Notes on what literary theory does

Tuesday I sat down with other people to discuss literary theory (which, remember, is not critical theory) with one of our more prominent professors. I agreed a lot with what he had to say--and even more with the jovial way he said it, with genuine seriousness appended as he focused on describing how using literary theory feels. I share some of my notes here, however, because regardless of agreement they offer at least another perspective on what to do with literary theory--or rather, what it's good for--at this stage in the game.

He began by saying that the age where you had to be either for or against theory has completely passed (and this, I'll just say, is certainly true: it might be the case elsewhere that people are trying to breathe life into theory, but we're here all more focused on what you do with it now that it's over, or how you restructure things around a new and more interesting situation). Surely no one has to do it. But, then, he also stressed that in a way no one in an English department was really ever a full blown theorist to begin with--nobody ever really did it. Northrop Frye-like figures were indeed theorists, because they ultimately gave up reading to work out the system. Philosophers might be called theorists because they don't usually bring to bear what they have to say on literature. But for everyone else, in literature, it's always a matter of practical criticism, usually, or judgment and analysis--reading. Why? Because theory is not a method, he said: it gives you insight, in a way that he came back to explain, but it isn't something you can apply. So basically even in the heyday of theory people wrote practical criticism that was "in favor of having some theory" as he put it (and I'd agree, except that I'd also add the crucial missing link: when we do think we're theorists, we're really only doing methodology, and I'd try to see that perhaps as an opportunity, or as perhaps implying no only).

Literary theory usually can't be applied because it is more formative than a method: it sort of changes your whole tack towards an issue. Or allows you to grasp it at a certain angle. But the timeframe here is huge. You really get a theory over the span of a year, or something like that, he said. On that note, he said always to read the primary texts. Never read intros. And he blasted Terry Eagleton in the same way I did not so long ago: Eagleton just turns the theorist into a caricature... one after another after another. And this should not be an introduction to any of them, because it's not the primary text. Read the primary, even if you don't understand it, he said.

He used the example of Lévi-Strauss. He wrote a book on film based on Lévi-Strauss and myth. But it wasn't any sort of application. He just thought Lévi-Strauss' sense that a myth was the resolution of a social conflict was interesting. And then watching films, he started to see these sorts of figures and scenes--representations, mini-narratives--repeating themselves. Like the lone ranger riding into the sunset. Why does this occur? He took it as a myth--but by then it had already been quite a long time, and the theory was bent, as it were, so that it really didn't quite resemble where it came from. On this point, he said he didn't in fact cite Lévi-Strauss anywhere except footnotes. The best theory, he thought, was this sort of absorption of the theorist to that point... not to the point that you can rattle off his or her whole "system," and articulate how your project fits into that system, but in terms of having consumed and integrated it all and made it come out the other side, as it were, as something else, something bearing upon your object, or such that your object's fate is its fate in some mysterious way, back across the gap that the theory has since traveled. He told a story of using Marcel Mauss and then some anthropologists admiring how he did it--and he going away with some minor minor sense that he had altered a little bit of anthropology by just pulling it off. It wasn't that he used Mauss right out. It's just that he saw a problem where Mauss would be good to bring up--and the anthropologists like it, precisely because it's never something they would have done with him and probably should never have done. The disciplinary issues then were coming up: he said you shouldn't think of using a theorist as interdisciplinary work so much as the opposite, something like differentiating-disciplinary work. You show the specificity of your discipline with what you do with the others.

But back to theory, via this: he basically had the myth example and then an example with deconstruction. In the first, this was an example where he found the theory useful. In the second, he found something like a dissatisfaction with an aspect of the theory, as it was philosophically being articulated and of course picked up at Yale etc. It's "elegant pessimism"--a phrase I loved--especially at the end of whatever narrative it is reconstructing. Anyway, so he brought the theory to bear on a particular object (basically the double inscription of the mystery text in less genre-specific work), and this actually was to address a theoretical incapacity. Again, the terms in which this was done were not pure, were not theoretical--they were trying to "have some theory," or have some more coherent, interesting theory--to make an intervention through his object and its dynamics. Now, as far as technical terms go, he's for using them, but also for thinking of similar sorts of words that might cue up something like the theoretical framework, but which really bear more on your project. It's almost as if he is for writing a project where you use a vocabulary that, if you didn't really cite that theorist in footnotes, people might accuse you of ripping her or him off, or, say, thinking you were onto something original when it was exactly what Heidegger, for example, said. He wants you to toe that line, because it makes you think first and foremost about your project, not the theory, and articulate everything in a vocabulary nuanced enough to bring out your object.

Here's some quotes: when I use theory, it doesn't sound like the theory I got it from. But on the other hand, there's a certain necessity to my use of it. Also, theory is good for skepticism, in the sense that it makes you always ask--what's the upshot of this project, and never rest content with, say, history: with a description of the history or a development only. Also, find the person who is doing what you don't want to do, either as a theorist or on the project level. You'll run into them somewhere, and when you do, you will finally probably know what you want to to, because you ran into her or him when you didn't know you didn't want to do it that way so very very viscerally.

Ultimately, he concluded that theory was a good way of "seeing the consequences" of a thought. It was a little vague what this meant, though I thought it similar to the notion of the theory ceiling which I worked out a while ago, though taken in a more positive way in terms of what the ceiling or cap produces for you. I gathered what he meant in particular, though, was that you pick up a theory and follow it at a specific stage in your argument because it forces you to stop taking for granted the story you're telling and push it towards the level of upshots, payoffs--assuming, however, the theory has been sort of internalized in the way described above. The moment of theory, I took him to say, and to be theoretical, was a moment of negation, of that closure Jameson (and Greimas) talks about: you push the argument forward and then allow it to enter another series of moves, a series where perhaps another different theorist/theory might be useful. I said I was finding Jameson's eclecticism wonderful--and he said this was a sort of extreme (in that you are sort of carpetbombed with theories), but also a pretty exact, example of what he liked, where the theory is still subordinate to the matter at hand at the same time as it also is not applied, and carries argumentative force by forcing some closure, some coimplication of the object's fate and the theory's fate.

This, I'll just say in conclusion (and as a way of working a post I promised a while ago into all this) is why we don't think up the idea ourselves: literary theory is often accused of just culling together other great ideas. But, first, we transform those ideas, according to what I said above, and we show how they work, what they feel like in use. Second, we turn to these other ideas in the first place because they do argumentative work through this transformation above and beyond the analysis we're already doing, work that we don't think we should be doing alone since (like I say in the post on the theory ceiling) it is on a more general level. This means taking thinkers into a realm which used to be called aesthetic--but, since Coleridge, who first did this seriously, really can't be considered such, as this makes the issues only philosophical. I doubt many philosophers feel their work is too small in scope or in import, but this is what literary theory says is the case especially as their work bears upon art (and I tend to agree with this notion, though perhaps not for the same reasons). And it bears repeating that this doesn't mean a widening of issues into some conceptual jungle--philosophers know first and foremost how changing a framework can produce a slimmer, more focused set of problems. Perhaps this change is put best, though, if we say it's a matter of opening up the analysis of art to other areas than philosophy, seeing art as not only a philosophical problem. And we do this alongside what we also primarily do, which is refuse to see art solely as a problem of appreciation. We also perform this alongside literary history, which is another way to accomplish the dissolution of aesthetics.

I should also note this doesn't preclude some dismissal of the arguments and the texts that make up aesthetics (as I think some people sometimes believe): theorists study aesthetics very hard, but just refuse to use the texts in that limited way. One can justify this more positively with a reference to the importance of language over sense and perception, but, with my sympathies to phenomenology (including Derrida, though this might seem paradoxical unless you actually understand these people--and stop listening to the Yale school deconstructionists), I've never felt the need to do so.

Distant reading, again

Franco Moretti is, as I've said before here, the most virulent of the increasing number of opponents to close reading in American literary criticism. He coins the term “distant reading” in order to suggest how his method of using abstract models for literary history--graphs, maps, and trees--actually makes sense of texts. I want to go over that once more.

Quite simply, distant reading makes sense of texts through the process of gathering immense amounts of empirical data about literary works—the presence or absence of various traits, noted by collaborative efforts considering texts in dozens of languages—and organizing it all into various systems or wholes that seek to make sense of their distribution—projecting representations of the evolution of a genre, say, and its spread across Europe as it becomes more or less viable in various markets. Such effort is continually motivated by astonishment at the “minimal fraction of the literary field we work on,” given that the empirical amount of literary works produced in a span of time often dwarfs even the most expansive canon of that period that we indeed study (one of his favorite observations is that even a canon of two hundred nineteenth century novels would be still less then one percent of what was then produced ), and because these works continually overflow the national and linguistic borders within which literary research often moves.

Against this, then, attempts to expand the canon over the years to include alternative literatures meet something like their limit case, but so too does close reading. For it is the organization of canons—or attempts to expand them—around the latter that makes the study of the actual, empirically existing literary field impossible: as Moretti says, “a field this large cannot be understood by stitching together separate bits of knowledge about individual cases.” This study is only possible if we begin to plot what we have not looked at closely in order to extrapolate tendencies that we cannot actually observe at all. The entire project of literary studies suddenly becomes not one of avoiding paraphrase in the sense of avoiding reduction--which, I’d suggest, is the most fundamental motivation of close reading--but what literary structuralists like Propp, Greimas, Genette and Todorov long ago discovered could constitute a powerful poetics: negotiating reduction, simplifying, and then working off of these reduced systems.

Lest Moretti's study of these particular systems of distribution sound too much like work on the economics of literature, however, which has sometimes been treated very extensively in literary study, Moretti assures us that the effort is ultimately directed to the study of where and when formal innovations in literature--the province once proper to close reading—occur, since the traits that will be noted and plotted on graphs, maps and trees will indeed be formal ones: the presence or absence of clues in the evolving genre of the mystery, for example, which is then able to be represented in tree form. This has significantly led Jonathan Arac to call Moretti’s work “formalism without close reading,” an appellation Moretti himself says defines his work perfectly.

But if Moretti can actually affirm his work’s formalism, he still cannot give us much sense of what the close reading to which it is opposed actually involves. “At bottom,” he says, “it’s a theological exercise--very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously--whereas what we really need is a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read them.” Such vagueness is typical of many recent critics who seek to turn away from close reading or, indeed, find new ways for critique in general to proceed. For specificity is not, ultimately, necessary: “close reading” can remain a label for the most tenacious of our basic critical dependencies—in Moretti’s case, at most it is the sort of scrutiny or attention that denies us access to the wide distribution of world literature that “distant reading” considers fundamental. “It’s a theological exercise,” in other words, only hints at what we need to make explicit in order for any widespread resistance to close reading to take place, and not collapse, as it sometimes does in Moretti, into the mere belief that anything different is better than what we have. In this respect, what is also necessary is a sense that distant reading is not only a name for Moretti’s work with models, but something like one pole at the end of a wide continuum whose opposite, while indeed being close reading, is only so if we cross many intervening levels of reading, from the more to the less distant over to the less and the more close. Looking for other distant readers than Moretti (I'd suggest Raymond Williams is such a reader), is then one step in both refining what we mean by close reading and showing how we can be lead out of it and brought towards something more distant, precisely by refusing to set up distant reading as some homogenous space outside of which, immediately, we fall into the close. Such a maneuver in fact capitalizes on what Moretti’s and other such attacks, in their vagueness, actually restore to close reading: its functional aspect, which ties it to methodological decisions that have alternatives.

Richards himself used the term “close” primarily in this functional sense, in order to denote the level at which one’s approach to the text in reading could, not make meanings appear, but eliminate other less relevant levels which might bear upon the act of construing a meaning. Only subsequently in America would the term carry the ethical significance it now has, and which the practical Richards never could really bring himself to charge it with except by becoming Utopian: the sense that if one read closely, one read slowly, with skill, with effort, bringing out the difficult and latent meanings with care. If the term and the practice have been able to remain less questioned, it is perhaps because its functions have become so intertwined with notions of virtue that, in the days of deconstruction, the cry “you have not read me closely,” could become not just a description but an accusation of irresponsibility in the widest sense--something like literary critical immorality, whatever that would be. And since it had become an empty term for, at bottom, interpretive work in general and what it does well, it is no surprise that “closeness” can veer round in Moretti to become an empty term for all that is bad.