Theory and the Life of the Critic

Abstract

Theory and the Life of the Critic H. Aram Veeser (bio) Are critics' lives relevant to their criticism? Over time, the answers to this question have veered back and forth, from far left to far right, from alpha to omega. Of course they are, say the phenomenologists. Nietzsche thought that every philosophy was the biography of its author. Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty felt that the whole purpose of thinking was to get an understanding of lived experience. Heidegger was like them an existentialist, but he thought it was enough to note that a thinker had been born, lived, and died. The so-called New Critics in North America wanted to keep their aesthetics pure, and they totally ruled out authors' biographies and intentions. Their formalism had no place for the messy aspects of experience including politics, the body, gender, disability, race, or society, although that did not stop them from getting personal in their own writings. The pendulum swung back with a later crop of literary theorists. Paul de Man, Fredric Jameson, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Walter Benn Michaels have kept the visceral and passionate topics at arm's length because they feel that language, images, and media of all kinds block any attempt directly to address human experience. Paul de Man, for one, tried to get at the deeper in meaning in Rousseau, but, as he put it in Allegories of Reading (1979), I "found myself unable to progress beyond local difficulties of interpretation. I had to shift to the problematic of reading." Problematics of reading occur when language obstructs its own efforts to make logical, straightforward claims. In de Man's extreme formulation, every piece of writing boils down to a figure—a logical proposition or argument—and then the undoing, the self-unravelling of that argument. No matter how brilliant the writer, and Rousseau was brilliant, the ambiguities and antitheses within words and syntax subvert, harass, and defeat every effort to state a meaning. So the current generation never gets out of the representational woods. This failure is a harsh disappointment to readers who long for the passionate engagements that they enjoyed in the old school existentialists. Writers such as Sartre and Camus wrestled with the essential questions. "They remained in touch with the density of life," writes the author of a recent group biography, At the Existentialist Café (2016). "They asked the important questions. Give me that any day." The times were different. Heidegger's and Sartre's and Beauvoir's world produced films like Rebel without a Cause (1955) and À bout de souffle (1960), books like Catcher in the Rye (1951) and A Thief 's Journal (1964). Even the existentialist Heidegger, for all his Nazism and gloom, paints a picture of more inviting world than do Paul de Man or Walter Benn Michaels. Heidegger's most famous image is a beautiful and lyrical scene: the conscious human being is a clearing in the dense canopy of trees. Many still pine for that distant clearing where thinkers could wrestle with meaning and decision. But the time is gone forever. By contrast, no such naturally occurring break in the gloom is imaginable to contemporary critics; instead, the Big Questions of Life's Meaning strike us as woefully sophomoric and sentimental. Critics distrust grand statements because of the statement part: the expressive medium with its intricate, deceptive, self-undermining treasons. Those stirring debates over freedom, purpose, and identity have to be placed indefinitely on hold, at least until we can straighten out this business of representation. In contrast to the self-tormented world of Holden Caulfield and Jack Kerouac, contemporary critics such as Bhabha, Dimock, Fish, Gallop, Garber, Graff, Michaels, Mailloux, Mitchell, and Ken Warren emerged from and within the post-human world of Taxi Driver (1976), Apocalypse Now (1979), Blade Runner (1982), and American Psycho (1991). They doubted the validity of heartfelt appeals to "the human"; we laughed at terms such as "the subject of history," this phrase employed by Marxist Georg Lukács, with its embarrassingly intoxicated, romantic idealism and its laughably inaccurate naming of the working class. Human "subjects" are, after all, nothing more than legal fictions, conveniences invented by [End Page...