Message and technique

Explaining why Madame Bovary was a scandal to French readers in 1857 but not to moderns, Kenneth Burke says that “we demand technique where they inclined to content themselves with ‘message.’ ”[1] In recent days, I have unexpectedly found myself in sympathy with Flaubert’s contemporary French readers. My strongest literary convictions have been unsettled by the evidence of Gordon Lish’s mucking with Raymond Carver’s fiction, even though Mark McGurl says in The Program Era that the “controversy surrounding Lish’s editorship” has been “considerably overblown.”[2]

I am not sure whether McGurl means that the extent of Lish’s mucking has been overblown or that the consequences for criticism are overblown, no matter how extensive Lish’s mucking. In either case, McGurl is wrong, I think. Lish’s revisions were deep and pervasive; they were sufficient, as I have argued, to damage or destroy several of Carver’s stories.

But the consequences for criticism are what really exercise me. What Lish’s mucking calls into question is the basic presupposition of literary analysis since the rise and flowering of the New Criticism—that is, the assumption that the literary text is an integer. Even deconstructionist criticism, which seeks to demonstrate the incoherence of a text, despite the author’s best efforts to submit it to his discipline, assumes that the published text, quoted against itself by them, has an integrity of intention: the incoherences they trumpet are not accidents of the publication process, but have been inserted into the text, on purpose, by an author who wants to reduce his work to a unified whole. An incoherence that results from the cross-purposes of author and editor does nothing whatever to establish or confirm the larger deconstructive claim that literary texts are unsuccessful attempts by a powerful ideology to subdue the inconvenient facts of the world.

For three generations, academic literary critics have been trained to handle the text as a woven tissue, which is all of a piece. Sometimes the assumption makes it possible for scholars to correct errors, as when J. V. Cunningham shows that Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress is not a “succession of images,” as T. S. Eliot would have it, but a logical syllogism; or when, later in the same essay, he restores Nashe’s original wording of a line in Summer’s Last Will and Testament, which Stephen Daedalus had misread in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with “trembling joy.”[3]

More often, though, the errors are taken as established fact, because literary critics are not taught to raise questions about the provenance and authority of the texts in their hands. Everything about their professional training and status encourages them to rush to interpretation. It makes no difference to them whether Raymond Carver’s stories, in the published form with which critics are familiar, are the record of Carver’s thinking or a joint product of Carver’s drafts and Lish’s revisions. The condition of the text does not alter their responsibility to interpret it, nor does it leave critics with no option but to adopt new methods. By definition, any doubts about the condition of the text are considerably overblown.

Even when they believe themselves to be discussing a text’s meaning, then, literary critics are really examining technique, the evidence of its weaving (or its unraveling, if their allegiances are deconstructionist). Although McGurl argues that The Program Era succeeded and replaced “the Pound era” in American literature, and though he points to creative writing with its “prideful attention to ‘craft’ ” as the cause, the truth is that the demand for technique—that is, craft—is what links the program era to the Pound era. Hugh Kenner, whose 1971 magnum opus gave McGurl his name for the earlier era, wrote that modernist literary texts are “self-similar” or “scaling objects,” terms derived from Benoit Mandelbrot, the inventor of fractal geometry. That is, great texts are fractals—“works with something of interest to offer at varying scales of attention.” Their larger design is reproduced in their smallest details. The whole is implied in the parts.[4]

Here is the apotheosis of technique, the prideful attention to craft. But what if literary texts (or at least a significant number of them) are not self-similar tissues of self-consistent details, but something looser, more informal, perhaps even more extemporaneous? An endeavor not to design something, but to say something? What if a novel or even a poem is not a verbal icon, but a voluble discourse? What if the most important thing about a literary work, in short, is not its technique, but its message?

At a stroke, textual errors become of deeper concern, because the problem is to make certain that you are getting the author’s message straight. At the same time, however, it becomes less pressing to settle upon an authoritative text, reflecting the author’s ultimate intention, because it is no longer the perfection of technique, the scaling of design, that is at issue—but what the author is trying to say.

The controversy over Carver’s stories has begun to convince me that literary criticism took a wrong turn some time ago, and needs to start paying less attention to texts and more attention to authors, which would mean (among other things) listening to what they have to say.
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[1] Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement [1931] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 59–60.

[2] Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 446n.

[3] J. V. Cunningham, “Logic and Lyric,” in The Collected Essays (Chicago: Swallow, 1976), pp. 162–79.

[4] Hugh Kenner, “Self-Similarity, Fractals, Cantos,” in Historical Fictions (San Francisco: North Point, 1990), pp. 317–27.