Writing for the Reader

what a pleasure it is, sharing this folio with my esteemed colleagues Ankhi Mukherjee and Elaine Scarry, and getting to think together about and with Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies. Within that field of inquiry, Kramnick’s is a vital book indeed, in the senses of both lively and necessary. Given how forcefully it insists on the importance of sustaining “the counterflow of ideas and practices from the young to the old,” I imagine Kramnick would agree that the book’s most vital respondents will ultimately be those emergent and future scholars for whose sake, principally, it aims to describe and celebrate and defend what we do as scholars of literature. But Criticism and Truth is also a clarion call to senior scholars to join in that work, and I am grateful for the chance to say what tones and timbres in that call have sounded most clearly to me, and to what work I hear them summoning us.

To my ear, one of the clearest and brightest notes is rung early on, in Kramnick’s claim that much of our knowledge in literary studies is “craft knowledge,” a knowing that which is garnered by means of knowing how. This includes how to fit our writing adeptly to the writing of others, how to channel the worldview and idiom of a literary text in analyzing it, and how to produce synopses that are at once accurate and partial to our reading. For me, Kramnick’s argument about craft knowledge crucially contests the notion that our writing is nothing more than the container we build to hold thinking that we have already done—in other words, that our writing is just a writing-up. (Eric Hayot also rejects this notion in The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities.)

To date, I have encountered the write-up theory of literary critical writing in two students’ attempts to explain why they submitted ChatGPT-authored papers as their own, the defense being that they had themselves done the important brainwork of coming up with a thesis statement, and had in effect just asked the AI to supply a prose box filled with prose packing peanuts. Many of my colleagues attempt to dissuade students from using AI by showing them the egregious hallucinations of which it is capable. But I think that acquainting them with Criticism and Truth’s craft-knowledge argument may be a more effective way of persuading them to drop the write-up theory of literary criticism. The following aphorism from the book might do the trick, not least because it incarnates its claim: “Anyone can come up with something interesting to say. Few can embody something interesting in practice.”

I realize that so far I have sounded as if I think I’m exempt from this bad theory of writing. I’m not, and I’m probably one of many experienced writers of literary criticism who are in the sway of a lower-intensity version of the same bad theory. It shows whenever we exhibit preciousness or anxiety about starting to write. At my keyboard I am a Muppet concert pianist, screwing the bench up, mopping his brow, adjusting the bench down, clearing his throat, scooting the bench forward, cracking his knuckles, walking off in a huff. Criticism and Truth has convinced me that what we call “close reading” is in fact a skilled way of writing in intimate contact and coordination with the writing of others. The crucial corollary to this is a powerful charm against writing avoidance: that until we begin writing, we have not yet begun to close read.

Kramnick’s claims about literary criticism as craft knowledge are advanced by way of a running analogy between the handmaking of criticism and the handmaking of physical artifacts, the first example of the latter type of object being furniture. The book’s introductory and only epigraph quotes the furniture maker and handcraft theorist David William Pye, from a passage in which he defines craftsmanship as a “workmanship of risk” insofar as “the quality of its result is not predetermined, but depends on the judgment, dexterity, and care which the maker exercises while he works.” Pye’s lines, with their emphasis on moment-to-moment skills that can never eliminate the possibility of error, offer a strong counter-model to the write-up theory of literary criticism. But they do not tell us much about the article of furniture’s relationship to its user or, by analogy, about the critical article’s relationship to its reader.

Because Elaine Scarry is a fellow contributor, I cannot resist drawing on her inexhaustible book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World to delve a bit farther into this question of the artifact, in part because it will help me to consider what kind of critical artifact we have in Criticism and Truth. In Scarry’s chapter “The Interior Structure of the Artifact,” she posits that the intention of all human making is “to distribute the facts of sentience outward onto the created realm of artifice”; only by doing this is the human maker “relieved of the privacy and problems of that sentience.” Of course, an artifact made by a human can possess neither the aliveness nor the sentience of its maker. What an artifact does possess, according to this passage, is the capacity to materialize its maker’s awareness of another person’s pain as well as the same maker’s wish to remove that pain. An artifact such as a chair is a kind of repository of sentience, a mimesis of its maker’s perception and counterfactual wish. If the dual event of perceiving a body suffering for lack of a chair and wishing things otherwise were to have a shape, Scarry writes, the shape of that “percipient event . . . would be the shape of a chair.” And she continues, wonderfully: “The shape of the chair is not the shape of the skeleton, the shape of body weight, nor even the shape of pain-perceived, but the shape of perceived-pain-wished-gone.”