Friday, October 23, 2009

Is there a Methodology in this class?

by Mary Kate Hurley

I was sitting quietly in my library carrel (where I spend approx. 20 hours of every day) when a friend sent me a Gmail chat, asking “Are you going to the talk?” I was feeling a bit tired, and a bit confused – “what talk?” I typed back, thinking that there was very, very little that would get me to leave the library that day. “Stanley Fish!” he answered. “12.30 in 523 Butler. Only Grad Students and Faculty invited.” Since I didn’t have to leave the library to walk downstairs, and it was even on my side of the building, I figured I didn’t have much to lose.

I was curious, and that was the major reason I wanted to go. I’ve had my share of disagreements (one-sided to be sure) with Prof. Fish. I’ve taught him in class and read his NYTimes blog when I manage to get past my email backlog while procrastinating. I don’t always agree with him. In fact, I actually don’t think I agree with him much at all – as he’s a Miltonist, this hasn’t really been a central facet of my increasingly Beowulf-focused life in recent days (as a side note: Hi, everybody! It’s been ages!). But I’m always interested in hearing what another “giant” of the field is like when giving a talk – will he be well-spoken? Dismissive of grad student questions? Funny? Irascible?

Thus I found myself at Stanley Fish’s talk, on “Milton and Theory.”



I have to say: I was quite impressed. I found his analysis of other Miltonists quite amusing at times, and enlightening at others, if often a bit harsh. His central claim revolved around how theoretical readings of texts tend to turn the literary works they treat into “allegories” which simply prove the reader’s point, again and again. As a medievalist, I found this assertion quite interesting: I hate allegory with a firey passion, mostly because I often have trouble finding where the allegory ends and where whatever takes its place begins. Fish was speaking on a very specific kind of reading of Milton, Deconstructionist with a Capital ‘D’. Again, it’s a theory I’ve largely lost interest in as I’ve gotten further into my own work. Deconstruction is fascinating, and an important theoretical tool, but I’ve never been able to see it as more than just that, a tool.

In the end, Fish’s talk made a single claim with three major points, beyond his annoyance with other interpreters of John Milton. The claim was about “what to do with John Milton and Paradise Lost,” a question to which Fish gave three answers:

  1. Find out what the author meant. (Find the author’s intention).
  2. Find out how other critics have read the author, for example, how the Romantics read Milton.
  3. Find out what you can make with the text in question.
For Fish, the only one of these which was really worthwhile as a literary endeavor was the first: an avowed intentionalist, he defined his premise as believing that the text means what its author says it means. He ended the talk with a call for what he termed “professional humility,” which if I read him correctly, meant that remembering that the endeavor of the literary critic is to treat the text in a way that is limited to the text itself: in short, that we should not pretend we’re saving the world here.

I was curious about Fish’s point here. In college, while working on my senior thesis, a biweekly colloquium convened to help us work through the difficult task of writing a paper longer than anything we’d ever written. I remember one colleague, struggling with the awesome difficulty of beginning to write on Shakespeare (the details of her argument are fuzzy now) who was petrified of beginning. With everything others had said already, she explained, what could she do? What if she was wrong? I vividly remember turning to her, saying the single thing that I would give anything to be sure of now: “Shakespeare will be fine. There’s nothing you or anyone else can do to him that will ‘mess up’ the plays.”

At 21, apparently I knew something that I have trouble remembering at 27: the critics rarely become anything more than just critics. That is to say: while literary criticism is difficult and beautiful and life-changing, the consequences are perhaps more humble than our highest aspirations (or deepest fears) would have us believe.

But, returning to Fish’s talk, I was very interested in the three theses he proposed. So, like all good sixth year graduate students do at such events, I asked an evenhanded but still (I hope) engaging question. Explaining that I was a PhD candidate working with Old English texts – a tidbit of personal information that I hoped would contextualize the question I went on to ask – I inquired as to Prof. Fish’s ideas about Methodology. Is it possible to ask a fourth question of a text? I asked. Is it possible what a poem or other literary work does -- that is to say, not what does it mean so much as how does it construct this meaning? Could we productively raise a question of methodology here, and might the methodology literary scholars seek to employ also determine (or pre-determine) what types of evidence is admissable, and does this have ramifications for our enterprise?

To begin a response, Prof. Fish acknowledged that these questions were very complicated – and I’m sure they were more so when constructed on the spot during the question and answer session. But what it seemed to come down to, in his response, was that being an Intentionalist meant that one believed the text meant what its author said it meant. It is a critical affiliation, to be sure, but it is not a methodological point. Fish averred that our best option is using the “usual empirical way” – interpretation, for Fish, is an empirical activity, not a theoretical one. There is no methodology that attaches to it. This accumulation of empirical research may “take too long” – but there it is.

I’ve been mulling over this since Tuesday: what does it mean, if we are to be empirical in the pursuit of literary studies? On some levels, I suppose, it means what I always tell my students: use textual evidence. But at the same time, aren’t close readings also a form of methodology, and doesn’t empiricism hold its own theoretical rather than interpretive troubles? To wit, can’t empiricism itself proceed from a single (and allegorizing) premise? That everything is both explainable and reproducible, and moreover, that steps taken in an orderly proceeding will inevitably point us to an explanation for – well – everything?

Fish raised some important questions, and I was glad to find him humorous and erudite, and very much accepting of questions from all levels of scholars. I want to engage the points he raised, but in part I don’t know how to begin: all I know is that some of the evidence I accumulated while writing my most recently completed chapter was taken very well, and some of it was deeply disliked and disapproved of. There are, it would seem, certain ways that It Is Okay to Read Beowulf – and stepping outside those is difficult, if not impossible. How, then, to define a literary endeavor? How do we accumulate evidence to interpret a text – what tools do we have to use, and can we use them as tools rather than allegory?

What, dear readers of In the Middle, do you think? What is Methodology, and how does it relate, or not relate to Interpretation? Or to the study of Medieval Literature? Is there a difference between interpretation done in pre-modern and early modern/modern texts? And as regards literary criticsim, is there a methodology in this field?

4 comments:

Kári said...

Everybody's got a methodology; the question is just whether it's explicit or implicit (and please don't ask me to define mine!). A complete disavowal of methodology must be based on false consciousness, surely. The real motivation for the choices governing your reading remain obscure. "Empirical" interpretation requires a certain method and an awareness of the factors determining the outcome. (Natural scientists have painstakingly to document their methodology when conducting an experiment as well, even if it's just based on "seeing what's there").

Now, Fish may be right in railing against that form of Deconstruction which ultimately has only itself as its goal: find the point where the text begins to unravel, pull, sit back with a smug look on your face. Such an approach is interesting in terms of what it reveals about language as such, but ultimately says nothing whatsoever about any individual literary text. As you put it: every text becomes an allegory of the deconstructibleness of language as such.

But as long as deconstruction (or any other branch of criticism for that matter) remains less self-serving and actually concentrates on the text or texts at hand, it (they) can illuminate different facets of meaning which the others are blind to. The problem with rejecting them all and just "reading what it says" (quite apart from the fact that you don't just throw out 100 years' worth of literary criticism as useless and misleading) is that it falls prey to the very assumption it claims to identify in deconstruction, namely that its is the only correct/true/meaningful reading of the text. This, furthermore, is not something true deconstruction would ever subscribe to and hence this attitude is based on a fundamental "misreading" of a rival methodology.

Heidi said...

If one's methodology includes an idea that communication is possible, then surely a well written piece of literature can communicate whatever 'allegory' becomes necessary to its meaning, which I believe is indeed ultimately the one that the author intends (though I think there is a legitimacy to what we bring to the text, if we keep that separate from the text itself). It will always be mixed up -- but if language accommodates itself to that mixing up, and if words are sufficient to make us think new thoughts, we can hope to apprehend a meaning outside of ourselves and what we bring to a text. I do believe the nature of language is such that it can convey not only meaning, but the necessary framework for apprehending it. Too often though, we aren't really listening -- we prefer our own interpretations, and the problem becomes a spiritual ('pride'? as referenced in the post) rather than a purely intellectual one?

That's just the take of a housewife who doesn't understand all the technical jargon, but did enjoy the post -- as well as, poking around on your blog -- immensely. We have some favorite authors in common (& I deeply love Beowulf) Thanks.

Unknown said...

When I was younger I used to think there was an encyclopedia of symbolism somewhere that had every symbol established already, e.g. "green light at end of pier" equals "American dream."

But as I wrote more fiction I discovered that other readers were interpreting my writing in ways I never imagined, e.g. "the mask" equals "dehumanization of character by the narrator." WHAT?!?

Of course I realize that sometimes I too stretch the text to make it fit my idea of a worthy interpretation. In fact, I'm pretty sure we all use literature as a looking glass to study our own subconscious needs.

And that's what it's for, at least partly, because the best literature helps us discover what it means to be human, not just what it means to be animal or logical or mortal, but all of those things at once.

That's why literature is so powerful, because one reader can decide that wyrd is the onward rush of certain doom, and another can decide that it's liberation from the paralyzing weight of self-determination. And the whole story changes depending on how full is the flagon of mead.

The Mad Dreamer said...

I find your question interesting. The idea of asking how the text makes its meaning rather than what it means... a completely new idea to consciously pursue.

As an undergraduate, this is making my head spin. I'm looking back at previous papers and finding hints of this question in some of them, most obviously in the paper I did on Chaucer's Merchant's Tale. I think with a conscious effort at it, this question could be the cornerstone of very fruitful critiques on all sorts of texts.