Читать книгу The Fall of Literary Theory - Liana Vrajitoru Andreasen - Страница 7

FOREWORD

My love of literature began in a freshman English class in which students read stories and poems and wrote papers on the “meanings” of those works. Each piece I read seemed to be a locked box in which hid a mysterious secret that would be revealed only if I had a special key, one I believed to be in the possession of all my professors. I thought of my literary education as a gnostic initiation in which I had to prove worthy of being awarded a key of my own. I looked forward to a day in which I could unlock all those written treasures.

This was in the late 1970s, and my professors had attended graduate schools where they were steeped in the New Criticism. Follow Brooks and Warren, learn how to apply close readings, and meanings would emerge like flowers in a garden. Poems and stories were organic, self-contained items that should be allowed to speak for themselves, not forced to fit into theoretical templates.

When I studied philosophy in graduate school, that approach to literature aligned well with my interest in phenomenology. Husserl directed us to the things themselves, and Heidegger maintained that his treatment of Dasein was nothing more than a description unfolding from a rigorous introspection. After all, Heidegger taught us that truth is aletheia or unconcealedness, not some property of propositions as the analytic philosophers claimed. Similar approaches came from hermeneutic thinkers such as Gadamer and Ricoeur. All of this deepened my understanding of literature by setting horizons on my readings of fiction and poetry just as these thinkers had done with other art forms.

By the time that I finished grad school and had substantial training in phenomenology and its precursors Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, I found that many other thinkers—all of whom had taken their cue from the phenomenologists—were the rage in literary criticism. They were called “poststructuralists” or “postmodernists,” terms with which I was barely acquainted. How had I missed the excitement? Was their work the logical outcome of the earlier philosophers I adored? I needed to catch up with theory.

Books by Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Cixous, Baudrillard, and others cluttered my desk. The array of approaches was vast. Some incorporated forms of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and other ideologies for new ways of understanding, not just literature, but politics, architecture, classical history, and nearly every field of academic study. Theory was exciting for me, although also bewildering. I would read a novel and consider it in terms of deconstruction, reader-response, or the failed Enlightenment project. Invariably, I wondered which approach worked best. Could I combine several, even those that appeared at odds with each other? This occurred when I was beginning to write fiction of my own, and I had to wonder if I was, like other authors (as Barthes claimed), dead.

Just as I began to see literature (and the world) through these theoretical lenses, rumors flew that theory was dead. Theory had led to the rejection of truth, of historical progress, of moral conviction, the rumors whispered, and had left us with a post-modern predicament of economic, artistic, and social bankruptcy.

I refused to believe the rumors. True, theory had uncovered in literature and other cultural artefacts insidious hidden agendas of various sorts of hegemony, and it offered no antidotes. But ugly truth is still truth, right? Besides, colleagues discussed my novels with me in terms of some of these theories, and I learned a great deal from them. Theory was taking a beating, but I was convinced that it was not down for the count. Someone with better skills than I surely could get it back on its feet and in fighting form again.

Liana Vrăjitoru Andreasen does so in this book. She pushes us to reconsider questions such as: What should be the practical effects of literary interpretation? What should theory, or any kind of critical apparatus, do for readers? Most importantly, she insists that such questions cannot be separated from one more fundamental—what is literature? Andreasen rightly sees that every important work of poststructuralism or postmodernism forces these questions, and if we are in a post-theory era, have we abandoned the questioning to which literature, by any estimation, naturally leads?

Andreasen makes a brilliant and thoroughly original move by showing that we can use theory to auger towards the essence of literature by engaging the categories of identity and fallenness. Literature is largely about identity and how the many forms of identity are illuminated by the questioning inchoate in literature. The questions, however, are only the start. As each stratum of linguistic concealedness is scraped away, the remaining substrata crystallize in response, requiring ever-sharper shovels to break through to the central, ultimate meaning of a work.

Such an endeavor cannot, of course, reach fulfillment. Andreasen explains that our failure to find completion in our literary archaeology is due to fallenness. Her selection of this term is an ingenious example of retrieval, which is largely what this book is about. The obvious connotation is a biblical one in which humankind is fallen from grace and lost its divine immediacy. For anyone raised in or touched by the Judeo-Christian legacy, is not this fallenness exactly what literature addresses? Without it, why the Bible? Why the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Ibn Rushd? Why the Divine Comedy? Why Paradise Lost? Patching the wound created by religious fall is not restricted to outright religious works. With no notion of human infirmity and the limits of reason and writing, would we have Hamlet, Don Quixote, Candide, Crime and Punishment, Heart of Darkness, The Waste Land, Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, or the works upon which Andreasen focuses, Billy Budd, Absalom! Absalom!, and The Crying of Lot 49? Each of these pushes identity to its literary precipice, beyond which it plummets.

The other sense of fallenness Andreasen draws upon is from Heidegger. In Being and Time, Heidegger deems Dasein fallen to its core, rejecting its “ownmost” identity for an ersatz notion of self that is defined by das Man. We relinquish our authentic selves to “the they,” so that any possibility to own our future is covered up, buried in anonymity, and nearly impossible to excavate. In his later works, Heidegger speaks of fallenness in a broader sense, of how the original sense of awe of presocratic philosophers that signaled the birth of philosophy has been lost and of how the history of thought itself—the ability to ask fundamental questions about the nature of Being—has been usurped by calculative thinking endemic to our technological age. For Heidegger, phenomenology is the auger that can bore through Dasein’s fallenness to the existential structures that make possible its authentic identity (a process that he calls fundamental ontology) as well as the balm for reversing the concealedness of thought to its restorative sense.

The thinkers whose work led to poststructuralist and postmodernist theory were immensely influenced by Heidegger. Andreasen is well aware of this connection and how those theorists moved beyond the boundaries of phenomenology to develop their own notions of how to ask questions about the nature of Being through the medium of literature yet succumbed to their own distinctive kind of fallenness. Perhaps theirs was a series of failed projects, but the failures were nevertheless grand ones that left clues to how they can be rejuvenated to help us return to literature without plunging into the endless maelstrom of fallen identity. Andreasen convincingly argues that we can reverse theory’s failures, but we may have to make a few sacrifices and amend a few assumptions about what literary criticism is all about.

Theory is not dead. It was at an earlier time no match for an opponent such as fallen identity that carried the freight of era upon era of writing. Like a skilled boxing coach, however, Andreasen knows her fighter’s strengths and weaknesses, and has studied the same in the opponent. She has devised a new strategy hitherto unforeseen and has secured a rematch. I know where I shall place my bet.

Ron Cooper, College of Central Florida, author of Hume’s Fork,

Purple Jesus and The Gospel of the Twin