"The Practice of Reading" by Denis Donoghue Appearing in Ideas, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1998 (Continued, Part 3 of 3) scar Wilde took up Arnold's phrase and Pater's deformation of it and produced from them a typical exorbitance. In July 1890, Wilde published "The Critic as Artist," an essay in the form of a dialogue between the flamboyant Gilbert and his straight man Ernest. At one point Gilbert recalls Arnold's formula and Pater's allusion to it--"'To see the object as in itself is really is,' has been justly said to be. . . ." Gilbert continues,

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900).  This photograph of the Irish-born writer in dandified attire was taken on his 1881 tour of the United States, where his first play was produced the following year. His better-known works, including Lady Windermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Ernest did not appear until a decade later. (Photo courtesy of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA)

It has been said by one whose gracious memory we all revere . . . that the proper aim of Criticism is to see the object as in itself it really is. But this is a very serious error, and takes no cognizance of Criticism's most perfect form, which is in its essence purely subjective, and seeks to reveal its own secret and not the secret of another. For the highest Criticism deals with art not as expressive but as impressive purely.

For proof, Gilbert refers to Pater's reverie on the Mona Lisa. Who cares, he asks, "whether Mr. Pater has put into the portrait of Mona Lisa something that Leonardo never dreamed of?":

The painter may have been merely the slave of an archaic smile, as some have fancied, but whenever I pass into the cool galleries of the Palace of the Louvre, and stand before that strange figure . . . I murmur to myself, "She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and has been a diver in deep seas."

Ernest does not point out that Gilbert's recitation of Pater's prose is illegitimate. He should be composing his own reverie, not quoting Pater's. Ernest lets him get away with it:

The highest Criticism, then, is more creative than creation, and the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not.

Gilbert answers:

Yes, that is my theory. To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticises.

Only the phrasing is original to Wilde: The conceit itself is implicit in many versions of Aestheticism.

But Wilde's formulation of it has had a suggestive history. There is a nuance of it in Paul Bourget's book on Flaubert, where he speaks of the malady of thought as thought which precedes experience instead of submitting to it. Jules de Gaultier has a more specific study of it in his Le Bovarysme: La psychologie dans l'oeuvre de Flaubert (1892), in which he describes Bovarysm as man's determination to see himself as other than he is. Poor Emma gives her name to it because de Gaultier finds in her, as in many of Flaubert's characters, a certain predisposition, "a pathological and singular exaggeration of the faculty of imagining oneself to be other than one is." He thinks that the predisposition is at one with a hatred of reality: It is a ruling tendency in Emma, by virtue of which any actual condition of existence arouses in her a contrary conception. The difference between Bovarysm and a worthy use of the imagination is that, in the latter, one conceives an alternative or antinomian reality without proposing to put it into practice, one retains it as a fiction: In the former, one takes it as a program and acts upon it.

De Gaultier thinks that the determination to see oneself as other than one is accounts for the entire human comedy and drama, but other writers think of it as mostly comic or pathetic. In "Rhetoric and Poetic Drama" (1919) T. S. Eliot acknowledged that the really fine rhetoric of Shakespeare "occurs in situations where a character in the play sees himself in a dramatic light," and he quotes as an instance Othello's last speech, "And say besides that in Aleppo once. . . ." But in a later essay, "Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca" (1927), Eliot quotes the same speech to make quite a different point. Othello is addressing Lodovico, Montano, and the officers who have come to arrest him:

Soft you! A word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know't
No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely, but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
Perplexed in the extreme; of one whose hand
(Like the base Indian) threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their med'cinable gum. Set you down this;
And say besides that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog
And smote him--thus.

Eliot comments:

What Othello seems to me to be doing in making this speech is cheering himself up. He is endeavouring to escape reality, he has ceased to think about Desdemona, and is thinking about himself. Humility is the most difficult of all virtues to achieve; nothing dies harder than the desire to think well of oneself. Othello succeeds in turning himself into a pathetic figure, by adopting an aesthetic rather than a moral attitude, dramatizing himself against his environment. He takes in the spectator, but the human motive is primarily to take in himself. I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovarysme, the human will to see things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare.

The "Quite Too Utterly Ecstatic" Aesthete. Wilde's larger-than-life features and his extravagant lifestyle made him a caricaturist's delight. He and his set were satirized by Gilbert and Sullivan in Patience. Wilde, accused by critics of writing frothy plays, responded that he put his genius into his life, only his talent into his writing. (Illustration from Entr'acte, 1881)

In 1890, Wilde's extravagance--"to see the object as in itself it really is not"--was regarded as a conceit, a vivacity, but it has now become a fairly common practice in literary criticism. Not universal. Arnold's sober formula still holds as orthodoxy. But Wilde's heresy has many adherents, critics who write about works of literature as if their taking the particular form they take were of no account; or as if the critic were free to wish them to be other than they are. Pierre Macherey has insisted that by its very nature, criticism immediately dissents from the empiricist fallacy; it aspires to indicate a possible alternative to the given. Roland Barthes read books as if he mainly wanted to defeat them, or at least to deflect the force of their rhetoric.

When Jacques Derrida writes about Rousseau, Nietzsche, Hegel, Celan, Mallarmé, Ponge, or Genet, he is not much interested in saying what is there, in the works under consideration: He is far more concerned to invent a piece of writing by improvising upon the themes they offer. In Jacques Derrida by Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Bennington is the straight man, like Wilde's Ernest, the patient explainer, telling us about différence, Husserl, sign and signified, translation, and Derrida's relation to Levinas; meanwhile at the bottom of every page Derrida, like Wilde's Gilbert, plays grim variations on other themes--circumcision, Augustine, God, the death of Derrida's mother. The Gift of Death starts out as if Derrida were explicating Jan Patocka's Heretical Essays on the Philosophy of History, and broods to much purpose on Christianity and responsibility. But it soon becomes a heretical essay in residual relation to Patocka's heresies: It winds up as a set of improvisations on secrecy, sacrifice, trembling, mystery, with copious reference to Baudelaire, Heidegger, Levinas, and "Bartleby the Scrivener." I am not complaining. The Gift of Death is one of my favorite books, its tropical plenitude is Derrida at his grave best.

Alternatives to the given are now regularly enforced by critics of different persuasions--Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytic, gay-and-lesbian, deconstructive. These critics do not feel any piety either toward the object as in itself it really is or to the impression the work has made upon them.

Specifically: Marjorie Levinson has written a book on Wordsworth's poems mainly, it appears, for the satisfaction of chastising him. She is not the first to do this. Arnold, I regret to have to concede, much as he admired Wordsworth in other respects, thought that he had turned away from half of human life. Douglas Bush made much the same comment. The complaint has been taken up by several critics to impugn what Jerome McGann calls "the romantic ideology." But Levinson has extended the tradition into a relentless rebuke. In a chapter on "Tintern Abbey" she accuses Wordsworth of suppressing the social, historical, and economic facts of the case. He does not look at what is there in front of him--the scene around the Abbey, the squalor, the misery, the beggars, the pollution of the River Wye. "The 'still, sad music of humanity' drowns out the noise produced by real people in real distress. . . . By narrowing and skewing his field of vision," Levinson says, "Wordsworth manages to 'see into the life of things.'" The poem achieves its "fiercely private vision" by that suppression; by expressing Culture as if it were Nature. Finally, the poem presents mind and memory as barricades "to resist the violence of historical change and contradiction."

Levinson deals with the persuasive force of "Tintern Abbey" simply by rejecting it. We are to tell ourselves that "the prolific contraries of Romantic poetry and criticism"--such as creation-and-perception, innocence-and-experience, subject-and-object--"are not our family of conflicts, which is to say, they are not prolific for us":

To pretend otherwise is to forget ourselves through a facile sympathy, and to lose our enabling, alienated purchase on the poems we study.

But it does not occur to Levinson that "to forget ourselves" may be a morally fine thing to do, and that the best way of doing it is by imaginatively participating in lives other than our own, while continuing to know that they are not our own-- participating in Wordsworth's life, for instance. Sympathy need not be facile. Levinson refers to "our enabling, alienated purchase on the poems we study," but she refuses to turn that alienating force upon herself or to question her own rhetoric and the sources of her resentment. It is almost as if she hated the reality of Wordsworth's poems and determined to conceive how they might be if they were different and morally better.

Wilde's formula would allow us to deflect the blow of Levinson's criticism. Wilde's Gilbert says that "to the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own." We might then read such criticism as if it were literature--which it sometimes is. I have no doubt that Derrida is part of the history of French literature, whether or not he is part of the history of literary criticism. It may be that his books belong, with Rousseau's Confessions, to the genre of autobiography, even those which are not explicitly autobiographical. If so, their bearing upon the works they discuss may be a minor consideration. Perhaps this device is intolerably cynical: By referring Derrida's work to the history of French literature, we seem to be challenging it to take its chances there, in the midst of that prolific and abundant library. Perhaps there is no harm in that. If Levinson's book on Wordsworth is not primarily a book on Wordsworth but "a new work of her own," we might read it as a chapter of her autobiography. We might use it to imagine, yet again, what it must be to be different-- which is, in my view, why we continue to have an interest in writing and reading.

t would be difficult to argue the respective merits of these three forms of reading without disclosing a prejudice. The argument would be mainly an attempt to find reasons in support of the prejudice. The causes which make one person a realist, another an idealist, and a third a pragmatist are not to be found in the reasons each would give to justify his position: One would have to start further back, when the prejudice in favor of a particular stance went without saying and was not felt to need reasons. In literary criticism, a critic does not start from a formulated position: The formulation comes later, after many essays that seemed to need no such thing. Arnold was Arnoldian in many practices before he found it necessary to give reasons. Pater became Paterian at a much earlier point in his career. Wilde had the intuitions of a dramatist before he thought of turning them to comic account in literary criticism. Donald Davie once gave a talk called "Three Analogies for Modern Poetry" in which he argued that Pound's poetry aspired toward the condition of sculpture, Eliot's toward the condition of music, and Yeats's toward the condition of drama. Davie's own poetry is Poundian, for the most part, and seeks the sculpture of rhyme. But it discloses that affiliation only after the event of many variously disposed poems. A label merely notes a tendency, but it is useful to have a label--it makes for clarity--despite the limiting considerations of "merely" and "despite."

Each of the three ways of reading I have described gratifies certain desires and runs particular risk. "Arnold" gratifies the desire for knowledge and construes knowledge as a relation in which a subject respects an object. He is like a Victorian scientist in that consideration, content to regard subject and object as separate entities and to take the subjective presence largely for granted. He is also content that the subject should appear to be a servant, a mere scribe. "Arnold" runs the risk of exaggerating the objective character of a work of literature and of counting too much on the common sense of a realistic epistemology. A poem is in some respects a visible thing, but in other respects it is as mobile as one's breath. A play moves in time, and is moving because of that consideration among many other considerations. "Pater" appeals to the privilege of experience rather than of knowledge. He may not feel any disrespect for the object, but he is especially tender toward the subject, his sensibility, and he is mainly concerned to have the sensation of feeling that the world, seemingly opaque, is--or appears to be--suggestible and translucent. It must be an acute pleasure to feel that everything in the given world is incipiently and subjectively intelligible, available to the practice of divination. But "Pater" runs the risk of displacing the work of literature by his own feelings. He solicits the temptation of loving his feelings more than the paintings, the poems, the fictions. "Wilde" might be accused of not reading at all, as Picasso might be thought not to have read the African masks from which he started in several paintings. Presumably the reading is done silently while the artist prepares to produce his own new work. "Wilde" is indifferent to knowledge and dissatisfied with experience: They are too old, they have run to seed without being fruitful. He is avid for production and performance, the production of new writing, new gestures, new masks, new selves. He willingly takes the risk of thinking that he has surpassed the work of literature by the verve of his performances in its vicinity.

But I should not, in turn, make too much of these tendencies and temptations. Even to name a way of reading exposes me to the risk of making it seem fixed in that character: It is fixed only when its practitioner reflects upon his purposes with the intention of confirming them and loving them alone. It is more likely that we move from one mood to another. Emerson said in "Circles" that our moods do not believe in one another. It is probable that anyone's moods will include from time to time one or another of the three figures I have sketched.

Finally, it is possible to combine the motives of the three ways of reading by seeing them as mutually obliging. I find an instance of this combination in one of Christopher Ricks's essays. He has quoted a passage from Stevens' "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction":

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.

Ricks comments:

Does imagination "embrace" reality, or is there a turn, with reality embracing imagination? Why is not the imagined, like the imagination, as much a part of reality, albeit differently so, as anything else? Independence of mind imagines interdependences.

These sentences allow for our three ways of reading. Ricks assumes, by referring to "a part of reality," that there is at any moment a whole, reality itself or the hypothetical sum of its parts. A poem is one of those parts. Poetry, as the sum of particular poems, is part of a much larger whole, the world, reality, everything that is the case. This is an Arnoldian stance. Ricks then implies, in his second question, that "the imagined" is not as starkly opposite in its nature to "the real" as Stevens on this occasion says it is. A Paterian movement on Ricks's part, much as he disapproves of Pater. He well knows that Stevens, in many other poems and other parts of this one, enlarges the range of "the imagined" to the point at which it appears to usurp the rights of "the real." In those poems Stevens calls "the imagined" by the name of fiction, and imagines a Supreme Fiction, rival to God's creation because, according to "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour," "We say God and the imagination are one. . . ." "Why is not the imagined, like the imagination, as much a part of reality, albeit differently so, as anything else?"

Why not? But the difference, unspecified, would allow "Wilde" to claim that it makes all the difference in the world and some difference to the world. He intends adding a new thing to the world while seeming to pay attention to an old thing. "Wilde" declares his independence of mind, releases himself of every obligation to the work of literature, by choosing not to imagine interdependences. Or, having imagined them, to challenge them in performing his new self, striking through yet another mask.