
Prolegomenon
What follows are some notes. They regard a research topic I’m entertaining which may work toward some dissertation ideas. It’s something like a train of thought—and not really a complete one. But if it strikes a chord with you please message me. I’d relish a chance to discuss it.
The background of this idea comes from my experience earning an MFA. I came to Pacific with an English degree from a state school where my experience was, I think, typical—the standard blend of New Critical/New Historical/Post-Colonial-Feminist-Queer approaches; Saussure, Foucault, Barthes, Derrida. If you did it, you know it. Anyways.
With this background I attended my first MFA workshop. I brought with me stories which reflected a certain wrongheaded desire to write like other authors. This meant writing the way I understood other authors which, given my education, meant writing fiction which participated in theory.
It's embarrassing to admit but I once thought I should write metafiction. As in I told people that. Those words came out of my mouth. You know, Barth, Barthelme, Pynchon, Marquez, Borges. Sheesh. I’d read too much Linda Hutcheon and longed to squirm beneath her microscope, earn the ultimate compliment: meta. My cheeks burn as I write.
Thank God, this desire lasted for only about a year before it died. And it was a death by a thousand cuts, sliced by each advisor I had, and each craft lecture I attended. Almost without exception, theory was a byword among these faculty (who are internationally renowned authors, recipients of major awards, published in leading publications).
In theory’s place, they counseled a work-a-day approach. No big ideas, no mysteries, just well-conceived characters, immediate plot designs, interesting problems. For them, the task of writing was technical, a matter of fitting together pieces so as to make wholes which accorded to their vision, their concept. As the son of a carpenter, the whole process felt very…familiar.
They also recommended a certain kind of reading to learn the practical skill of writing. It involved reading for craft, the practice of pulling apart a text to see how certain affects were accomplished. As I tried it, two things became clear. 1.) That I must assume books are internally coherent, that they have within themselves—when written properly—a logic which controls their movement; and 2.) that I must see books as artifacts, that is, made by people to accomplish certain tasks, to realize certain ends.
Nothing could be farther from the assumptions of the theory I’d been trained in. Reading for craft involved taking the text as I received it, which is to say, a mode of communication. But theory asked me to do the opposite, to impose a framework onto the text, vetting it by that framework, and understanding it within the framework’s terms.
MAR Habib says in his History of Literary Theory that theory (here he is talking about New Historicism) assumes that “...the history of a given phenomenon…operate[s] according to certain identifiable laws, yielding a certain predictability and explanatory power…” (Habib 760) That is, theory operates in terms or rubrics which are brought to bear on texts, claiming to define that which controls their meaning. This is why, to get an “A” in undergrad English class, my task was not to understand a given book as such, it was to understand the theory with which my instructor read the book. After being presented with Paulo Friere’s Pedagogy of The Oppressed in English 101, I was expected to apply Friere’s terms—banking and dialogics—to excerpts of textbooks. The same was expected of me in World Lit, where we analyzed Jamaica Kincaid’s use of the second person you, and were asked to apply it to travel brochures.
Implicit in this pattern, regardless of what theory was being taught, was a basic suspicion of the text as it was experienced. Anything, we were cautioned, could happen if we just read. Our biases, our cultural assumptions, even our psychological hang ups would be reflected onto the page’s mirror and obscure its meaning. Understood this way, reading was to be an internal event. Any notion of objectivity was to be considered mythic, a hangover of renaissance idealism.
And what happens to the text itself in this process? No one really knows. As far as my professors in undergrad were concerned, we haven’t seen the whites of its eyes since Kant, we’ve only glimpsed at it through cultures’ vast “tissue of texts,” as Barthes had it, or through the fog of class war as Marx had it, or not at all as Derida had it. As far as theory is concerned, any notion which suggests an essential text, and therefore an author, is a dead end.
I sensed a stark difference between how my MFA advisors saw the text and how my undergrad profs saw it. However, I began to sympathize with my advisors. For the first time in my life, I was in constant contact with authors, real, celebrated writers. These were the people who wrote the texts I had been trained to criticize. Yet, they, the authors of these texts, thought writing was opposed to theory, irrelevant to its creation.
This suggested something strange and unsettling: the way I had been taught to read had nothing to do with the way books are written. I started asking eerie questions. Had I been taught to study books, or had I been taught to study theories about books? In light of this, exactly what did my facility in the “critical essay” get me? Was it an expertise in literature per se? Or was it expertise in something else?
An illustration comes to mind. Imagine you were fascinated by trains. And imagine you decided to become a mechanical engineer so as to design your own trains. Then on your first day of class you were told the following. To really understand trains, you should understand the power structures which gave rise to trains in the first place; you should understand the personal complexity and moral history of the train’s inventor; you should understand that when you look at a train, you are really looking at a tissue, or matrix of physical instantiations, and to understand the train at all, you must situate yourself within the laws which govern this overall representational matrix—and not to mention the ways in which trains were used to segregate the south, marginalize women, or discriminate against queer people with their binary bathroom signs.
As worthy as these observations may be—and in some cases essential to questions of ethics and politics—they truly have nothing to do with trains as such. You would certainly be disappointed as one who aspired to learn more about trains—the way they work, how they can be improved as trains, how exactly they accomplish their purposes.
What I found in my MFA was that theory about texts is about as useful to someone who wants to learn about literature, as theories about trains are useful to someone interested in locomotion.
The Train of Thought
With that in mind, I’ve been investigating certain arguments put forward by neo-pragmatist scholars Walter Benn Michaels and Steven Knapp. Their infamous article “Against Theory” questioned the notion of literary theory by taking aim at the semantics undergirding theorist’s arguments. It’s semantics, after all, which animates modern notions of theory, specifically the Saussurian notion that speech is distinct from language. It’s by way of this distinction that Theorists are able to make space between the authors intention and the theory which governs the texts they create. Speech is the intentions of the author, the transmission of their ideas onto the page. But language, according to the theorist, is a different animal all together, a product of history, power, politics, and the unconscious. It is by theorizing about how language works that the theorist is able to make claims about a text in excess of the author’s intentions.
Knapp and Michaels take aim at this distinction. They do so by deploying a series of thought experiments. The most famous of these is one where they describe a person walking on the beach. As waves lap the shore and recede, the beach walker notices scratches in the sand where there were none before. Upon closer inspection, the scratches appear to be letters, letters which turn out to be Wordsworth’s poem, “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal.”
Here, Knapp and Michaels ask a question: if it is obvious that there was no one to write these words, do they have meaning?
Knapp and Michaels want to illustrate that no matter how miraculous the circumstances, language fundamentally requires a speaker, one who intends something with their speech. In fact—unless you’re willing to posit some supernatural or conspiratorial cause of “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” in the sand—those scratches must actually mean nothing by the fact that no one wrote it.
Paul Fry, a theorist who is ultimately unconvinced of Knapp and Michaels argument (though he is very sympathetic to it) uses, perhaps, a more vivid example of the thought experiment. Take the declarations of those who claim to see Jesus’ face in tortillas or overpasses. The very difference between those who believe such things are miracles and those who don’t, is the fact that those who do, believe in a possible author. In other words, the only thing which makes those faces intelligible is to assume the existence of one who burned themselves into the tortilla.
I find these kinds of arguments really compelling. They seem to vindicate the authors who taught at my MFA program. Grand theories about language which exist outside of an author’s intention should be looked at with suspicion. Meaning requires a someone to mean, communication implies intention.
This, I think—and we’re getting away from Knapp and Michaels and into me—suggests a sort of textual essentialism. That is, what a text really means constitutes the actual thing one reads. There is no such thing as free-floating meaning, special, hermetic lexicons of abstract language. Rather, meaning only exists in particular articulations—essays, novels, poetry collections, and the like. This is a text first concept of reading.
But theory wants to say the opposite. Theory wants to say that meaning is the stuff off the page, or behind it, or between its lines. Meaning, the theorist maintains, is in the language, before the author utters it. It is not in the mind of the author prior to the language. This, it seems to me, is a skeptical attitude with respect to the knowability of simple physical objects. If the text is unknowable in itself, then it’s a mute in the land of the blind, cut off from our perception until the laser of theory burns away our cataract.
But, I think, to maintain this view is to engage in a vicious circularity. We have to ask the question: from where do we derive theory if not from texts themselves? Language is only known by way of individual instantiations of text in the first place. If they exist, we don’t come to know Saussure’s Langu, nor Derrida’s logos, nor Barthe’s “tissue of texts,” nor Foucolt’s power, nor whiteness, nor blackness, nor queerness, without first meeting a simple text, held in both hands. Therefore, in the order of perception, real texts frame and precede the ideas which they inspire—even if those ideas are to question the text all together. Remember, they wouldn’t have occurred unless someone sat down to read the text which suggested them.
Therefore, to reject the existence of the text on the grounds that preconceived notions and polluted language have already devoured it, is to block oneself from theorizing altogether. Therefore, I’m wondering, can we have it both ways? Can we have a meaningless instantiation of language, which still suggests enough meaning to give us theory?
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