Returning to Philology/Practicing Music

Series: How to Read Well

Criticism, I take it, is the formal discourse of an amateur. Where there is enough love and enough knowledge represented in the discourse it is a self-sufficient but by no means an isolated art. It witnesses constantly in its own life its interdependence with the other arts.  It lays out the terms and parallels of appreciation from the outside in order to convict itself of internal intimacy; it names and arranges what it knows and loves, and searches endlessly with every fresh impulse or impression for better names and more orderly arrangements.
—R. P. Blackmur, “A Critic’s Job of Work” (1935)

Over the course of writing my book on Jonathan Swift and Edward Said, The Last Amateur, I have used this passage from autodidact, poet, critic and charismatic lecturer R.P. Blackmur’s most famous essay as prompt and inspiration.  Entering into conversation with Swift and Said, a conversation I frame as a kind of counterpoint, has enabled me to see that if there is an art I witness constantly as dependent with my own, it is music in the concretely utopian sense in which Blackmur’s student Said understood it. The “arrangements” Blackmur articulates in the name of criticism are both assemblages and performances, unruly and orderly at once. To “convict oneself of internal intimacy” is to force oneself to separate from what one knows and loves in order to name it. To be a critic is to come into consciousness over time in a process that never ends. This talk begins with a return to my own formative experience of close reading as a student at Amherst College, an experience of listening that also defined Hum 6, the iconic undergraduate course at Harvard that inspired Paul de Man’s  influential essay “The Return to Philology” (1986) and created a generation of teachers invested in close reading. My own arrangement, which includes Swift, Erich Auerbach’s “Philology and Weltliteratur” (1952), and the virtuoso pianist Glenn Gould, demonstrates how Said’s practice of music, slow reading understood as performance, stakes the work of the critic on the difference between writing a book and having a voice.