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EVEN IN an era that idolizes youth, sands down wrinkles, and makes a ceramic artifact—“jug handles”—of an unwanted body part, the process of aging carries its rewards, one of which is that the soul so beset, the senior citizen, becomes a living document, a palimpsest on whose shriveled surface successively lived moments in time have been recorded. Reaching what in Spain is charmingly called “la tercera edad” (“the third age”) means that one carries within one’s own person the earlier two ages, a sweep of history, at least the chunk of history that covers every younger body’s historical awareness. Peel away the folds of age, penetrate the layers of memory, and the stored events of several decades play out as in an old newsreel.
The hero of my title—“The Molting Academic”—quite obviously is the literary critic, now nearing dotage (or voluntary retirement), who has labored in our profession over a span of some four decades, while my subtitle evokes the state of our critical art across the same period. I choose the image of molting because it aptly describes the transformations that have characterized us and our bailiwick in the course of these years, skin-deep transfigurations that yet have marked the species profoundly. Mind Webster’s definition of the term:
molt [. . .] vi: to shed hair, feathers, shell, horns, or an outer layer periodically ~ vt: to cast off (an outer covering) periodically
These last few decades of the twentieth century did, indeed, shed their outer layers not only periodically but at a prodigious pace. The battlefields of recent literary study are littered with the remains of body parts that critical critters have cast off, either seasonally or in combat. Even so, there is no cause for alarm. The buck with its little cranial protuberances, the soft-shelled crab in all its vulnerability, the snake still trailing its papery cover: they’re all engaged, as nature has fit them, in a process of renewal, gaining fresh life and growing, and they repeat the process year after year.
Any critics not exhausted by the birth of their PhD dissertations, any critics not yet superannuated and still engaged in public dialogue as they near emeritusdom willy-nilly course a trajectory where the distance between the greenhorn and the veteran describes the events that shaped a career. So I look in my overcrowded collection at a book that Andrew Debicki inscribed to me thirty-four years ago and I look at his most recent one, jacketed with his warm, paternal smile, and I register that here is the work of a critic who has stuck to his guns but who has updated his arsenal in response to the flux of his time. Stack up in chronological order Debicki’s ten or so books, those remnants of his moltings, and what you build, more or less, is a history of the shifts in critical theory and practice that have occurred during the second half of the twentieth century. Debicki and his writings are a symptom of the breathtaking transformations through which we have passed as readers and critics of literature. I’m hard put to decide between calling them an evolution or a revolution, an evolving revolution or a revolving evolution. Whatever the proper designation of the phenomenon, to have lived through this exciting, challenging, and tension-filled period ranks alongside e-mail as one of the special privileges granted to those of us sufficiently grizzled to have spanned this expansive moment of fierce innovation.
Of course, in those by now mythical sixties big things began to happen in all arenas. Students got restless and occupied buildings, napalm defoliated distant jungles, salad bars with tofu and garbanzo beans invaded restaurants, rock ‘n’ roll stirred the air, the environment became an issue, Dr. Spock liberated parents, Dr. Seuss entertained babies, Californians began to jog, Kennedy replaced Eisenhower, jets replaced propellers, sex replaced love, the MLA convention became politicized, and the cozy world of literary criticism got sucked into the maelstrom of the times, never to be the same again.
The acute critical self-consciousness that exploded in the sixties and from which, happily, we haven’t emerged, rests historically, as I see it, on three ponderous foundation stones: these are, in chronological order, Russian formalism in all its guises, American New Criticism, and Northrop Frye’s foundational book, Anatomy of Criticism. More than anything else, and before the French waves washed the North American shore, this holy trinity sanctified the literary text and gave it its due in its own right: in a manner of speaking, autonomized it. But these were well-guarded secrets in most graduate programs training Hispanists. Back in the forties and fifties, there were three ways of becoming a critic in the Hispanic field. I list them for you in order of importance. One, you were alive; two, you studied philology and literary history; and three, you went to Yale.
If you were alive that’s all you needed by way of preparation to analyze and interpret a work; the same as with teaching. (Incidentally, in those days there weren’t any “texts”; there were only “works.”) All you had to do was commune with the work; use your instincts, your good taste and breeding; and give your impressions. By way of example, listen to what Angel del Rio, author of a noted history of Spanish literature, the bible of students willing to risk fudging the preparation for area exams, had to say about Tirso de Molina’s most famous play: “los aciertos superan con mucho a las fallas, y es El burlador una de las grandes obras del teatro clásico español. El personaje y el conflicto básico están en ella definidos con firmeza y máxima eficacia desde la primera escena” ‘its achievements by far outweigh its shortcomings, and El burlador [de Sevilla] is one of the great works of the Spanish classical theater. The character and the basic conflict in it are drawn solidly and with maximal effectiveness from the very first scene’ (1: 377; my trans.). Then again, if you were serious, you became a philologist or you studied the author and his time (“his,” mind you; in those days there was no “her” and most assuredly no “his or her”). Thanks to my own rigorous training, I was able to unearth in the early sixties a short story by the famous nineteenth-century writer Leopoldo Alas that had never passed into any of his collections and had remained forgotten on a dusty shelf in the bowels of a Madrid newspaper archive. Some forty years later, the world of scholarship is still reeling from that discovery, and I’ve been riding on my reputation ever since. Ah, but if you went to Yale, as Andrew Debicki did, things were different, for there you were thrust into the new haven of New Criticism, where the Russians had come and where T. S. Eliot and I. A. Richards cast long shadows, from which even the budding Hispanist couldn’t escape, lest he fall into those most heinous of sins, the affective fallacy or the intentional fallacy, also known as psychology and referentiality.
Frankly, I can think of no better exercise for the mind, no better training for the future critic, than the close reading or textual explication that was at the core of the New Critical pursuit. That pursuit also exacted from the critic an act of faith, a commitment to a particular approach to the literary artifact. Within the jurisdiction of Hispanism, Debicki surely ranks among the earliest converts and has been one of the most avid, most dedicated, and most accomplished practitioners of the New Critical tenets. Save yourselves time: read Debicki and you don’t have to read the theoreticians of the New Criticism. In his first book, on the Mexican poet José Gorostiza, he puts their principles to work without evoking them directly. When he then jumps continents to deal with Spanish poetry of the 1920s in a volume on the poets of the 1924–25 group, he articulates explicitly his principles and his methods, and his are theirs. “[A] mi modo de ver,” he says, “un análisis minucioso será el mejor método de hacer evidente la experiencia que nos comunica un poema” ‘As I see it, a close analysis is the best method for revealing the experience that a poem communicates to us’ (Estudios 13; my trans.). The indicated path is from the poem to the poetry to the poet. Expressing his special debts to the stylistics of Dámaso Alonso and Carlos Bousoño and bolstered by William Wimsatt, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks in rejecting reliance on the author and on other external elements, he conceives of the poem as an integral world subject to its own organic rules. This means that, along with the New Critics, he also renounces the reader’s experience of the text as an interpretive gauge, what later on was to win the day as reader-response criticism. Privileging the text, he performs what he repeatedly terms “internal criticism,” which focuses on a work’s vocabulary, structure, style, imagery, metaphors, symbols, tone, rhythm, and patterns of irony, paradox, and ambiguity—all of which are assembled as the poem’s compounds of meaning. Debicki continues on this course subsequently in his book on Dámaso Alonso, where he seems a bit uncomfortable and apologetic about the Twayne series’ prescription of paying some initial heed to the author, and, again, in the early seventies, in his monumental volume on Jorge Guillén, where the affirmation of the New Critical creed could not be more rotund and insistent: “Este tipo de critica me parece el más adecuado para subrayar los valores presentes en la obra y asequibles a los lectores de hoy, de mañana y de siglos venideros. [. . .] La forma de un buen poema no es un atributo extraño a su significado, sino la manera única e insustituible de configurar este significado, de darle existencia objectiva y de hacerlo asequible a todo lector” ‘This type of criticism strikes me as the most appropriate for underscoring the values that reside in the work and that are accessible to readers today, tomorrow, and in coming centuries. The form of a good poem is not an attribute extraneous to its meaning but rather the single irreplaceable medium for configuring this meaning, for lending it an objective existence and rendering it accessible to all readers’ (Guillén 10, 12; my trans.). Small wonder, in the light of this declaration of faith, that Debicki’s rejection of referential components as primary evidence is equally firm: “He tomado en cuenta que una preocupación excesiva por la biografía y las intenciones del autor puede desviarnos de su obra. [. . . E]l lector que trate de averiguar las características de la experiencia poética indagando las intenciones o los episodios que la motivaron, acabará a menudo sin obtener respuestas claras” ‘I have taken into account that an excessive preoccupation with the author’s biography and intentions can deflect us from his work. The reader who tries to ascertain the characteristics of the poetic experience by probing the intentions or the events that motivated it will often end up without obtaining clear answers’ (Guillén 11; my trans.). Accordingly, chapter titles in this book, which invoke formal devices, tone, point of view, imagery, symbolism, and rhythmic patterns, are clues to its methodology, and only the final chapter comes to rest on “Jorge Guillén: su época, su vida, su poética” ‘his time, his life, his poetics’ (my trans.).
On the surface, the same approach appears to guide Debicki’s next project, a scrupulous and rich scrutiny of a dozen of Spanish America’s finest modern poets. But something has happened to the New Critic on his way back across the Atlantic. The book’s subtitle, with its (ascending? descending? undifferentiated?) triad—point of view, perspectivism, experience—appears to slide from formal structure to the factors that structure artistic form. What was a postscript to the Guillén study now stands announced in the titular series. The no-longer-quite-New Critic confesses that exclusive reliance on the tried methods of internal textual criticism does not bring fully satisfactory results. Close textual scrutiny is still the order of the day, but witness in the critic’s development the inroads of narratology and a gentle overlay of the reader-response criticism that by the mid-seventies had begun to waft through the air and to which books by Umberto Eco, Jane Tompkins, and Susan Suleiman and Inge Crosman give witness at the end of the decade. It should not be lost on Debicki’s reader, however, that the shift—or rather the expansion—has been forced on the critic not so much by the theoretical fashion of the day as by the fact that he is dealing with poets who aim to break with traditional expectations. The New Criticism was showing signs not necessarily of obsolescence but certainly of inadequacy, as its own major proponents had begun to discover and admit.
By the time of his next book, Poetry of Discovery, which deals with the Spanish poets active between 1956 and 1971, the New Critic’s critical renewal is complete as he announces the burial of close reading and the insufficiency for his purposes of “[c]ommonly used methods of analysis and close reading” and of “conventional stylistic and ‘New Critical’ techniques” (vii). In his search for “more effective methods of inquiry,” he now accords greater weight to contingency in his interpretations as he gives himself over to the tools of semiotics, reader-response theory, intertextuality, and deconstruction. The index of this book gives testimony to the theorists who have infiltrated its author’s consciousness and have expanded his critical vision and vocabulary: Roland Barthes, Jonathan Culler, Eco, Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, J. Hillis Miller, Paul Ricoeur, Michael Riffaterre, among others, though, tellingly, none carries the numerical weight of the entries still devoted to Bousoño. Again, it is the needs of these poets’ production, the turns of their verse, their modification of reader expectations, as much as Debicki’s readings into current theory, that account for the critic’s new clothes. Finally and most recently, in his sweeping survey Spanish Poetry of the Twentieth Century, Debicki has given up—well, sort of—the generational model that has dominated Hispanism and that besets it yet, even as it comes under fierce attack from sundry quarters and for a variety of good reasons. “Generation of 1898” and “Generation of 1927” still pepper his text, particularly its early pages; stand accepted as legitimate and legitimizing labels; and are not even blunted by the favorite escape hatch of many critics, a temporizing “so-called” in front of “generation.” Yet in this latest book Debicki recognizes and distances himself from the fragmentation and isolationism of this classification system and leans instead toward the modern-postmodern typology. His mission now is to situate twentieth-century Spanish poetry within broader currents and contexts. Commentators who have developed the paradigms associated with the vanguard and with European modernity and postmodernity have served Debicki to confect this synthesis in which of necessity the former New Critic, now at least partly regenerated, has come to make concessions to contexts, to organizational schemes, and to historicizing gestures. He confesses, “We can only seek structures that will be useful for given purposes, at given times—and not try to discover a permanent order” (2).
There is no question that, over the run of his career, this critic has molted, has molted often; he has shown flexibility and openness and has kept up with the times. Yet the critic is no snake in the grass or crab in the sea; he is not so easily given to changing his skin or coming out of his shell. The tug between the old New Critic and the newer critic seeps through the lines of Debicki’s defense, and his reader spies not so much a rejection or abandonment as a process of growth and expansion. The molting critic is too attached to his skin to sever it entirely, so he grows one skin atop another and becomes, yes, ever more thick-skinned.
The critic’s enhanced profile in the eighties and nineties matches what was going on in the turbulent world of critical theory at large, where former approaches were never fully squelched but gave way instead to an ever-enhanced menu of fusion cuisine. The recipes have become more complex and more tasty, but the ingredients have not been chucked. If the tuna-noodle casserole, that delectable dish of the fifties, has been replaced by gingered ahi on linguine, it’s still tuna and noodles. Neither structuralism nor deconstruction could exist without its formalist forebears.
In the past four decades, critical dishes have been served up one after another, have been all the rage with some consumers while despised by others, and have been replaced by fresher fare with overwhelming rapidity. Anyone who has lived or studied those nourishing if confusing developments knows the names and isms by which they go. Matters started heating up in the sixties when structuralism emerged out of the formalism that had shaped the Debickis and purged the positivism that had shaped me. Structuralism, with its roots in Saussurean linguistics, sought to systematize the study of the literary text, in which, as in other cultural phenomena, structuralist critics discerned operational principles and governing rules of order. The critic’s task was to engage the textual model in a quasi-scientific examination of its grammar or poetics. No mean feat by any means, the feat flew in the face of previous practices, brought literary criticism into contact with other disciplines, and spawned hot debate. Suddenly a book was no longer a work; it was a text. And language was no longer a string of words, it was composed of signs. And a text, with its signs, had a system and codes. A novel was a long sentence with a grammar of its own. We became narratologists. We had to distinguish between author and narrator, between poet and poetic voice. Hunting down sources was a no-no; hail to intertextuality! We had to digest diegesis. The ground was cut from under us when we learned that meaning was arbitrary but structure was not. Structuralism was our rude awakening to the demands and the excitement of a committed literary criticism and to the awesome power of theory. Structuralism, more than any force up to that moment, led us—forced us—into the critical renewal that has become inescapable.
Much of what followed structuralism was either an extension of or a reaction against structuralism, or both. In time, those associated with it tried to distance themselves from it and joined rival gangs or created their own. Semiotics was more all-encompassing; hermeneutics more cautious; Marxist criticism more political and sociological; and poststructuralism harbored under its umbrella a host of approaches: reader-response, feminism, queer theory, performance theory, psychoanalytic criticism, and deconstruction. Whether we like it or not, whether we concede it or not, these critical developments have tinged (some might say polluted) the air that we breathe, have affected the way we read and the critical language that we speak and write. It used to tax all our energies just to keep up with what was going on inside our specialized fields; now, on top of that, we have to keep up with a constantly changing frame as well. The rapidity of this succession of transformations and innovations—one step forward, half a step back—has been dazzling, and its most dramatic consequence has been endless renewal. No snake or crab or lizard or buzzard could possibly keep up with us!
Yet for each of us there are limits. We are all the creatures of our tastes, our convictions, our habits, our education, our commitments, our intolerances. We all have to be true to ourselves, and it seems to me—if I may be allowed to pontificate—that the critics who molt annually and those who molt sometimes and those who molt never ought to be able to live peacefully side by side, without getting under one another’s skin and with each being able to somehow profit from the other. We’re not really so incompatible. Not long ago—I’ve forgotten exactly on what occasion—Andy Debicki (deny it though he may) proclaimed to me that he’s finished molting. No more. “I’ve done a lot of different sorts of criticism,” he said, “but I’ll never do cultural studies.” Well, I have news for Debicki and for like thinkers. For one thing, we all in this trade, whatever our cast, have been doing cultural studies for all our careers as critics. It’s just a matter of how one defines cultural studies. For another, the moment one forms a commitment, or before one has the opportunity to do so, the tide has turned. Not long ago, a banner headline in the Chronicle of Higher Education screamed, “Beauty Is Back!” and within the issue noted scholars signaled a return to aesthetics, or at least to a balance between cultural studies and aesthetics (Heller). The clock moves forward, but round a circle. Close reading anyone?
———. Estudios sobre poesía española contemporánea: La generación de 1924–1925. Madrid: Gredos, 1968.
———. La poesía de Jorge Guillén. Madrid: Gredos, 1973.
———. La poesía de José Gorostiza. Mexico: Andrea, 1962.
———. Poetas hispanoamericanos contemporáneos: Punto de vista, perspectiva, experiencia. Madrid: Gredos, 1976.
———. Poetry of Discovery: The Spanish Generation of 1956–1971. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1982.
———. Spanish Poetry of the Twentieth Century: Modernity and Beyond. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1994.
Del Rio, Angel. Historia de la literatura española. 1948. 2 vols. New York: Holt, 1963.
Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957.
Heller, Scott. “Wearying of Cultural Studies, Some Scholars Rediscover Beauty.” Chronicle of Higher Education 4 Dec. 1998: A15–A16.
Kronik, John W. “Un cuento olvidado de Clarín.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos 136 (1961): 27–35.
Suleiman, Susan R., and Inge Crosman, eds. The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.
Tompkins, Jane P., ed. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980.
© 2001 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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