THE NEW CRITICISM AND THE ANT FARM OF LIFE

As an all-round pile of virtue, I am completely honest about everything. So I’ve been getting militant about what we know, or think we know, or can know, or how we came to know it—or came to think we know it. We know very little; we inch forward. Yet others seem to think we can know so much we can play golf with God.

Among my several ongoing Herculean endeavors, I try to use strategies of literary criticism as a way to get at other problems, the solutions to which might prevent divorce, war and most human injustice.

I have breakfast buddies; one group of four meets every month or so, with the understanding that we have come together because we’ve been called upon to discuss timeless, epic matters, such as education, politics, and metaphysics—the usual suspects. From one perspective, these are merely more freshman dormitory ramblings. From another, better vantage point, however, it's clear that we should never pretend to have outgrown those concerns, for that is when we end up talking endlessly about golf, plumbing, brownie recipes, and babies’ bowel habits.

One Saturday morning the breakfast boys were speaking freely about the author’s life, character, and intentions during the composition of The Get-Down Dirty Frolick Papers. Turns out that Dickens—not Charles, but Big-Lew-Tiny Dickens (BLT to his breakfast pals)—underwent gall bladder surgery halfway through that novel’s composition. The vast majority of reviewers inferred, therefore, that Dickens’s thorough, precise, artistically rendered gore, splattered throughout the second half of his murder mystery, was the result of the author’s daily three-hour study of his own gallstones, which sat in a jar on the mantle, beside a shot glass with a cyst floating in formaldehyde—it had been removed three years earlier and is now widely accepted as the inspiration for Dickens’ contemporary classic, Chicken Fat Floats.

When I asked if they’d forgotten about the New Criticism, my friends stared at me. Puzzled, I gently reminded them of the New Criticism’s rejection of biography as a means to understanding literature. They stopped chewing. They raised their silverware as if to attack. Slim Tim developed a little spittle in the corner of his mouth.

These are smart guys, so their rage led me to wonder: am I the only one who still clings to The New Criticism as an approach to understanding poetry (I'd include all serious literature)—and through that, understanding what one can and cannot know about most things, from religious beliefs to magical popcorn.

The New Criticism was developed at Vanderbilt University in the 1920s and then at Kenyon College in Ohio. It remained in favor into the 1960s (Wikipedia). It still makes complete sense to me, but no one else, it seems.

The New Critics' thesis holds, modestly, it would seem, that readers and critics should look only at the words on the page to interpret a text. Serious readers are interested in the song, not the singer or the auditorium; leave the singer and his venue to the biographer, historian, or architect, not the simply good reader, whose subject is the song.

Stay tuned for more. Sleep well.