Interpretation in Recent Literary, Film and Cultural Criticism

t- \r- 9 Anxieties of Commentary: Interpretation in Recent Literary, Film and Cultural Criticism Noel Kitg A Dissertàtion Presented to the Faculty of Arts at the University of Adelaide In Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy March 7994 Nwo.rà"o\ \qq5 l1 @ 7994 Noel Ki^g Atl rights reserved lr1 Abstract This thesis claims that a distinctive anxiety of commentary has entered literary, film and cultural criticism over the last thirty years/ gathering particular force in relation to debates around postmodernism and fictocriticism and those debates which are concerned to determine the most appropriate ways of discussing popular cultural texts. I argue that one now regularly encounters the figure of the hesitant, self-diiioubting cultural critic, a person who wonders whether the critical discourse about to be produced will prove either redundant (since the work will already include its own commentary) or else prove a misdescription of some kind (since the criticism will be unable to convey the essence of , say, the popular cultural object). In order to understand the emergence of this figure of the self-doubting cultural critic as one who is no longer confident that available forms of critical description are adequate and/or as one who is worried that the critical writing produced will not connect with a readership that might also have formed a constituency, the thesis proposes notions of "critical occasions," "critical assemblages," "critical postures," and "critical alibis." These are presented as a way of indicating that "interpretative occasions" are simultaneously rhetorical and ethical. They are site-specific occasions in the sense that the critic activates a rhetorical-discursive apparatus and are also site-specific in the sense that the critic is using the cultural object (book, film) as an occasion to call him or herself into question as one who requires a further work of self-stylisation (which might take the form of a practice of self-problematisation). IV The thesis focusses this general theoretical discussion on a series of case- studies of films (Gillian Leahy's My Life Without Steve. hollywood teen movies, Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces. Nicholas Roeg's Bad Timing) and novels (Don Delillo's White Noise and Jane Delynn's Don Tuan in the Village). On each occasion the unit of analysis becomes both the text (novel, film) and the public space of critical debate into which it is pulled. Thus the writing that attaches to these texts - both in the form of immediate journalistic reviews and the later academic writing - is regarded, together with the text in question, as forming the overall unit of textual analysis. The thesis regularly moves between a discussion of meta-theoretical issues (for example, the literary criticism of Ian Flunter, the debate about how to constitute popular cultural texts as objects of academic critical analysis, the debates around postmodernism, fictocriticism and the paraliterary, the positions on film criticism contained in David Bordwell's Making Meaning) and an assembling of its own readings of particular texts. This is done to keep in play a connection between the performance of one's own interpretative occasion and the meditation on what is involved (ethicatly, rhetorically) in the performance of such a critical occasion. v The idea is worn out by now and no longer usable... Like silver paper, which can never quite be smoothed out again once it has been crumpled. Nearly all my ideas are a bit crumpled. Ludwis Wittsenstein, Culture and Value vl Contents Introduction: Anxieties of Commentary 1 Chapter One: Postmodernism, Fictocriticism and the Paraliterary 20 Chapter Two: "Everything Drifts and Floats": Reading White Noise 58 Chapter Three: "Writing in the Direction of Delynn: Cruising/Reading Don Tuan in the Village 109 Chapter Four: Occasional Doubts: Ian Hunter on Self-Problematisation in Interpretation 1'45 Chapter Five: Critical Occasions: David Bordwell's Making Meaning and the Institution of Film Criticism 178 Chapter Six: Intellectualising the Popular: The Teenpic Debate 227 Conclusion: "That Was Then, This is Now": Towards a Diagnostic Critical- Pedagogic Practice 262 Bibliography 276 vll Acknowledgements I would like to thank the following people for assisting, directly or indirectly, in the production of this thesis: Christine Alavi, Manuel Alvarado, Don Barry, Pru Black, Jill Brewster, David Brown, Chris Chesher, Steven Connor, Russell }{ogg,Ian Hunter, Larry King, Gunther Kress, Tony May, David Matthews, Alec McHoul, Toby Miller, Stephen Muecke, Margaret Nixon, Tom O'Regan, Anne-Marie O'Sullivan, Dana Polan, Helen Pringle, John O. Thompson, Gary Wickham, Dugald Williamson, Paul Willemen, Bruce Wilson, Tana Wollen. Penny Boumelha supervised the thesis with great diligence, intelligence, wit and attention to detail. The writing of two of the critics featured prominently in the thesis, |ohn Frow and David Bordwell, has contributed significantly to the final form of the thesis. The thesis is dedicated to my parents, Fred and Shirley King, and to the memory of my grandmother, Adeleine Noal Booth. Introduction Anxieties of Commentary In an interview published in Diacritics in 1982, Fredric Jameson claimed that we "are indeed far more vitally informed and defined by our anxieties than we like to think: they make up the very texture of our lives."l |ameson was speaking in the carefully delimited context of the marxist teaching of literature, but he spoke also of "an anxiety about the loss of gender privileges class anxieties, anxieties about the future, the unconscious 'management' of class struggles and so forth" (91). Earlier in the interview he had been asked to respond to a question posed in a New Left Review article on his work by Terry Eagleton.2 In that piece Eagleton had asked: "how is a Marxist-structuralist analysis of a minor novel of Balzac to help shake the foundations of capitalism?" (65). jameson took this question to be evidence of a more general "expression of an anxiety which everyone working in the area of Marxist cultural studies must feel" (72). Fifteen years earlier, in the mid 1960s, the art critic Harold Rosenberg had wondered whether it was still possible to speak of the work of art as an "anxious object."3 Rosenberg was there thinking of artistic production as constituting one among a number of cultural sectors, and he was also 1 Fredric ]ameson, "Interview," &gi!!cs, 12,2 (1'982),86. Subsequent references included in the text. 2 Terry Eagleton, "The Idealism of American Criticism," New Left Review. 127 (1,981.), 65. Subsequently collected in Eagleton, Against the Grain: Essays 1975-1985 (London: Verso 1986). 3 Harold Rosenberg, The Anxious Object: Art Today and Its Audience (New York: Horizon Press 1966),73. Subsequent references included in the text. 2 referring to the art object in the context of what he took to be the commercial media's appropriation of certain "artistic" devices of formal experimentation. Rosenberg was suggesting that the prospect of having a particular set of art practices plundered and imitated resulted in an art practice which displayed a "constant threat of deformation and loss of identity" (17). This led Rosenberg to say that the notion of the "anxious object" best described the way "the art object persists without a secure identity" (17). These last comments are a very partial reading,/rewriting of Rosenberg's way of introducing his book, but they allow me to lead into one of the central claims of this thesis, namely, that it is now the case that the role of cultural criticism "persists without a secure identity." It is not only "marxist cultural studies" (as ]ameson referred to it) but cultural studies writing more broadly which construes itself in this way. As Dean MacCannell put it in the introduction to the 1989 edition of his book, The Tourist: "with all the good will in the world, current criticism is a self- conflicted exercise."4 Spurred by remarks of this kind, this thesis concentrates on a few different ways of conceiving of cultural criticism (by which I mean the criticisms produced in relation to various literary, film and popular cultural objects) as a particular discursive practice. Broadly, cultural criticism is regarded as an "occasional" activity in the sense that one might talk of "occasional verse" or of an "occasional address." In addition, I speak throughout this thesis of "critical alibis," "critical postures," "critical performances" and "textual assemblages" (both fictional and critical). And at one point cultural criticism is also regarded as a public staging of the self, a piece of critical theatre in which a particular agonistic is performed 4 Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theorv of the I .pisrrre Class ë (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), xii. 3 - namely, the use of a cultural object to call oneself and one's social- cultural role or location into question. That is, the cultural object becomes the occasion for a piece of critical "self-fashioning," to redeploy Stephen Greenblatt's term, or else the critic practises a number of "techniques of the self," to use Michet Foucault's terminotogy.S In this understanding of cultural criticism the text becomes an armature or a device within a performance or staging of an act of self-interrogation. In short, criticism becomes an ethical exercise, an instance of what Foucault calls "the interpretative analysis of the self."6 In a brief article born of a visit to China, Roland Barthes says: "when you go to China, you carry in your baggage a thousand urgent questions."T Barthes then addsi. "we want there to be impenetrable phenomena, so that we can penetrate them: an ideological atavism has made us deciphering creatures, hermeneutic subjects. We believe our intellectual task is always to discover a meaning" (776-17). In relation to China, Barthes says that he tried to "produce a discourse that was neither assertive, nor negative, nor be no comment" (1,20).

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