Monday, September 4, 2017

Once more, with feeling: Computation, criticism, and a way forward

And I mean computation, not as a tool to crunch data or process words, but as a way of thinking about literary structure and process. How do I sell that to the profession when it would seem that I long ago abandoned the approach to computation and the literary mind that convinced me of computation’s importance in the first place?

We’ve been through this before. It’s complicated.

That abandonment is what it seems. As a consequence of my immersion in cognitive science I have a much different sense of intellectual possibilities and responsibilities. And I bring a much different set of intuitions to bear in my literary researches.

The intuitions, those are key. If I could, by a snap of my fingers, grant one thing to the profession, it would be those intuitions. It does not, alas, work like that. How does one develop those kinds of intuitions? Do you have to do it like I did, by internalizing a sophisticated computational model of the mind? Or can you back into it another way?

That other way would of course be through the description of literary form. But those critics don’t even seem to have a hint of curiosity about form, a little grain of irritation to be nurtured into pearls of description, not wisdom. No, not wisdom.

* * * * *

Let me present an example of the kind of blindness that seems pervasive in academic literary criticism. Back in the spring of 2001 James Paxson published an article, “Revisiting the deconstruction of narratology: master tropes of narrative embedding and symmetry” [1] in which he discussed ring composition. As you know, ring composition is a hobby horse of mine. I like it because, well, fundamentally, it intrigues me. I’m curious. It’s something definitely to look for and describe in a text.

Paxson dismisses ring composition, not without reason, of course, but the reasons he gives are not good ones. They betoken a professional arrogance that lingers on. I say “professional” because I have no reason to think that Paxson himself was an arrogant man. He was pleasant enough in our brief email correspondence, which was about ring-composition. No the arrogance is in the profession, in its stance toward the intellectual world.

Here's what Paxson says:
Ring composition is the symmetry or concentricity believed to characterize the aggregate of images, episodes, or utterances comprising certain culturally special narratives. [brief description of ring-composition deleted] And although the “elements” might seem arbitrarily produced, analysis of ring composition...always works to resolve the narrative into a decisive tectonic calculus, a notation that might neatly be expressed something like ABCCBA. More customarily, the ring analyst will indicate each reversed element using the prime exponent, ...C’B’A’. (Compare the fact that the use of calculi, as the formulations of Mieke Bal and Jeffrey Williams indicate, still undergird the persistent scientism of narratological research in focalization.) But more telling is the primacy of that tectonic center in the ring text, a center often marked by an X in the notation, ABC...X... C 'B 'A'. Ring analysts look for such linear symmetries in brief, isolated passages that comprise epics, lais, romances, or novels, and they insist on coherent linear symmetry in entire narratives, prose or lyrical, however lengthy. Ring composition therefore speaks to the desire to find bilateral or biaxial symmetry, a symmetry that might seem at times, certainly to skeptical theorists, less than perfect, often too fanciful. But to the narratological ring analyst, intrinsically bilateral symmetry cannot be denied. Her enthusiasm might obscure less than perfect bilateral symmetry, revealing at times merely punctuated anaphora or redundancy. But the ringer’s tectonic enthusiasm, the rage for order, characterizes virtually all of these symmetry-seeking exercises in critical formalism.
Notice that dismissive term, “ringer”, which Paxson repeats later on.

The nature of Paxson’s critique is clear enough. Most generally, ring analysts are seeing what they want to see – a well-known problem in literary criticism. More specifically, this particular mode is scientistic, both in its use of quasi-mathematical notation and in its search for symmetry and order. Finally, as this passage makes quite clear, these ringers are working hard to prop up the Western canon:
Indeed, the search for and study of ring compositions seems to function as part of the validating process of great works in the Western canon. Because most of the critics listed in my note (number 6) to such Great Books were New Critics, all intent on proving their author’s superiority as a literary craftsman, it appears that symmetrical (and thus harmonious) ring design could be thought of as part of the institutional machinery that helps produce or validates the canonicity of great authors. This institutional validation sounds a lot like the universal canonizing function of multi-degree narrative embedding.
Debunking complete.

Nothing is surprising about this. After all Paxson’s title proclaims this to be an exercise in deconstruction, and that’s what deconstruction is, high-class, sophisticated, and sometimes even necessary and useful, debunking.

So, for the sake of argument, let’s take that at face value. Guilty as charged.

What Paxson doesn’t do is even attempt to demonstrate that any of his ringers went astray. He doesn’t pick even one example and show where and how the ring analysis is somewhere between doubtful and flat-out wrong. He simply assumes that these analyses must be wrong (either that or that their correctness is trivial–though he doesn’t say anything like this).

That’s what bothers me about his article, that he doesn’t bother to check the work of those he’s critiquing. Why not? because it’s not necessary, because their motives, because we’re beyond that now, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We know how literature is and it’s not like that.

Really?

* * * * *

And that, as far as I can tell, is where the profession is now. There is, in addition however, a widespread sense that something’s amiss. Of course, there’s angst about the institutional situation of the humanities, and about being shoved out the door by STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). I suppose this is a real issue – departments, after all, have been shuttered here and there (I’m thinking particularly of SUNY Albany).

But it’s always been a real issue, hasn’t it?

I wonder if it isn’t rather grimly convenient that these institutional pressures seem to be getting more intense. That makes it easy to project doubts about the profession’s intellectual underpinnings onto these institutional matters. Oh, there’s nothing wrong with what we’re doing. But those bean counters, those STEManiacs, they’ll be the death of us.

But of course there are intellectual doubts here and there, glimmerings of questions, attempts to find new ways of knowing. But where’s the delight, the curiosity, the joy in discovery? The profession’s immersion in skepticism seems to have killed off its capacity for wonder. Now that it has become skeptical about skepticism it wanders about looking for something to do.

* * * * *

You see my problem, no? I want the profession to take computation seriously as a way of thinking about the mind. That’s what I did when I plunged into cognitive networks years ago in the mid-1970s. But I only ever analyzed one text with that model, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129. Moreover the cognitive sciences themselves have all but abandoned that general class of models in favor of statistical techniques and machine learning (the kinds of models used in computational criticism).

How can I sell that? And yet learning that (hand-crafted models of symbolic computing) had a profound effect on my intellectual imagination. It changed my sense of the possible, and the necessary.

Before that intellectual transformation I had a sense for, a curiosity about, literary form. I’d honed that in my early work on “Kubla Khan”. It was that sense and that curiosity that brought me to computation. Close-reading surely wasn’t going to tell me about form. But computation might.

It didn’t, not yet. But it’s the only thing in the game. Narratolgy’s trying, but hasn’t quite made it. Poetics, who, where?

But you don’t actually need those computational models in order to analyze and describe the formal features of literary texts. All you need is curiosity, the capacity for delight, and a willingness to grind out the work.

Where does the curiosity come from?

It is my belief, my faith if you will, that it is our job, as literary critics, to describe literary form. To be sure, that’s not our only job. Not at all. But we are the only intellectual discipline for whom formal description of literary form is within our scope of responsibility. If we don’t do it, no one will.

It’s time to go to work. The key to the treasure is the treasure. If WE don’t turn the lock, it won’t open.

* * * * *

[1] James J. Paxson, Revisiting the deconstruction of narratology: master tropes of narrative embedding and symmetry. Style, Vol. 35, No. 1 Spring 2001, 126-150.

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