Barthes: the tenacious theoreticalism of the French is always good for a little hilarity
FRYE:
Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not that he is learning nature.
Art, like nature, is the subject of a systematic study, and has to be distinguished from the study itself, which is criticism. It is therefore impossible to “learn literature:” one learns about it in a certain way, but what one learns, transitively, is the criticism of literature.
Similarly, the difficulty often felt in “teaching literature” arises from the fact that it cannot be done: the criticism of literature is all that can be directly taught.
So while no one expects literature itself to behave like a science, there is surely no reason why criticism, as a systematic and organized study, should not be, at least partly, a science.
Certainly criticism as we find it in learned journals has every characteristic of a science. Evidence is examined scientifically; previous authorities are used scientifically; fields are investigated scientifically; texts are edited scientifically. Prosody is scientific in structure; so is phonetics; so is philology.
And yet in studying this kind of critical science the student becomes aware of a centrifugal movement carrying him away from literature. He finds that literature is the central division of the “humanities,” flanked on one side by history and on the other by philosophy.
Criticism so far ranks only as a subdivision of literature; and hence, for the systematic mental organization of the subject, the student has to turn to the conceptual framework of the historian for events, and to that of the philosopher for ideas.
The literary chit-chat which makes the reputations of poets boom and crash in an imaginary stock exchange is pseudo-criticism. That wealthy investor, Mr. Eliot, after dumping Milton on the market, is now buying him again; Donne has probably reached his peak and will begin to taper off; Tennyson may be in for a slight flutter but the Shelley stocks are still bearish.
This sort of thing cannot be part of a systematic study. The texture of any great work is complex and ambiguous, and in unravelling the complexities we may take in as much history and philosophy as we please, if the subject of our study remains at the center.
The only weakness in this approach is that it is conceived primarily as the antithesis of centrifugal or “background” criticism. Antitheses are usually resolved, not by picking one side and refuting the other, but by trying to get past the antithetical way of stating the problem.
I suggest that what is at present missing from literary criticism is a co-ordinating principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomenon it deals with as parts of a whole.
We speak of the rhythm of music and the pattern of painting; but later, to show off our sophistication, we may begin to speak of the rhythm of painting and the pattern of music.
Rhythm, or recurrent movement, is deeply founded on the natural cycle, and everything in nature that we think of as having some analogy with works of art, like the flower or the bird’s song, grows out of a profound synchronization between an organism and the rhythms of its environment, especially that of the solar year. With animals some expressions of synchronization, like the mating dances of birds, could almost be called rituals. But in human life a ritual seems to be something of a voluntary effort (hence the magical element in it) to recapture a lost rapport with the natural cycle.
Patterns of imagery, on the other hand, or fragments of significance, are oracular in origin, and derive from the epiphanic moment, the flash of instantaneous comprehension with no direct reference to time, the importance of which is indicated by Cassirer in Myth and Language.
The myth is the central informing power that gives archetypal significance to the ritual and archetypal narrative to the oracle.
BARTHES:
In France, Mallarme was doubtless the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner. For him, for us, too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all the to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs,’ and not ‘me.’ Mallarme’s entire poetics consists in suppressing the author in the interests of writing (which is, as will be seen, to restore the place of the reader). Valery, encumbered by a psychology of the Ego, considerably diluted Mallarme’s theory but, his taste for classicism leading him to turn to the lessons of rhetoric, he never stopped calling into question and deriding the Author; he stressed the linguistic and, as it were, ‘hazardous’ nature of his activity, and throughout his prose-works he militated in favor of the essentially verbal condition of literature, in the face of which all recourse to the writer’s interiority seemed to him pure superstition.
Proust himself, despite the apparently psychological character of what are called his analyses, was visibly concerned with the task of inexorably blurring, by an extreme subtilization, the relation between the writer and his characters; by making of the narrator not he who has seen and felt nor even he who is writing, but he who is going to write (the young man in the novel—but, in fact, how old is he and who is he?—wants to write but cannot; the novel ends when writing at last becomes possible), Proust gave modern writing its epic.
I can delight in reading and re-reading Proust, Flaubert, Balzac, even—why not?—Alexandre Dumas. But this pleasure, no matter how keen and even when free from all prejudice, remains in part (unless by some exceptional critical effort) a pleasure of consumption; for if I can read these authors, I also know that I cannot re-write them (that it is impossible today to write ‘like that’) and this knowledge, depressing enough, suffices to cut me off from the production of these works, in the very moment their remoteness establishes my modernity (is not to be modern to know clearly what cannot be started over again?).
Is Frye correct when he says literature cannot be taught, only the criticism of literature can be taught? We think he is right. What does this mean for Creative Writing? Is this why Creative Writing has replaced the English major? Critical theory bores people, but criticism of your work and your peers’ work will always fascinate?
Barthes, the “Death of the Author” critic, belongs to the text-mad tradition, and was this the real goal, after all? when he says, “Mallarme’s entire poetics consists in suppressing the author in the interests of writing (which is, as will be seen, to restore the place of the reader).” The reader?
What shall we do with the reader?
In Creative Writing, the reader and the writer become one, and the question is finally, does this hurt them both?
In Theory, the reader becomes a mole, burrowing into the text, as if to hide from the world.
The readers of popular works don’t count at all, of course.
Barthes is actually rather enjoyable to read, and we like his definition of Modern: to know that we cannot start over.
Frye attempts to bring readers back into the sunshine of a unified reality, but that’s perhaps the problem; in his unified myth, he simply bites off more than he can chew. But we admire the attempt.
WINNER: FRYE
THIS FINISHES THE FIRST ROUND ACTION!
WE HAVE REDUCED THE FIELD OF GREAT LITERARY PHILOSOPHERS FROM SIXTY-FOUR TO THIRTY TWO!
NEXT: THE SWEET SIXTEEN!
