In 2010 Heather Love published an essay that got a fair amount of buzz, “Close but not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn” (New Literary History, 41, No. 2, 371-391). After discussion the role of description in the sociology of Erving Goffman and Bruno Latour, Love examines at Toni Morrison’s Beloved, but NOT to describe features of Morrison’s text. Rather, she’s interested in Morrison’s use of description IN her text. If Latour describes the phenomena that interest him, why doesn't Love do the same? Why does she displace her descriptive desire into Morrison's text?
I think the answer is simple: She’s treating Morrison’s text like she treats a text by Latour or Goffman. I find that both puzzling and not at all puzzling. I found it puzzling because, as someone who is very much interested in describing literary texts, patterns in words, I was disappointed that Love displayed no interest in that at all. She chose Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a case study and what did she do? She examined Morrison’s use of description, which is what she did with Goffman and Latour, but is quite different from describing patterns in Morrison’s text.
Thus she says (p. 384):
One of the few critics to recognize the significance of the documentary impulse in Morrison’s work is Stanley Crouch, who published a scathing review of Beloved upon its publication. In the midst of a general attack on what he sees as Morrison’s sentimentality, Crouch singles out her gift for realist description. He writes, “Morrison is best at clear, simple description, and occasionally she can give an account of the casualties of war and slavery that is free of false lyricism or stylized stoicism.” Although Crouch concedes that Morrison can portray some of the costs of “war and slavery,” he mostly praises her descriptions of quotidian events in everyday life—he cites a passage approvingly where Sethe makes biscuits. I want to follow up on his suggestion—mostly ignored by later critics—that Morrison’s primary gift is one of neutral, detailed description. However, I argue that, instead of merely providing a background for the events of the novel, Morrison’s descriptions are central to her representation of “war and slavery.” I look specifically at Morrison’s first account of Beloved’s murder; in this scene, Morrison lets the camera roll, recording circumstances and actions with minimal intervention.
She then sets out to do it and produces what is, for all practical purposes, a “close reading” of a standard and familiar kind.
In her practice Goffman, Latour, and Morrison are all in pretty much the same business, using texts to describe the (human) world. The fact that Goffman and Latour wrote non-fiction while Morrison wrote fiction, that difference is elided in Love's method. It is all but invisible. Just as the texts of Goffman and Latour are not of interest in themselves, but treated simply as a means of access to the world, so Morrison’s text is not of interest in itself. It is a means of access, and what interests her is the world it gives access to. Oh sure, Love knows full well that Beloved is a work of fiction – all critics know they’re dealing in works of fiction and theorize it endlessly – but she treats it as a frame and all but forgets about it once she comes to examine the picture.
That seems the all be inevitable in a disciplinary arc that came to construe theory, not as an instrument to examine literature, but as a means of using “Marxism and psychoanalysis, structuralism and poststructuralism, and semiotics and deconstruction” (p. 372) as instruments through which they use literary texts in an investigation of the world. In a deep and fundamental sense, the language of literature has been erased, pushed from awareness, forgotten, all by critics who claim sophisticated awareness of language.
When will critics learn that meaning is not language. And you cannot understanding language and its mechanisms through meaning alone. But first, you must learn how to describe language, to describe texts. How do we do that? What are the proper terms?
Begin by admitting ignorance and move on from there.
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