I have gone through my own practice and tried to identify the things I tend to do. The first is recurrences. I’m sort of an auteur critic in the sense that if I find a writer interesting, I try to read all their work. I do the same thing with musicians and painters. And when you do that, what you begin to notice are recurrences. As I say, I began with style studies, where one paid close attention to tics—not themes but peculiarities, eccentricities, recurrent expressions in a writer’s style. And from there one began to deduce a Weltanschauung. Spitzer calls it a kind of hermeneutic circle. Doesn’t matter what you call it, but Spitzer’s idea is that you find some stylistic peculiarity in a writer and then you begin to find other ones, and when you connect them they form a distinctive worldview. I take style as the central thing. Style meaning precisely this recurrence of certain forms and certain idioms—idiolects, if you like.

In fact, another maxim I have offered myself at certain moments is that ideological critique has to end up being a critique of the self. You can’t recognize an ideology unless, in some sense, you see it in yourself. Making critiques from the outside is like reading books you don’t like because you want to denounce them. Sometimes that can be politically important, and I would never knock that. There are political things one has to do, judgments one has to make, quarrels one has to have. But with literature, it’s much better to deal with things that you like, that you associate yourself with. And then, if there are ideological nuances to that association, it becomes a self-judgment. That is to say, you recognize the role of the ideology in yourself, your own racism or something, and then, from that, you evolve a judgment, if you like.