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Literary criticism, of the type that follows in this project, is a series of experiments with and about the matter of authority: about how much authority a critic should want to have or be willing to give up, and how much authority a critic is able to live without.
This is not a project that deals in explanations, nor is it a project that feels the need to come to some point. If, at its worst, criticism involves the realization that some walls resist all efforts at removal, that despite the benefit of sunlight and a country to stretch our legs in, we may nevertheless come to declare, along with Dickens’ Miss Wade, ‘I have the misfortune of not being a fool’, then at its best, criticism is the fact of not being trammeled by what we demand of others, and by what we cannot quite bring ourselves to say. It is an acceptance, even, that a fool may be what we really are, that if we cannot absolutely be cured, we might, at least, not be quite so badly off as we might have believed.
If sto...
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