Is There Meta-Criticism?Note

0. Although most of us would be reluctant to answer the very old question, “What is literature?”, there is seems to be a general agreement in the more recent question, “What is criticism?”, at least as far as the faint outlines of the answer are concerned. Criticism, one could argue, is writing about literature. Criticism is a text on a text, or, more specifically, literary criticism is a text on a literary text. Criticism (literary criticism) is commonly regarded as writing about a specific literary work, whereas meta-criticism as writing about criticism proper. However, there must be made several qualifications before we go on and try to challenge this formulation. My aim here is not to reply either question but rather to reflect on their nature.

1. First, let me reflect on their historical dimension. Is this latter question (What is criticism?) really much younger than the former one? Can we simply say that literature is something very old, and, therefore, the question concerning its nature, its definition, its differentia specifica is a very old one, whereas criticism, on the other hand, is only the development of the last centuries, it dates back perhaps to the Age of Enlightenment, when the institute of criticism in the sense that we take it today began to take shape? Is this description correct? We can challenge perhaps both horns of this argument. What if we say that literature itself is a moving and changing category, not less than criticism is? It can be supposed that the question “What is literature?” has always changed its content, that the concept in its focus is not a permanent, perpetual, stable one. It is a commonplace that concepts of literature (and, hence, the scope of the question) have changed from time to time, from culture to culture, from region to region; the question is not at all the same question throughout the centuries. The question, then, in a somewhat analytical philosophical vein, should be reformulated as “When is literature?”, or “What counts as literature?” or “What do we see as literature?”

And if it is true, cannot we say the same thing about criticism? That is, it can be speculated that there always have been reflections on literary works of art (whatever they could have been), in the forms of commentaries, explanations, interpretations, rewritings, and so on. Literary works (even if they were not taken as literary works in the modern sense), have always been parts and parcels of discourses, learned or not, for they have been objects of reception, and, moreover, reception of a community. So if we suppose that the question, “What is criticism?” was formulated only in the last centuries, when the institute of criticism was shaped, then we overlook the fact that texts about texts have always been there among those receiving those texts. Although this question does not seem to be that puzzling and hopeless as the question “What is literature?”, it is similar to that one inasmuch as it is not at all clear what the concept it would wish to inquire into is. Still, it is clear that whatever people was to say about literary works was not called criticism proper for a long time; and also that interpretation was not regarded as a problem. In those happier ages when interpretation had its tacit rules, its constant laws and unquestionable practice, there was no need to ask what it really was. Criticism emerges in an age when interpretation is not clear, evident and obvious any more; so to speak, when it does not go without saying any more. There must be something said about what goes on: there must be a reflection on the critical/interpretive activity; criticism must be born.

To sum up, criticism as a differentiated form of discourse must have been born after long centuries of speaking about texts: criticism then differs from those activities not only inasmuch as it now has a specific genre, it has specific contexts and institutions, but also inasmuch as it embodies the problematic nature of speaking about texts: it speaks (or, rather, writes) about speaking (or writing) about texts.

2. As a second point, I would like to reflect on the common view, of which hitherto I have made use, namely that criticism is a piece of text about another text. Now I would like to argue that although criticism as part of the literary process in fact has a traditional position of being about a literary text, it can never be exhausted by such an approach.

2. 1. My first argument here concerns the “referential” view of criticism. Writing about something, having something as a reference of a text is far from being enough to give a description of the writing (the text) itself. Just as no utterance can be described in terms of its “literal meaning” or in terms of its “reference”, for it always used in a specific context for a specific purpose, the “text about text” approach is too much restricted, narrow, and even misleading. Whenever we say that critical texts are about something (namely, a literary work), all we specify is its immediate referential context. However, a text will necessarily have other contexts: indirect, textual, paradigmatic etc. - that is, it is woven into the intricate network of other texts.

Examples (although not at all proofs) for my first argument could be the generic differences between critical texts. It is quite clear that a literary work can be the “subject” of several other texts: leaflet information, publisher’s advertisement, short notice in a daily newspaper, scholarly treatise in a theoretical journal, an essay in the literary magazine: can we possibly judge which of these refers better or more faithfully or more precisely to the subject in question? Is it possible to subsume all these texts under one and single heading on the grounds that they refer to one and the same thing? Some of these acts of reference can be valid (or can fulfill the felicity conditions) for some readers, in some contexts, in certain conditions, just as, in Austin’s example, the sentence “France is hexagonal” may serve as a normal, even true statement - although it is, in several other respects, incomplete, false and unhappy, and having serious shortcomings as far as its reference is concerned. Act of reference, then - and I think one should prefer the term act of reference rather than reference - is a function of context and reception, and in some contexts and for some readers a text may count as a proper act of reference whereas in other contexts and for other readers it will not work that way. Thus, simply speaking of the reference of a text - as it were the property of that text - is, to say the least, misleading.

Another point to support my first argument against referential view of criticism is the textual character of criticism. A piece of literary criticism is not just a sign of something, it has a texture, a structure, it has a language, and so on; it is fabricated in a way or another, and it has a specific position vis-à-vis other texts, critical or other. We do not read a piece of literary criticism just for information; although it is not a literary work, we tend to assign to it at least some of the characteristics of literary works. A careful reading of criticism will discover motives, correspondences, parallelisms, interesting structures to the critical text; and, anyway, some critical texts are called better (or worse) written. A critical text may be itself an object of literary critical analysis - and, to be sure, it often has the manifested ambition to become one.

2. 2. My second argument against literary criticism as a text about a text is that a literary critical text is never just about a text; it necessarily embodies and implies values, judgments, norms, attitudes, presuppositions, etc. As soon as criticism implies value judgments (and it will necessarily do so, even if in a very implicit, hidden way), it will be about the state of the world, about the individual in that world, and the community surrounding that individual. A critic will always give account of how he sees the world and the literature within; of the ways of communication he is familiar with, of the conventions he prefers to read texts. As I said, interpretation is not a clear, evident and obvious act any more; criticism, then, will always have to refer to itself, it will be self-reflective, show the ways of its own operations, something will be said about what goes on. Criticism, therefore, is always its own meta-criticism.

2. 3. Furthermore, a critical text is inevitably intertextual: not only does it rely on another text (that is, the literary text, which is itself necessarily an intertextual phenomenon, a “reply” to several other texts, as Baxtin put it), but also on its own context and tradition of writing literary criticism. It is never just an expression of a solitary speaker: it is never alone. Let me just to list some of the elements of its contextual nature.

A critical text will always be read as a manifestation of a communal value system (of an interpretive community, of a specific group of people); if the point of the critical text is to persuade its reader or even at least to give an account of a personal, individual impression, the minimal goal is to form a community of two people, the reader and the writer. But in most cases the supposition is that there are far more than these two people in that community. In certain cases, the target community may even be the whole nation, that is, it is the shared illusion of both the critic and its audience that what they will represent is the very large community of a nation. In other cases, this will be the community of the learned intellectuals, the proponents of the modern writing, the conservatives, the female writers/readers, and so on; that is, forming and/or representing an interpretive community is inherent in every critical text.

Moreover, a critical text will always rely on the readers’ experience of other (and older) critical texts: a critical text has a generic tradition and a present generic context. Its intertextuality may even go far beyond the reference to the literary work in question; some ten years ago Michael Glowinski has wondered whether the intertextual nature of literary criticism will not overcome its metatextual nature, thus giving up its informative character. Sometimes it is an ambition of a literary text to reflect on several texts in the culture, to include and to put different texts, literary or other, in motion and in interplay; to give, in this way, a survey or a panorama of the context of the literary work in question, as well as to situate itself within the realm of texts.

Further, we will always know whenever we read a critical text because we went through a socialization process, and we have learned the rules and conventions of these texts. We know somewhat of the history of critical texts (even the lay do, at least they know that there is a certain genre called criticism), we compare it with other critical texts; just as in the case of literary works, there is no first encounter, a reading is never a first reading, and hence our interpretation is never really ours. Critical texts, then, are in the endless line of critical text, they are in the field of critical discourse, so that it cannot be received independent of their (historical) contexts.

These (and several other) aspects of the intertextual nature of literary texts imply that they will always transcend both their proper subject and their proper goal: they challenge and support their contextual situatedness, and reach far beyond themselves.

3. 1. I would suggest that there is a continuity of literary and critical texts: continuity not in the sense that some critical texts are more “literary” than others, and that there should be a gradual transition from the literary to the critical, but in the sense that the difference is not to be sought for within the structure or nature of the texts themselves. An imitation or a parody is a text relying on another text (or, if you wish, a text about another text); is, then, an imitation or a parody a critical text? And, further, great writers have always, as Bourdieu formulates it, surveyed the whole field of their culture, and created their works in respect to, relative to that field - is not that a sort of critical activity, a challenge or reaction to the texts around them? So should we call Dante or Cervantes critics? They certainly have taken into consideration the literary life of their age, they have referred to texts in their texts, expressed value judgments, and said something important about the nature of literature. Or cannot we read certain great critics as excellent writers of literature, offering us finely structured narratives, intricate metaphors, subtle intertextual allusions, expressions of the individual’s inner life? One could look for the metaphors of the critical text, the repetitions on different levels, the parallelisms and the chiastic or mirror structures; the rhythm of the sentences (length, punctuation, repetition of sentence structure); the position of the persona behind the text (singular or plural, apostrophe, whether it turns to the reader or not, etc.); we could look for the traces of certain genres in theoretical texts, starting from drama to lyrical poetry or narrative. And what about the reflections on literature and aesthetics by Flaubert in Bouvart et Pécuchet? Are Heidegger’s poems part of his philosophy, or are they just literary works? What about the poetic confessions of thousands of writers for thousands of years? And there is a genre tradition, that of the essay, which can traced back at least to the Romanticism or to Montaigne or perhaps even to Plato, that of the theory formed artistically; how should we classify the representatives of this tradition?

3. 2. The idea of continuity is a tempting and in a sense tenable vision of literary and critical writing. In practice, however, most cultures do make a difference between the literary and the critical, most readers will recognize literary or else critical texts. Even if we must encounter serious difficulties when we would wish to draw the theoretical boundaries, practice will always have them. I have to stress that the idea of continuity is not only a theoretical trick, it does illuminate several interesting characteristics of both literary and critical writing - however, we must give account of the everyday practice of differentiating between the two, that is, the discontinuity which seems to characterize our everyday practice. It is in clear in a number of cases (though not necessarily all of them) what counts as a literary text and what as a critical one. Usually, we have a rather firm set of conventions concerning the position of texts; we know what discourse we are involved in, we know the tacit rules of understanding, whatever they may be.

Thus, in my view, we should speak about differences of discourses: the notion of critical text as a “discourse genre” has been suggested, among others, some twenty years ago by Michael Hancher, and earlier, in an implicit way, in Baxtin’s conception of speech genres. It would mean that the difference (and discontinuity) between literary and critical texts lies in their respective communicative function, in their position taken in the field of communication. We use them, to put it very simply, in different ways.

This is not at all a minor difference: it is a fundamental, decisive difference. And perhaps just because of that, it means a major challenge both for critics and for writers of literature. Playing with the transgression of different communicative situations, discourse types, problematizing the functions of texts within a communicative situation has been an important target in modern ages, from Nietzsche to Duchamp and to Borges, along with confronting culturally different conventions of communication and culturally different functions of texts within specific communications. In our days, very often the status of the discourse is either non-conventional, or it is exactly the status what is at stake, or different reading conventions can function simultaneously. Thus, just as literature itself has always loved to venture out to the edge of its communicative conventions, critical discourse, too, has always been on the wild borders of literature.

4. The original question in the title of my paper was, as you will remember, “Is there meta-criticism?” Now the answer, as it follows from what I have said so far, is not simple. Or, rather, I have at least two replies: yes and no. Yes, of course, there is meta-criticism, in the sense that critical texts exist, and there are critical texts about critical texts. For instance, what I was doing until now could surely be called meta-criticism: I was speaking about criticism. And no, because there is a meta-critical moment inherent in every critical text itself, that is, critical texts contain already their own meta-critical moments. Now let me elaborate somewhat on these replies.

4. 1. First of all, the same should be told about meta-criticism as about criticism - that is, one should avoid the “about-ness” conception. Though meta-criticism is certainly about criticism, it is not a sufficient and perhaps not even necessary condition of its definition. The case is somewhat similar to the theory/non-theory distinction, inasmuch as the distinction survives only as a distinction between discourses with positions assigned to them by the participants and the institutions of the literary system; all this does not imply that there is no distinction between criticism and meta-criticism, or between theory and non-theory, for that matter. What is argued, however, is that this distinction is relative to the whole system of literary process, the institutions and the participants of the literary field.

4. 2. Second, meta-criticism is not just another step ahead: the schema literature--criticism--meta-criticism is completely false. Just as the relation of criticism to the literary work is an intricate, delicate, ambiguous one, where critical text is not just an innocent bystander, a cool observer, but it intrudes into the fabric of texts - similarly, meta-criticism is not just a set of texts about (critical) texts, but it has a function in the whole system of literary communication. Debates, then, about critical positions will affect not only the production of literary texts, but the interpretation of literature in general - that is, literature; for literature is always something interpreted. Discussions about how to read a work, what to praise and what to condemn, are not of pure theoretical nature: they are very closely connected to how readers (will) read. If there is meta-criticism, then, its responsibility is no less than that of criticism. What is at stake is interpretation. What is at stake is literature. Maybe it is less than life; but a very important part of it.