We sat at a restaurant and we went around the room to talk about "the breaking point"--the point where each of us knew that a divorce was inevitable. (Out of six of us, all but one had been divorced.) Everyone told a compelling story, and there wasn't that much difference in people's ability to narrate, characterize, set the scene, define the decisive moment. Everyone was just about as good at analyzing one another's stories, understanding motivations, etc... There was no advantage, necessarily, to being a scholar of literature or a fiction writer. I was probably not the best narrator of the group. Everyone was highly educated, but I'm sure that people without formal education can also narrate things effectively.
Everyone, then, is an expert on the raw material of fiction: human behaviors and motivations. Everyone understands basic narrative principles too. There are people at one end or the other of the curve: very bad at telling stories or understanding motivations, or very, very good, but most people are probably in the middle, with a very good ability to do this.
Not sure where I'm going with this. Maybe that literary criticism is not that hard. What is difficult is to come up with something that is not simply in the middle of the bell curve. If a pro critic just points out basic things that every reader will get anyway, what is the point?
3 comments:
What is hard is actually having the patience to read a text without jumping to an interpretation you want to see. Many lit courses actually teach you not to read because you are to come up with an interpretation and polished paper quite fast.
Fiction, psychological fiction, is tough to read in this regard. I think your group understood the divorce stories because you're all modern people in US and possibly about the same age, so might well experience things through similar lenses.
I had terrible trouble teaching Querido Diego this semester, all the students wanted to talk about how Quiela was pathological in her inability to let go (it takes her a few months to get over being abandoned after 10 years, particularly because Diego refuses to say directly: "I am breaking up with you"). A few months, after a relationship that important, does not seem odd to me at all, nor does thinking about what happened, remembering times good and bad but the students thought she was "living in the past" and "in a fantasy world" or "obsessed." HARDLY - over a few months she writes a few letters, heck. I guess if she'd seen it coming, or realized he was leaving or had left (and was not going to send for her) she would not have inquired as many times. ANYWAY. Then I came across a magazine essay I had read before, about the Junot Díaz debacle, in which the writer pointed out that it is the patriarchy that says women should know how to get over it quickly, not cause trouble when they have been discarded. I found this very interesting having always been taught a strong woman and good feminist would keep dignity by not saying they wanted to get back together. I find the point in the magazine article quite interesting, valid.
But my point on reading and interpretation: the students were HELL BENT on applying self-help principles of various kinds as quickly as possible, even when there were large portions of text they had barely skimmed. And still do not seem to see the difference between saying the character is codependent or is in the five stages of grief and actually reading the text before judging them in this kind of condescending way.
I a still not sure what to do with this but as you can see it concerns me.
I'm coming late to this, but it's an interesting issue. I once said that you shouldn't write a novel about a problem that an intelligent social policy could fix. Maybe we shouldn't write novels about people who just need a little self-help either. Of course, good novels aren't "about" such people at all. That is, we shouldn't approach literature as though the characters just need welfare or therapy (even some novel kind of welfare or therapy), though these things are of course often part of the environment of the story.
We can't reduce The Wire to bad drug policy or The Sopranos to mid-life depression. But there's long been this tendency to read novels as though they mainly illustrate ideas, as though they are essentially political pamphlets or psychological cases. One problem here is that it means you have be a competent, say, Marxist or Freudian to do literary criticism.
"Why doesn't she just get over it," sounds a bit like, "Why doesn't Hamlet just kill Claudius." Cynics sometimes say dryly: "Because then there wouldn't be a play." But there are much better reasons, which emerge from looking closely at the narrative. Leslie seems to be making the same case for Quiela.
Interesting comments.
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