As a proponent of principle for contemporary Nigerian critical practice, I am also less interested in critical scholarship than I am in literary criticism in its original sense of elucidating, analysing, comparing, and judging literature in a constructive and grounded manner for the reading public. In Nigeria, there has never been a tradition of mainstream literary criticism. The process of the academic tradition of reading we do have—courtesy of our universities—is slow. It is also anything but popular or public. For instance, peer-reviewed journals, in Nigeria as it is elsewhere, take more time to publish their accepted works than average mainstream journals. This does not mean, however, that the quality of critical scholarships being produced in academia is finer than the more accessible criticism mainstream outlets publish on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. For two reasons, the opposite is the case. First, the accepted—encouraged—language of academic scholarships is much more complex and obscure beyond literary criticism’s fundamental aim at clarification. Second, the academic method of literary analysis is largely ideological, the sort of perverse intellectual practice that subordinates literature to the darling triad of academia in politics, race, and gender. By merit of pickabacking literature to ideologies, academic criticism abdicates its fundamental responsibility of elucidation and passing judgement on the quality of the literary object under its critical consideration. 

Indeed, literature is subordinate to nothing. ‘If literature becomes something more than literature’, the American literary critic, Alfred Kazin, ratiocinates in ‘Criticism and Isolation’, ‘it ceases to be literature at all.’ Also, the American modernist poet, Wallace Stevens, would define poetry as a self-substantiating entity unfolding freely around itself in both meaning and substance in the twelfth section of ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’:

 The poem is the cry of its own occasion 

 Part of the res itself and not about it 

 The poem speaks of the poem as it is. 

‘The poem’ stands in for the whole of imaginative literature. Reading those lines, I wonder what multiculturalist, feminist, or Marxist reading could touch their simple, uncomplicated, total aesthetic relevance of self-definition. Although the imaginative work comes from the social, economic, political, cultural, and historical forces which serve as its background, these forces are simply that—backgrounds. It follows that if these forces could exist independently in the world while being influenced by other forces of consciousness in their turn, then what they serve as mere backgrounds to—literature, in this case—should be granted the same freedom of independent existence, to retain its autonomy despite their invariable influence on its construction. 

No doubt these forces exist in the literary object. However, quarrying them from the poem, play, novel, and short story as though they are borrowed properties to be returned to their place in isolated interpretation is a violation of the artefact’s ontological freedom in the universe of ideas. It is an undemocratic act of ideological condescension, rendering the literary object a placeholder for the other disciplines of consciousness. Asking what poetry is for, as Stevens’s lines infer, is wildly irrelevant because literature is for itself and capable of meaning as such. But that particular question of social substance is exactly what the proponents of ideological criticism are insistent on asking literature, a question the American critic and scholar, Stanley Fish, concludes in ‘Harold Bloom’s Warning to the World’, ‘will not simply harm [literature], but destroy it.’ 

However, Fish himself has a theory of reading that the Nigerian writers’ combative reception of criticism suggests they would appreciate and even encourage us to take up. In ‘How To Recognize a Poem When You See One’, the pioneering essay on reader-response criticism in America, Fish concludes that ‘Interpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do not decode poems; they make them.’ The criterion for recognizing a poem as such is to confer on anything the poetic status. Then, after the arbitrary poetic initiation, the thing recognized begins to take the form of poetry within our understanding of what we believe poetry to be. ‘If your definition of poetry tells you that the language of poetry is complex’, Fish continues, ‘you will scrutinize the language of something identified as a poem in such a way as to bring out the complexity you know to be ‘there.’’ Mere identification as such, according to Fish, makes poetry.

The outgrowth of this ‘distressing’ conclusion is clear. Using his critical skills to construct meaning instead of construing the same within the insight the techniques employed in the work gives off, the critic participates in the writer’s invalidation as a hierarchical entity on the plane of aesthetic discipline. If all critics adopt this method—as I believe any unambitious writer working in this nanny climate would want—then we lose any hope for comparison of imaginative strength between writers. Reasonably, should we comply with this view of reading, we would have no need for comparison of imaginative strength at all. 

We would lose even more in the meaninglessness of judgement since whatever informed judgement any critic can make depends on the hierarchy of imagination and executive competence of the writers. Fish’s theory obliterates the possibility of both hierarchies because, without guiding principles for reading, the critical imagination can be as inventively far-reaching as the creative imagination. Therefore, as we hope to establish a unified motive for criticism in reading strengths and weaknesses in Nigerian literature, destructive propositions of hierarchy such as this should be disregarded with the same oomph of purpose we aim, in our more theoretical criticisms, to disembark our writers’ imaginative execution from foreign sensibilities. 

Fish’s popular anti-foundationalist and unprincipled view of critical reading is, therefore, no less a destruction of the discipline of the imagination than the reductive views of the proponents of ideologies. Rather than being practically effective in critiquing literature as an independent existence in itself, reading from ideologies serves as nothing more than the legitimation and extension of those ideologies themselves, as Fish himself regards in ‘Why Literary Criticism is like Virtue’. 

The ultimate problem with ideological reading of literature is that it often results in the ideological critic’s moral paroxysms being attended on the writer’s constitution of imagination and democracy of wit and judgement to choose not only what to express but also the proper way and manner to express it. The relevant prescription of aesthetic judgement is hindered. Instead of being criticized within the aesthetic and socially harmless confines of literature, the writer is held to account within the standards of which he has not prepared his literary work. 

In Nigeria, I don’t see how reading texts through the limiting lens of ideology will help our young literature improve. I also don’t see how it helps our aim as critics to bring literature to the reading public with clear aesthetic demands. ‘To have great poets’, Walt Whitman writes in ‘Ventures, on an Old Theme’, ‘there must be great audiences too.’ But the greatness of reading, of being an appreciative audience of literature, has everything to do with actually reading literature for its own sake. It has nothing to do with reading literature as a placeholder for politics and other social superstructures.