No More Than Pen and Ink

In the first semester of my freshman year I was enrolled in ENG 112 “Critical Approaches to Literature” a class which was designed to be the foundation of the literature major at Geneva College (and was also required of writing majors). In the class we explored different schools of criticism (and had to write papers attempting to use some of them). We started with a whirlwind historical survey that covered the great thinkers on literature and then we launched into the real study of the theories of Literary Criticism we would have to imitate: New Criticism, Structuralism, Deconstruction and the various forms of “Special Interest Criticism” (Marxist, Feminist, Cultural and Gender Studies). This class was my first C partially because of an ideological struggle that I had with the theories and my timidity at going beyond mere description of what the texts plainly said (after all, I was a freshman and these were great writers like Nathanial Hawthorne and Walt Whitman). I got over the timidity after this class, realizing that I would have to make assertions (no matter how ridiculous or obvious to me) and ‘back them up’ with textual support (however tenuous) to get good grades (and none of my professors ever called me on BS).

For those of you who don’t know what these theories of criticsim are I will give you a brief summary (albeit filtered through my own perceptions). New Criticism seeks to explore the form divorced from context and the author, looking at nothing other than the work in question and the techniques it employs, seeking to divine truth from the form of the work. Structuralism is an application (I struggled really hard not to add ‘mis-‘ to the beginning of ‘application there, but managed not to. And then negated that success by writing this parenthetical, ah well) of Sassure’s linguistic theory that words are merely signs of what is signified and treats the text as an encoded artifact to which the reader applies binary oppositions that create the meaning for the reader (such as Good/Evil, Light/Dark, Man/Woman) again, it is focused on the form (though in this case of meaning) and what the reader gets out of the text. Deconstruction takes structuralism and tries to show that the opposite of any binary pairing is equally valid (so Truth=Lies, Hate=Love and Evil=Good). And the Special Interest Criticisms try to show how various groups are repressed through the work. None of these systems of understanding literature (or any form of art) care about the author and all try to impose their own ideas onto the text.

In my notes I have sketches of the author-text-reader triangle for each of these forms (the triangle is just a way of visualizing how these views relate the different elements, drawn as a triangle with the privileged party at the top) they all have the reader or the text at the top. For New Criticism the triangle has the Text at the top and in my notes I have written in big ostentations script the words “The Text Knows More Than Its Creator” and across the page in distinction I have the triangle as I used to see it with the Author on the top and the words “The Author Owns Your Mind” and in smaller print “and the text”. At the time I was struggling to understand the relationship between the artist and the reader and the art. As a creator and someone who has always had great respect for the creator of works (and as a Christian who believes in an absolute creator) I found it difficult accept that the author had no role other than as a vehicle of blind production of platforms for the exposition of other people’s ideas. The author could not be ignored. At the time I may have over-reacted and gone too far in de-emphasizing the role the reader plays in the creative act.

Since that class, which opened my mind to the world of literary criticism and the intellectual reader-games that the elite play with texts, I have come to what I think is a somewhat more mature understanding of how art works. The author creates the text, which is infused with the way that he thinks and views the world, the text then takes that view to the reader who then interprets the text in light of his own view of the world. This is inherent in the way our minds work. And it is a beautiful, interactive (almost collaborative) process that mirrors the absolute work of art that is God’s creation: God created and we are right now engaging with and interpreting his work in a cycle of incomplete understanding until the day all truth will be revealed. I think that it is the duty of the intelligent truth-seeker to use the text to get at the truth of what the author was trying to say. But I also think that it is the duty of the reader to seek out the truth in any text even when the author was aiming at lies, and that there will, by the grace of God, be truth hidden in any creative work beyond what the author intended. So nowadays I draw the triangle as a straight line with the text between the author and the reader (with God at the top), or I flip it so that the text is on the bottom and both the author and the reader are on top–and then I remove the line between author and reader.