A great deal of literary criticism, especially that associated with so-called Theory, but by no means confined to those brands, is about finding hidden meanings in the text. Such criticism seeks to pass through the text itself, its sounds, syntax, and semantics, and into some hidden realm where the real action is. Once that real action is discovered for any one text, well . . . No critic would actually own up to discarding the text itself, no would any critic actually do so. But, it sure seems like it.
There’s the problem: If the real meaning is hidden in the text, what do we then do with that TEXT once we’ve chased MEANING out of its lair? Do we decorate it? Destroy it? Take up residence? What?
Preparatory to thinking about those problems, consider some observations Graham Harman makes his in recent ASK/TELL interview:
There is a widespread tendency to think that if anything is moved in any way by ulterior impulses, then it must be entirely corrupted by those impulses. For instance, John Dean of Watergate fame came to lecture in Cairo six years ago. He was presenting himself to some extent as a hero for turning on the Nixon people and testifying against them in Congress. A rather cynical friend of mine said: “So what? He only did it to save his own skin.”
To which I should have replied: “So what to you too?” The fact that something is guided initially by self-interest does not reduce it utterly to that aspect. For example, the initial reasons for St. Thomas Aquinas becoming a Catholic may have been something petty like the wish to please his parents and be treated as a good boy. Well, that hardly matters, does it? The origins of a thing do not always contain its truth. Supposing young St. Thomas wanted to please his parents, then enjoyed the praise he received during his studies, who cares if these were his original motives for extreme piety? Over time, it became something much more. We could say that the original incentives lured him into the profession, but then the profession became much more to him than the original lures.
A bit later he continues in the same vein:
The cynical approach [to desires] would say something like: “Basically, all people care about is sex and power.” Perhaps at some stage that is more or less true of everyone, but the lust for sex and power can be transformed by a kind of alchemy into a love of harpoons, Catholicism, or ballet. This isn’t quite the same thing as “sublimation,” which still assumes a kind of dualism, with the libido lurking underwater and ballet a pristine Other that provides substitute satisfaction. Instead, I would say that the libido is in the ballet, which isn’t really sublimated at all, but simply a metamorphosis of the libido that has now become autonomous and self-contained.
The issue goes beyond dreams, and covers all transformation of one thing into another. I’m against the reduction of anything to its causes or foundations, but also against the idea that anything rises too far above those causes and foundations. A child can never be reduced to its parents, yet the child will always preserve a disturbing number of features and mannerisms from its parents. Do you ever cough and hear the sound of your father coughing, or recognize your mother’s eyes when you look in the mirror? It would be like if you transmute lead to gold, but then the gold is still somehow lead at the same time.
As with dreams, so with literary texts. Can we think of those hidden meanings, not merely as the objects of critical quest, as prizes to be won through diligent effort, but simply as some of the machinery and scaffolding used to build the text? Keith Oatley talks of literary texts as simulations of real experience. Those hidden meanings are traces of the machinery and scaffolding needed to stage and to run the simulation.
Cf. my brief for Compositionist Literary Studies.
No comments:
Post a Comment