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knowledge, when in fact the wonder and importance of his work begin
where such explanations of it end . Of course, some aspects of any piece
of writing
are
socially and politically conditioned; but to the extent that
it is a work of great art, it leaves these general determinants behind to
go beyond them. But that "beyond" is precisely where these analyses are
unable or unwilling to go.
The John Hopkins Guide
offers a truly inge–
nious series of attempts to account for literary events by means of imper–
sonal, systematic, theoretical, and cultural exp lanations, but what is
brought home to a reader over and over again is how the most interest–
ing aspects of each of the literary works and artists dealt with slip
through each successive interpretive net. The mystery, the eccentricity,
the distinctiveness, the slipperiness of individual consciousness elude the
sytematizations. That is why the cumulative effect of the volume is so
depressing and mind-numbing. Amid all of the clever acts of contextual–
ization, almost none of the articles comes within ten miles of what it
actually feels like to write or read a poem, a novel, a play, a story. You
have to put the book down and pick up a Wordsworth poem or a
James short story to remind yourself why literary criticism exists in the
first place. Reading and writing are far more complex and mysterious
events than these theorists dream.
What is lost sight of is that literature is essentially a different way of
knowing from the forms of knowing that philosophy, history, sociology,
and cultural studies offer. Indeed, it might be argued that literature
figures what will
110t
be known in those ways. Sociological, historical,
and philosophical knowledge is direct, clear, and abstract. It offers
general truths and insights independent of personal points of view,
sensory particularities, and emotional inflections. Literary knowledge, in
contrast, is not final or ultimate, but emergent and shifting -
continuously adj usted and revised. It bristles wi th prickly sensory
particularity. It is anchored in particular spaces, times, and bodies. It is
humanized and bent by voice tones and emotional overtones. It exists
only in specific, local, unrepeatable forms: in the obliquities of particular
words and the convolutions of specific syntactic shapes.
In fact, it might be argued that literary knowledge is not knowledge
at all in the sociological, historical, or philosophical sense of the word -
but something more like experience (since reading a novel is more like
having an unusually complex and stimulating life experience than like en–
countering an argument in a sociology or philosophy text). While soci–
ology, history, and philosophy bring clear and definite ideas into exis–
tence, literature seems devoted to the cu ltivation of what might be
called unclear, uncertain, unresolved ideas. Literature frustrates the search
for simple or general forms of understanding. It destabilizes meanings.
