Reading literature comes to include, for any developing mind, reading criticism. In philosophy there is much less of a distinction between “primary” and “secondary” sources: ask a philosopher what he does, and the answer is philosophy. (Geoffrey H. Hartman to the Editor, PMLA, 92.2, [March 1977], p. 307)
Hartman’s letter to the Editor of PMLA is a response to Cary Nelson’s article “Reading Criticism” published in that journal, but it is also a variation on Hartman’s sustained challenge to the boundary between creative and critical writing.
What interests me about this particular iteration of Hartman’s argument is that even as it questions the distinction between primary and secondary literature, it distinguishes the two by means of their relation to quotation. Whereas the ‘creative’ writer weaves an intertextual web in which his reading matter is alluded to, elided, evoked, but rarely named (Hartman here calls it ‘inner quotation’), the ‘critical’ writer makes it a point of honour not to leave a single source without attribution. There is even a species of citicism whose primary object is to locate the sources that the author has not attributed. However barren, it is perfectly legitimate.
To write literature is, in a sense, to rewrite works already written. This means to read them closely, to interpret, to challenge or pay tribute to them – in a word: to criticise. Therefore it is not that the literary writer is less intellectually engaged than the critic, or that the critic is less imaginative than the creative writer. Both literature and criticism present us with the results of a critical investigation of the literary tradition. However, where the critic compiles a bibliography, the creative writer transforms her sources to her own ends. Rather than viewing literature as the object of criticism, we should regard it as the practice of criticism without quotation marks.
Thoughts fallen by the wayside 