Return to Literary Art
By Edith L. Tiempo
Foremost, these questions: Have we lost our literary art so that a return to it is called for? Is literary art lost, indeed, considering that in fact our creative writers have been conscientiously creating all these years?
Fortunately, to these very pertinent questions one could reply just as appropriately with this response, that literary art is not lost — but that it might well be, since its aesthetic character has been besmeared and mangled by linguists and political and economic theorists, and by scientifically administered academic disciplines, among these, sociology and psychology, so that the view of its inherent nature as art is taking on some formidable distortions. Especially is the iconoclastic zeal for innovative theories rampant in Western countries, specifically in Europe, where the ferment began, in France and Soviet Russia and some Marxist satellites of the former Soviet Union, and from thence spreading their doctrines’ plausible involutions to the rest of the world.
Obviously, the restoring or the recovery of any loss in literary artistry is practicable only after a judicious look not only at the directions where our aesthetic insights have strayed from it, but also at the agencies responsible for the deviation. To this end, I am presenting here two points, both of them dealing with the two systems of thought judged by critics as responsible for bringing about the literary debacle that we are now skirting. After these two points, this address ends with a short but necessary recall presenting the existent literary tradition, if only to remind us that it is the one guide in which, throughout the centuries the most effective writers had rooted their aesthetics. In the present embattled situation of literary art, it is for us to second-glimpse, as it were, the features that are integral to its authority; for us to commend this durable guide that has informed the craftsmanship of writers as they capture in their works the meaningfulness of human events and human aspirings.
This is not the occasion to go into a scrupulous discourse on comparative critical theory. The objective is rather to go into the recent cultural past, which is the only way to see how at least these two critical and political dogmas have proved injurious to art; specifically, these agencies are: first, the Marxians and the social-political, the economic, and other disciplines influenced by Marxist theory. And second are the damaging tenets of the Structural linguists. These two agencies, the Marxians and the Structuralists, have superimposed their incredible divergences on the world community of artistic writers and thinkers.
The first of the two points I present here is about literature being preempted into the service of the political and economic ideologies, and by the scientized disciplines of sociology and psychology. I have used the term, preempt, because it defines just what these various institutions have tried to do to supplant or scrap the aesthetic quality of literature in order to fit it to their needs.
As we have known, the preemptive Marxist philosophical system of thought advocates the use of certain socio-economic concepts as the method of analysis and interpretation, not only in literary criticism but also in political science, economics, history, and the other social sciences.
An important follower of Marxism is Louis Althusser, who is an outstanding leader in the group known as Structural Marxists — and I suppose that in my context, it makes this group double malefactors, not Marxist only but Structuralist as well. In the early 1960’s Althusser attacked humanism in many of his works — shocking to us who take humanism as the basis of literary art. As one commentator observed, the structural Marxist finds it deplorable that “the problem of the aesthetic object has been a dominant concern” in a way that makes “the domain of the purely aesthetic object confining and oppressive.“ The same commentator mentions that Althusser advocates the later text of Marx, which “posits a historical thought without a humanistic subject, the real subject being the social relations of [economic] production.” To the structural Marxists the aesthetic perceptions are subordinate and even irrelevant; for (as we know) to them, the subjects of socio-politics and economics are the real determinants of society.
Sociology is also making inroads into literary art and distorting the functions of literature. There are sociological groups — in and outside of the academe — that want to dispense with the symbolic and metaphysical features of literary art because they believe that the noble use of literature is in designing and promoting programs for social change. The eminent critic, Harold Bloom, has coined a picturesque name for these groups that are mongering for social uplift and reform to the detriment of literary art. Harold Bloom has dubbed these groups the “School of Resentment,” presumably because they resent the fact that literary inventiveness and originality are integral to aesthetic and not to ideological use.
Likewise, the discipline of psychology tends to consider the inventive works of fiction and poetry as fantasies that are to be used only scientifically, for illuminating the psychological axioms. Of course literature creates these so-called fantasies not to serve scholarly studies dissecting the psyche; literature’s fantasies, as we know, proclaim the wonder of the human mystique — for even the eccentric and bizarre literary turns of plot and character and idea, if these be fantasies, are fantasies that are shared and acknowledged by all humankind and are portrayed in that light. In this connection, the humanistic Carl Jung’s memorable book, Man and His Symbols, is a fortuitous vindication of literature as it chronicles the human being expressing his personality in relating to his fellow creatures and to his world. For literature is distinguished by its commitment to humanism, and touching the psychological, it celebrates both what is clearly apparent and our unfathomed depths.
We come now to the second of my two points, which is about the contrapositioned phenomenon known as the Structural linguists. In this connection I apologize for the necessary mention of certain innovative data which are already familiar to our academic studies, although I assure everyone that only the brief central items are needed here to illuminate the second of my two points; and moreover, that this is the only place in this address where it is necessary to present the skeletal details of a critical theory.
We recall that Structuralism is based upon semiology, which, as we know, is an unusual scientific system because semiology treats words as signs that have no relationship with the object they represent. Whereas the literary writer creates the meaningfulness between the word and the object it represents, the Structuralist, using the semiotic device, declares that there is no defining and interpreting ideas between the word and its object, no evocations of meaning or sensibilities linking them.
Rather, to the Structuralist the meaning of any given word depends on two things: First, as that word belongs to an accepted structure of meaning, a structure made of objects and identities around which the given word gathers its meaning. Thus, to the Structuralist there is no such thing as creating or evoking meaning — the meaning already exists in the appropriate structural aggregates established. Secondly, the Structuralist claims that the given word generates its own specialized meaning only and strictly by its relationship to the other words in the syntactical construct, and not from its represented object or from any other referent outside its syntactical construct. Definitely, we see the damaging implications resulting from this theoretical practice which demolishes literary meanings as we know them.
Let us do just a bit of simple demonstration. A literary writer writes a poem on, say, the nature of mother love, and he or she lights upon the symbolic referent of Mother Earth as the quintessential mother — or if the writer is a Workshop Fellow, his or her referent object could be the National Writers Workshop’s adoptive mother, who is known as “Mom.“ The poet then proceeds to create his own unique meaning of mother love by linking the term with Mother Earth or with “Mom.” A Structuralist, on the other hand, using the semiotic procedure, would deny any such relationship; rather, the Structuralist affirms the meaning of mother love by establishing this term within a chosen structure, a formation composed of, say, mother, father, siblings, nurture by habitat, nurture by precept, et cetera: and the meaning of mother love is further generated by the term’s syntactical relation to the rest of the constructed articulation called a poem. That is all the meaning the Structuralist requires, and would therefore consider any ephemeral evocations from Mother Earth and “Morn” as so much hogwash.
How is this Structuralist procedure damaging? It is quite obvious; in denying the evocations that are metaphysically created between the word and its referent object, Structuralism throws out both the creative writer and the meaning of his work. Both creator and meaning disappear in the world of Structuralist-semiotic interpretation.
Structuralism may be working wonderfully in the other disciplines, but in literary art it is in direct contradiction — because can we picture a literary composition, a poem or a novel, that is without the voice or the hand of the persona shaping and evoking the artifact into meaningful form? Structuralism dismisses the writer as the creator of fresh insights, or as the generator of new approaches to the meaning and the magnificence of even the commonplace objects or events in our environment.
In this same connection we can see why the semiotic procedures recommend the so-called deconstruction of ideas and images, and why they are leery of metaphors and symbols. Simply put, to deconstruct means divesting the given word of all the attributes that creative minds invested in and around that word, stripping it of connotative baggage, presumably in order to leave the word in its pristine denotation. Consequently, in deconstructing a poem’s reading, the subtle overtones of the creative author are expelled and we are left with an interpretation more literal than literary.
But that is exactly the way Jacques Derrida, the inventor of deconstruction set it up, allowing the word neither persona nor meaning, but stripping it utterly naked. A commentator on critical theory noted that deconstruction has a parallel in the Emperor’s new clothes, but the ultimate “scandal” is that it removes the Emperor as well. In deconstruction the clothes of meaning (or signification) disappear and so does the author or his persona.
Nonetheless, deconstructing does have its uses, specifically in the correction of errors and misinformation. As an example, we recall the painter, El Greco, whose strangely elongated figures were taken as intentionally done in order to project a haunting artistic effect, to endow the attenuated figures with spiritual attributes. The elongation was taken as intentional artistry, until the discovery that El Greco must have had an eye defect (astigmatism) because when corrective lenses were used to view his paintings, the esoteric elongations fell into proportion; less interesting figures, perhaps, but quite normal. That particular case, however, was not really a species of deconstructing but the purely fortuitous correcting of a misconception.
In my recent visit to my family in Iowa City, my daughter Rowena and I had an interesting talk on deconstruction. She listened to my rather doleful view of it, then she firmly reminded me that one species of deconstruction is postmodernism, which is responsible for the many artistic innovations that flood the cultural panorama today.
I think it is relevant to quote here the small portion about my daughter’s ideas on this very contemporary species of deconstruction. As she explains it: “The postmodern at its inception was, and still is, undergoing the process of ‘becoming,’ of defining and redefining itself as a literary current. This is an interesting fact because while many cultures are still caught up in delineating what is ‘modern,’ already the postmodern is being defined and redefined.
“In its present manifestation the postmodern — whatever that might be — appears to be built on certain Structuralist tenets. From the works of authors such as Barthelme and Barthes, and even Borges, or Marquez, we see postmodernism based mainly on the specific attributes and events that are presently obtaining in a given culture. The so-called postmodern approach — and indeed its subject matter — relies on the use of irony, which has been a prevailing mindset since the end of the previous decade (in the 80’s), and is now a staple of popular culture. We have seen the ironic stance in certain modes of advertising, and more particularly in the situation comedies that we enjoy on Cable TV.
”The irony in postmodern experimentation, often takes the form of parody — it parodies preexistent forms and archetypes. As recent examples, it may parody the hierocratic omnipotence of a terrorist like Osama bin Laden, or the Abu Sayyaf; or a postmodern literary work may be a faked biography of a non-existent spy of World War II, a fake biography complete with wholly invented footnotes and pastiches of ‘PhotoShopped’ documentary photographs. Or perhaps it may be a very precise ‘how-to’ instructional manual, say, a pretended manual of instructions on how to build an aviary for endangered birds, complete with diagrams and sketches.
“Such delightful fictional inventiveness assumes that the audience is viewing the work from the vantage point of a shared political history or a common body of societal experience. Because this matrix of cultural references is based crucially on what is current and contemporary, it is therefore directly antithetical to the acknowledged premise that art is derived from a universal body of human experience. Yet, it is true that postmodernism presupposes a certain level of cultural sophistication, and assumes that the viewer can indeed appreciate the author’s inside joke that the Emperor has no clothes — that, by going beyond that now-popular archetype, the reader would be capable of clothing the fictitious ‘emperor’ in whatever current narrative garb that the postmodern author is suggesting.” That is the end of Rowena’s ideas on this very contemporary artistic development.
From all this we see that the postmodern practices are actually a species of deconstruction which is indeed artistically inventive, but the inventiveness is concentrated overwhelmingly on current cultural specifics, and it is mostly shrugging off the universal base of what is inherent and ultimate in human nature.
Finally, we come to our quick but necessary overview of the literary position as it exists now, and has so existed, for centuries. The short portion I wind up with mentions briefly four features which convince me that despite inimical forces, literary art withstands, and that its continued enduring will be due to its inherent humanistic character, and because aesthetics is the implement.
First, literary art is inventive, and not literal, and because it is not literal it is not steam-rollered by realistic reporting and the need to authenticate statistical or historical or other data. Instead, one of its integral and versatile features is the advantage of invention — invention which is, paradoxically, the vehicle for truth-telling in art. Sociology or psychology dare not indulge any invented data or they lose their validity.
A second intrinsic attribute of literary art is the capacity to command its material from any of the other disciplines, and this is the reason literature can portray not just the expertised data of specialized studies but can cover all the various aspects of the human story. Although encompassed by eclectic materials, aesthetic literature is not deluded into taking on any of the other self-confined disciplinary roles. Having a more widened scope, its aesthetic function is that of affirming humanity, of expanding our awareness that being human means belonging to all existence.
Inevitably, however, this inclusiveness presents the human situation as a complex of disparateness, where the contradictions and inconsistencies could faze the more innocent literary mind and send it skittering back to the nineteenth century — for that is the period that dodged the problem of inclusive contradictions, resolving it by means of simple dichotomizing; that is, in the nineteenth-century writer’s sensibility, a thing is generally taken as either right or wrong, it is good or bad, there is body and there is spirit, it is temporal or eternal, it is a matter or essence — a clean cleavage all along the line.
It took the earlier half of the twentieth century to breed the kind of perception that healed the dichotomy, to acknowledge that existence is not necessarily made absurd, nor is it hamstrung by its contradictions and inconsistencies, but rather that human life is made whole and complete — and richer — wherever there is a blending of these opposite concerns in a single sensibility. The effort of the more canny writers today to depict this single composite sensibility accounts for the use of the literary devices of disparateness, ambiguity, paradox, irony, reconciliation of opposites in order to articulate an integration of insights on the motley panorama we inhabit.
One last attribute of literary art we should mention here is the matter of durability. The philosopher Martin Heidegger has an essay on the nature of aesthetics where he quotes and analyzes the poetry of Holderlin as showing Heidegger’s own idea of the essence of poetry. The philosopher’s interpretation claims that this crucial poetic essence in Holderlin’s poetry establishes what this poet calls the “permanent” in our world. But because the things we hold as permanent may be actually transient and temporary, Holderlin says that “this permanence is entrusted to the poets as a care and a service.”
By these words the literary artist is charged with a clear mandate, and lest he or she preempts or be preempted by other mandates, the artist fulfills this role by safeguarding the instrument of aesthetics. The mandate is to affirm us, human beings, in all the diversity of our character, to reveal the finite creatures that we are, yet constantly reaching toward the infinite, as we engage in the transforming of our perishable world into the essence of the permanent, as we unravel the enigma of our destiny of disaster and transcendence. The literary artist and his insights have this splendid function of portraying humanity — for we are mutable and need defining and redefining, and we still remain in many ways a mystery even to ourselves.
The ancient psalmist, longing to borrow the majestic eye of the Infinite, chants these words in awe and wonder: “What is man that thou art mindful of him? … For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor.”
Only the instrument of literary art can capture the pathos and the splendor needed for such a portrayal. This is the recurring challenge of literary art.
Bibliography
Althusser, Louis. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. New Left Books, 1971. Courtesy of Monthly Review Foundation.
Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon. New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1994.
De Man, Paul. “Semiology and Rhetoric.” Yale University Press, 1979. Courtesy of the editor of Diacritica, where it first appeared in 1975.
Derrida, Jacques. Différance. Trans. Alan Bass. Reprinted from Margins of Philosophy (1972: trans. 1982). University of Chicago Press. This version is taken from Critical Theory of Literature Since 1965, ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle, Florida State University Press, 1986.
Heidegger, Martin. “Holderin and the Essence of Poetry.” Reprinted from Existence and Being, ed. Verner Broch. Courtesy of Regency Gateway, Inc.
Searle, Leroy. “Criticism and the Claims of Reason.” From Critical Theory of Literature Since 1965, ed. Hezard Adams and Leroy Searle, Florida State University Press, 1986.
Keynote Address given at the annual PEN Conference 2001, held at CAP Building, Dumaguete City, 30 November 2001.
