Citation as Explanation

Graham Lyons:

What both Benjamin and Zukofsky identify — one through the lens of an imperfectly enacted intentionality, one through a critique of self-serving criticism — is the problem of reading complexity, of explaining away difficulty. Benjamin’s final sentence spatializes this difficulty by offering a location (or the image of this location) for a form of understanding: to fathom the “admixture” of elements in Emile Zola’s work, he suggests, begin by thinking through the architectural space of the Paris arcades. Zukofsky, on the other hand, proffers vision (the “lens”) as a balm to self-congratulatory criticism, as the highly problematic yet potentially illuminative medium through which to “shoot” Shakespeare — even if the understanding you gain can only be termed an “accident.” What seems most important, to this reader at least, is the marginalization, by both Benjamin and Zukofsky, of explanation as a mode of reading and of critique. Direct elucidation misses the complexities of the whole and ‘presumes’ to contain the potentialities of the text — inherent in the content, the form, the contexts (of reading and of writing), in language itself.

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via Silliman