The Ethics of Critical Engagement: Vitality, Justice, Understanding, Overstanding
Does criticism have an ethics? Should it? Back in 1979, the literary critic Wayne Booth published a book called Critical Understanding. This book was the culmination of more than 20 years of thinking about how critics interact with each other, and especially about how they make strawmen of each other. Critical Understanding was part of an effort, as Booth said, “to turn critical warfare into pluralistic inquiry” (p. xiii).
As a critic, Booth was a practitioner and promoter of a certain type of criticism, called rhetorical criticism. However, Booth did not believe that his preferred method of criticism was the one true method. Rather, as a “metacritic” — someone who theorizes about criticism — he was a pluralist, and specifically what he called a limited or methodological pluralist. A pluralist about criticism believes that there are many possible valid methods for analyzing texts. A limited pluralist believes that there are many possible valid methods of analyzing texts, but also that there are some methods that are invalid. Criticism is not just a world of anything-goes; there are some broad standards that we do, or should, abide by to be taken seriously by other critics. A limited pluralist is not a relativist, because the limited pluralist believes that some methods are better than others, given the kinds of things we want to know about literary texts.
In the following I want to sketch Booth’s standards for good critical community. Although he is focused on literary criticism, in his book Booth suggests that these have a broader application, and that is also what I want to suggest here. Booth’s four values — vitality, justice, understanding, and overstanding — are not just good standards for critical interactions; they are good standards for many kinds of social or political interactions.
Indeed, Booth’s position of limited pluralism is arguably the democratic position. In a democracy, a certain range of ideological positions is allowable and, as Booth would say, vital. But a democracy or an open society is not just anything-goes. Certain positions need to be excluded for an open society to function. Booth’s standards for an open and lively critical community are worth keeping in mind when thinking about the wider community you find yourself in.
Booth argues especially for “three inseparable values” (p. 219) that should guide us in doing and evaluating criticism — or, let us say, in doing social interaction generally. But there is also a fourth that grows out of these. The three basic values are vitality, justice, and understanding. The fourth is overstanding. Let’s look at each of these and why overstanding — which is actually misreading or violating a text — can have a certain value.
Vitality
Vitality is the tendency of something to perpetuate itself. How likely is some type of activity to lead to more of that type of activity? When we read criticism, we can ask, “Does this critical statement in fact increase the likelihood of further critical life?” (p. 221) As criticism is a social activity, it requires a community. So for Booth, the vitality of criticism is the vitality of a critical community. It’s the vitality of a way of life.
So we ask: Does a critic limit more good kinds of talk about literature or invite more kinds of good talk? Does a critic vitalize the community of readers and writers or only him/herself? In short, Booth asks, “what incentive do you give to other participants to continue the fray” — that is, the critical contest or dialogue (p. 222)? Are you helping the conversation continue or are you trying to turn it into a monologue? Are you supporting a non-zero-sum expansion of the world of good criticism, or do you just want things done in your way — in which case when you win, I lose, and vice-versa?
In fact, both the non-zero-zum and the zero-sum positions are selfish, in a way. But the non-zero-sum position is selfish in a smart way. Booth points out that the vitality of the critic — the critic’s tendency to keep doing criticism — is dependent on the community. Therefore, the more a critic improves the community, the more she improves herself (p. 223). I’ll come back to this point about individual and social vitality when I get to understanding.
Now, obviously, we don’t want to encourage “bad” literature and “bad” literary criticism. But so far we are preliminary to deciding whether a critical method — or a political position, etc. — is good and bad. How we figure out what is good and bad is what is in question. So far we’re trying to make sure that the community is not preemptively limited. Good criticism at least promotes vitality, but good criticism is also more than that. Vitality is not the only value, but it does seem to be the first value (p. 227), in the same way that you need to be alive for anything else to be important.
So vitality is about promoting non-zero-sum critical games that allow the community to continue to exist and grow.
Justice
Vitality needs to be balanced against justice and understanding. Let’s talk about justice first. For Booth, justice basically means no double-standards. If you live by the sword, be prepared to die by the sword. This is a version of the golden rule, and variations on the golden rule can be found throughout Booth’s writings. Whatever critical method or standard or way of reading you employ, Booth says, that method should be applicable to your own writing just as much as to others’. The deconstructionist critic J. Hillis Miller had something like this in mind when he wrote that deconstructive criticism is also deconstructable.
There are many reasons to analyze a text: we may be interested in what knowledge a text gives us, in how it affects our behavior as readers, in the history of how it came to be, in how it has influenced the artistic or social or political world, and so on (p. 226). More controversially, we can “read against the grain,” as critics sometimes say — look for hidden assertions or biases. More sloppily, we can create strawmen and strawwomen of other critics and authors, by exaggerating what they say, or leaving out context, and so on. If a critic employs one standard in reading the texts of others but wants a different standard of reading applied to his or her own texts, we should be suspicious.
In other words, justice doesn’t need a single standard, it just needs reciprocal, transpersonal standards (pp. 225, 226). Perhaps rather than “double” standards, we should speak of “asymmetrical” standards; and what we need are not “single” standards but “symmetrical” standards. Again, this is a variation on the golden rule. Judge others as you would be judged.
Booth sometimes talks about a three-criteria test of criticism (pp. 31–32). The three criteria are correspondence, coherence, and adequacy or comprehensiveness. If we look at an act of criticism we can ask: Do the observations of the critic correspond to what we find in the text and the relevant context? Do the statements of the critic cohere with each other, or make sense together? And how much of the text/context does the critic take into account? When we look at how critics treat other critics, we can ask: Does a critic demand a higher degree of correspondence, coherence, or comprehensiveness for others than he does for himself? Or, more generally, do you expect others to be more honest, rational, and inclusive than you yourself are? If so, this is a violation of the standard of justice (cf. pp. 84–85).
I think a part of the symmetry of standards is what Booth calls “the law of disparate giftedness.” This is about showing a preliminary respect for authors (or, more generally, speakers). The law of disparate giftedness comes from an ancient Greek historian and rhetorician. The law says that, in any exchange, the speaker/author probably has more to offer than the listener/reader (p. 273). Presumably, the speaker wouldn’t be speaking if she didn’t have something important to say, and the listener wouldn’t be listening if she didn’t have something to learn. This is especially true when we’re dealing with something that’s been “tested by time” (p. 273), whether that time is centuries of transmission or just the weeks/months/years needed to get an article or book into print. Before the reader gets a text, the author has usually already spent more time on it than the reader ever will. A kind of golden-rule symmetry comes into play again: Give other authors’ efforts the respect you would want them to give yours. Respect other speakers to the extent that you would want to be respected when it’s your turn to speak. This supports the vitality of the community, and it is a first step toward understanding.
Once we’re sure we have our standards in symmetrical order — once we’re sure that we’re treating others the way we want to be treated — justice may still require that we “kill” another critic, so to speak. We will find that some critical statements do “deserve only to be wiped out on the spot” (p. 227). By using our various standards and tests, we can see that some statements by critics make use of grossly asymmetrical standards or contain obvious errors of fact, glaring incoherences, oversimplifications (strawmanning), etc. But justice here has to be restrained by vitality as well as by the third value, understanding. These values require that we proceed cautiously. Everyone makes mistakes. We need to be sure that the vitality of the community is protected and that we have actually understood the other critic.
So let’s move on to understanding.
Understanding
Understanding a text, for Booth, is knowing an author’s intention — basically, what an author wants of us by having written a text. To understand a text we need to reconstruct the author’s intention — figure out what the author was trying to do when she wrote the text — and then make that project our own (p. 351). Booth describes this as entering into or incorporating part of the mind of another (p. 262). A quick and easy example is a grocery store sign that Booth reproduces in his book (p. 264). The sign says:
Due to paper shortage
We are to discontinue use
Doubling bags
Only when
it is
necessary
The sign makes no sense, grammatically. But we understand what the people who wrote it meant; we can figure out what they intended: They want us to know that the grocery store workers are only going to double-bag our groceries when it’s absolutely necessary because there’s not enough paper (this is from back in the day when stores automatically gave you paper bags for your groceries).
Let’s take another example. At one point, Booth quotes a long passage from the French critic Roland Barthes, and then gives two paraphrases of it. Neither paraphrase captures everything Barthes was trying to say, but one of them is clearly more accurate than the other. Booth’s argument is that Barthes would have preferred one paraphrase over the other, and that this means that Booth has understood Barthes to some extent and that Barthes would have understood Booth’s two paraphrases.
But the question is, does seeking after the author’s intention in this way limit vitality? That seemed to be the argument of many newer critics around the time Booth was writing — people like Roland Barthes but also Harold Bloom, Jacques Derrida, J. Hillis Miller, and others. They wanted to argue that intentions were unrecoverable or undecidable and that texts were, in a sense, unreadable. And in this way the newer critics gave new powers to the reader.
In one sense, of course, it’s impossible to perfectly reconstruct the conditions that “caused” a complex text such as a poem or novel or critical essay to come into existence; and it’s likewise impossible to perfectly reconstruct the effects that the poem/novel/essay was intended to have. Works of literature tend to be more complex in origin than signs in grocery stores. But critics like Barthes don’t really seem to be saying that understanding as the reconstruction of intention is impossible so much as that it is undesirable (p. 231). And it’s undesirable because it limits the freedom of the reader. The real interest of Barthes et al. is expanding the freedom or the vitality of the reader.
There appears to be a conflict between vitality and understanding. A requirement to understand the author would seem to limit the reader’s vitality. But Booth believes that this apparent conflict is based on an error. The “meaning multipliers” or “polysignifiers,” as he calls people like Barthes, think that understanding (as Booth has defined it) limits freedom and that misreading (to use Harold Bloom’s word) enhances freedom. Booth has two different kinds of arguments against this in his writings. In some places he points out that there is a double standard or asymmetry here: Misreaders generally want their own works to be read, not misread — that is to say, deconstructionists and misreaders want to limit the interpretations that readers give to their own texts even while promoting multiple interpretations of other people’s texts. There is an asymmetry of standards. But Booth also argues that misreaders also have a mistaken assumption about freedom or vitality. They think freedom means going beyond limits imposed by others. For Booth, on the other hand, freedom means going beyond one’s own limits, and to go beyond your own limits means entering into the experiences of others. Booth writes:
We do not lose our freedom by molding our minds in shapes established by others. We find it there. As Kant says, repudiating the possibility of unlimited knowledge: “The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might [well] imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space.’’ (p. 232; also cf. p. 260)
He refers here to a famous passage from Kant about the importance of limitations. It’s the restrictions provided by the environment that make the dove’s flight possible. It would not be able to fly at all in totally empty space, as much as it might yearn for that kind of absolute freedom. Likewise, if a critic is not simply to display her pre-existing biases over and over again, she needs to be able to enter into an understanding with the work, and this means being open to being checked by the author, who can say, “Yes, this is (or No, this isn’t) what I was trying to do with my text,” or by other critics, who can say, “Yes, I agree (or No, I don’t agree) with your interpretation of this text.”
Overstanding
So vitality, justice, and understanding — these are our three main interdependent values. As Booth says, “The vitality of criticism depends on maintaining standards of justice, and both depend on an active pursuit of understanding” (p. 235; emphasis added). If we want to protect the vitality of our community, we need to maintain symmetrical standards of justice, and if we want to be sure that justice is being done, we need to do our best to really understand each other; and doing our best to understand each other is part of what makes a community just and part of what keeps a community vital.
But there may be times when the demands of vitality and justice push us beyond understanding in the conventional sense of knowing what the text wants of us. Texts come to us with different “demands” that we learn to recognize with experience. The grocery store sign that I mentioned —
Due to paper shortage
We are to discontinue use
Doubling bags
Only when
it is
necessary
—demands that we behave in a certain way with respect to it. For example, it “demands” a utilitarian response, not an aesthetic response. We’re not meant to admire the beauty of the sign or feel catharsis in its evocation of the tragedy of being. We’re supposed to use it to guide our responses to the immediate situation.
Likewise, the Bible or Hamlet or The New York Times ask for certain kinds of responses from us, or a certain range of responses. The Bible, Hamlet, The New York Times — these were each designed to do something in particular, to answer certain questions or needs that we might have. But there are times when we might be justified in asking other questions of these texts rather than the questions they were designed to answer. All texts set or imply “boundaries” on how they are to be read. But there is always a question of whether we should “honor the boundaries” (p. 242). We may be justified, by our current culture or by the kinds of problems we are trying to solve, in asking questions that the text was not originally designed to answer. This process of asking questions that the text was not designed to answer is what Booth calls overstanding. So the modern critic who asks about sexism, say, in Shakespeare or in the Bible may be said to overstand the text; likewise the critic who deconstructs Shakespeare or the Bible. The texts were not designed to answer questions about sexism and feminism, or to be deconstructed, but they may be made to answer such questions nevertheless.
But overstanding is (or should be) based on preliminary understanding and justice. Before you read a text “against the grain” or anachronistically, or correct a text, or deplore a text, or repudiate a text, you first have to understand it (pp. 242–43). You first have to understand what a text was designed to do. We are probably right to violate a text like Mein Kampf or The 120 Days of Sodom, but to do so we (perhaps unfortunately) need to understand what it is we’re violating. Indeed, in these cases, overstanding becomes an ethical necessity. Hitler wants to prove to us that the Jews were really the source of Germany’s problems. Obviously, we don’t want to just make that project our own; we want to ask additional questions of the text that Hitler would not have wanted us to ask. The vitality of our community and our sense of justice demand that we not just understand his text but also violate it or overstand it.
Booth points out that there are various kinds of violations of texts. It’s worth briefly mentioning these although it gets a little technical. Violations of a text can either be of data or of danda. These violations have their sources either in particular modes of criticism or in critics’ personal idiosyncrasies.
The distinction between data and danda comes from the philosopher Stephen C. Pepper (pp. 244, 246). Data is what appears to us to be uncontested and uncontestable: either Invisible Man was published in 1952 or it wasn’t; either “Moby Dick” in Moby Dick is the name of a whale or it isn’t; either Neo in The Matrix swallows the red pill or he doesn’t. Data is what we know about a text regardless of our critical position. Data can always turn out to be less certain than we first thought; but at any given time there is a bunch of stuff about a text that we all basically agree on. Critics generally try not to violate a text’s data, because these violations will just seem to other critics like obvious mistakes.
Instead, most violations of a text are violations of what Pepper called danda. Danda are observations that are only available from a certain critical perspective. While data survive all critical perspectives, danda are unique to critical perspectives (pp. 246–47). For example, the penultimate line of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” This is a datum about the poem. What the line actually means is a dandum, which will vary with a critic’s method. When the critic Kenneth Burke says that the line means “body is turd, turd body,” this is a dandum, an observation only available from a certain idiosyncratic Burkean critical perspective. It’s hard to believe that Keats really meant that body is turd and turd is body; Burke here overstands the text in the service of some kind of higher (lower?) understanding.
As another example of a violation of danda based in mode or method, I once argued that Thomas Carlyle’s book Sartor Resartus was structured like a sonata in the classical music tradition. This is not a datum about the book; it’s a dandum. There’s no special evidence that Carlyle was influenced in this way by musical form. Some readers might see the pattern and some might not. It’s an observation available from a certain formal and musicological perspective, an overstanding of the text. And while I think it can help you understand how the book is organized and how the characters are related, it’s certainly not a fact about the book that would be agreed to by all. It’s an overstanding of the book based on an understanding of it, which can hopefully lead to a deeper understanding.
To make a more general point: Overstanding is the act of saying, “I believe I understand what you are saying, but have you considered this other question?” Booth sometimes talks about pluralism as a “yes, but” approach (a phrase he borrows from another critic): “Yes, what you say is true, but — there are also other truths to be said.” Overstanding is like an “I understand, but” approach: “Yes, I understand what you are saying (and am prepared to prove it to your satisfaction), but I believe that you have overlooked this fact (or perspective or implication).” Overstanding helps us put things in a broader perspective and can enhance the vitality of the community; but before you can overstand you must be able to show that you have understood.
Conclusion
So these are the values that Booth would have us practice when we interact with each other: vitality, or acting to further the life of the community; justice, or applying to others the standards you would apply to yourself; understanding, or entering into the perspective of another; and overstanding, being prepared to violate another’s perspective when vitality or justice demand it. It seems to me that these are useful values to keep in mind not just when criticizing or analyzing but when engaging in any complex social interaction. In such interactions we might consider asking ourselves these questions: Am I supporting the vitality of the other? Am I creating a double-standard? Can I demonstrate that I have really understood the other? Am I justified, in this case, in violating the other’s perspective?