What’s “literary theory” for? What good is it? What can and can’t, should and shouldn’t, we expect it do for us? Refer to any three (at least) texts we’ve studied to make your best case.
I used to have a big problem with the concept of literary theory, on the grounds that it was so unavoidably linked with literary criticism; a concept which, as both a reader and writer, I deeply resented. What I resented was not merely the analytical way in which literature was treated, but the way in which every word and phrase was analyzed not to death, but to humdrum comatose by our secondary education English teachers. What also upset me was the “Death of the Author” concept. It infuriated me, the way a critic could revoke the author’s personal insight into—and, as I later deduced, the very ownership of—his work, of his own words. The gross injustice of this sanctioned thievery, and how widely it was accepted especially by academics and scholars, had the power to momentarily pulverize me. I know I was not alone in the feeling, since the most common complaint among my high school classmates espoused resentment of overcomplicating and over-dissecting the books once cherished, now despised. It was as if freedom of speech had been ripped from the individual in order to be flung haphazardly to the selfish (and self absorbed) masses. It got to a point where the words “literary criticism” alone could boil my blood. An explanation offered by Dave Barry in College served only to kindle the angry red heating system of veins, and it goes as follows:
“Never say anything about a book that anybody with any common sense would say. For example, suppose you are studying Moby-Dick. Anybody with any common sense would say that Moby-Dick is a big white whale, since the characters in the book refer to it as a big white whale roughly eleven thousand times. So in your paper, you say Moby-Dick is actually the Republic of Ireland. Your professor, who is sick to death of reading papers and never liked Moby-Dick anyway, will think you are enormously creative.”
If Herman Melville didn’t roll in his grave over that, I am sure I did enough reeling—and spitting and ranting and raving—to make up for it. It is not that I don’t believe a reader can’t identify personally with a novel. Far from that, since I myself have on numerous occasion, and think that literature itself it held together on a foundation of universal humanistic concordance (I wanted to write identifiability, but apparently that is not a word). What upset me was the disregard for both the writer and the written work itself, since oftentimes interpretations of a text deviate from context within the story itself, fueled by humanity’s willingness to assert itself onto that which it doesn’t own. Feudal lords at least had to fight to claim another’s land before raising it to the ground. Moby Dick was not a metaphor for the Republic of Ireland. Closer to home, I would like to argue that every single mention of water in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening was not a metaphor for sex, as was recently proposed to me. The Awakening is one of my personal favorites, and reading it directly after learning of Virginia Woolf’s suicide resulted in the story holding particular sway with me. I can understand if a person identifies Edna’s drowning suicide to be an expression of ultimate freedom, or if they correlate the Gulf of Mexico, as Edna sees it, as a metaphor for force of will or freedom from societal repression or a release and relief from her own ego and superego. But to say that every mention of water, from the glass of water on a table to a puddle on the street, is a symbol of sex is to read where the lines have not only stopped, but never thought to go. Sometimes people drink water because they are thirsty, and sometimes a puddle exists because the natural phenomenon we call rain has recently occurred.
However, literary theory is not the quest for symbols in subtext (or untext, as I would prefer to call it), and when it is applied in such a way as to seek those symbols, it is the applicant’s misdeed rather than the concept’s. When it comes down to it, literary theory is the interrelation of and speculation on moral, ethical and social philosophy, humanistically relevant history, and, of the utmost importance, emotional content. Literature—in particular, the novel—has and will always transcend film, dance, and even music, in its ability to both move and express the human condition. Music, while able to move the human spirit, is still an indistinct medium of expression. The nature of dance is similar. Film, while a combination of theatre and visual art, fails to fully convey the whole of the inner workings and the distinct ipseity of individuals. I believe the immediacy of film, rather than the quality of its ability to express, is what draws the masses to today’s movie theaters. More than any other medium, books are able to express the contradictory cruxes of humanity: the individuality of selfhood and the amalgamation of social interaction. The novel not only divulges the profundity of existence, but draws readers into situations which, while not their own, hold enough emotional and logical truth to acknowledge the similar world and complexity of spirit within a like and dissimilar human. Memores acti prudentes futuri. Martha Nussbaum’s Poetic Justice aptly demonstrates my newfound opinion of literary theory itself:
“Novels…present persistent forms of human need and desire realized in specific social situations. These situations frequently, indeed usually, differ a good deal from the reader’s own. Novels, recognizing this, in general construct and speak to an implicit reader who shares with the characters certain hopes, fears, and general human concerns, and who for that reason is able to form bonds of identification and sympathy with them, but who is also situated elsewhere and needs to be informed about the concrete situation of the characters. In this way, the very structure of the interaction between the text and its imagined reader invites the reader to see how the mutable features of society and circumstance bear on the realization of shared hopes and desires—and also, in fact, on their very structure.”
Literary theory’s purpose is identifying the complimentary aspects of human experience for those bound to benefit: mainly, readers. But “reader” is not a person’s sole status. The world is made up of mothers and fathers and sons and daughters and brothers and sisters and friends families and peers and colleagues and overseers and workers and chance encounters and lifelong searchers and philosophers and adventurers and home-makers and bachelors, and the things we learn from books do not remain in the mind of that interspersed creature, “the reader”. The magic of literature is that it is not purely logical, relying only on sense and reason; books deal in all the realms of selfhood and for your time and attention reciprocate with an understanding that is wholly human because of its encompassment of emotion. We can expect literary theory to aid us in understanding both our personal character and the guiding temperament of our surroundings, but we cannot (and should not) expect literary theory to interpret a novel according to the whims of any current scholastic pretension. Literary theory, in closing, is to be understood as and used as a spurring of the personal comprehension of what it means to be human via the medium of novels.
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