Paper delivered at ASECS 2023, Saint Louis
If we think of Earl Wasserman as a critic’s critic, perhaps that is because Wasserman is moreover a critic’s theorist. His work explains not only what poetry does, but also, if more implicitly, it explains what the academic study of poetry can and cannot do. In so doing, Wasserman consoles, or at least, grounds, academic critics and literary historians who worry, as they will, about the viability of their profession. In part to address such worries, literary theorists model, for critics, how academic literary study reproduces itself through the generations, and also how literary academia transcends its proper institutionality when it mediates past literary artists for present and future reading publics. Wasserman provides such models, or, one might say with Sandra Macpherson, contexts: for one way to describe the idea of critical process Wasserman propounds is as the “contextualism” Sandra has described. I want to contrast the stance toward the object of study enacted, in Wasserman's work, by such “contextualism” with the practice of “affiliation” which another dix-huitièmiste, Edward Said, proposes in the early essays on “secular criticism” he collects in “The World, the Text, and the Critic”— essays Said wrote within a decade of Wasserman’s last works. What can Wasserman’s method teach us about critical affiliation then, and critical affiliation now? Is Wasserman himself an affiliative critic, with whom we can affiliate?
Writing at the end of the 1970s, Said proposes “affiliation” as a model critical disposition, a model that on his account involves agency more than what he criticizes as Foucault’s overly passive model of “genealogy.” (Here, as more generally, Said is a poor reader of Foucault, but that is a topic for another time.) Whereas, Said argues, religious and ideological societies reproduce themselves by enforcing filiation, modern societies, with their plethora of works and forms, give rise to practices of critical judgment that denaturalize filiation and make it possible instead to affiliate with common, chosen cultural projects. Said aligns himself and his constellation of cultural heroes—among them Swift, Vico, and Auerbach—with this secular mode of critical affiliation. Said warns us that such affiliation, when it becomes routinized or thoughtless, can devolve again into mere filiation; but he reassures us that true criticism retains an essentially oppositional character that always enables it to disrupt mere filiation, and construct instead the evolving, critical equilibrium affiliation makes possible.
I bring up Said as a foil for Wasserman because while Wasserman starts with the same received ideas about sacred and secular social form, he deconstructs their opposition, suggesting how hard it is to keep criticism oppositional when such criticism is, at one and the same time, soulful friendship. To be sure, Wasserman shares with Said the evaluative mode borne of an era when a critic’s choice of object would habitually be read as a gesture of affiliation or disaffiliation, of condemnation, enthusiastic embrace, or more likely something in between (subtle distantiation, say, or mild encouragement). And to an extent, Wasserman’s characteristic attentiveness to the worlds of the texts on which he comments represents a series of affiliative gestures. Yet Wasserman attends to each text so intensely that he renders it an “elemental” world of its own, and thereby calls the very possibility of affiliation with the text into question. If the text is, as The Subtler Language argues, a world unto itself, “self containing,” and “self sustaining,” the world of the text is only equivocally the critic’s. Performing this argument, Wasserman moves himself, and moves his reader, out of a stance of affiliative judgment and into the attitude of an amazed witness. We literary scholars of today, who by and large historicize or analyze rather than evaluate, may think we too, in some such way, witness more than we judge. But is this true? Rereading Wasserman, and shadowing his practice, may help us find out: perhaps especially if we attend to how Wasserman ajudicates, or witnesses, the supremely difficult case of the poetic texts of Percy Shelley.
Wasserman learned to practice criticism under the aegis of a modernism generally dismissive of Romanticism, and of the work of Percy Shelley in particular. Shelley presented extraordinary difficulties: some of them brought on by how Shelley himself outraged Church and State, defied patriarchal norms, lived chaotically, and died young, and some of them brought on by the formal discoveries, renunciations, or failures with which Shelley's work confronted its readers. Paradoxically, Shelley’s obsession with form revolted the modern, and especially modernist, critics who otherwise championed kinds of formalism; even though, or perhaps because, many of them had been attracted by Shelley’s work in their youth. This paradox is the well-known, difficult “case of Shelley” that Frederick Pottle ably diagnosed in the middle of the twentieth century. Wasserman was the great mediatory, contextualist critic who wrote about Shelley after Pottle’s ground-clearing exercise, and after the anti-Shelleyan fulminations of F. R. Leavis to which Pottle particularly responded, but before poststructuralism and liberation politics transformed our understanding of the critical and social contexts into which Shelley’s work was seen to fit or fail to fit.
In his Shelley book, Wasserman elaborates how Shelley mashes up Enlightenment styles of thought into a practice of skeptical transcendentalism. As a skeptical transcendentalist, Shelley challenges the very possibility of telling filiation apart from affiliation, and the sacred from the secular. For Wasserman, as for many, Shelley may be a nineteenth century poet, but he is an eighteenth-century thinker, holding the opposed tendencies of eighteenth century thought without resolving them a la Kant or Hegel, without marrying them in his thought as he does in his verse. Shelley’s ambivalence can be summed up with the formula that, in The Finer Tone, Wasserman discerns at work organizing Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: Shelley, too, presents us with a “mystic oxymoron.” And in a chapter crafted, I believe, especially for this Shelley book, which mainly collects chapters published previously, Wasserman demonstrates the difficulty of locating the worldliness of the Shellean text by working through, exactly, the paradoxes of filiation and affiliation at the heart of the drama of The Cenci.
In The Cenci, Wasserman writes, Shelley seeks to portray what the poet calls “a sad reality,” “to paint … what has been,” and to critique and oppose religious and ideological tyrannies so mad to impose filiation they will conspire in the rape a child. Yet Shelley’s realism, his preferred worldliness, ultimately shows theology and tyranny to be “human creations”; creations fashioned, Wasserman says, “for the purpose of oppression.” “Shelley’s moral principles,” he writes, “arise out of his … moral analysis of man’s psychological constitution … throwing light on some of the most dark and secret caverns of the human heart.’” Even filiation, it turns out, is at bottom borne of affiliative choices. Beatrice may criticize her society, but she too cannot choose but to err. Strikingly, Wasserman tries to root Shelley’s argument in the stabilizing ground of biographical intellectual history. He refers throughout, in footnotes, to Shelley’s efforts, in The Cenci and related works, to “align himself especially with” his chosen family, with “Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft,” and with Mary Shelley. Wasserman adverts that “part of the purpose of this chapter on The Cenci … is to show that Shelley shares,” or one might say, affiliates himself with, their view “that undue curiosity about the suppressed thoughts of the mind also has dangerous consequences.” It is hilarious that Wasserman unironically traces this supposed view of Shelley’s back to the champions of oversharing responsible for the disastrously revealing Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
Where do we situate ourselves, now, in relation to this idea of critical practice as always ambivalently mystical and skeptical, filiative and affiliative, given and chosen, intimate and private? In lieu of an answer I have a parable, drawn from my own personal intellectual biography. We scholars affiliate with our teachers, but we and our teachers alike can see mentorship as a process of filiation, and much of what we do flows from how we negotiate the terms of such collaborations. I myself think back to discussing—and conducting!—such negotiations with Lauren Berlant, when she was on my dissertation committee at Chicago in the mid 1990s.
I was visiting with Lauren once when she asked me sharply why I hadn’t yet produced a dissertation chapter for her to read. I stammered out some line about how I was still visualizing the conceptualization process, or whatever, when she cut me off and told me that my problem was that I was trying too hard to think along with my dissertation director, who was himself, on her account, still preoccupied with trying to write for his dissertation director, which to her mind, explained why his then still unfinished second book was so long delayed. I protested, quite reasonably, that people value their teachers and want to write for them, and that I would finish my dissertation, and that Jim Chandler might admire Jerome McGann, but he would someday finish England in 1819, and she rolled her eyes at me. So, flailing about for evidence, I hit on the case of my other committee member, onetime Wasserman dissertation student W. J. T. Mitchell.
“Well Lauren,” I said, “come on, think about Tom Mitchell. You can’t deny Tom has his own voice! But Tom also has a framed picture, on his desk, of Earl Wasserman!”
“That’s exactly it!” Lauren responded. “Tom has his dissertation director on his desk—in a box! In a frame! Right where he can see him! So that he, Tom, can remember that he, is, someone else!”
Now, as then, I admire Lauren’s faith in Tom’s ultimate critical detachment, and certainly there are few critics whom Tom admires more than he admires Edward Said. But then as now, I find Earl Wasserman a much more enigmatic signifier than Lauren would allow, and a figure whom, if not quite like a father figure, is, in the nature of enigmatic signifiers, hard not to love,.