Multiple Choice and the Critic

Recently I wrote a rather heated polemic against standardized testing, but as Mssrs. Emerson and Wilde so aptly put it: consistency is "the hobgoblin of little minds" and "the last refuge of the unimaginative." So today I will do a graceful volte-face and acclaim its virtues (well, in one specific context) while sporting a sheepish little smile. 

Some weeks ago I took the GRE Literature Test, required by many graduate programs in English. I am already a PhD student, so there was no pressing need for me to do so. But what with English not being my first language, I wanted to see how I would stack up against the motley pool of test takers (college seniors majoring in English, students fresh out of MA programs in English and "mature" students who graduated years or decades ago and want to attend grad school.) Plus, a good result might be a feather in my beret should I ever feel like applying to adjunct positions in English.

The test consists of around 230 multiple choice questions on the analysis and identification of texts ranging from Beowulf to Elizabeth Bishop, Gower to Ginsberg. "Multiple choice? Literature?" I hear you say. Wouldn't that be a throwback to a prelapsarian time before meanings had started to multiply by mitosis? A time when Oxford was still a city of aquatint and dons in caps and gowns were the guardians of truth? A time, in short, when an exam on Edmund Spenser could look like this:

"In whose reign did he flourish? Repeat Thomson's lines. What is said of his parentage? What does Gibbon say? How did he enter Cambridge? What is a 'sizer,' and why so called? What work did he first publish? What does Campbell say of Raleigh's visit to Spenser?" (A Compendium of English Literature, Charles D. Cleveland, 1852)

Or perhaps (given that you need to be able to recognize a iambic tetrameter or ottava rima) we think of the diluted versions of New Criticism that seeped down to high school students in the 50s, brilliantly captured by the fictitious Understanding Poetry by the equally fictitious J. Evans Pritchard, PhD:

"To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme, and figures of speech. Then ask two questions: One, how artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered, and two, how important is that objective. Question one rates the poem's perfection, question two rates its importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining a poem's greatness becomes a relatively simple matter."

Ah, 'twas the best of times... A time when the canonical texts were treated with silk gloves and the pages of the textbooks were still firmly glued together. But today, when every single literary edifice has been subjected to the wrecking ball of Derrida and Sons, Deconstruction Company? Sure, you could test the trivial (as in the Victorian exam) but you're only a click away from those facts on your cell phone, so why bother with them in the first place? And while you might be able to scratch the surface with multiple choice, surely you'll never reach the murky, rhizomatic depths of literature?

Before I answer my own rhetorical questions, I need to throw in a caveat. The GRE Literature test is rather silly (but surprisingly fun to take); its "predictive value" is questionable. You can score very high and still be a mediocre critic. But then again, no English Department in the US will ever judge an application solely on the GRE score. In fact, GPAs, writing samples and published articles are infinitely more important. And this is how it should be. I do, however, think that the test says something. It's an indisputable fact that, say, Althusser's notion of interpellation is a form of "coercive address," that Thomas of Hales' "Hwer is Paris and Heleyne" exemplifies the "ubi sunt motif" and that the choice between my and mine in Shakespeare's Sonnet 23 rests on "the same rationale as the Modern English choice between a and an."

Factual recall, rudimentary close reading skills and linguistic inference, all pretty elementary skills, right? What about those pesky rhizomes? Well, consider this item (taken from the Practice Test Booklet):

So what with blod and what with teres
Out of hire yhe and of hir mouth.
He made hire fairce face uncouth;
Sche lay swounende unto the deth,
Ther was unethes eny nreth:
Bot yit when he hire tunge refte,
A litel part therof belefte,
Bot sche with al no word mai soune,
But chitre and as a brid jargoune.

Which of the following lines make use of the same story?

(a)
Twit twit twit
Jug jug jug jug jug jug
So rudely forc'd
Tereu

(b)
Tu – whit! – Tu – Whoo!
And hark, again! The crowing cock,
How drowsily it crew.

(c)
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes

(d)
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl...

(e)
This I sat engaged in guessing, but no
Syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned
Into my bosom's core

In order to make the connection between John Gower's and T. S. Eliot's uses of the Philomela myth, you need to be conversant with English literature from vastly different periods. Factual recall might help you identify the different snippets, but it will only take you so far. In fact, only 19% of all students tested got this one right (i.e. fewer than you would expect if they just threw a random guess.) This is hardly surprising; students take classes in Modernist Poetry and (though not very likely) in Middle English Poetry, but they are not taught to make thematic connections. And who can blame them when even tenured professors are bewitched by the siren-song of Foucault with its call for "absolute discontinuity" between the modern and the pre-modern (someone who did have a good supply of organic beeswax was J. G. Merquior whose takedown ought to be required reading for professors and undergraduates alike.)

In fact, this item calls for a modicum of that quaint and curiously old-fashioned thing called erudition. And this is part of what I find appealing about the test. Everyone in grad school is supposed to have the tools necessary to delve deep into their chosen area, but in order to retrace the winding paths that lead from text to text, you also need a broad survey map. When novelists and poets prove to be more well read than the academics dealing with them, something is clearly awry. Case in point: postmodern scholars (of some renown, I might add), writing on Chinua Achebe or Yvonne Vera, who are blind to their grapples with and responses to T. S. Eliot, simply because they have never read him. As that much-maligned poet himself put it: "the most individual parts of [a poet's] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously." (from "Tradition and the Individual Talent")

To recap, I would say that the wide-ranging reading required to answer questions spanning over a period of 1000 years is a good foundation for more focused work in grad school. Even when dealing with something highly specific you still need to make connections and discern influences straddling the epochal divides.

You are also tested on the King James Bible and some Greco-Roman literature and mythology, and let's face it, every Western author writing before, say, 1950, writes for a reader well versed in the Bible. How can we feel for Leopold Bloom, and understand what an underdog and outsider he is, if we are as ignorant of the meaning of "I.N.R.I" as he is? Joyce takes for granted that we can appreciate both the ignorance and the sheer beauty of his folk etymological strike of genius: "Iron Nails Rushed In."

And to take another example: for all his expertise on military and fortification history, Sterne's Uncle Toby has no idea who Cicero was. If we share his ignorance, he is no longer the exceptional oddball the contemporary audience loved. Such knowledge breeds familiarity; it might help bridge the divide between writings from the past and the contemporary scholar. He or she might actually get it – not on an academic "[T]he 18th century readers, most of whom had studied Cicero in the original Latin..." level, but on a more visceral "Whoa, this guy is amazing!" one.  Or in the words of Cleanth Brooks:

"We tend to say that every poem is an expression of its age; that we must be careful to ask of it only what its own age asked; that we must judge it only by the canons of its age. Any attempt to view it sub specie aeternitatis, we feel, must result in illusion.

Perhaps it must. Yet, if poetry exists as poetry in any meaningful sense, the attempt must be made. Otherwise the poetry of the past becomes significant merely as cultural anthropology, and the poetry of the present, merely as a political, or religious, or moral instrument […] We live in an age in which miracles of all kinds are suspect, including the kind of miracle of which the poet speaks. The positivists have tended to explain the miracle away in a general process of reduction which hardly stops short of reducing the "poem" to the ink itself. But the "miracle of communication," as a student of language terms it in a recent book, remains. We had better not ignore it, or try to "reduce" it to a level that distorts it. We had better begin with it, by making the closest possible examination of what the poem says as a poem." (The Well Wrought Urn)

While a knowledge of history, myth and the Bible, of metres and tropes, and of allusions, echoes and thematic connections (things that can be tested on a multiple choice exam) will not get you there, it might take you some way towards experiencing the miracle of language and literature.