the minnesota review n.s. 48-49 (1998)David GormanAvoiding Criticism(on H. Aram Veeser, ed., Confessions of the Critics [New York: Routledge, 1996])Marianne Hirsch had her first period when she and her family lived in Vienna; Marjorie Garber and her lesbian partner have a place on Nantucket, where they frequent auctions; Gayatri Spivak's mother gets annoyed at her daughter's relentlessly metaphysical way of expressing herself; Candace Lang, meanwhile, has very mixed feelings about both her parents, and had her first graduate seminar with Derrida; Diane Freedman suffers from depression, which runs in her family; Bruce Robbins's paternal grandfather (whose name was Rabinowitz) was not only a small-time gangster of some description, but a Socialist; Jane Tompkins's father died right in the middle of one semester; also, she is a vegetarian, and can sometimes be obnoxious about it. Do we need to know any of this? And, after reading Confessions of the Critics, can we say that we have learned anything pertinent to what literary critics and theorists aim to learn? As we will see, these are silly questions for those working in the mode on display in Confessions of the Critics, from which all the above factoids are taken. The volume editor, Aram Veeser, is known for his two previous collections, The New Historicism (1989) and The New Historicism Reader (1993). Rarely has someone seemed to be so much in the right place at the right time, since these anthologies have become the standard citations for the most influential movement in recent literary criticism. Contemplating this new compilation of Veeser's from arm's length, one strongly suspects that he hopes to repeat the trick: catching a critical movement in its first formation and crystallizing it in a collection of writings. Whether he has managed to pull this off again here is too early to decide. But let us say that what in this volume is variously labelled Confessional Criticism, Personal Criticism, or the New Belletrism (among other things) does indeed represent an emerging tendency in the spectrum of current criticism, closely parallel to what was going on with the New Historicism, say a decade ago. Even granting this, however, one major difference jumps out immediately. The New Historicism, whatever its strengths or weaknesses, was motivated by issues involving substantive matters—such as the traditionally unquestioned privilege of text over context and literature over nonliterature, or the political position of critics and their discourse, or the constructed nature of categories previously assumed to be given by nature. Personal or Confessional Criticism, by contrast, is about styleand not much else, as we will see. Certainly Confessional Criticism is not about literature, to judge by the material in Veeser's collection. Nor is it about literary theory of any sort familiar to most critics: there are few discussions of critical principles, presuppositions, or methodology in the two dozen items in this anthology, and those that do occur (Gerald Graff's "Self-Interview" being a good example, and perhaps the most interesting) are confined to the first ten or so items. Most, in any case, feature the kind of personal observations or revelations canvassed above. In addition to tidbits like these, the theme of bursting into tears is pervasive (where is the academic Tom Hanks to yell, "There's no crying in criticism"?), though references to bodily functions are mercifully rare. I mention this because Jane Tompkins's announced intent to visit the bathroom in her 1987 essay "Me and My Shadow" is generally accepted as marking the birth of "Per. Crit." (or "Con. Crit."). Her status as inaugurator of the genre is confirmed in Confessions of the Critics by the placement of her contribution, "Let's Get Lost," at the conclusion of the volume in which, although she spares us any peeing, she does mention farting (270). Her audience expects no less. It might be objected that these bits of icky personal business make up only a very small proportion of the material included in the volume. However, such items of self-revelation, whether embarrassing or trivial (often both), are clearly the point of most of these essays, the bulk of which typically amount to so much build-up to what comes across as a punch line, in which the critic abandons all pretense of talking about the world exterior to himself or herself and lets us in on something intimateand the more sensational the better, as we know from tabloid talk shows (which only too clearly provide a model). Moreover, these confessional punch lines, however small the space they may take up in a given essay, are what distinguish it as an example of Personal Criticism. Without them, there might be nothing to distinguish the individual essayand there would certainly be nothing to constitute a general movement in criticism. But, even putting aside obfuscations about what this kind of work essentially involves, how is it supposed to be justified? The book, after all, is entitled "Confessions of the Critics"; and the movement is labelled "Personal" or "Confessional" (or some other kind of) Criticism. In what sense can material of this kind be characterized as contributing to a discipline or a field of research, which is what criticism has usually been thought to be? One virtue of Veeser's anthology is that it allows us to survey the standard apologias, and to think about them in various contexts. One justification for the confessional style would be that it belongs not to literary criticism but to cultural criticism: this would account for the aforementioned fact that there is virtually no commentary on literature in Confessions of the Critics. Indeed, on this line, that absence would be one of the book's strongest features. The idea here is that the most pressing task at hand in the humanities is not to renew our addresses yet again to a relatively small canon of "literary" writings, which have been unjustifiably singled out for special privilege and attention (and pretty much worn out in the process), but to confront various issues facing contemporary society and culture. The approach to criticism through personal experience is thus highly strategic, since our personal lives are undeniably conditioned-if not produced-by our society and culture. The problem with this line of response is not that it is false but that, taken as a rationale for a certain practice of discourse (say), it justifies almost anything. Here arises the endemic, oft-noted shortcoming of cultural criticism, which is that no one has been able to define it satisfactorily. Barring a few borderline disputes, there is general consensus as to what we mean by "literature," and most people in the humanities agree about what "literary criticism" is (though not, of course, about how to practice it); but because there is no consensus on the meaning of "culture," the de facto definition of the object of cultural criticism so far has simply been, whatever is not literature. What then should criticism of something so amorphous as the "personal" consist of? A second justification for Confessional Criticism is political, expressed in the tiresome mantra (repeated in many of the essays), "the personal is the political." The problem with this is not the introduction of politics that the slogan offers, but rather the mindlessness of this catchphrase. The general fault of clichés is that they provide excuses for thought-avoidance. The personal—however we define that—can be political, and vice versa; but note that, in addition to changing the verb, I have dropped the second definite article, the use of which encourages the vain assumption that the sphere of personal affairs simply coincides with that of political affairs. It does not. So to reveal details about one's personal life, gross or merely prosaic as they may be, and to suppose that in doing so one has struck some sort of political blow is as absurd and self-serving as the assumption frequently displayed in the heyday of deconstruction, that there was something terribly political in itself about what Paul de Man called a "rhetorical" reading of a work by Dickens, Dickinson, or whomever. Critics of the confessional stripe must unlearn the same fallacy that deprived the left-deconstructors of their credibility. (I propose to christen it the Fallacy of Misplaced Politics.) These are not the only kinds of rationale offered for the value or interest of Confessional Criticism. Two others are put forward regularly—they surface repeatedly in Veeser's collection, for instance—and both appeal to the notion of expression. To begin with, there is the value of self-expression. A standard objection to this kind of criticism is that it is merely self-indulgent. In a note to his contribution, which attempts to sketch a social background for what its subtitle calls "The Culture of Autobiographical Criticism," David Simpson cites Tompkins's comeback to this objection: "Self-indulgence is the charge made by people who are afraid of their own selves" (93; n. 8). And while it is hard to fault Simpson's response—"Personally I think it important to remain afraid of myself" (94)—there remains more to the problem with this defense than that. It is not just that a subjective approach to criticism, or any other kind of intellectual activity, involves overrating some aspect of the individual critic's personality. That was the objection mounted by the newly-academicized critics at the beginning of the century to what must henceforth be called, I guess, the Old Belletrism, exemplified by Walter Pater. But this critique now seems misguided: an essay by a critic like Pater enables us to perceive a literary work in a fresh way—that is, precisely, as refracted through the Paterian sensibility. Thus there is a point to its subjectivity: it contributes to our knowledge (I mean our knowledge of something other than Pater). And here lies the problem with the rampant subjectivism of Confessional Criticism: what is its purpose, beyond trying to give us a vivid sense of the critic writing it? The self is not enough; and foregrounded in the self-celebratory, in-your-face style of the New Belletrism, it blocks our attention to anything else (as both Simpson, at the end of his essay, and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, in her outstanding contribution, emphasize). The Confessional Critics have a response ready, however. This fourth line of justification, which also draws upon the notion of expression, constitutes a kind of trump card for these critics. The real issue, they want to contend, is the sorry state of contemporary critical writing. In a period of wild overproduction of critical discourse, and of the predominance of standardized schools and modes of criticism, no one who reads much of this stuff can avoid the sense that current criticism has become flat, stale, and unprofitably routinized. The real value and significance of Confessional Criticism, its practitioners claim (explicitly or not), is that it offers us a way to reinvigorate critical writing by personalizing it. There is much talk about this sort of discourse as "performance," and about the capacity that personal critics are realizing to "stage" said performances (for a summary, see Veeser's disarmingly ironic Introduction). The most revealing piece in Confessions of the Critics is the collective interview with Cathy Davidson, Alice Kaplan, Jane Tompkins (who thus figures twice in the collection), and Mariana Torgovnick, whose writing group at Duke University has been a major production center for Personal Criticism. What comes out in the interview is that they think of what they are doing primarily as a new way of writing rather than, say, as a mode of political intervention, or—God forbid—a contribution to scholarship: the kind of thing that her participation in the group made Tompkins realize, referring to West of Everything, that "I really don't have to make it look like other books" (161). Later in the interview the group arrives at a consensus that what they do could best be called, not personal or confessional criticism but "creative criticism or writerly criticism" (170). There it is in a nutshell: any conception of critical discourse as offering a contribution to knowledge has now gone out the window, replaced by the idea that the style is the critic. But even accepting this line unreflectively, let us return to the sound-bites collected in the first paragraph above and ask ourselves now, not whether any of them is informative, but whether any of them is interesting. That after all is the ultimate claim of Personal—excuse me, Creative—Criticism. The established styles of academic writing in the humanities are boring, played-out, moribund; there is an urgent need for a new style, and confessional/writerly criticism fulfills it. But if, in order to justify what you do, you claim that it is more interesting than what is done otherwise, then it had better be interesting. And certainly it creates a perceptible jolt to read about such things as a critic's family relationships, health problems, or (yes) bodily functions. But all this—whether moving, disastrous, or funny—is simply the stuff of ordinary life. We do not expect people engaged in an academic discipline like criticism to write about them, so that it surprises us when they do. But the surprise, being based entirely on the departure from an established norm, wears off quickly, and after we have read a few examples of it, Personal Criticism becomes as predictable as any other style of academic discourse. There is a reason why we do not expect critics to write about embarrassing and/or trivial personal details, which is that they are so banal. Everyone has to pee and fart, and no larger purpose is served in reminding us of this (larger, I mean, than the purpose of getting a quick rise out of us). I would say that the commonplaces of ordinary life being placed so emphatically on display in Confessions of the Critics are the opposite of interesting—except, precisely, to these authors personally. If there were anything more to Confessional Critical writing than self-exposure masquerading as "transgression" of disciplinary codes, the result might be interesting; but, to judge by most of the work collected by Veeser, all there is to Personal Criticism is this routinized stylistic device. Though there remains no convincing justification for Personal Criticism, there is certainly plenty of motivation for it, as some of the more reflective contributions to this volume attest. There are self-serving, self-deceiving, and (let me say it) self-indulgent motives in evidence in a number of the essays in the volume. This is at worst an incidental problem, since—as pointed out more than once here—the most apparently impersonal criticism can evince just as strongly a need to shock or otherwise gain attention. Then again, there is a pervasive dissatisfaction with critical writing as it is currently practiced. And no one who plows through current issues of many critical journals, for example, can really disagree with this. Certainly, we could really use a new belletrism: it is just that Confessional Criticism is not it. Fox-Genovese makes a very illuminating point about Tompkins, now the paradigmatic Confessional Critic but previously an advocate of Reader-Response Criticism: the fomer is in effect the "logical conclusion" of the latter, with its emphasis on personal reaction (69). Perhaps the best diagnosis of the roots of the impulse to criticize confessionally is presented in Gillian Brown's essay "Critical Personifications," which explains it as a consequence of the current obsession with positionality in the humanities. Critics have recently become fixated on the idea that all inquiry, and all discourse is carried on from some time-and-circumstance-bound locale, and from this truism they have inferred (falsely) that any claim that we make to knowledge or some other kind of intellectual authority must be contingent, parochial, and generally inadequate. Leaving aside the falsehood of this conclusion, it certainly accounts for the most insistent quality of this kind of writing, which is its monomaniacal delineation of the position and identity of the writer. I mean that—to judge by this collection, at any rate—if you want to practice Personal Criticism, then you must not omit to spotlight any regional, ethnic, political, or other kind of peculiarity or marginality about yourself or your family, no matter how slender or remote. A skeptic might note that, while I have complained that no literary criticism is going on in writings of the type collected in Veeser's anthology, I continue to refer to its contributors as critics, and to use labels like Confessional Criticism. But this inconsistency—one among several others (see Simpson)—is built into the discourse. A case in point is one of the best pieces in Confessions of the Critics, "Laos Is Open," Stephen Greenblatt's engaging travelogue of a vacation that he took with his family in one of the most unlikely, godforsaken places on Earth, the Laotian capital of Vientiane. This is not Greenblatt's first excursion into travel writing—I look forward eagerly to his account of the family's ski trip to North Korea—and anyone reading this, or similar pieces by him, would agree that it is very well done. But again the question is, why are we reading it here? One thing to note is that this essay is more than travel writing, or rather that it would not be as good if Greenblatt did not utilize the travelogue format to remind us that it is no accident that Laos is the godforsaken place it is, and that the discomforts it holds for contemporary American tourists has everything to do with its encounter with the last round of American visitors to Southeast Asia, who passed through in B-52s. Here then is a too-rare example of a piece of personal writing that actually carries a real political edge. But the fact remains that "Laos Is Open" would not be a significant, indeed prestigious component of this volume had Greenblatt not also written influentially about, you know, Shakespeare. Confessional Criticism is only criticism in a parasitic sort of way: it consists of the confessional, autobiographical, or otherwise personal reflections of writers who also happen to be critics in the traditional sense, which, far from being challenged by this style of activity—and style, again, is all that it amounts to—is in fact its effective basis. Let me make it clear that I have nothing against the use of first-person pronouns in critical discourse. In particular, I am open to the autobiographical impulse in criticism. This impulse, it seems to me, has at least two legitimate avenues of expression. One is straight academic autobiography, lately typified by James Phelan's Beyond the Tenure Track. This kind of work, which is intended to convey to nonacademics a sense of how academic life feels or looks from the inside, is fully legitimate. Anyone outside the profession—and, recently, a lot of us inside—may want a sense of what we do (or anyway what we think we do), and autobiography is an efficient and attractive way to present this. A second kind of autobiographical writing, that we find far too little of in any academic discipline, is the intellectual autobiography. Because advanced research is such an idiosyncratic affair, because there is no set method that one can follow to obtain significant results (except, as T. S. Eliot said, to be very intelligent), we need as many accounts as possible of how successful intellectuals developed their projects and pursued them. The fact that I cannot think of an outstanding recent example of intellectual autobiography in the humanities is a reason why I think that writing of this kind should only be welcomed. Nothing, however, in Confessions of the Critics pertains to the growth of inquiry. Someone less unsympathetic than I am to Confessional Criticism may want to take issue with the contrast that I have repeatedly drawn between two kinds of knowledge—the kind of information conveyed in the examples of autobiographical writing that make up most of Veeser's anthology on the one hand, and what I have variously called learning, scholarship, research, or inquiry. What is the nature, what is the basis, an objector might ask, for my distinction? To this I can only reply that nothing heavily epistemological is involved. Consider tabloid talk shows once again—the seemingly endless stream of geeks who routinely reveal to Montel, Jenny, Sally, and anyone else watching, that they have abused substances, broken the law, committed sexual indiscretions, or whatever, routinely justifying doing this in pseudo-medical terms: they have all learned the discourse of illness, trauma, and therapy. But does their psychobabble constitute anything like knowledge, medical or otherwise? No. And no more do essays in the Personal mode of criticism contribute to anyone's knowledge, except in the trivial sense that I did not know, for example, that Garber lives on Nantucket part of the year (for that matter I did know that all the contributors urinate regularly, and cry from time to time). Again, we do not have to agree at all as to what kind of knowledge should be expected from critical writing—or from medical discourse—to grasp the point that, whatever it is, it should not be trivial. I cannot resist mentioning a passage taken slightly out of context, from near the end of the anthology, from (inevitably) Tompkins's essay. In it she tells the story of an experimental course that she taught called "American Literature Unbound." One of the many unconventional things about the course was that, rather than simply assigning grades, Tompkins arranged for the participants in the course—both she and her students—to finish it with a collective self-evaluation. In her narrative, Tompkins recounts how taken aback she was by the fact that the student evaluations of what happened in the course were so much poorer than her own. "Another person might have taken it better," she writes, and "not been so sensitive. But the students had unknowingly found me out. Criticism was what I'd been trying to avoid all along, criticism of any kind—literary criticism, and criticism of myself as a teacher, my having to criticize them" (278). I have belabored the context a bit here to make it clear that Tompkins's point is different from the one that I want to make, but the passage is too perfectly symptomatic to leave unquoted. It summarizes the fundamental impulse of the personal in this kind of discourse, which is not to do criticism in some new or different way but to avoid doing anything like criticism at all. It is finally misleading to call contributions to collections like this the work of personal critics, or autobiographical critics, or writerly critics, or whatever descriptor may be picked. The only accurate label for people like Greenblatt writing about his travels in Laos or Tompkins writing about her experiences with her class is, surely, moonlighting critics. It is of course not forbidden for critics to moonlight; but in that case critics must be prepared to pay the price of not calling what they do "criticism." And that price is persuading anyone to take a continuing interest in, e.g., what they do on their summer vacations. What a great topic for bold new writing. Works Cited
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