For ENG4013 (Criticism), we're using Bennett and Royle as a theory text while reading five novels. This weeks B&R reading is "The Text and the World". I read it during the intersession break, and I read it again today. I'm struggling with it. I can't tell if that's because it's so dense, so erudite or just so dependent on holding an Existential world view, which I don't. (More on that later, maybe.)
This entry is mostly an attempt to recap the discussion in class and what I got or didn't get from the reading. Bring your waders. It gets deep quickly.
Dr. M told us to focus on three areas of the text:
- B&R say the world is mediated by language. What do they mean? Give examples from the text.
- In discussing Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress", what do B&R mean by the "fiction of immediacy"? Is there direct, immediate access independent of others' mediation? Why is immediacy a fiction?
- B&R claim that texts "destabilize the very notion of the world" (p28). How do they demonstrate this?
- The distinction between reality and the text (representation) is not clear-cut. The real is only accessible through representation.
- Mediation separates us from knowledge. We see an "impersonation", a representation of the author and the characters in the text. Representations are not reality. (Holding up a photo saying, "This is me," is a delusion. It isn't me, it's an image on a piece of paper -- an image of a point in time that has ceased to exist.) Because the text can exist without the author, the author ceases to matter.
- Our only access to the real is through language that complicates or frustrates knowing the real.
B&R question the distinction between the text and the world saying, "... its very formulation presupposes a differences between a text on the one hand and the world on the other" (p27). I read this to mean that they question the view that the text is a representation of the world distinct from a non-representational, factual, absolute world. In other words, there is no concrete reality, only what we perceive, which sounds like fundamental relativism and existentialism to me.
They then go on to talk about language as a mediator of the world and poststructuralism, quoting Michel Foucault, whose statements I read as saying that language expresses the speaker's will, intent, beliefs, prejudices, etc., not anything separate from the speaker. B&R then ask, "Is there a world [without texts and reading them]?" (p28) as a lead in to the destabilization quote cited above. I had to conclude that they mean "reading" and "text" in much broader senses than books and running one's eyes over the page to process the words. Indeed, later in the chapter they talk about Marvell's poem referencing a language of nonverbal signs in the body of the coy mistress. So this idea seems to have some support, but I'm not sure about it. They could be arguing instead that there is no "real" reality to perceive, or that the idea that there is such a thing as "reality" is meaningless.
B&R spend a few sentences on p29 discussing whether Marvell is writing to a woman he knew or writing about an imaginary man and woman. I don't see that this distinction is important. Whether the people involved are real people or not (supposing B&R aren't arguing that such a concept is ludicrous) the point of literature is to express ideas, to stir up images and emotions, to have some effect on, some resonance with the reader. B&R seem to suggest this later in the paragraph where they raise the question. So maybe that is their point.
On p30, B&R say that the poem "is mediated not only by reference to other kinds of literary texts (poems of seduction, love poems, the blazon, the carpe diem, or memento mori motif and so on), but also in terms of other kinds of discourse (biblical, classical, colonial, philosophical, scientific, military." I should note that I'm not sure what "blazon" means in this context and that I've come to understand that "discourse" in literary theory is about "different ways institutions try to appropriate or control" something (Dr. M, lecture), presumably the text and its meaning. Which is still a little vague to me, but something is better than nothing. I think the first part (about literary texts) is suggesting that the poem follows the patterns of or invokes images of the various things listed, so rides their coat tails to trigger certain responses and expectations in the reader -- subconsciously, consciously or maybe a bit of both at once. I'm still not sure about the "discourse" part.
On the same page, B&R raise the idea of language as a mediator again. This time they start by quoting Jean-Jacques Lecercle who says that language "always reminds us that it, and no one else, is speaking." Is this the idea that language affects how we think about things? That the way we conceive certain ideas is shaped to some extent by the language(s) we use? Or is Lecercle again asserting that there is no real reality? They go on to talk about Jacques Derrida's claim that, "There is nothing outside the text", or, as B&R prefer to translate it, "There is no outside-text." B&R say, "His point is not that there is no such thing as a 'real world' but there is no access to the real world of, for example, Marvell's poem, except through the language of the poem."
I think what they're saying is that a written text is static, a frozen image like the photograph Dr. M mentioned, a point in time. It isolates itself into it's own alternate universe, like the alternate time line found in some SF stories, and the text becomes the only channel into that universe. Because the text universe is mediated by language, and language stimulates (sometimes subtly, sometimes drastically) different images, perceptions and conscious and subconscious associations in each reader, each person sees something slightly different and none is more real than the other.
It's the next bit on p30 that gets a little hairy, though. B&R say that Derrida is saying, "there is no access to 'the world' except ... through language." But they use quotes around "the world", so I'm not sure if they're talking about the world of the text, or, again, if they're suggesting there is no "real" reality. I do know that they're using language very broadly here, including nonverbal language, the subtle movements, changes, and actions that someone sees and interprets to mean something about the person they're watching.
With all the uncertainty about what they mean when they use certain words, I had trouble with p31, discussing how Marvell's poem illustrates their point about language as a mediator. It makes a certain sense if I read "the world" as the alternate universe created by the text, even if that text is based on something that actually happened. It becomes a bit too difficult to follow if I read "the world" to mean "real reality" (meaning B&R question whether there is such a thing).
Moving to p32, I run into more difficulties. B&R talk about the distinction between text and world as a "false opposition" that "overlooks ... ways in which literary texts produce our reality, make our worlds." My main struggle here is, again, to understand whether B&R are suggesting that there is no real reality. If they're using text in the narrower sense of books, stories and the like, I understand that texts can stimulate people to think about things and possibly change their view or see something they didn't see before. For example, maybe you read a story (fiction or not) about someone with a particular terminal illness that you'd never heard of before and become aware of it as a result. Okay. I see that. Maybe you read something that causes a subtle shift in your opinion about some issue -- maybe to see a politician in a different light (good or bad). In either case, the text is informing you of something you didn't know about. Sometimes it could be more subtle. I believe that, unless a reader is watching for hidden biases in texts, those biases can, over time, alter the reader's perception of a given issue. But if B&R are suggesting that texts create reality rather than affecting people's perception, I find that a bit of a stretch unless they are truly arguing that there is no real reality.
As an example of this, they cite Elisabeth Bronfen and apply her feminist criticism to Marvell's poem, saying that patriarchal society says woman = death and therefore Marvell's use of a dead woman image means "the poem exemplifies patriarchy's repression of the fact of the (male) subject's own death by the displaced representation of that death in the 'other' (the woman)" (p32). Okay. I can see where you could read it that way. But when I read line 30, "And into ashes all my lust." and to some extent lines 26-27 "Nor, in they marble vault, shall sound / My echoing song:..." I saw that as the man being dead as well as the woman. Let us not forget lines 21-22, "But at my back I always hear / Time's winged chariot hurrying near". I didn't see a denial of mortality -- and while I can see how one could read it that way, I still don't see that as any more "right" than the one I saw. In fact, given that line 21 refers to time hurrying near "my" (the man's) back, I think the poem strongly faces the mortality of both the man and the woman.
B&R then discuss the idea that if we read the poem as art, we get one view, but if "we read it as a powerful and influential expression of the cultural construction of femininity" the text/world separation goes away.
Eh. Whatever. I tend to agree with H.R. Rookmaaker's view that art may be good or bad, but it needs no justification in terms of a given belief system. Decide what the art is trying to say and whether you want to hear that every day, which tells you whether you hang it on your wall or put it somewhere out of sight.
If B&R are trying to say that it means whatever you want it to mean, well, fine, within certain bounds of reasonableness. As Abraham Lincoln said of a dog, "Calling a tail a leg don't make it a leg." If you push relativism too far, you end up destroying any attempt to communicate, at which point you have to ask why anyone would bother participating in an expressive, communicative act. Put another way, if carry relativism to it's end, I could say that "To His Coy Mistress" is about a tree and a distant mountain because line 11 refers to "my vegetable love" and the "hue" and "fires" in lines 33-36 refer to glowing lava and so forth. Of course, this would be attempting to appropriate a piece of art and wedge it into a particular belief system that likely has nothing to do with anything the writer conceived consciously or unconsciously when he was writing it. Such an effort is generally a waste of time. Art needs no justification. Enjoy it.
Back to the questions Dr. M left us...
The "fiction of immediacy" as B&R explain it is that, while the poem talks about "here and now" and uses phrases that imply temporal immediacy such as lines 21-22 talking about "always" hearing time at one's back, and "Now, therefore... Now" in lines 33-37, there is no access to the world of the poem except through the text of the poem. It is impossible to reach beyond what the poem says to touch the body of the mistress. Okay. I can deal with that, though I'll say I could take up where the poem left off and imagine what happens next. (Does she consent or does she slap him?) Maybe this is me making my own "text" to extend the alternate universe of the original text. Fine. I do that all the time. (I spent two weeks figuring out what happened after "Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi" ended, and rather liked my follow-on, quaint though it may have been. On the other hand, "Tonari no Totoro" didn't really stimulate that kind of thinking. It wasn't that I liked one better than the other, just that "Sen" was an adventure story that left loose threads begging to be tied off where "Totoro" was very much a self-contained "slice of life" experience piece.)
I'm less certain about the other two, though, mostly because I'm not certain what B&R are trying to say when they try to break the distinction between "text" and "world". If they're going down what I described as the "alternate universe" road, then the answers below are probably in the ballpark. If they're going down the "no real reality" road, I have a much harder time putting it all together. So, assuming the "alternate universe" of the story is "the world"...
Mediation by language means that words are the only access to the alternate world running around in the writer's head. In the simplest sense, its saying that the image that the writer thought of when he wrote "tree" and the image I think of when I read "tree" are probably different (though probably not different enough to make communication impossible in most cases). As mentioned earlier, B&R talk about language in the larger sense, including nonverbal signs and symbols, for example, where the man reads the woman's blush as a sign of willingness.
As for texts destabilizing the notion of the world, I'm really not sure where to go there. I don't think B&R are talking about the idea that what we read can shape our opinions. It is this section of the chapter that leads me to think that, somehow, they are claiming that there is no real reality and every individual is totally isolated from every other individual because there is no way to convey the same perception between any two individuals and that everything (including literary theory) is ultimately meaningless because we cannot know with any certainty that there is anyone else out there and either we blind ourselves to our blindness and pretend that they are, or we open our eyes and face the crushing darkness and insignificance of our existence.
In other words, I think they're really going down the existentialist rabbit hole and saying there is no real reality and everything is fictional, so texts are as real as anything else.
I think I've been thinking about this too long. Hopefully we'll be able to discuss some of these points in class before the quiz so I can nail down what Dr. M wants to see. I may or may not agree with where he takes it, but I can always repeat a variation of his interpretation. In the process, I'll probably learn something, even if it is something I ultimately choose to label as a violation of my world view and hence something I reject.
