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I like to think of the critic’s profession as a community
of readers, helping each other read more proficiently.
Interview with EARL
INGERSOLL
LIDIA VIANU:
You are a
reputed and experienced critic of contemporary literature. You have tackled in
your books the American poets of the eighties, Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing,
Lawrence Durrell, but also DH Lawrence and Joyce. You are Professor Emeritu at
SUNY Brockport. You have published interviews with the writers above. Do you
feel that an interview means today more than a book of criticism to readers?
Because no other age indulged in interviews as we have been doing for the last
few decades... Or is it just a reflection of the need to capture the attention
of mass-media, and therefore not literature at all?
EARL INGERSOLL
Interviews with authors have a wide and varying audience of readers who are
attracted to conversations with writers for a variety of reasons. I think of
“interviews” in the context of journalism where an interviewer swoops down on an
author with an agenda of questions that the author-interviewee is expected to
answer, rather like short, impromptu essays which fill in the blanks. In the
literary “conversation” the questioner may have several questions in mind but
prefers a more flexible structure for the interchange with the author, allowing
the conversation to take its own course. In the literary conversation the
questioner usually is an academic, familiar with the author’s work as a teacher
and scholar, while interviewers sometimes preface their questioning with a
comment such as I’ve never read any of your work, but I’d like to ask you a few
questions about . . .
In some cases readers of
interviews are curious about what kind of person wrote a book such as
Gravity’s Rainbow.
They may be looking for hints as to what the author intended in writing
the book, what it means, how the writer goes about writing a novel or a poem,
etc. Scholars often find interviews useful in writing about an author’s work. If
I am writing about Ian McEwan’s novel On
Chesil Beach and I’m struck by the names
LIDIA VIANU:
Is our love of interviews (which I am
guilty of as anyone else) proof that we are prolonging the book we read into its
author’s life, in an attempt to build our own story, whose hero the author is?
Proof that we are trying to subvert his authority and confiscate both his life
and work in order to satisfy our desire to be creators?
EARL INGERSOLL:
I think many of us want to be connected to
authors, who often seem to be standing in the wings, off-stage, where we have a
strong sense of their presence, but they remain in the shadows. The irony is
that as many authors have reminded us the author who writes the book is not the
“author” who answers interview questions. I don’t think the author who writes a
second novel, say, is the same author who wrote the first, even though the same
name is on the spines of both novels.
LIDIA VIANU:
We have
come to a point in literary criticism where – since cutural studies no longer
monopolize the market (thank God for that) – we feel like going back to the
solid analysis of how a story is made, how a poem was written, and to what
purpose. In short, as I sense (I may be wrong, of course), we are going back to
the text after a trip into biography, philosophy, linguistics, history, which
turned critcism into a discourse that had nothing to say about the work it
claimed to focus on. Was it a good idea to yield to cultural studies? Have they
helped literary critcism?
EARL INGERSOLL:
I have been generally opposed to cultural
studies, which seems to say a text is a text is a text without any concern for
the value of the text, and in the process encouraged the production of writing
on writing that is essentially journalism directed often to the investigation of
nonentities. I abhor the misguided egalitarianism that considers the assessment
of value in a piece of writing a symptom of “elitism.” Most days I envy art
historians because they have managed to escape the leveling down of works of
art, primarily because art objects have monetary value, i.e., the value
established by a purchase price. People in the art world don’t say that
someone’s doodling is as worthy of attention as Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,”
mainly because no one is willing to pay 100, 000, 000 euros for a doodle.
LIDIA VIANU:
What name
would you give to the kind of literary criticism you teach and practise?
EARL INGERSOLL:
You know, I’ve practiced some psychoanalytic
criticism, à la Lacan, or the vein of criticism I admired in the writing of
Shoshana Felman, Barbara Johnson, and Jane Gallop, but not “Freudian”, you know,
the kind of reading that finds the phallus everywhere.
But as a boy I was taught by New Critics and I am still enamored of the
notion that it is the text itself, in and of itself, that matters. I realize
that many considered that approach “elitist” from their righteous and
self-congratulating egalitarianism, but I am too old to have to pretend respect
for the smugness of academics politics—you know, “we are correct politically,
and we will bury you.”
LIDIA VIANU:
Do your
students prefer the new critical fashions of turning the text into a
side-discourse (I mean Postcolonialism, Identity, and so on) to thematic
critcism, for instance? Is the communism of
cultural studies still strong in your university?
EARL INGERSOLL:
I like to think students still come to a
literature class to learn to read more effectively.
I think young academics invest in the newest critical approach in part
because it’s going to get them hired, published, tenured, and promoted. I recall
that during an MLA interview for a position in our department a member of the
search committee asked the applicant about a course she was teaching in the
“Harlequin Romance,” sometimes called “bodice-rippers” in my country,
specifically, how students reacted to a whole semester of novels, supposedly
written for and read by “desperate housewives.”
The applicant replied: “Well, eventually they ask, ‘When are we going to
read some literature?’”
LIDIA VIANU:
What do
you think of such terms as ‘hystoriographic metafiction’, repeated and
refurbishd by successive critics, who treat the words as if they were sacred
cult objects? There are academics who still examine their students’ knowledge
about the story of a term: who created it and when, who changed it partially and
when?
EARL INGERSOLL:
I think that some of the jargon of the
discipline has the same origins as the lingo of physicians, or the slang of
adolescents: it offers the security blanket of “our little group knows a
language that excludes those who don’t know it.”
LIDIA VIANU:
Is
literary criticism, in your opinion, a precise way of measuring literary quality
(which is the assumption cultural studies often start with) or creation – and in
the latter case, is it all right to be a bit imprecise, allusive and to write
appealing (not just dry) texts? Is the literary (ambiguous, inevitably) load of
a word important in criticism? Is the critic supposed to be a creator himself,
or a measurer of effects?
EARL INGERSOLL:
This is a bundle of questions. First, I doubt
that literary criticism can be all that “precise.” We may enjoy deluding
ourselves into believing we are being “precise,” but honest critics don’t
pretend. I am just as well pleased
to have a literary criticism admit subjectivity; otherwise, I find myself
reading someone’s self-delusion. In a
literary critic I look for someone who offers a reading of the text, and when I
write I feel as though I am repaying some of those over the years who have
helped me to read texts a little more effectively.
LIDIA VIANU:
Do you
feel any change in the quality of the literary text as a result of the recent
fascinating virtual adventure? Has the internet affected the way writers write
and we read? The way we look at a book on paper?
EARL INGERSOLL:
Yes, I am aware of how digital texts have the
potential to change the way writers write and readers read. At the same time, I
still see people in bookstores buying books.
People try out things such as Amazon’s Kindle, and then go back to
reading books in their more “primitive” form.
LIDIA VIANU:
I still
experience a religious feeling I had as a child, when I held a bound book in my
hands with the certainty that it was an object of art, smelling of paper, minute
care and a million ideas on every page. They were just letters, no
illustrations, no ‘readers’ digest’, no guide – it was just me and the author. A
perfectly intimate literary affair. What do you think those who read in the
computer or on printed paper feel these days?
EARL INGERSOLL:
I too have had intimacy with authors through
reading. I am conservative enough to believe that that is still
the reading experience, and I don’t
think it’s going to be completely eradicated by the impulse toward the “new,”
the “advanced,” etc. Every once in a while I encounter a writer or a book that I
like to say “reminds me why I became an English major.” Most recently, the
writer and the book have been Colum McCann and his newest novel,
Let the Great World Spin. I find I
have a deep psychological, maybe even
spiritual need for literature that confirms my faith in the simple notion
that experience means something.
LIDIA VIANU:
Since
literature gives signs of losing its audience, how come literary theory and all
those branches of rigid literary criticism still appeal to some? Have critics
lost touch with reality? Can criticism be suicidal to such an extent?
EARL INGERSOLL:
I think what’s wrong with academia, in my
country, and maybe in others, is that some academics are less lovers of
literature and more political ideologues, bent on foisting their views on their
students. Or their readers, if they
are writing essays for scholarly journals. I was asked by a good journal to
referee a submission castigating Ian McEwan for writing a novel –
Saturday – whose viewpoint character
is a surgeon who is so preoccupied with his work that he has no time to pay
attention to issues of diverse cultures and ethnicities in contemporary London
where he practices. I felt a bit of an old curmudgeon saying that having
recently undergone surgery I didn’t much care about my surgeon’s social and
political views, but I was impressed
that when he released me from the hospital on a Saturday he encouraged me to
call him that day or Sunday if I experienced any problems with what might have
been a premature release. I get annoyed by academics who seem blissfully unaware
of the egotism in their self-righteous sense of what is “correct.”
LIDIA VIANU:
I am
aware that most literary criticism today is either academic (scientific and so
on), or review-oriented. I am afraid that the literary critic, who was the
writer’s and also the readers’ partner in the process of reading, has turned
into an advertiser: either of the author (reviews on sites and papers, blurbs,
etc) or of himself. What future do you see for the critical impulse, which, as
Eliot once said, is ‘as inevitable as breathing’?
EARL INGERSOLL:
I fear that literature, and culture generally,
is a business, and that upsets our traditional notion of the artist starving in
the garret for his or her art. On the other hand, literature probably always was
a business; you know, writers having to please a patron or patroness and his/her
circle of associates. Even Shakespeare could be swayed by the “Tudor myth” of
strong monarchs as the Tudors wanted to see themselves, and didn’t he write
Macbeth in part to please James I ?
Clearly the critical impulse has a future because we want to know what the
“experts” think. If I see a new film and like or don’t like it, I might well
Google the movie reviews and see what films critics thought of it.
LIDIA VIANU:
If you
were to start all over again, would you choose to be a critic and an academic
teaching literature?
EARL INGERSOLL:
You bet I would! I miss the opportunities to
talk about books I have read with students who are sometimes much more
perceptive than we give them credit for being. Like most retired academics, I do
not miss the stacks of papers to
evaluate and the effort to grade fairly and the meetings that last 90 minutes
only because they were scheduled to last that long.
Criticism I still do, even
though it brings me no merit raises or promotions anymore.
Still, it has its rewards, such as the occasional e-mail from a stranger
saying, I wanted to let you know how useful I found your essay on X, Y, or Z. I
like to think of the profession as a community of readers, helping each other
read more proficiently.
March 16, 2010