At the end of 2023, Jonathan Kramnick published a slim volume entitled Criticism and Truth. The book's main argument: that literary criticism strives toward truth in a way that is unique and valuable and not reducible to the methods of the physical sciences. This thesis may relate to Kramnick's earlier critique of literary Darwinism, because proponents of that school argue that the humanities should be in consilience with (their version of) the sciences.
This slim volume is Jonathan Kramnick's apology for basic methods in literary scholarship. In the twenty-first century, literary criticism has come under institutional attack. In universities, budgets are drying up, and the number of graduates has dropped. Kramnick argues, first, that literary scholars have a unique and valuable method to their discipline which he and others call close reading, and, second, that the method of close reading produces knowledge or truth. Literature is therefore worthy of study in the university.
Key to Kramnick's argument is the idea that a critic, when writing about literary texts, weaves together the text of the literary work itself with his or her own critical text in a seamless whole. For Kramnick, writing criticism is a craft knowledge, like carving a sculpture or performing a dance (or even, if I may say, a physical scientist splitting a ray of sunlight into a spectrum of color). Kramnick rejects the imposition of the sorts of methods found in the physical sciences, where reproducibility and abstraction from the particular case are valued.
Kramnick discusses several techniques that critics use to weave texts together in their prose. He spends time on the technique of in-sentence quotation as well as the technique of interpretive narrative summary.
Kramnick doesn't just want to claim that the prose of the literary critic is the beautifully wrought product of a craftsman; he wants to claim that it is true. "I also want to underscore that skill has an epistemic function and is fundamental to method" (10). He echoes Keats by writing, "Elegance is aptness, and aptness elegance" (58). By saying that skillfully written criticism has an epistemic function, he seems to be arguing that beauty is truth.
Still, he acknowledges that the skilled interweaving of texts is just the beginning. He writes, "Every one of my examples, in other words, grapples with the thisness of particular artifacts in order to derive from them some more capacious argument, set of concerns, or register of significance. ... Scaling up from the particular to the larger than one requires all kinds of skills that lie outside the scope of this book: skilled acts of research and abstraction, theory building, and historical-chronological argument" (47). The way I would say it is: skilled quotation is a beginning, but the final product is a significant and abstract argument.
On page four, Kramnick argues, "Academic work contributes to making the world intelligible and so transforming it for the better." I would disagree with the universality of his claim. What if I make the world intelligible by claiming something to be the case which is otherwise demonstrably false through methods of reproducible observations? Shouldn't the claims put forward in my beautiful prose also be true in the sense of veritas, in the sense of scientific reproducibility?
To give an example, what if I make the world intelligible by claiming that the recovered memory movement is valid, and that such memories are true? Reproducible psychological experiments can rigorously show that therapists can implant false recovered memories in the minds of their patients. Those implanted memories might ruin the lives of innocent people who have been falsely accused of heinous acts. That would be an instance where making the world intelligible does not transform it for the better.
In the physical sciences, one begins by positing an abstract theory to explain observable phenomena. Then one uses craft knowledge to create experiments which may confirm or reject the theory. Because of all the complex ways in which the physical world can present itself, falsifying a scientific theory is not straightforward, but the goal is to confirm the abstract theory or reject it.
When a scientist forms an abstract theory, the scientist might generalize from observations, such as Faraday's studies of electromagnetism. Or, the scientist might formulate the theory from philosophical principles, such as Einstein's belief that the universe is fundamentally simple. What makes the process scientific is that, at some point, someone uses observations, often observations derived from experiments built with craft techniques, to validate the theory.
The craft of the experimental method does have an epistemic function, but if there were no theory to test, the experiment would have no epistemic point and would be the equivalent of underwater basket weaving or interpretive dance. Kramnick cites Polanyi about skill in science, and he is not wrong to do so, but craft knowledge is only half of the scientific dynamic.
Kramnick wants to claim that the truth of the craft knowledge of writing good criticism is inseparable from the claims that criticism puts forward. "If, in the case of criticism, the truth or falsity of a given assertion is inseparable from how well the assertion is made, how well the assertion is made is inseparable from how well its objects are handled"(88). Kramnick's problem is that the 'if clause' of the above sentence is not true.
A literary critic needs to begin with a theory about the literary work under study. That theory might come from observations derived from the critic's experience with many literary texts, or it may come from a theory about what makes humans tick, say, from psychology or sociology. It could also come from religion or philosophy, such as, to pick a random example, a claim that a particular novel represents a dialectic between two competing versions of philosophical humanism.
A psychological theory used as the basis for a literary interpretation doesn't even need to be one that psychologists take seriously. For example, Freudian psychology is not considered a valid approach to scientifically-based psychology anymore, but it continues to be commonly used as way to interpret and understand literary works. Paradoxically, a Freudian interpretation of a literary work might be a valid way to interpret the literary work even if the theory upon which it is based on is not a valid way to describe how humans actually tick.
Once a thesis exists, the literary critic uses techniques such as in-sentence quotation to show the critic's readers how that already-formed theory can make this particular literary work intelligible. Quotation does have an epistemic function of demonstrating the application of that thesis to this particular literary text.
For example, one could use quotations and plot summary to investigate the question: can the Freudian theory of the Oedipal complex help us to see the actions of Shakepeare's character Hamlet in an intelligible way? (In this case, the answer is a resounding yes, in part because Freud first thought of the complex while reading Hamlet. He originally called it the Hamlet complex, but changed it to a character in an ancient Greek drama to avoid being seen as overly fond of British culture.)
A psychological theory which is not scientifically valid is especially appropriate for creating a valid interpretation of a work of literature if the author of the literary work subscribed to the now-rejected theory. For example, giving a Ross Macdonald novel a Freudian interpretation is especially effective in part because Macdonald was a follower of Freudian psychology. That type of argument, though, sends a would-be critic into a hockey brawl over the validity of hypothesizing the intentions of the author, the dreaded Intentional Fallacy.
What is the goal of literary criticism? If the critic's demonstration is effective, it strengthens the reader's conviction that the critic's claims about a particular literary work are worthy of respect. However, because it is difficult to prove some abstract assertion false about a literary text, it is difficult to invalidate a theory about literature. Often the best that a critic can do is show how a particular literary work can be seen through the lens of a set of aesthetic and cultural values. A reader of literary criticism regularly asks the question: does this assertion make the literary work more intelligible to me and more worthy of my attention? If the answer is yes, then the critic has succeeded.
Kramnick spends a good deal of time arguing that the methods of the scientific disciplines are fundamentally different from those of the literary critic. He goes on to argue that the methods of literary criticism are different from those of computational linguistics and gives an example from linguistics to show how they are fundamentally different (73). However, he does not compare literary criticism with a discipline that is adjacent to it, such as the craft of argument practiced by lawyers for and against the guilt of a defendant.
In the realm of jurisprudence, the elegance of the argument is also used to convince an audience (of jurors) about the truth of an individual claim. The legal argument might pull in evidence from a reproducible science, like DNA evidence, but it might not. It might convince the jurors to view the defendant as guilty even when the defendant is innocent (or vice versa), so the aptness and elegance of the craft of rhetoric might diverge from the truth of the theory about who committed the crime.
Kramnick complains that other literary theorists focus on the more abstract, or as he says capacious, arguments and sets of concerns and ignore the common practice among all literary critics: close reading. To me, it makes sense that critics would focus on the abstract arguments rather than the micro-process of close reading. The abstract arguments are where the cultural values are reaffirmed or rejected. If the academic establishment preserves, as Joseph Henrich would say, the collective brain of the community and its shared knowledge, then debating the overall significance of literary texts is where the action is.
On the one hand, I agree with Kramnick that techniques specific to the discipline, such as in-sentence quotation, do have epistemic qualities. However, it is the epistemic quality analogous to the craft knowledge of an experimental physicist or chemist. In the physical sciences, the truth-generating function of the experimentalist is used to confirm or reject a theory. In literature, the truth-generating function of the weaver of texts must be used in service of arguments for and against abstract theories of literary criticism and how they apply to a text. Both the scientist and the critic can conduct their craft work properly and arrive at a negative result.
In this book, Kramnick argues that you can begin with craft techniques such as in-sentence quotation and smoothly build up to the truth of abstract theories (56). But you can't. The theory is separate and antecedent, and the craft knowledge of the scholar tests the theory. In literature, you use the craft knowledge of weaving prose to make the case to the reader that the abstract theory about a particular literary work is valid and worthy of serious respect. The close reading methods should be true even if a paper's thesis which they test is not.
I have been studying what I call evolutionary literary criticism for some time, and I have recently begun moving the foundation of my approach to the theory of cultural evolution. Kramnick himself is one of the more prominent critics of what the practitioners themselves call literary Darwinism, arguing that the capacious arguments of the entire school should be rejected wholesale. I hope to take an in-depth look at his refutation of this school in the near future. However, I have begun here with an investigation of some of his broader claims to truth.
To repeat, I agree with Kramnick's immediate claim: that micro-processes such as in-sentence quotation and interpretive summary have epistemic functions. However, his broader, half-suggested claim that this craft knowledge can scale up smoothly to the inevitable truth of the abstract theories of various schools of criticism is not correct. Beauty is not truth, and the truth is not always beautiful.
Bibliography
Kramnick, Jonathan B. Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies. U. of Chicago Press, 2023.
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