In Focus

My scepticism with regard to the value of the critical analysis of literature is no great secret. It has grown over time and these days pretty much every class I teach gets a glimpse of it at some point. But I must admit that underlying this very real scepticism is a quizzical sense of often actually enjoying the process of analysis - not so much, if at all, in writing, but certainly in the discussion of texts. How can this be? How might this glaring contradiction be reconciled?

I'm such a lazy thinker that I've never really tried to do so previously, preferring gleeful rants about the destructive nature of analysis. But I had a bit of a breakthrough moment today just after having had a good time doing the business on a bit of Yeats at his finest. Previously I suppose I vaguely thought the pleasure came simply from the fact that the material under consideration had a magic of its own which survived attempts at analysis. Now I realise it's the way the act of analysis makes you read hard and creatively (at least in its better moments) and the way this leads to an intensity of focus that results in a better reading. It's similar to the sense in which really listening changes music, and really looking changes visual art.

It's not simply the magic of the work under consideration but the magic of the collaboration of that work with the active imagination of the perceiver that works the trick. And it's difficult to be imagine being more alive that in those moments when the trick works.