The Practice of Reading, by Denis Donoghue, Yale, 307pp, £20 in UK
Reading a book, especially a book of fiction or of poetry, is one of the more bizarre human activities. We do it so frequently, and have been doing it for so many centuries, that we no longer recognise what a peculiar process it is. A visiting extra-terrestrial would perhaps be charmed, possibly fascinated, but certainly baffled, to observe one of us Earthlings sitting in a study , or in an armchair by the fire, or on a bus, silently scanning black lines on a white page and apparently lost to everything present, away somewhere in another reality. Reading is not the same as looking at a picture, or listening to music, or watching a performance of an opera or a ballet. W.H. Auden remarked the fact that one can attend a concert or stand before a painting while thinking about one's dinner and still have at least some kind of valid artistic experience; a poem is unique, however, in that one must either read it, or lay it aside; total concentration is required. (Had Auden not had the poet's fond contempt for fiction he might have said the same of the novel, or some novels: it would be impossible, for example, to read, in an real sense of the word, in Ulysses, the transcription of Stephen Dedalus's thoughts as he walks on Sandymount strand, while at the same time worrying about one's bank account, or entertaining an erotic fantasy.)
Denis Donoghue has devoted his life to reading, and to communicating to others - students in particular, the rest of us in general - the things he has learned thereby. The son of an RIC officer, he was born in Warren point, attended UCD and the Royal Irish Academy of Music - his musical training registers in the controlled melodiousness of his prose style - wrote book reviews for the Irish Independent and music criticism for The Irish Times, and taught English for many years at UCD, from where he was elevated to the position of University Professor and Henry James Chair of English and American Letters at New York University.
Donoghue would probably not be offended to hear himself described as an old-fashioned critic. His immediate forebears in the discipline are the so-called New Critics of the Forties and Fifties, mostly Americans, who specialised in close reading, and took the text itself, and not the circumstances of its production - biographical, political, social, etc - as the primary focus of study. The New Critics themselves could trace their origins back to Matthew Arnold, and Donoghue is a champion of Arnoldian "disinterestedness", which he defines as "a quality of one's attention to images and objects at large":
. . . a good critic silences the dialogue of his mind with itself while he judges particular objects and actions in the light of the best ideas he can find. The critic should raise his mind above the bias of his standard interests and especially above his preoccupation with himself. He should pay attention to each object as he comes upon it, and he should discriminate one object from another. Disinterestedness is the quality of one who is alert in the world, conscientious, morally responsible.
In this passage from The Practice of Reading, Donoghue has written a pretty accurate job description for himself. He is suspicious of theory, and especially of Theory, in its narrower, and narrowing, manifestations, as in the work, as he sees it, of a Derrida or a Paul de Man, or as it is conducted in many contemporary academic centres under the general rubric of Cultural Studies. "There is a good deal of evidence," he writes, "that Theory as an institution in our profession [university teaching] is being advanced as if it amounted to a belief, and with the insistence that normally accompanies the expression of a belief." Elsewhere he observes, in a splendid formulation, that for the most part nowadays "literature is taught not as rhetoric and poetics but as spilt politics". Against the depredations of the ideologues, Donoghue, like a vampire hunter holding aloft a crucifix, insists on the sympathetic powers of the imagination, which he takes to be "the capacity to imagine being different".
But there are forces at large in society that urge on us not the imagination of difference but the repetitive recital of the same . . . On all sides we are urged to define ourselves, and to do so by assembling the nearest categories and stereotypes to hand: I am female or male, white or colored, gay or heterosexual, Occidental or Oriental . . . Surely I can't be the only person who resents being told that I can't understand what it means to be a woman because I'm not one, can't understand being gay because I'm not, can't imagine being African-American because I'm Irish and white?
It is against this kind of stereotyping and attempted imposition of "identities" that Donoghue has taken up his blade, and in this volume, despite the studiedly diffident stance and tone of mild protest which are his trademarks, there is a deal of swordplay, and a quantity of drawn blood. Of The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: "There is now somewhere for feminists to go to be together for a while"; of teaching in the "radicalised" atmosphere of present-day American universities: "I have found it hard to convince students that a work of literature is not an editorial or a political manifesto and that the experience of reading a novel does not consist in finding one's prejudices confirmed." Sometimes, not often, the sword is exchanged for the wasp's sting: "Conor Cruise O'Brien has a theory about nationalism, which he applies to every country except Israel."
Readers should not be put off by the intimidatingly professional sound of the title, which has overtones of "the practice of medicine", or "the practice of law". The book is in two parts. The first eight essays deal in general with the current competing theories of criticism, and sound numerous, elegantly formulated warnings against threats in this post-humanist age to the conception of literature and the teaching of it as humane and humanising activities. The other seven essays are practical examples of close reading of works ranging from Othello and Gulliver's Travels to the Nausicaa episode in Ulysses and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. Although at times the common reader may have the uncomfortable feeling of having strayed into a postgraduate seminar, Donoghue, ever "alert in the world", is one of the few critics at work today who can remind us of the pleasure and excitement, and the profit, of reading.