, and individuals, though without claiming (as who ever did?) that these subjects are autonomous or uncompromised by their relations with social and historical forces; and such a criticism will make judgments of success and failure in execution, not in order to establish or protect a canon, or to distinguish high art from low, or to rid the field of pretenders, but simply as an inevitable component of the business of description and analysis. To call for such a criticism will doubtless strike many readers as conservative, indeed as reactionary, quite literally, to the tendencies of contemporary academic writing. Such reactions are everywhere, characterized too often by a reflexive hostility to newfangledness, motivated too often by political and cultural resentments, striking too often the note of proud loneliness or nostalgic defeatism. But there is increasing critical action, as well as reaction, being taken on behalf of critical interests neither radical nor reactionary, but liberal and progressive— [End Page 985] open to the appeal of new texts and topics as well as old, but struck, nevertheless, by the uncritical ease with which an entire critical vocabulary has been abandoned. 1 Everybody knows, it seems, that they can’t talk anymore about subjects, individuals, or experiences, or appraise the rationality of arguments or the accuracy of descriptions or the literary value of texts, without participating in a guilty and discredited enterprise. But not everybody is so sure just when this discrediting took place, or whether the descriptions and arguments that underlay and enacted it were accurate and rational. At the same time, and with strangely little in the way of explicit or explanatory analysis of the apparent contradiction, some of the most engaged and influential of academic critics have rediscovered Oscar Wilde’s dictum that criticism “is the record of one’s soul . . . the only civilized form of autobiography.” 2 In much New Historicist writing, and even more clearly in recent feminist and gender studies and in the burgeoning field of queer theory, it is evident how unready we are culturally to abandon the human as a category—this in spite of the Foucauldian inspiration of much of this criticism. Anecdotes and human particulars abound, but the critical language with which we once assessed and appraised such writings has fallen into disrepair. While critics of all persuasions continue regularly to argue from their experiences and to make judgments of accuracy, rationality, and literary interest, these judgments and arguments tend to be confined to prefaces or asides, disguised as premisses or presumptions, or apologized for with a rhetorical maneuver that claims, in essence, “I know that what I’m doing may look like a relapse into liberal individualism (or enlightenment rationalism, or humanism), but I’m a credentialed avant-gardist, well...