ducksanddrakes

In the last post, I examined Jonathan Gottschall’s recent essay about integrating the aims, techniques and rigors of the sciences into the study of literature. I pointed out that in order to stage his argument clearly, Gottschall built two constellations of adjectives. The first described poor literary criticism …

Theoretical, Speculative, Irrelevant, Wandering, Circuitous, Bending to Fashion and the Pronouncements of False Leaders,

… and the second described what a better litcrit might look like …

Sure, Firm, Gradually Accumulated, New, Durable, Steadily Built, Solid.

In a sense, the purpose of the essay is to move litcrit from the first world to the other, and science is but a means to effect this end.

In the earlier post, I took Gottschall to task for using polemical rhetoric that unduly eschews the beliefs of the very people that it wants to convince. I also criticized him for promoting the idea of integrating obdurate scientific qualities into literary studies, even though he does not himself employ such concrete data to describe the current state of the literary critical field.

When last we saw him, Gottschall was in some rhetorical trouble. Surprisingly, however, it is at just this point that the argument begins to achieve its strongest force. In this second of three posts, I will look at how Gottschall offers his main point, and I will parse the ways in which one might object to how he substantiates this point. I argue that the author finesses his readers into accepting solid, built knowledge as the goal of literary study by framing the way in which his own evidence can be challenged. In other words, Gottschall has structured his argument in such a way that even if we say he is wrong, we are only drawn more deeply into his paradigm.

It’s one of those rhetorical moves that is just so smart and so sneaky that you know it must be an accident.

Anyway, let’s pick up where we left off, at the moment that Gottschall makes his main proposal:

Literary studies should become more like the sciences. Literature professors should apply science’s research methods, its theories, its statistical tools, and its insistence on hypothesis and proof. Instead of philosophical despair about the possibility of knowledge, they should embrace science’s spirit of intellectual optimism. If they do, literary studies can be transformed into a discipline in which real understanding of literature and the human experience builds up along with all of the words.

To sell us on the approach and to illustrate some of its results, Gottschall offers three instances in which scientific methodologies have been employed to study literature. In the first, he explains that statistical work on hundreds of folk tales has shown that our culture places no greater emphasis on the “beauty myth” than other societies, proving that we are no more unusually sexist than others. Next, Gottschall argues that modern literary theorists subscribe to the theory that “the author is dead,” a notion that he takes to mean that readers manufacture their own idiosyncratic meanings. In fact, we are told, according to a study of “analytic responses” by 500 literary scholars, there is little variation in the thoughts and feelings of readers about literary characters. Finally, Gottschall shows that computers have helped to bring stylometric proof to the old question about Shakespeare’s authorship, while also falsifying the notion that literary traditions change suddenly in fits and starts that coincide with historical change.

Flush from these empirical victories, Gottschall proclaims

Studies like these showcase the promise of applying a scientific approach: Relatively simple experiments can upend decades’ worth of untethered theoretical speculation, exposing flawed assumptions and focusing scholars’ attention on fresh and productive questions.

Although there’s nothing I like better than untethered theoretical speculation, I’ve got to admit that this stuff sounds promising. But let’s imagine how an antagonist might rain on Gottschall’s parade. It seems to me that there are at least two lines of argumentation to choose from – one based on interpretation and another based on experimental practice.

In the first line, the antagonist would query how Gottschall has characterized the content of the theories that he claims to have debunked. Is “the beauty myth” really just a comparative argument about the relative sexism of western culture vis a vis all other cultures? Does the “death of the author” actually imply that readers just make up whatever they like when they read? Are questions about Shakespeare’s authorship really burning mainstream literary critical issues? Each one of these questions exerts pressure on the simplistic ways in which Gottschall understands the “speculations” that he objects to. I think that many antagonists would pursue this option.

However, a number of antagonists would also take a different path, and object to the aptness of the methods that the cited studies employ. Does it make sense to equate the folk tale with modern narrative forms as a way to “measure” the “amount” of beauty myth that given societies feel? Do the sheer numbers of these tales have meaning without considering their differing popularity, dispersion, novelty or context? If you want to look for variation in interpretations, does it make sense to take as a representative sample a group of professional interpreters of texts? It’s like asking a bunch of pole vaulters how they would get over a wall in order to understand how anyone would do it. And finally, what counts as “innovation” and “sudden” for the stylometric computer program that Gottschall cites, and would its conclusions change if we use different increments? These are but a sample of a range of potential methodological objections that an antagonist may launch.

What’s interesting about this situation is that if our hypothetical antagonist were to pursue this second line of objections – as many critics would – then he or she would be accepting the appropriateness of the paradigm that Gottschall is proposing. Once he or she is quibbling over methods, the antagonist is already evaluating the offered evidence purely on the basis of the standards that the author has laid out (Sure, Firm, Gradually Accumulated, New, Durable, Steadily Built, Solid). Ironically, Gottschall’s aim would be better served by citing bad science than good science here, because if he can get us to expend our energy objecting to the design of an experiment, then he has successfully distracted us from underlying conceptual and literary theoretical questions and convinced us to concede that experimental design is a more germane issue. We are now thinking like scientists.

I consider this to be the strongest aspect of the overall argument. Lured by desire to critique Gottschall’s evidence, we end up implicitly conceding the very point that this evidence substantiates.

It’s like quicksand: the more you struggle, the deeper you sink.

Next time: I look at how Gottschall wraps up his argument, specifically at the “Philosophy of Knowledge” that is behind his recommendations, and at the yearning for “optimism” that I consider to be the most earnest instinct at the heart of the project.