Words About Words
How to Be a Chestertonian Critic
Psychoanalysts like to psychoanalyze psychoanalysis, writers like to write about writing, and poets like to poetize poetry. This has always both interested and annoyed me. It may be that some psychoanalysts, writers, and poets are ‘overthinkers’ (a common, but, I think, overused and often misguided word). But I think it could be equally true that there is something in these ways of thinking (psychoanalysis, writing, and poetry) which encourage or reward turning the activity around upon itself. Other activities do this, too. Anthropology, raising children, and philosophy play in a similar spirit. I am not organizing these “fields” hierarchically—nor am I considering these activities as “fields”, at all really, but more as ways of thinking. And each way of thinking has, again, an instinct, inherent or not, to use its own tools and look at itself.
Authors and directors have been known to lambast critics—particularly when they receive negative reviews—for not being able, or for being unwilling, to contribute anything to the field they leach off of. But are critics really leaches? Critics themselves seem to think that criticism is itself something which stands on its own two legs. Northrop Frye tried to make literary criticism into a kind of science and Oscar Wilde wants to convince us that criticism is a form of art. Whatever else it is (science, art, or parasitism), criticism is a form of dialogue about something else. In the end, it requires something else to precede it, but this doesn’t necessarily differentiate it from any other art. Everything, in some sense, is a footnote to something else.
Criticism, G. K. Chesterton writes in The Everlasting Man, “is only words about words; and of what use are words about such words as these?” It must be that some people engaging in some activities ask this about themselves. At some point, the poet is led to ask: What does it mean for me to write poetry? Similarly, if writing itself (and novelists are most guilty of this) is not worth writing about, why do so many writers do it? In psychoanalysis, a “training analysis” (in which an analyst enters his or her own treatment) is differentiated from a plain old analysis. As if something different is produced, something different happens when the practitioner engages herself in her own practice.
There have been names given to activities such as these. I have heard of the term ‘reflexive practices’ to encompass things like psychoanalysts psychoanalyzing psychoanalysis and so on. And reflexive practices basically mean what Chesterton believed criticism to be: words about words. But why should we continue thinking about one’s thinking and doing? I think there is something in our cultural milieu, and perhaps it has always been there to some degree, which has a disdain for reflection. It’s as though if one thinks too hard about one’s own life, one isn’t living it. It is said that the ancient Romans would say “Action cuts through fear” before battle. Is reflection, then, always born from fear?
This is reflected in the current discourse around psychotherapy. Talk therapy is good; something with less talking, like somatic therapy, is the best. We’re in a moment of Cartesian dualism, with the emphasis on the body. And if a person thinks, well, they must be overthinking.
When to Overthink
There is a difference too hastily drawn between thinking and doing, as if they’ve always been set apart from each other, and as if those two separate activities have always been at odds with one another. Hence the term ‘overthinking,’ which in our culture is ascribed to those people or those activities in which thought is applied thoughtfully. It’s almost as if there is something wasteful or simply bad about Chestertonian criticism. As if letting oneself too deeply into reflection is harmful to the practice.
Before we throw out the bathwater of reflection, it's worth asking what could happen to the thing we’re doing if we keep the baby of reflexivity. To follow Chesterton, we might ask “what use are words about such words as these?” As a pragmatic question, this invites us to consider removing the barrier between thought and action. What use are these words about words? For the poet, like Wallace Stevens, to spend most of Harmonium in reverence to poetry and the writing of it, or Charles Bukowski to situate most of his literary output as an excursion into the life of himself via a semi-fictionalized writer, there must be something useful in this practice. Or else they wouldn’t do it. (That’s our hypothesis. It could very well be that it doesn’t do anything for anyone, and it’s simply an example of intellectual masturbation or self-aggrandizing narcissism.) For one thing, it keeps the activity personal. One might argue that Stevens spends too much time writing about poetry in a way that doesn’t speak to the non-poet who reads his work; but one cannot argue that reading those poems does not reveal what Stevens thought he was doing when he was writing poetry. So, for all of the other uses we might get out of a reflexive activity, we at least get the sometimes amazingly productive and pleasurable attempt at re-describing one’s life through one’s chosen medium. Since Freud was the unmoved mover and no one was authorized to analyze him, he had to write An Autobiographical Study to figure out for himself and for others how and why he came about creating psychoanalysis. Similarly, Jacques Lacan opens Seminar XI, after his excommunication from the International Psychoanalytic Association, with the question: “What gives me the authority to teach about these things?” What we can learn, then, from these examples, is that when the Other is removed, the subject must account for itself. In less Lacanian jargon, when there is nothing else which justifies one’s own activity, it must be the person who does the justifying.
And how else can one justify than in the re-descriptive potential of criticism of oneself? I do not mean self-criticism in terms of the self-lacerating attempts to minimize oneself—I mean the exact opposite: courageous attempts to expand oneself, and one’s very own vocabulary. Nothing else makes a writer a writer other than the simple fact that the writer writes. A novelist is a person who writes novels. It is not the readers or publishing houses who give this designation. These tend to come after the fact, and give a kind of ceremonial and social aspect to the novelist—but who would doubt that the greatest novelists would cease to write if people stopped reading and publishing houses closed their doors? And so, the writer must justify himself, must describe to himself what he is doing. And since he’s rather good at writing novels, that might be a good place to start.
Bukowski’s Mirror
What else can one get by re-describing oneself within a specific activity? Evident from these artists and other attempts to continually address themselves in their own activities, we might say that being a Chestertonian critic can introduce a new dimension of creativity to one’s work. Speaking about psychoanalysis, but easily applicable to these other reflexive practices, Walter A. Davis tells us, in his book Inwardness and Existence, that “One is and acts in a new way because, through a painful process of reflective action, one has grasped one’s conflicts not in order to be rid of them or bring them to a successful ‘resolution,’ but in order to ready oneself for their ripest issue.”
This ‘ripest issue’ is whatever one wants to do with their desire. It is to live in a creative, rather than a defensive, relationship with it. Davis makes much of Freud’s idea that we never let go of any desire, it only transforms and reorganizes itself within our psyche. If that’s the case, Charles Bukowski has always wanted to be a writer. Now that he is one, his task is to figure out how and why. This puts him in a new relationship with his desire to write, and his identity as a writer. After all, another Freudian lesson teaches us that finding an object is always a refinding. But this process, which Davis calls “motive hunting,” is not only to prop oneself up in a shadow box or frame to show off to people: “Look at all the ways I know myself.” This is taking up a defensive position in relation to one’s desire. To the extent that hunting for motives for this or that activity or behavior is relatively endless, one must figure out when it must stop. If not, we might find ourselves in an endless loop of self-criticism. If everything Bukowski ever wrote was only to prop up himself as a writer, we would probably find it boring and dull and probably think him a narcissist. If that’s true, then revisiting one’s position in one’s activity should be refreshing, referred to now and then—is there a proper tempo?—to renew one’s own interest.
But what is the balance of self-criticism? There must be a line which is crossed when reflexive action becomes motive hunting, an endless and boring search for one’s ‘true causes’ or ‘true self’, for such a thing, of course, is fiction. In Beckett’s Molloy, the protagonist (a very liberal use of the word) is trying desperately to find his mother. But he cannot—and we are not even sure if she exists, or if she is dead. He is not sure what town she might be in, what her name is, and other details which would be helpful in his quest. Because, in Sartre’s words, he cannot find the ultimate substantial ground of his being, he is left suspended in a web of words and ideas which are barely linked together, and he is forever lost in his own internal world.
This is what is at risk with reflexivity. One could easily slip from being a Chestertonian critic to a Beckettian critic.
I do not have an answer to this question, partly because I think it is one which can only be answered individually and not prescribed. It can only be arrived at through self-criticism. Perhaps it is a matter of tempo or rhythm, revisiting reflexive activity on a regular and paced basis. Maybe it has something to do with the Other: it must keep the other (the reader, the listener, etc.) always in mind. If not, it is only a mirror of and for oneself. And though I cannot say for certain whether or not this is true, because it is singular, the writing of someone like Bukowski might be rather mirror-like. We only get his perspective, and it feels always stuck in his own being, his own self-criticism. There is no space for the Other or others in his novels, no ethics, and so on.
Testimony as the End of Criticism
This puts testimony and memoir in a new light. If justifying one’s own engagement and motive hunting for creative enrichment are some of the products of a successful reflexive activity, why does it need to be socialized? It seems at first glance that these activities are deeply personal, that they are questions which require answers which might be uncomfortable or painful to answer in front of others. Among those motives we find for our activity as a writer or a poet which are easy to celebrate (heroism, courage, integrity), we just as easily find motives which are easier to shield one’s eyes from (humiliation, ambition, disdain). This is especially clear in Bukowski’s novels. We do not get the sense from Ham on Rye that his turn to literature and novels was born of a noble and straightforward ascension to the great Western canon alongside Virgil and Shakespeare. On the other hand, we get some of that, but we also get the picture of a kid who thought himself to be so disfigured and alone in a violent house and uncaring city that books were the only objects which didn’t deepen those scars. A painful history—so why memorialize it? Why give it a voice which others can read? Doesn’t Bukowski care about his reputation?
This is the question of testimony: why give an account of oneself to others? Motive hunting is fine and good in the privacy of one’s own room, but it is when it is elevated and shared amongst fellow human beings that it receives a different status.
There are many cultures and practices which elevate testimony to a high level of engagement with oneself and each other.
In the Catholic Church, one bears one’s deepest sins, regrets, and failures to another; in the Episcopal Church, it is done in front of and alongside the congregation. Lacan came up with the idea of the Pass to allow an analysand to move into the position of being an analyst by giving a testimony of their experience in psychoanalysis to a group of people. Memoir has been a beloved form of confessional literature since St. Augustine. And recent books like Badiou on Badiou have revitalized Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, indicating a wish to preserve the practice of self-criticism by one’s own medium near the end of one’s fruitful career.
Testimony is one of the many ways we can link our experience of self-criticism to others and the larger social context we operate within. Self-criticism can become indulgent; it can become an endless and hungry motive hunting to locate one’s innermost faults and motivations. But done with one foot in the social and the other in the practical, Chestertonian criticism can allow for the production and telling of testimony and encourage new bonds to form.
*Painting: “Woman before the Mirror” (1925) by Ellen Emmet Rand
