‘How Should One Read a Book?’ My title question apes that of a talk Virginia Woolf first gave at a girls’ school in 1926:
To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench amid the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice. Even, if you wish merely to read books, begin by writing them. For this is certainly true – one cannot write the most ordinary little story, attempt to describe the simplest event – meeting a beggar, shall we say, in the street – without coming up against difficulties that the greatest of novelists have had to face.
She goes on to propose a thought-experiment: ‘let us imagine how differently Defoe, Jane Austen, and Thomas Hardy would describe the same incident – this meeting a beggar in the street.’
Woolf begins by imagining how Defoe would describe the scene:
Defoe is a master of narrative. His prime effort will be to reduce the beggar’s story to perfect order and simplicity. This happened first, that next, the other thing third. He will put in nothing, however attractive, that will tire the reader unnecessarily, or divert his attention from what he wishes him to know. […] Further, he will choose a type of sentence which is flowing but not too full, exact but not epigrammatic. His aim will be to present the thing itself without distortion from his own angle of vision. He will meet the subject face to face, four-square, without turning aside for a moment to point out that this was tragic, or that was beautiful; and his aim is perfectly achieved.
Woolf then goes on by sharply contrasting this with how Jane Austen would manage the same material:
But let us not for a moment confuse it with Jane Austen’s aim. Had she met a beggar woman, no doubt she would have been interested in the beggar’s story. But she would have seen at once that for her purposes the whole incident must be transformed. Streets and the open air and adventures mean nothing to her, artistically. It is character that interests her. She would at once make the beggar into a comfortable elderly man of the upper-middle classes, seated by his fireside at his ease. Then, instead of plunging into the story vigorously and voraciously, she will write a few paragraphs of accurate and artfully seasoned introduction, summing up the circumstances and sketching the character of the gentleman she wishes us to know.
And so on. All is changed. The comparison allows us to see how each style entails a vision, each vision a style, and that all is changed as we pass from one style to the next; and that we must understand each style by trying it out on a piece of life or another text. As Vladimir Nabokov said in another context: ‘The art of writing is a very futile business if it does not imply first of all the art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction.’
In this talk, I want to make a case for Woolf’s approach to the teaching of literature, which I will be calling ‘imitation’, both on the creative and the critical sides – or rather, as a bridge between if not a fusion of the two. My doing so comes frankly out of the immense pleasure I have taken in teaching literature through imitation, parody, and transposition, alongside critical analysis, at UEA, for the past nine or so years – mainly on my MA module on Ludic Literature, which there are several graduates of here today, though now also at 3rd year undergraduate level in my module on the novel of consciousness.
I do so in the conviction that literature should be thought of as an event as well as thing – that is, it’s useful at least sometimes to think that all literature is a kind of drama, which happens in a moment, and between a group of people. And in the 20th century, that’s often in seminar rooms and class-rooms, which are, I think, places where literature happens, alongside the shadows of those theatres in the minds of people reading. So, this talk is part of that pedagogical history of literature – literature as a history of how it has happened, especially in the teaching situations which also inform how it is then created, but are also part of its creation. That is, I take the seminar room as a place of creation and criticism. It’s inspired in part by Ben Knights’s wonderful work, especially his Pedagogic Criticism, and another recent book, The Teaching Archive, by Rachel Buurma and Laura Heffernan. One of the things I want to do in this talk is to pay homage to work that I’m thinking with and to point you to some writing you may or may not be aware of.
Well, to begin with, creative writing and literary criticism as we do them in universities – and schools – are of course both very recent things. Until the late 19th century, as we all know, and in truth well into the 20th, there was a form of literary pedagogy which made little distinction between criticism and creation. But it was, mostly, though not entirely, conducted in Latin and Greek, not in English. And one of my claims is that English studies went wrong early on when they discarded a lot of what was good in the teaching of ancient languages which had dominated since Erasmus and Lily, and by which almost all the writers we study up to 20th century were formed.
What was that? Well, a major element in it was what they called imitation, or imitatio, but which encompassed what we might call parody, pastiche, translation, mock-epic, transposition between styles and forms, and more. Its principles were formulated by Erasmus, Petrarch, and other humanists at the turn of the 16th century. Its aim was on one level to teach people to write good Latin. More deeply, to make ancient writers live again, to make the word speak. It was a pedagogical principle applied to children as young as eight; it was also the principle by which most poetry if not fiction was composed up to the 19th century. It was, as Thomas Greene says, ‘a literary technique that was also a pedagogic method’.
At its heart were two paradoxes, one creative and one critical.
1) To create one must imitate; to find one’s voice one must try on, adapt, splice, and wrestle with prior and alien voices. You forge new writing out of old writing. You don’t really create, to the extent that creation implies the making of something from nothing.
2) But that to imitate well one cannot imitate slavishly. Cicero’s writing, Virgil’s writing, was apt to its place and moment. To write like Cicero or Virgil in 1590s London would not be to write like Cicero or Virgil. Out of this paradox unspools a labyrinth of complication comparable to – though not quite the same as – that which faces translation theorists. I’ll come to that labyrinth in a bit but for now let me just say that the paradox forces upon one a set of critical questions about one’s own culture, language, and self, as well as about Cicero’s or Virgil’s.
You can learn about it in Greene’s great difficult book, which comes out of the Yale of Harold Bloom and de Man; more recently in Colin Burrow’s book, Imitating Authors, from which I have learned a great deal; and in Jeff Dolven’s work, especially in his Scenes of Style – and Dolven has been teaching through imitation at Princeton, and disseminating that pedagogy in his students, as it came to him from John Hollander and, I guess, Tom Greene. An old book by T. W. Baldwin, Shakespere’s Small Latine and Less Greek, sets out the primary evidence from Renaissance schoolbooks more fully than has since been done. Gerard Genette’s Palimpsests has a long section setting out the range of literary practices which imitatio encompassed – the movements up and down through styles; the transformation of style into a different content, or vice versa; the transposition of prose into verse or verse into prose; and so on.
It was in fact a mode of studying and teaching literature recommended and practised by many if not most of the modernists I work on – by Nabokov, certainly, arch-parodist, and opposed to formal criticism; by Auden and Pound, by Woolf; and indeed Proust. I’ll come back to Proust and Woolf at the end of this talk, but just to note now how few if any of the modernists – or indeed any major poets or novelists – have looked with approval on the kind of literary criticism now routinised in the educational establishment, with its heavy dependence on the objective methodical essay. Clearly literature for most of its history got on perfectly well without the enormously sophisticated and learned criticism and scholarship we now bring to it. The history of literature suggests that literature doesn’t need literary history; but perhaps history does need it. As for criticism, which aims at understanding and not knowledge, and therefore doesn’t belong to history, that’s a harder question.
3) It’s a harder question because the sort of thing we now call criticism in universities and schools is nothing like what people took to be criticism for most of the 19th and 20th centuries. The ambiguities and changes in the word criticism obscure the extreme novelty of the writing on literature which in all its variety now happens in literature departments. What distinguishes it is the absence, with some exceptions, of criticism – that is to say of the faculty of judgement and evaluation, which as late as 1976 Raymond Williams in Keywords took to be the one core of an otherwise ambiguous word.
Now by criticism in university we mean any kind of writing in response to literature; criticism in the sense of book reviews is a word which I think lives in a completely different place in our heads; we forget the one sense when we use the other.
As Joseph North has recently described in Criticism: A Political History, for most of the 20th century, and ever since the victories of the New Critics in America and the Empsonians and Leavisites in Britain, critics and scholars coexisted in English departments –
>> The field’s central axis of dispute was between literary “scholars” and literary “critics,” the key distinction being between those who treated the study of literature as a means by which to analyze culture and those who treated the study of literature as an opportunity to intervene in culture. <<
I’m not sure that’s the best way of putting the distinction, but it’s not bad. Gerald Graff tells the same story in Professing Literature. And then, as North says, in the 70s, the historical-contextualist paradigm won out, to the extent that the distinction is now widely un-recognised. What we now mean by criticism in universities – and, I think, mostly in the formulation creative-critical – is simply writing about or in response to literature, so that the phrase creative-critical often means simply writing about or in response literature which aspires to being literature, probably by eschewing the form of the methodical essay and by taking responsibility for its own form.
Criticism as a relentless principle of judgement applied to every walk of life emerges in the late 17th century, as Rene Wellek, Reinhart Kosellek, and more recently and fully Douglas Patey make clear. Dryden was the first to use the word criticism. It encompassed the full range of literary practice – editing, emendation, commentary – but literary criticism was a small part of it, for criticism could be applied to tradition, law, and life – so that, famously Arnold says literature is a criticism of life; and Eliot insists that Henry James, though a feeble literary critic, was a great critic in his novels, a critic of American life and lives ‘As a critic, no novelist in our language can approach James’ – ‘He was a critic who preyed not upon ideas, but upon living beings. It is criticism which is in a very high sense creative.’ For Eliot the main work of poetry and fiction is critical; though, by the way he was opposed to literary commentary aspiring to becoming ‘aesthetic’ or ‘creative’ in the sense he didn’t like, as recommended by Arnold, Pater, and Wilde, and which is what a lot of people mean by creative-critical now. Pound, too, thought that ‘The best criticism of any work, to my mind the only criticism of any work of art that is of any permanent or even moderately durable value, comes from the creative writer or artist who does the next job, and not, not ever from the young gentlemen who make generalities about the creator. Laforgue’s Salomé is the real criticism of Salammbo; Joyce and perhaps Henry James are critics of Flaubert.’ And how did The Waste Land or The Cantos, or indeed Pale Fire do that critical work? By imitating, parodying, comparing, contrasting and transposing styles from the past and from around the world. In short, by imitation, every bit as much as Dryden had done.
4) This takes me on to the birth of creative writing. The phrase is often mocked, or used to be, as crass and American as a hamburger, as Malcolm Bradbury once put it; as indeed is the word creativity – a word which emerges with other -ities after WWII. As I mentioned at the beginning, it’s important to be clear that the writing of poetry, whether in Latin or, by the late 18th century, in English, was normal and ubiquitous in European and American schools and universities until well into the early 20th century (you find it happening at Yale in 1910, for instance, and the writing of Latin and Greek poetry is still an option at Oxford); it’s the teaching criticism which is new, not the teaching of writing.
But creative writing in something like our sense started at the University of Iowa in the 1940s, when Norman Foerster founded the programme. They were so-called New Humanists, inspired by their master Irving Babbitt at Harvard, and their aim was not principally to produce new novelists or poets but, like Erasmus and Poliziano before them – to whom they frequently referred – to make people understand styles and forms by imitating them – trying to make them themselves, to break them, to reinvent them. For exactly this reason they in fact often avoided the phrase creative writing, preferring imaginative writing – for they did not believe that literature could be ‘created’ out of nothing, rather than it emerged from a critically informed engagement with earlier literature. (You can read all about this in two great books, one by D. G. Myers, The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing since 1880, the other by Mark McGurl,
They didn’t at all like the associations of the phrase with the progressive movement – there were creative lots of things in the 1920s – woodwork, teaching, dancing, etc – which is why we speak of workshops. They would have been somewhat but only somewhat more sympathetic to the phrase’s origin in Emerson’s ‘The American Scholar’, sometimes called the American declaration of independence – where Emerson also coins the phrase ‘the creative reader’. My author, Nabokov, enthusiastically embraced both those two phrases when he came to America – as, by the way, a teacher of creative writing at Stanford. The phrase creative reader points to the aim of the New Humanists – to make literature live, to make the word speak, by dissolving the distinction between reading and writing. Malcolm Bradbury made it clear, in a 1992 TLS piece, ‘The Bridgeable Gap’, that he had a similar purpose when he founded creative writing in Britain at UEA – ‘we saw a fundamental aim of our programme as being the building of new relations between the “creative” and the “critical”, both in individuals and in university culture too.’
The same, by the way, was actually true of the New Critics, at that time the allies of the New Humanists, the one founding modern university criticism, the other modern university creative writing. So, for example, R. P. Blackmur says – ‘the composition of great poem is a labor of unrelenting criticism, and the full reading of it only less so; … the critical act is what is called a “creative” act, and whether by poet, critic, or serious reader, since there is an alteration, a stretching, of the sensibility as the act is done.’ To learn what something is you have to discover what it is for; and what criticism and creative writing were for, to the New Humanists and Critics, was to make literature live.
5) I want now to come back to the key question for me today. How can literature – more specifically imitation – have critical force? To do so I’m going to revisit this simple but profound question that was at the core of pedagogy for hundred of years? How would Cicero write here, now? or, as I ask my students – how would Joyce, or Kafka, write here, or now? In his 1528 book Ciceronianus, the Renaissance humanist Erasmus caricatured those ‘Ciceronians’ who, he said, refused to use any word or grammatical form which Cicero had not used. But Cicero, as Erasmus and his allies pointed out, was such a good stylist because he always spoke and wrote appropriately to the occasion, his audience, and his age. To write now, in another age, and to another audience, exactly as Cicero had, would not in fact be to write like Cicero, for Cicero was not an antiquated writer in his day – just as to try to write exactly like Jane Austen now, in 2021, would not in fact to write like Jane Austen. Cicero himself had said that if Thucidydes himself had been alive at a later date he would have been more mellow and less harsh.’ (176)
So: that means that writing like a previous writer might not mean using the same words, or constructions, or tones, or rhythms, or images, or themes, of subjects, as the author you’re imitating. It’s more subtle than that. Rather, you are looking for a difference between yourself and your chosen language and culture equivalent of that to the author you’re imitating to their context, however they chose it, or however it was forced upon them. One style might in a new context decree a new style, or a different set of subjects. The Author being imitated – whether it’s Cicero or Austen or Joyce – comes to be understood ‘not as a specific body of texts or a particular set of words, but as a set of principles of composition which can be adapted to new circumstances’ (9), ‘a transhistorical principle that can be described in the subjunctive’, so that ‘each particular text is produced from the interaction between those skills and dispositions and a particular occasion, be that a set of historical events, or an audience with distinctive needs and interests.’ (176You might even, Burrow suggests, think of the author as a kind of ‘algorithm that could generate more works of a similar kind’ (24). The author is what the Greeks called a hexis – a skill, an attitude, the ghost of an instinct.
But imitation always runs into obstacles and blockages. Much cannot be carried across without changing beyond recognition, Imitation requires transposition, and transposition breaks the charisma which protect a style’s assumptions from becoming visible; it turns skill into knowledge. That in fact is why imitation not only often goes alongside parallel critical analysis but inspires and requires it – it did so in early modernist humanist pedagogical theory, and likewise in, say, Eliot’s essays, Pound’s ABC of Reading, and in Proust’s theorising – as Proust nicely says in his unsurpassable critical analysis of Flaubert’s style, which accompanies the imitation of Flaubert he published in the suite of parodies in The Lemoine Affair: Our minds are never satisfied unless they can provide a clear recreation of what they had first produced unconsciously [that is to say, in the form of analysis], or a living recreation of what they had first patiently analysed.
At its most extreme, what happens in the act of imitation is a kind of crisis – that is to say, a criticism – between imitator and imitated, imitator and their own culture, their own culture and that of the past. As Thomas Greene writes, ‘The text cannot simply leave us with two dead dialects. It has to create a miniature anachronistic crisis and then find a creative issue from the crisis.’ It has ‘to expose the vulnerability of the subtext while exposing itself to the subtext’s potential aggression. […] prove its historical courage and artistic good faith by leaving room for a two-way current of mutual criticism between authors and between eras.’
All which said, what we are really dealing with, I think, is not a two way exchange between two authors, one earlier and one modern, or two texts, but a triangle or even a square – between source author and their culture, imitator and their culture. The act of imitating requires the imitator to enter into a critical dialogue not only with their source but with themselves – that is to say, with the texts and voices that have made them.