Seasonal Symbolism: Silly, Sentimental Yet Still Seductive

‘The season’ is my favourite literary cliché because of the dimensionality imbued unto seasons by their ubiquitous and multifarious presence in our lives and the inability of their poignancy as metaphor to be diminished by overuse, due to their sheer immensity. So it was quite a pleasure to read Foster’s chapter, “…So Does Season,” especially in contrast to the dense, laborious writings scattered elsewhere throughout the ENGL3655 course reader. Sometimes it’s nice (excuse the vagueness of the adjective) to celebrate features of literature that are underdiscussed and unpretentiously profound, rather than expose their constructedness, deride their conventionality and subvert their supposed hegemonic allegiances. It seems Literary Criticism has a tendency to cannibalize Literary Appreciation.

Foster’s tribute to the poetic season is schmaltzy. But that does not stop even the most jaded from nodding along through each paragraph and occasionally letting a grin slip through while he elucidates the nexus of connotations between seasons and age, emotion, personal paradigms, agriculture and religion.  Foster reminded me epiphanically of the ethereal, un-deconstructable potentialities of poetry through his commendation,

“[Shakespeare] brilliantly invests [the season metaphor] with a specificity and a continuity that forces us to really see not only the thing he describes…but the thing he’s really talking about.”

And I also willingly bought into his reduction of Daisy Miller to “gloss on these two telling names [of the main characters.]” Foster’s description of seasonal connotations being “hard-wired” into responders struck me as apt while his reassurance, “the variation produced keeps seasonal symbolism fresh and interesting” seemed convincing.

Perhaps my gleeful reaction to this particularly frothy snippet of Foster’s thesis is naïve or reflective of my overexposure to literary theory and underexposure to more rudimentary aspects of literary study. I do not hate the ‘heavier stuff.’ But I’m starting to agree more and more with Felski (whose 2009 article is appropriately the most contemporary in the Reader) that we should at least try to emotionally embrace literature before poststructurally ransacking it.

Selling out or staying relevant?

The essays by Warner, Felski and Edmunson in different ways and to different extents constitute a contemporary introspection by literary theorists that I believe to be both laudable and well overdue. These academics are to be commended for their bravery in challenging the virtue of Literary Criticism, which Warner professes is an “invisible norm” that has come to define both the rationale and methodology of those who make the study of literature their vocation - we study literature in order to engage in Criticism, we engage in Criticism in order to study literature.

What these crusaders (Warner et al) are attempting to do is akin to an architect questioning the need for buildings, or perhaps questioning the need for plans to construct those buildings, and thus intellectualizing him or herself out of a role in society. The difference between architects and literary critics is that very few non-architects question the essentiality of that profession. Conversely, try as many literary critics may to hide beneath a rock (or perhaps a mahogany bookshelf stacked with “Penguin Classics”), there is in deed a ‘crisis’ brewing that stems from what Warner observes as “a widely felt disenchantment with the idea of literature.”

Perhaps that last hyperbole was the result of my unrelenting incredulity towards the dicta of literary theory emerging. I am an outsider to this world after all. But reading essays from ‘insiders’ whose sentiments are so congruous with my own has led me to believe that perhaps my suspicions towards the prudence and relevance of Criticism are not as Philistinistic or uninformed as I initially had thought.

Warner posits that a central paradox of Criticism is that it undermines its own role of bringing the reading public ‘closer’ to texts by requiring they disengage subjectively from ‘the text’ entirely and treat it with what Sedgwick insightfully describes as a sense of paranoia. Literary Criticism is prohibitively labour-intensive as a public activity intellectually and emotionally because of the time and institutional resources required. But perhaps it is even more taxing emotionally, as it requires subjects to anaesthetize and de-sentimentalise literature in the almost masochistic sprit of distanciation. So why should anyone continue to endorse it?

The easiest answer to fall back on is Kant’s theory of ‘immature reading’ – that the Literary Critic serves to unhinge the docility of the general, uncritical, reading public.  However, Warner tackles this dichotomisation of ‘critical’ reading as pious and ‘uncritical’ reading as dangerous through resurrecting the ignored history of Criticism itself. Predictably enough, he proves that it is really the result of a complex chain of academic, material, technological and social developments which have been funnelled into a paradigm as regimented, yet bizzrely naturalized, as “the fastidious aestheticism and canon worship it sought to replace” (as rather scornfully pointed out by Felski.) The hypocritical doctrinarism of Criticism is further pointed out by Edmunson’s clever indictment of readings, “they’re simply applied like paint to the side of a barn.”

Crucially, Warner also points out that not only is the Kantian model of Criticism contrived, it is also futile. It is impossible to reach a state of total anti-subjectivity because Herrnstein-Smith’s “contingencies” indefatigably meddle with the Critic’s microscope. And the assumption that any form of non-critical reading involves a submission to the indoctrinatory ambitions of some megalomaniac author is self-evidently myopic.

I do not agree with Edmundson that readings should be abandoned, nor do I adhere to Sontag’s vision of “reparative reading” or Felski’s advocacy of “reflective reading.” I do, however, believe that these models should compliment, rather than replace, traditional methodologies in universities. But more than anything, I celebrate the discussion these essayists have catalysed by alerting the profession of Literary Criticism to its straining relationship with the reading public, which itself is declining as a constituency within society at large.

Literary Criticism needs to reinvent itself if plebeians like myself, who are interested, but not engrossed, within the literary sphere, are to continue participating in a discourse which, despite my foibles, I believe to have fundamentally enriched my milieu.

Would an author by any other name smell as sweet?

Barthes’ "Death of the Author" has been derided for failing to be all the things it did not set out to be: theoretically rigorous, airtight, self-critical, balanced. However, it so easily catapulted itself into the spotlight of literary discourse because of the very pithiness it attained by eschewing these criteria. Its message is effectively epigrammatized within its final sentence, “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.” How many pieces of theory can be summarized so sweetly? And how many pieces of theory are as well known (even outside the world of literary academia) as Barthes’?

“The Death of the Author” was a seed that implanted a revolutionary and provocative idea into the realm of literary theory. The essay was a spanner in the works certainly, but it also left room for other tools in the box to attempt to repair the author/text/responder mechanism. From their formation on paper, Barthes’ raw ideas were ripe for challenge, interpretation, and refinement into some dictum that could truly resonate with the contemporary practices of readership.

The inherent hyperbolism of Barthes’ prescription becomes apparent whenever the ‘issue of authorship’ is raised within a literary discourse. The enduring ‘life’ of the author is affirmed every time an academic essay uses an author’s name as a synecdoche for the book that he or she has written. It is beyond the thresholds of human curiosity to accept a text as authorless. A text is experienced as a dialogue rather than an expedition. At least within my personal experience of reading, a work of Fiction needs to be perceived as something that has been created, rather than something that merely is, in order to facilitate complete engagement.

But this does not mean that the author we consult with when reading a text is necessarily the actual ‘writer’ of the text or a singular person at all, a distinction pointed out by Foucault.

What is an Author? reconciles the inescapability of ‘the Author’ (upper-case) with the elusiveness of ‘the author’ (lower-case). In reassessing what is meant by ‘Author,’ Foucault points out that the nexus between original author and text can only be inferred from vaguely discernable fingerprints left on the work which can be matched to known facets of the author’s literary disposition. However, the reader is unable to distinguish these authorial fingerprints from the editor’s, the critic’s etc. The depersonalization of the author is usefully analogized by Donald Pease to Marx’s theory of the alienation of labour: “the author seems an effect of the critics’ interpretation rather than the cause of the work.” ‘Commodification’ has relegated the writer to the station of a production line, which feeds through to the editing of texts according to super-authorial agendas and finally the packaging of the products within the rapping of critical endorsements.

Yet despite the author’s ontological ambivalence we still reconstruct some avatar to sit next to us while we read the text, to ask rhetorical questions and reassure us that the text is ‘heading somewhere’. So the author is not definable as a singular entity, but it is definable by the function it serves the readily experience. Hence Foucault presents us with the ‘author-function’: “a variety of egos and a series of subjective positions” which is employed by readers to “construct…profundity or ‘creative’ power” and derive “relationships of homogeneity…authentification.”

Foucault really has hit the nail on the head with this one. Like God him/it/herself, the God-like, omnipresent author only exists for those that believe he/it/she does. For them, the author (or author-function, call it what you will) enriches, and anchors their reading experience. I truly believe that despite Barthes' Dawkins-esque proclamation, which many believe was literarily blasphemous, most readers have retained their faith in this author. Hence long after the writer is dead, the author remains alive and kicking. 

Kill the kvetching about the canon!

John Guillory’s body of theory articulates an opinion towards the contemporary ‘Canon Debate’ that has been germinating within me throughout the discussions and readings in ENGL3655, but which until now has evaded by capabilities of description. This opinion is that the project of diversifying, overturning or reaffirming canonicity inhibits, rather than enables, theoreticians from solving the true ‘crisis’ facing literature within contemporary society.

I interpreted Guillory’s essay to be a vast open letter to the literary world requesting the cessation of the canon debate by employing two key justifications.

The first pillar of his argument is that the theoretical foundation of the liberal pluralist attack on the canon is flimsy. Guillory convincingly surmises that ‘liberal pluralists’ have miscalculated the project of dehegemonising literature through a fetishization of identity. He posts that liberal pluralist attitudes towards the canon have stemmed from a superimposition of ‘identity politics’ onto the process of canon formation, indicting the History of the canon as a targeted exercise in exclusion.

Hernstein-Smith’s article can be used as a reference point for this liberal-pluralist position. Her repeated maxim of ‘contingencies of value’ is merely an inflected term for ‘identity’ and its supposed pervasion of composing and responding literature. She claims that every assessment of value stems from an interfacing between the subject’s ‘political economy’ (“biological, psychological, material, experiential”) and the characteristics of the text itself (“specific ‘features’, ‘qualities’ or ‘properties.’) She thus dubiously infers that because of their pedagogic and cultural pre-eminence, ruling hegemonies have implicitly entrenched their dominance by proliferating the texts which they derive value from through their own political economy (identity). They then make the evaluation that others will similarly value these works and hence the body of literature (the canon) is proliferated, and received, as an object of value and thus consequentially re-inseminates the hegemony it supposedly embodies.

Guillory destabilises this highly politicized assessment by pointing out that “the historical process” of funnelling literature into an oblique canon “is too complex to be reduced to determination by the single factor of the social identity of the author.” (17). His convincing materialist account of canon formation indicts what I perceive to be the liberal pluralist tendency to Historicise the literary past into an allegorical narrative that suits its present agenda. If canon formation was formed by hegemony and exclusion, it seems noble for the liberal pluralists to project ‘minority voices’ into the literary sphere, even to the extent that they drown out canonical voices.

Not only is the liberal-pluralist position theoretically impoverished, but also the impacts of canon revision are so inconsequential to its supposed benefactors, “minority readers,” as to render the entire project naïve.  Supposedly the revolutionising of attitudes toward value should ‘reaffirm subjugated identities,’ but in actuality the results of this endeavour are almost entirely limited to the University, to which many members of ‘voiceless’ groups are excluded due to various social and economic factors.  

I think a useful analogy for the impact of liberal pluralism on literary discourse is the impact of reverse discrimination on the field of employment – it is a bandaid solution which deteriorates the quality of the economy, (financial or literary) and ignores underlying structural deficiencies. Theoreticians should focus on the social, economic and pedagogic structures that create the inequality of opportunity for certain disadvantaged groups to achieve representation in literature rather than unfairly deride canonical works and artificially promote what they brand noncanonical works. Even the description, ‘noncanonical’ is fundamentally flawed – how can it be assumed that merely because an author possesses a certain ‘minority’ characteristic that this ‘contingency’ is fundamentally imprinted onto their work and hence the work ‘represents’ this ‘voice’? And isn’t the liberal pluralist urge to extrapolate anti-hegemonic value from these ‘noncanonical’ texts just as draconian in its prescriptiveness as the conservative positions in the defence of the canon?

The hierarchy of value in the contemporary literary world can not be resolved by scapegoating the canon. The crisis facing literature is not a crisis of representation. It is in deed a crisis of access.