Subjectivity: is an objective judgment of a literary work possible?

EACH of these essays/entries is intended to stand alone, so there is a certain degree of duplication in them as it is unlikely they will be read in sequence or even that all will be read by a visitor to these pages. This is intentional: someone reading an essay/entry must not be puzzled by some allusion she or he might not understand because they have not read the other essays/entries.

 

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[Critics] have neither wigs nor outriders. They differ in no way from other people if one sees them in the flesh. Yet these insignificant fellow creatures have only to shut themselves up in a room, dip a pen in the ink, and call themselves ‘we’, for the rest of us to believe that they are somehow exalted, inspired, infallible.

Virginia Woolf, from An Essay In Criticism,


New York Herald Tribune, Oct 9, 1927.

[Critics are] lice who crawl on literature.

Hemingway in The Green Hills Of Africa, 1935.

VIRGINIA WOOLF wrote An Essay In Criticism as part of her review for the New York Herald Tribune of Men Without Women, Hemingway’s second volume of short stories, and some commentators believe she intended to highlight a difficulty perpetually faced by literary critics. This difficulty, they suggest, is that whereas the ordinary reader has all the time in the world to reach a judgment of the worth of a new novel or a volume of short stories, the critic — pity the poor critic, they claim Woolf implies — must make up his or her mind more or less immediately and then announce that judgment to the public. This is surely a misreading of what Woolf writes, and a wilful one at that.

Certainly it can be read as intending to explain and excuse why a later, more considered, reading of a work by other critics has shown that the earlier judgments of some were completely at sea. ‘In the heat of the moment,’ a critic might protest, ‘and faced with a deadline, we can’t always be expected to get it right.’ Such an explanation is plausible, but doesn’t quite match the tone of what else Woolf has to say: mocking the critics as ‘somehow exalted, inspired, infallible’ does not speak of Woolf charitably letting them off the hook.

In fact, what Woolf writes can be easily interpreted in a very different way, one far less flattering to critics and their cousins, the college English department academics who are equally prepared to lay down the law on the worth of this or that writer. Woolf is also a little scathing of the general reader who, she implies, is only too willing to set aside his or her own judgment and instead accept that of the critics and the critics’ own estimation of themselves, their abilities and their judgments as ‘exalted, inspired and infallible’.

However one chooses to interpret what Woolf says, it would seem almost indisputable that an ‘objective’ evaluation of a literary work is impossible. I would go further and suggest that ultimately every judgment of, and opinion passed on, a work of art is subjective, that there is no convenient yardstick, no Archimedean fixed point, which would allow us to evaluate works of art objectively.

The essence of the dilemma of having no universally accepted criteria by which to judge works of ‘art’ presents itself in other areas of thought, for example in moral philosophy. Once atheists insisted, inconveniently, that an all-powerful ‘God’ did not exist and thus could not be the ‘fixed point’ by which moral standards and virtue were gauged, moral philosophers faced a real problem: so what was the imperative to ‘be good’ rather than ‘be bad’? It could be even worse: was it possible that without such an imperative ‘good’ and ‘bad’ simply did not exist?

. . .

Even if one accepts that ultimately objectivity is a chimera, it is still possible that the — albeit subjective — judgments and opinions of some in any field, including literature, might deserve to be taken more seriously than those of others. Furthermore, there can be, and often is, a consensus on the ‘worth’ of a work of art — but note: this can’t in any way mean that the critics ‘are right’ simply because a great many of them agree; it means nothing more than that there is a consensus on the worth of a work of art.

In the literary world critics, academics, publishers’ editors and writers themselves will have read a great deal, very possibly more than you or I. They might thus be regarded as having a broader literary hinterland, one which can help them evaluate the scores and flaws of different works; and because of that broader reading and experience, some might assume those critics, academics, publishers’ editors and writers are more likely to recognise the qualities of what could be thought of as ‘good writing’ sooner than would we ordinary joes.

Yet I must repeat: the fact of a ‘consensus’ of opinion and judgment can only mean that there is ‘a consensus’; and it most certainly cannot mean that a work of art universally regarded as ‘excellent’ is thus per se ‘excellent’. It is also worth noting that the critics and academics, on the one hand, can — in theory — be thought to be disinterested; when considering the judgment of publishers’ readers and editors, on the other hand, a note of caution must be sounded: publishers’ readers and editors are not necessarily or even primarily looking for ‘good literature’; they are hoping to discover work that will sell. And it was that factor which helped to launch Hemingway’s career. Because three of his novels — The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell To Arms and For Whom The Bell Tolls sold very well indeed. But were and are they ‘good literature’?

. . .

We should bear in mind that what this year or in this decade or in this era is deemed by ‘the critics’ to be ‘good literature’ might by a future generation of critics and readers be valued a great deal less: future generations might regard today’s ‘good literature’ as stilted, archaic, verbose and certainly not to ‘modern tastes’ in whatever respects that ‘modern taste’ is currently ‘modern’.

In fact that fickleness, that readiness to abandon yesterday’s generation of literary heroes and promote fresher ones will be welcomed by publishers: ‘new’ always sells — if the marketing is right. Hemingway might be a notable exception — and just why he became a notable exception is precisely what interests me — but the past is littered with ‘up-and-coming writers’ whose heyday has long passed: who today still champions Hugh Walpole, Thomas Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, Brett Easton Ellis and Martin Amis?

In fact, it is — ironically — one of life’s constants that subsequent generations delight in debunking the values of a previous generation. It’s how they can define themselves more clearly and put clear blue water between themselves and the ‘older generation’.

It was precisely that which benefited Hemingway when first he offered his short stories and subsequently his novel The Sun Also Rises for publication: whatever else his writing was, it most certainly was not boring old Henry James, John Galsworthy, George Gissing or Edith Wharton, the writers whose work the bright young things of Hemingway’s generation began to regard as stilted, archaic and verbose. As the New York Times put it when it reviewed The Sun Also Rises in October 1926, Hemingway was writing ‘a lean, hard and athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame’.

. . .

Despite a possible consensus among the critics on the worth of any given novel, volume of short stories or of poetry, and even though — as Woolf observes — ordinary joes are all too eager to doff their caps and acknowledge that the judgment of the critics — assumedly better-read and more ‘educated’ in literature — should carry more weight, each of those judgments is still a subjective one; and no number of subjective judgments, however much they agree, will or can add up to an objective judgment.

There’s a further dilemma: critics regularly disagree with each other on just ‘how good’ a new novel is: how should we who doff our caps react when the judgment of one set of well-read critics and academics is wholly contradicted by the judgment of another set of equally well-read and well-informed critics or academics? Can the judgment of one set take precedence over that of the other?

More to the point, does it make sense to acknowledge that one judgment can take precedence over another? And even deciding which judgment might be ‘more valid’ than another is itself a subjective value judgment. Here’s an example: commenting on Hemingway’s post-war novel Across The River And Into The Trees, the novelist John O’Hara, in a review for the New York Times in September 1950, wrote:

The most important author living today, the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare, has brought out a new novel. The title of the novel is Across The River and Into the Trees. The author, of course, is Ernest Hemingway, the most important, the outstanding author out of the millions of writers who have lived since 1616.

Yet commenting on the same novel in a letter to a friend, the novelist and one-time close friend of Hemingway John Dos Passos simply and unambiguously observed:

How can a man in his senses leave such bullshit on the page?

Who is ‘right’? O’Hara or Dos Passos? And given such disagreement, how are we ordinary joes, who often lazily look to ‘the critics’ for our opinions — and who earn Virginia Woolf’s scorn for doing so — expected to decide whose judgment carries more weight?

It gets worse: what if we ‘non-expert’ readers disagree with a consensus view of the critics? What weight — if any — do our dissenting judgments and opinions carry? Can the judgment of a ‘non-expert’ ever be regarded as just as credible as that of the ‘professional’, especially if it contradicts an orthodox and hitherto received view?

One is tempted to say ‘of course it can’t’: just as we defer in medical matters to qualified physicians, we are very inclined in literary matters to defer to the ‘professional’ critics. But having thus given into the temptation of agreeing that there is a hierarchy of judgment, one is still obliged to explain exactly why that ‘expert’ judgment should be given more credence. And it is pertinent at this point to repeat Virginia Woolf’s observation that

[Critics] have only to shut themselves up in a room, dip a pen in the ink, and call themselves ‘we’, for the rest of us to believe that they are somehow exalted, inspired, infallible.

So why, exactly? Why do we doff our caps?

. . .

Hemingway, whose own subjective judgment of his writing abilities was that he was extraordinarily good, most certainly did not doff his cap to the critics. Even before he found overnight success with his novel The Sun Also Rises and when he was still a hopeful, rather than an established, writer, he expressed very trenchant views on literary critics. In a letter to Sherwood Anderson in May 1925 — this was before he turned on Anderson in what biographers assume was part of a strategy to free himself of his contract with Boni & Liveright to join Scribner’s — he wrote:

God knows people who are paid to have attitudes toward things, professional critics, make me sick; camp-following eunuchs of literature. They won’t even whore. They’re all virtuous and sterile. And how well-meaning and high-minded. But they are all camp followers.

Hemingway’s contempt is ironic given that the enthusiastic reactions of most critics to his book of short stories, In Our Time, and to his ‘first’ novel, The Sun Also Rises, were the major factor in establishing him on the literary scene and launching his career. The critics also played a crucial role in helping to create the figure of ‘Hemingway the genius’. Their initial consensus was that Hemingway was ‘the real deal’.

Yet his opinion of critics did not improve over the next 36 years, and that is not surprising: after the early success of his novels The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell To Arms, and of Men Without Women, his second volume of short stories, his subsequent literary output met with ever less critical enthusiasm.

His bullfighting book Death In The Afternoon in which he educated the American reading public on bullfighting but in which he also pontificated extensively on writing, and Green Hills Of Africa, his safari book in which he also pontificated extensively on writing — came to be scrutinised more keenly and judged more harshly, and gave him more reason to dislike ‘the critics’.

It’s likely that when all is said and done more readers than not are prepared to bow to the judgment of ‘the critics’. Their obeisance might be suspect, but why complicate life: the critics are paid to ‘have opinions’ and such opinions prove useful in deciding what to read next. But some of us, having read a novel we are assured is ‘acclaimed’ by the critics, might find ourselves wondering just why it is ‘acclaimed’.

We might even be bold enough to venture the shy admission that ‘to be honest, I didn’t enjoy it all that much’, or, more cautiously, ‘it’s not really quite my kind of thing’. Yet rather than risk looking foolish by disagreeing with the accepted opinion of the great and good — the accepted opinion of Woolf’s ‘exalted, inspired and infallible’ critics — we probably keep our scepticism to ourselves and concede – at least publicly – that we don’t doubt this or that novel or poem is ‘great’ even though we ourselves don’t quite know why.

Often the public might not even have read a work it agrees, in deference to the critics, is ‘a masterpiece’; and when talk turns to some such acknowledged ‘masterpiece’ or to a writer who is seemingly universally regarded as ‘a genius’, they simply fall back on repeating the accepted view.

How many of those, for example, who talk of Cervantes ‘great novel’ Don Quixote (‘The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha’), Herman Melville’s ‘masterpiece’ Moby-Dick or George Eliot’s ‘superb’ Middlemarch have actually read those works? How many of those who have read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises or A Farewell To Arms and liked it well enough, but privately thought ‘well, it’s really nothing special’, will continue to declare publicly that it is ‘a masterpiece’ and its author ‘a writer of genius’?

If they do so, it is because that is the orthodox and hitherto received view (and, anyway, it says so on the back cover of their paperback edition). Privately they might console themselves for their apostasy by conceding ‘maybe I’m missing something’.

. . .

A related practice, especially in the case of Hemingway, is to progress to regarding all the work he turned out as superior for no other reason than that he, ‘the great writer’ Hemingway, had written it. Matthew Brucolli observes in his book Scott And Ernest, The Authority Of Failure And The Authority Of Success that

Hemingway did not progress from strength to strength. His best work was done before he was thirty, and he produced only one major novel — For Whom the Bell Tolls — after 1929. Nonetheless, he spoke with the confidence of success. Everything he did, everything he wrote, became important because he was Ernest Hemingway.

Although Matthew Brucolli was primarily a scholar who dealt with the life and work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, he was by no means hostile to Hemingway. But like many writing about the writer decades after his suicide in July 1961, a list that includes Michael Reynolds, James R. Mellow, Kenneth Lynn and Scott Donaldson, his eye was cooler and more sceptical than that of earlier, somewhat hagiographic, biographers and memoirists (Charles Fenton, John Atkins and, most notably, A. E. Hotchner) who were all keen, for one reason or another, to fan the Hemingway flame.

In Brucolli’s introduction to Hemingway And The Mechanism Of Fame he makes his view clear that ‘Ernest Hemingway was famous for being famous’, and he continues that in his view Hemingway pursued fame as a goal in itself:

He assiduously cultivated different and sometimes divergent personae — sportsman, soldier, aesthetician, patriot, drinker, womanizer, intellectual, anti-intellectual, sage, brawler, world traveller, war correspondent, big-game hunter, and even author — each chosen to foster his place in the American cultural consciousness and support the sales of his books. In every role he projected the insider's air of authority and expertise that was presumed credible, even when not wholly deserved. His success in these self-legendising efforts to couple non-literary celebrity with literary stature is evident in his continued fame among those familiar and unfamiliar with his books. 

. . .

A consequence of the assumption that ‘this is by Hemingway, so it must be good’ was that over the years everything he wrote has been analysed and interpreted. Hemingway kept pretty much every scrap of paper he wrote on, and in addition to the manuscripts of his novels and published short stories, each sketch, every discarded half-written short story and all those scraps of paper he was loth to throw away are now in the Hemingway Collection of Boston’s John F Kennedy Library And Museum.

That in itself, by the same self-validating process outlined above, will be accepted by some as tacit ‘proof’ that ‘Hemingway was a great writer’: they wouldn’t keep all that crap (the argument will run) if he wasn’t great.

Given Hemingway’s status as a ‘great writer’ — a status awarded to him by the critics before he was 30 and which he assiduously maintained even when the same critics increasingly went cool on him within a few years with the publication of Death In The Afternoon — academics went, and still go, into analytic overdrive to find ‘meaning’ and ‘significance’ in everything her wrote.

Even where quite possibly none existed, they summon up that useful standby ‘the subconscious’, and suggest that although this or that allusion was not ‘consciously’ intended and Hemingway might even not have realised the resonance of this or that phrase, paragraph or scene, nevertheless . . . This line of argument is especially effective in that it is almost impossible to disprove; but it is a claim that is difficult to square with just how a writer can praised for his artistry and skill if he was, in part, unaware of what he was doing.

The suspicion of subjectivity also taints the conclusions made about ‘meaning’ and ‘significance’. At best we can only make assumptions when analysing Hemingway’s fiction (or, for that matter that of any other writer) for meaning and significance. Yet the received views of what this or that story ‘means’ gain ever greater heft as they are repeated and adopted by new generations. As Kelli A. Larson points out in Lies, Damned Lies, and Hemingway Criticism

Since scholars write about what they know well, such familiarity . . . leads to increased critical attention as scholars share their ideas with others via publication. Thus the cycle of critical debate begins anew with the opening of each semester and attests most clearly to Hemingway’s ‘re-readability’ down through the years.

A consequence of this cycle of critical debate is that the same interpretations are repeated over and over again until, almost unobtrusively, they are regarded as ‘fact’. A good example is the orthodox view — it now has that status of doctrine — that in his novel The Sun Also Rises Hemingway was portraying — indeed intended to portray — the despair of a ‘lost generation’.

Not only was that news to Hemingway who repeatedly denied he had intended to do so, but oddly and tellingly it was not at all apparent to any of those critics who reviewed the novel, almost all enthusiastically, when it was published. In The Immediate Critical Reception Of Ernest Hemingway, Frank L Ryan observes

No single factor was as illustrative of the failure of The Sun Also Rises to convince the critics that Hemingway was a great writer than its failure to convince them that it was the record of a generation and that its author was the spokesman for that generation. A year and a half after its publication, Richard Barrett spoke of the impressions which the novel was having on the younger people about him, of the young men and women who spoke so reverently of it, marked passages in it, and kept it by their beds, apparently for solace in the dark hours. But one searches in vain for this response from the reviewers who did not hear in it the mournful sounds of a lost generation.

This immediately begs the question: if the despair of a ‘lost generation’ was, as we are now assured, a major theme of Hemingway’s novel, why did none of the its contemporary reviewers pick up on it?

Many might, and probably will, disagree with the contention that both literary judgment and ‘meaning and interpretation’ are wholly subjective — because they can’t be anything but — and that there can be neither an objective judgment nor objective findings of ‘meaning and interpretation’. That notwithstanding, in the early days when reviewing In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises, Men Without Women and A Farewell To Arms the critics all declared Hemingway to be a great writer, and their very unanimity lent their declaration its seeming objectivity.

That the gilt already began to flake off Hemingway’s literary reputation just six year later with the publication of Death In The Afternoon in 1932, and carried on flaking off a year later with the publication of his third short story collection Winner Take All in 1933, and, in 1935, Green Hills Of Africa, his account of a safari in East Africa, was by then oddly irrelevant. That he was ‘a great writer’ was becoming an objective fact.

By the early 1930s, and unusually for a writer, Hemingway was achieving a parallel national prominence — he was becoming a celebrity like the nation’s singers, film stars and sportsmen — and in the following 30 years, as John Raeburn, of the University of Iowa details in his book Fame Became Him, Hemingway As Public Writer the more his credibility diminished in literary circles, the more his fame grew. Hemingway and his lifestyle and his hunting and fishing exploits became good copy for middlebrow photo-magazines such as Time, Life, Colliers and Esquire, publications whose readers thus came to know Hemingway as ‘a great writer’, though ironically many had not and did not read a single word of his fiction.

. . .

Woolf’s ‘exalted, inspired, infallible’ critics cannot be blamed, of course. Myriad other factors contributed to Hemingway’s rise and rise in the public eye and to the conviction of many that he was ‘America’s greatest writer’.

Yet that rise began with their insistence in the mid-1920s that Hemingway was the exciting new voice of American letters. That not many years later they began to have their doubts, and said so, was irrelevant. Generation after generation for whom notions of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’ were academic and irrelevant had by then already been persuaded of Hemingway’s greatness. Pity Woolf’s poor critics who

have neither wigs nor outriders. They differ in no way from other people if one sees them in the flesh. Yet these insignificant fellow creatures have only to shut themselves up in a room, dip a pen in the ink, and call themselves ‘we’, for the rest of us to believe that they are somehow exalted, inspired, infallible.