Literary criticism

James Joyce once famously said that if it took him seventeen years to write Finnegans Wake, then a reader should take seventeen years to read it. In his usual prophetic way, he turned out to be exactly right.

These letters may refuse the methodological stringency of academic literary criticism, but beyond some epistolary scaffolding (an addressee, a conversational tone, questions answered or posed) they are largely close textual analyses performed by astute readers with comp lit bona fides and early-career positions at Yale, Princeton and Oxford.

In the dentist’s chair, mortality is both obviated and underlined by the banality and the intensely personal quality of an experience that has almost no role to play in a narrative, other than to allow the banal and the personal to blunder tastelessly into the foreground. We are held back from platitudes about physical decay. There is simply no point, other than irony, in approaching the dentist with the mythical sense of crossing that grips Woolf as she breaths in the gas. The dentist is the everyday manifestation of our otherness to ourselves or, better put, the rearticulation of that otherness as a facet of the everyday.

I have used the word ‘magic’ to describe this book, and it occurs to me again that there is a spell at work here, an incantation as old as time, as fresh as a splash of clear water. Here are the stories of the world, he says; here is my story; here is theirs; here is yours. And they are all spinning together. Pay attention, for these distractions are not distractions; they are the substance of the story of everything. ‘There is an almost super-connectedness between events.’

This, Clive James’s final book, is a collection of his writings on Larkin and his work. James takes his title from the final words of Larkin’s ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ (1959). The ninety four pages, which include copies of one manuscript letter and two typed letters from Larkin to James, don’t offer very much book for your money, but you do get Clive James, who’s always good value. His explanation of why Jack Nicholson is the only Hollywood actor appropriate to play Larkin onscreen justifies the price of admission.

‘Writers and metaphors might not lead us directly to a change in policy. But that is not to say that writing cannot do things in the world. It can shift our frame of reference, for one.’

Confronted with the prospect of civilizational collapse, both Humour and Silliness end with exhortations for more humour.

Unvarnished ‘truth’ in literature is of course only relative to the position of the speaker and often used as a bludgeoning tool.

Disappointingly, however, the majority of chapters in the Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability, continue the erasure of disability from literary history that is already so prevalent in culture. Overall the book fosters the impression that disabled people either don’t write much, or don’t write much of value.

I think it would be a mistake to read Literary Criticism as simply another history of twentieth-century criticism. The tendentious and programmatic shaving down of local complexities allows North to sharpen his polemic into manifesto-like poignancy. One of the peculiarities of the manifesto is that it presumes the existence of something it is actually engaged in creating. This, I think, accounts for the odd yet telling choice to name a book after a practice that in its own account has been off the disciplinary map for at least the last few decades.