Barbara Herrnstein Smith, “Contingencies of Value”

In her essay “Contingencies of value, Herrnstein Smith investigates the things upon which our ability to evaluate texts are contingent, and concludes that we must be concerned, or at least be aware of, the agent and the time in which it is being evaluated. She outlines the tension between the desire to achieve an objective neutralism and emotive evaluations, which have come to be looked upon as something of a dirty word in literary criticism since the 20^th century. However, she asserts that evaluative judgment continues to be practiced, but in disguised forms, for example every time a text is published, included in an anthology, or in a series of ‘classics’, as we have seen in recent years with the “Popular Penguins”. Her article really got me thinking as to whether it is really no longer appropriate to simply come out with an instinctive feeling of love or hatred for a text. In tutorials, such statements are always qualified with close textual analysis (if we are game enough to make them in the first place), achieving some kind of middle ground between the two conflicting methods of literary criticism. It struck me that there is an element of arbitrariness about why we value texts—if a text, when it is written, is popular, it becomes more widely printed, more people read it, and thus becomes representative of a particular historical literary style, for example, a task that may have been fulfilled by any number of other contemporary texts.  This can be taken further when some texts are revered purely because of their ability to endure, as some kind of  ‘historical relic’ (49) thus blurring the literary and historical disciplines. This point lead me to consider Margaret Cavendish’s seventeenth century romances which, while they are generally regarded as lacking in any modern idea of literary merit, nonetheless continue to be studied and revered for their historical significance and their overall rarity, factors which are entirely external to the text itself. 

The article also raises the very general question of what prevents a book from going out of fashion- is literary genius merely holding the key to universality of style and subject matter, in order to make it a relevant text throughout generations? The issue of trans-generational relevance of texts interests me greatly- the question of what makes a text timeless. Smith suggests the reason is that the texts are a product of “a series of continuous interactions among a variably constituted object, emergent conditions, and mechanisms of cultural selection and transmission”. (47) Which translates, I think, into ordinary speak as the fact that the same texts may remain relevant over many years within many different contexts due to various shifting external factors that result in a text maintaining cultural relevance for different reasons. The various formal ‘properties’ of a text are in fact externally determined, or at least given meaning to, and as such constantly shift with historical change. In many ways I feel that this links to the discussion of the death of the author, as it places far more importance on the audience of a novel than on the original intentions of the author, despite the fact that it may have been the intentional value decisions made by the author in the first place which have instigated its initial value, such as word selection, thematic choices etc. This has presented a significant challenge to how I have always felt about ‘classic’ texts, in that I always believed that such enduring work possessed some kind of superior universality than its less-remembered peers. The thought that Wuthering Heights could suddenly disappear from reading lists due to cultural changes in modern society seems both alarming and highly unlikely to me—what is more likely is, as Herrnstein Smith suggests, the society “makes texts timeless by suppressing their temporality” (50), by finding new ways to identify with the same texts in new contexts. What with humanity’s wonderful ability to manipulate anything into a desirable form if they so choose, I think Wuthering Heights will be safe for awhile yet.

Source:
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value- Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Harvard University press: Cambridge, Massachusetts,1998)