Substance, Part III

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This is the third and last in my series on Jonathan Gottschall’s essay “Measure for Measure,” in which the author argues that literary studies ought to become more like the sciences. In my first post, I argued that Gottschall’s initial paragraphs establish qualities for litcrit to aspire toward – firmness, stability, durability – even though he himself does not adroitly exhibit these qualities when he frames his argument. In my second post, I showed how Gottschall shrewdly describes a number of “scientific” literary studies in such a way so that even those who object to the designs of these experiments will be drawn into adopting the standard of firmness that it is Gottschall’s aim to promulgate.

In this last post, I want to deal with what Gottschall calls “philosophy of knowledge” and “standards of evidence,” terms that appear more and more as the paper goes on. This frequency reflects that at a certain point the paper starts to raise epistemological claims, including an attempt to establish a unitary standard of rigor, evidence and knowledge. This notion has problems, and so it is exactly the sort of idea that needs to be proposed in a very delicate way in order to be even moderately persuasive. In this post, I argue that Gottschall’s decision to “arrive at” this notion toward the end of the essay represents a modestly successful rhetorical choice only because he begins to make epistemological claims after first subsuming the work of the critic to the work of the scientist.

To see how this process takes place, let’s pick up where we left off, just past the middle of the essay. Until this juncture, Gottschall has mostly been urging critics to try out scientific tools – statistics, surveys, programs – to study literature and reading. This recommendation ought to be familiar to many in the field, which already has heroes with an “instinct for the scientific” from Vladimir Propp and the formalists to Janice Radway and Franco Moretti. Personally, I’d call this type of work a “science of literature” rather than literary science, but that’s a fussbudget point at the moment. More importantly, anyone who really cares about literature will concede that there is some value to surveying readers and using programs to track styles. We may not agree that such studies ought to drive the agenda, but they are in any case harmless.

Had Gottschall left the argument there, I suspect that the reaction would have been affirmative from the wider literary critical field. As it turns out, however, the enterprise soon ceases to be an excursus on fun science projects, and it becomes about knowledge: Gottschall also wants us to derive literary theory from the “sciences of the mind.” Here’s where the transition to the epistemological idiom happens:

Contemporary literary theory […] is deeply rooted in the “blank slate” theory of the mind – the idea that the human mind is overwhelmingly shaped by social and cultural influences, rather than by biology. But this theory has perished in the sciences, killed off by advances in evolutionary biology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and other related fields. So most of the “big ideas” in contemporary literary studies have been flawed from their inception – they have been based, at least in part, on failed theories of human nature. Armed with a current understanding of the sciences of the mind, literary scholars could develop surer interpretations of individual works, answer larger questions, such as why literary plots vary within such narrow bounds, and even plumb the ultimate wellsprings of the human animal’s strange, ardent love affair with story.

Gottschall has harnessed the momentum from his earlier suggestion about using science and channeled this energy into forging a theory about the role of the critic. In Gottschall’s view, scientists discover how minds work, and critics are supposed to read about the scientists’ consensus on the subject and then draw conclusions about how literature works. Moreover, every time that the status quo changes in the pages of Neuroscience Today, literary critics must presumably trash all of the criticism that they had just completed based upon the earlier model, and start anew based on the prevailing wisdom offered in the latest vogue.

It’s a scientists world, and critics just live in it.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Gottschall’s idea represents a backlash against the types of projects that have become common after Thomas Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” Ever since this was published in 1962, while historians have shown that developments in science are “socially constructed,” critics have considered it within their ken to analyze scientific prose to discover cultural influences in the writings of Galileo, Bacon and Darwin. By contrast, in Gottschall’s world, the scientist’s work is in some way impervious to these literary critical interventions, because it is only through science that a critic may justify his own enterprises. Literary critical ideas are procured from scientific conclusions, not vice versa.

This is a big move from the “fun with science” part of the essay. Now that we have burned down the house of criticism and moved its inhabitants into the house of science, it is easy and even seems pretty generous to show the refugee critics around their new digs:

But if ideas like “the beauty myth” or “the death of the author” arise from loose theorizing and defunct models of human psychology, how have they managed to thrive for decades in the world’s top literature departments? The answer lies partly in our standards of evidence: Instead of forcing professors to rigorously test their big ideas, as scientific methods do, literary methods encourage us merely to collect and highlight evidence that seems to confirm them. The result of this laxity, as Berkeley’s Frederick Crews points out, is that “our bogus experiments succeed every time.” And since it is so hard to be wrong in literary studies, it is equally hard to be right. So books and papers pile up but, more often than not, genuine advances in knowledge do not. To fix this problem, literary scholars need to develop more rigorous ways of testing their ideas, demand a higher standard of proof from their colleagues, and be willing to discard the theories that fail.

Notice how the language of stability has come back – applied not only to the content of litcrit, but to the epistemology with which it becomes rigorous. Traditionally, it has been believed that different scholarly fields possess different standards of rigor. Indeed, it is not so crazy to say that a discipline “is” its unique standards of substantiation and conjecture – thus the sociologist will exhibit rigorousness in one way, the biologist in another, and the philosopher in yet another. In the case of literary criticism, many of these standards arise from, well, literature, or at least from theories developed by those who spend most of their time studying it. But in Gottschall’s program, literary critical rigor ought to arise from the standards of science, a unitary means for recognizing evidence and deriving conclusions in all fields of knowledge. Something is only true if it is scientifically true, and a theory about Hamlet is only good if it is testable using criteria that are in some way equivalent to those used to study quarks, infant mortality rates and the mating habits of dormice.

My point is that Gottschalls’ essay doesn’t just “move literary studies closer to the model of the sciences” but it removes the capacity for unique rigor that makes literary study different from the sciences, replacing it with Gotschall’s own interpretation of what the sciences consider to be proof. The effect is to increase the range of what criticism will look like in the world of tomorrow, while simultaneously curtailing not only its theories but also its capacity to self-theorize and self-understand. This is the price for the “optimism” and “aspirations” that Gottschall ends his paper promising us: a literary criticism so firm, stable and durable that it needn’t be literary or critical.

From a rhetorical point of view, it has been vital to keep this implication subterranean until the second half of the essay. Only after Gottschall has placed the critic in the world of the scientist can he make it seem like he is rescuing literary criticism by showing it how to meet the burdens of an extraordinarily unitary scientific standard of evidence that is not organic to the literary field. Of course, by foisting these simplistic standards upon criticism we only eradicate one of the mechanisms that hold such reductive gestures in check, and perhaps this has been the point all along.

In any case, I hope that I have shown how a particular argumentative structure has been useful to Gotschall’s purpose, even if I confess a prejudice against that purpose: after all, in the paradigm that he proposes, there would be little rigor value attached to the highly theoretical, absently wandering and patently insubstantial analytic exercise that I have just finished performing.

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Filed under Language, Teaching

Tags: Franco Moretti, Jonathan Gottschall, Literary Studies, Thomas Kuhn, Vladimir Propp