Who’s Afraid of Theory?
In a pique of indignation, the editors of the journal Philosophy and Literature ran a “Bad Writing Contest” from 1995 to 1998 to highlight jargony excess among the professoriate. Inaugurated during the seventh inning of the Theory Wars, Philosophy and Literature placed themselves firmly amongst the classicists, despairing at the influence of various critical “isms.” For the final year that the contest ran, the “winner” was Judith Butler, then a Berkeley philosophy professor and author of the classic work The selection which caused such tsuris was from the journal Diacritics, a labyrinthine sentence where Butler opines that the “move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brough the question of temporality into the thinking of structure,” and so on. If the editors’ purpose was to mock Latinate diction, then the “Bad Writing Contest” successfully made Butler the target of sarcastic opprobrium, with editorial pages using the incident as another volley against “fashionable nonsense” (as Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont called it) supposedly reigning ascendant from Berkeley to Cambridge.
The Theory Wars, that is the administrative argument over which various strains of 20th-century continental European thought should play in the research and teaching of the humanities, has never exactly gone away, even while departments shutter and university work is farmed out to poorly-paid contingent faculty. Today you’re just as likely to see aspersions on the use of critical theory appear in fevered, paranoid Internet threads warning about “Cultural Marxism” as you are on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, even while at many schools literature requirements are being cut, so as to make the whole debate feel more like a Civil War reenactment than the Battle of Gettysburg. In another sense, however, and Butler’s partisans seem to have very much won the argument from the ‘80s and ‘90s—as sociologically inflected Theory-terms from “intersectionality” to “privilege” have migrated from Diacritics to Twitter (though often as critical malapropism)—ensuring that this war of attrition isn’t headed to armistice anytime soon.
So, what exactly is “Theory?” For scientists, a “theory” is a model based on empirical observation that is used to make predictions about natural phenomenon; for the lay-person a “theory” is a type of educated guess or hypothesis. For practitioners of “critical theory,” the phrase means something a bit different. A critical theorist engages with interpretation, engaging with culture (from epic poems to comic books) to explain how their social context allows or precludes certain readings, beyond whatever aesthetic affinity the individual may feel. Journalist Stuart Jeffries explains the history (or “genealogy,” as they might say) of one strain of critical theory in his excellent describing how a century ago an influential group of German Marxist social scientists, including Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse, developed a trenchant vocabulary for “what they called the culture industry,” so as to explore “a new relationship between culture and politics.” At the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, a new critical apparatus was developed for the dizzying complexity of industrial capitalism, and so words like “reify” and “commodity fetish” (as well as that old Hegelian chestnut “dialectical”) became humanistic bywords.
Most of the original members of the Frankfurt School were old fashioned gentlemen, more at home with Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone avant-garde then with Jelly Roll Morton and Bix Beiderbecke, content to read Thomas Mann rather than Action Comics. Several decades later and a different institution, the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom, would apply critical theory to popular culture. These largely working-class theorists, including Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Dick Hebdige, and Angela McRobbie (with a strong influence from Raymond Williams) would use a similar vocabulary as that developed by the Frankfurt School, but they’d extend the focus of their studies into considerations of comics and punk music, slasher movies and paperback novels, while also bringing issues of race and gender to bear in their writings.
In rejecting the elitism of their predecessors, the Birmingham School democratized critical theory, so that the Slate essay on whiteness in Breaking Bad or the Salon hot take about gender in Game of Thrones can be traced on a direct line back through Birmingham. What these scholars shared with Frankfurt, alongside a largely Marxian sensibility, was a sense that “culture was an important category because it helps us to recognize that one life-practice (like reading) cannot be torn out of a large network constituted by many other life-practices—working, sexual orientation, [or] family life,” as elucidated by Simon During in his introduction to For thinkers like Hall, McRobbie, or Gilroy, placing works within this social context wasn’t necessarily a disparagement, but rather the development of a language commensurate with explaining how those works operate. With this understanding, saying that critical theory disenchants literature would be a bit like saying that astronomical calculations make it impossible to see the beauty in the stars.
A third strain influenced “Theory” as it developed in American universities towards the end of the 20th century, and it’s probably the one most stereotypically associated with pretension and obfuscation. From a different set of intellectual sources, French post-structural and deconstructionist thought developed in the ‘60s and ‘70s at roughly the same time as the Birmingham School. Sometimes broadly categorized as “postmodernist” thinkers, French theory included writers of varying hermeticism like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Giles Deleuze, Jean Lyotard, Jacques Lacan, and Jean Baudrillard, who supplied English departments with a Gallic air composed of equal parts black leather and Galois smoke. Francois Cusset provides a helpful primer in the best single volume introduction on the subject. He writes that these “Ten or twelve more or less contemporaneous writers,” who despite their not inconsiderable differences are united by a “critique of the subject, of representation, and of historical continuity,” with their focus the “critique of ‘critique’ itself, since all of them interrogate in their own way” the very idea of tradition. French theory was the purview of Derridean deconstruction, or of Foucauldian analysis of social power structures, the better to reveal the clenched fist hidden within a velvet glove (and every fist is clenched). For traditionalists the Frankfurt School’s Marxism (arguably never all that Marxist) was bad enough; with French theory there was a strong suspicion of at best relativism, at worst outright nihilism.
Theory has an influence simultaneously more and less enduring than is sometimes assumed. Its critics in the ‘80s and ‘90s warned that it signaled the dissolution of the Western canon, yet I can assure you from experience that undergraduates never stopped reading Shakespeare, even if a chapter from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish might have made it onto the syllabus (and it bears repeating that contra the reputation of difficulty, the latter was a hell of a prose stylist). But if current online imbroglios are any indication, its influence has been wide and unexpected, for as colleges pivot towards a business-centered STEM curriculum, the old fights about critical theory have simply migrated online. Much of the criticism against theory in the first iteration of this dispute was about what such thinkers supposedly said (or what people thought they were saying), but maybe even more vociferous were the claims about how they were saying things. The indictment about theory then becomes not just an issue of metaphysics, but one of style. It’s the claim that nobody can argue with a critical theorist because the writing itself is so impenetrable, opaque, and confusing. It’s the argument that if theory reads like anything, that it reads like bullshit.
During the height of these curricular debates there was a cottage industry of books that tackled precisely scholarly rhetoric, not least of which were conservative screeds like Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students and E.D. Hirsh Jr.’s The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. Editors Will H. Corral and Daphne Patai claim in the introduction to their pugnacious Theory’s Empire: An Anthology of Dissent that “Far from responding with reasoned argument to their critics, proponents of Theory, in the past few decades, have managed to adopt just about every defect in writing that George Orwell identified in his 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English Language.’” D.G. Myers in his contribution to the collection (succinctly titled “Bad Writing”) excoriates Butler in particular, writing that the selection mocked by Philosophy and Literature was “something more than ‘ugly’ and ‘stylistically awful’… [as] demanded by the contest’s rules. What Butler’s writing actually expresses is simultaneously a contempt for her readers and an absolute dependence on their good opinion.”
Meanwhile, the poet David Lehman parses Theory’s tendency towards ugly rhetorical self-justification in in which he recounts the sundry affair whereby a confidante of Derrida and esteemed Yale professor was revealed to have written Nazi polemics during the German-occupation of his native Belgium. Lehman also provides ample denunciation of Theory’s linguistic excess, writing that for the “users of its arcane terminology it confers elite status… Less a coherent system of beliefs than a way of thinking.” By 1996 and even Duke University English professor Frank Lentricchia (in a notoriously Theory-friendly department) would snark in his Lingua Franca essay “Last Will and Testament of an Ex-Literary Critic” to (reprinted in Quick Studies: The Best of Lingua Franca) “Tell me your theory and I’ll tell you in advance what you’ll say about any work of literature, especially those you haven’t read.”
No incident illustrated more for the public the apparent vapidity of Theory than the so-called “Sokal Affair” in 1996, when New York University physics professor Alan Sokal wrote a completely meaningless paper composed in a sarcastic pantomime of critical theory-speak entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” which was accepted for publication in the prestigious (Duke-based) journal Social Text, with his hoax simultaneously revealed by Lingua Franca. Sokal’s paper contains exquisite nonsense such as the claim that “postmodern sciences overthrow the static ontological categories and hierarchies characteristic of modernist science” and that “these homologous features arise in numerous seemingly disparate areas of science, from quantum gravity to chaos theory… In this way, the postmodern sciences appear to be converging on a new epistemological paradigm.” Sokal’s case against Theory is also, fundamentally, about writing. He doesn’t just attack critical theory for what he perceives as its dangerous relativism, but also at the level of composition, writing in Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science that such discourse “exemplified by the texts we quote, functions in part as a dead end in which some sectors of the humanities and social sciences have gotten lost.” He brags that “one of us managed, after only three months of study, to master the postmodernist lingo well enough to publish an article in a prestigious journal.” Such has long been the conclusion among many folks that Theory is a kind of philosophical Mad Libs disappearing up its own ass, accountable to nobody but itself and the departments that coddle it. Such was the sentiment which inspired the programmers of the Postmodern Essay Generator, which as of 2020 is still algorithmically throwing together random Theory words to create full essays with titles like “Deconstructing Surrealism: Socialism, surrealism and deconstructivist theory” (by P. Hans von Ludwig) and “Social realism and the capitalist paradigm of discourse” (by Agnes O. McElwaine).
Somebody’s thick black glasses would have to be on too tight not to see what’s funny in this, though there’s more than a bit of truth in the defense of Theory that says such denunciations are trite, an instance of anti-intellectualism as much as its opposite. Defenses of Theory in the wake of Sokal’s ruse tended to, not unfairly, query why nobody questions the rarefied and complex language of the sciences but blanches when the humanities have a similarly baroque vocabulary. Status quo objections to that line of thinking tend to emphasize the humanness of the humanities; the logic being that if we’re all able to be moved by literature, we have no need to have experts explain how that work of literature operates (as if being in possession of a heart would make one a cardiologist). Butler, for her part, answered criticism leveled against her prose style in a (well written and funny!) New York Times editorial, where she argues, following a line of Adorno’s reasoning, that complex prose is integral to critical theory because it helps to make language strange, and forces us to interrogate that which we take for granted. “No doubt, scholars in the humanities should be able to clarify how their work informs and illuminates everyday life,” Butler admits, “Equally, however, such scholars are obliged to question common sense, interrogate its tacit presumptions and provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world.”
To which I heartily agree, but that doesn’t mean that the selection of Butler’s mocked by Philosophy and Literature is any good. It costs me little to admit that the sentence is at best turgid, obtuse, and inelegant, and at worst utterly incomprehensible. It costs me even less to admit that that’s probably because it’s been cherry picked, stripped of context, and labeled as such so that it maximizes potential negative impressions. One can defend Butler— and Theory—without justifying every bit of rhetorical excess. Because what some critics disparage about Theory—its obscurity, its rarefied difficulty, its multisyllabic technocratic purpleness—is often true. When I arrived in my Masters program, in a department notoriously Theory-friendly, I blanched as much as Allan Bloom being invited to be a roadie on the Rolling Stones’ Steel Wheel Tour. For an undergraduate enmeshed in the canon, and still enraptured to that incredibly old-fashioned (but still intoxicating) claim of the Victorian critic Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy that the purpose of education was to experience “the best which has been thought and said,” post-structuralism was a drag. By contrast, many of my colleagues, most of them in fact, loved Theory; they thrilled to its punkish enthusiasms, its irony laden critiques, its radical suspicion of the best of which has been thought and said. Meanwhile I despaired that there were no deconstructionists in
I can no longer imagine that perspective. It’s not quite that I became a “Theory Head,” as one calls all of those sad young men reading Deleuze and Félix Guattari while smoking American Spirit cigarettes, but I did learn to stop worrying and love Theory (in my own way). What I learned is that Theory begins to make sense once you learn the language (whether it takes you three months or longer), and that it’s innately, abundantly, and estimably useful when you have to actually explain how culture operates, not just whether you happen to like a book or not. A poet can write a blazon for her beloved, but an anatomist is needed to perform the autopsy. Some of this maturity came in realizing that literary criticism has always had its own opacity; that if we reject “binary opposition,” we would have to get rid of “dactylic hexameter” as well. The humanities have always invented new words to describe the things of this world that we experience in culture. That’s precisely the practice attacked by John Martin Ellis, who in his jeremiad Against Deconstruction took on Theory’s predilection towards neologism, opining that “there were plenty of quite acceptable ordinary English words for the status of entrenched ideas and for the process of questioning and undermining them.” All of that difference, all of that hegemony, and so much phallologocentricism… But here’s the thing— sometime heteroglossia by any other name doesn’t smell as sweet.
Something anachronistic in proffering a defense of Theory in the third decade of the new millennium; something nostalgic or even retrograde. Who cares anymore? Disciplinary debates make little sense as the discipline itself has imploded, and the anemic cultural studies patois of the Internet hardly seems to warrant the same reflection, either in defense or condemnation. In part though, I’d suggest that it’s precisely the necessity of these words, and their popularity among those who learned them through cultural osmosis and not through instruction, that necessitates a few statements in their exoneration. All of the previous arguments on their behalf—that the humanities require their own jargon, that this vocabulary provides an analytical nuance that the vernacular doesn’t—strike me as convincing. And the criticism that an elite coterie uses words like “hegemonic” as a shibboleth are also valid, but that’s not an argument to abandon the words—it’s an argument to instruct more people on what they mean.
But I’d like to offer a different claim to utility, and that’s that Theory isn’t just useful, but that it’s beautiful. When reading the best of Theory, it’s as if reading poetry more than philosophy, and all of those chewy multisyllabic words can be like honey in the mouth. Any student of linguistics or philology—from well before Theory—understands that synonyms are mythic and that an individual word has a connotative life that is rich and unique. Butler defends the Latinate, writing that for a student “words such as ‘hegemony’ appears strange,” but that they may discover that beyond its simpler meaning “it denotes a dominance so entrenched that we take it for granted, and even appear to consent to it—a power that’s strengthened by its invisibility.” Not only that, I’d add that “hegemony,” with its angular consonants hidden like a sharp rock in the middle of a snowball, conveys a sense of power beyond either brute strength or material plenty. Hegemony has something of the mysterious about it, the totalizing, the absolute, the wickedly divine. To simply replace it with the word “power” is to drain it of its impact. I’ve found this with many of those words; that they’re as if occult tone poems conveying a hidden and strange knowledge; that they’re able to give texture to a picture that would otherwise be flat. Any true defense of Theory must, I contend, give due deference to the sharp beauty that these sometimes-hermetic words convey.
As a totally unscientific sample, I queried a number of my academic (and recovering academic) colleagues on social media to see what words they would add to a list of favorite terms; the jargon that others might roll their eyes at, or hear as grad school clichés, but that are estimably useful, and dare I say it—beautiful. People’s candidates could be divided in particular ways, including words that remind us of some sort of action, words that draw strength from an implied metaphorical imagery, and words that simply have an aural sense that’s aesthetically pleasing (and these are by no means exhaustive or exclusive). For example, Derrida’s concept of “deconstruction,” a type of methodological meta-analysis that reveals internal contradictions within any text, so as to foreground interpretations that might be hidden, was a popular favorite word. “Deconstruction” sounds like an inherently practical term, a word that contractors rather than literary critics might use, the prefix connotes ripping things down while the rest of the word gestures towards building them (back?) up. A similar word that several responders mentioned, albeit one with less of a tangible feel to it, was “dialectics,” which was popularized in the writings of the 19th-century German philosopher George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, was mediated through Karl Marx, and was then applied to everything by the Frankfurt School. As with many of these terms, “dialectics” has variable meaning depending on who is using it, but it broadly refers to an almost evolutionary process whereby the internal contradictions of a concept are reconciled, propelling thought into the future. For the materialist deployment of the term by Marx and his followers, the actual word has an almost mystical gloss to it, the trochaic rhythm of the word itself with its up-down-up-down beat evoking the process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis to which the term itself applies. Something about the very sound of “dialectic” evokes both cutting and burying to me, the psychic struggle that the word is supposed to describe.
Then there are the words that are fueled with metaphorical urgency, short poems in their own right that often appropriated from other disciplines. Foucault used words like “genealogy” or “archeology” when some might think that “history” would be fine, and yet those words do something subtly different than the plodding narrative implied by the more prosaic word. With the former there is a sense of telling a story that connects ideas, trends, and themes within a causal network of familial relations, the latter recalls excavation and the revealing of that which remains hidden (or cursed). Deleuze and Guatari borrowed the term “rhizome” from botany, which originally described the complex branching of root systems, now reapplied to how non-hierarchical systems of knowledge propagate. “Rhizome” pays homage to something of beauty from a different way of understanding the world—it is not filching, it is honoring. The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci similarly borrowed the term “subaltern,” later popularized by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, for whom it came to designate communities of colonized people who are simultaneously exoticized and erased by imperial powers. The word itself was a term used for junior officers in the British colonial service. Finally, I’m partial to “interiority” myself, used to denote fictional representations of consciousness or subjectivity. Yet “interiority,” with its evocation of a deep subterranean network or the domestic spaces of a many-roomed mansion, says something about consciousness that the more common word doesn’t quite.
My favorite critical jargon word, however, is “liminal.” All of us who work on academic Grub Street have their foibles, the go-to scholarly tics marking their prose like an oily fingerprint left on Formica. We all know the professor with their favored jargon turn (often accompanied by an equivalent hand movement, like an intricate form of Neapolitan), or the faculty member who might be taken to yelling out “Hegemonic!” at inopportune times. Thus, I can’t help but sprinkle my own favored term into my writing like paprika in Budapest goulash. My love for the word, used to designate things that are in-between, transitioning, and not quite formed, has less to do with its utility than with the mysterious sense of the sounds that animate it. It’s always been oddly onomatopoeic to me, maybe because it’s a near homophone to “illuminate,” and makes me think of dusk, my favorite time of day. When I hear “liminal” it reminds me of moonbeams and cicadas at sunset; it reminds me that the morning star still endures even at dawn. An affection for the term has only a little to do with what’s useful about it, and everything to do with that connotative ladder that stretches out beyond its three syllables. I suspect that when we love these words, this jargon, it’s an attraction to their magic, the uncanny poetry hidden behind the seemingly technocratic. The best of Theory exists within that liminal space, between criticism and poetry; justifying itself by recourse to the former, but always actually on the side of the latter—even if it doesn’t know it.
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Ed Simon is the Editor-at-Large for The Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books. A regular contributor at several different sites, his collection America and Other Fictions: On Radical Faith and Post-Religion will be released by Zero Books this year. He can be followed on Facebook, his website, or on Twitter at @WithEdSimon.
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In Defense of the Mom Book: Picks for Olive Kitteridge Fans
In the comment section of our most recent The Millions Top Ten post, I wrote that Olive Kitteridge, this year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of linked short stories by Elizabeth Strout, was beautiful and moving, and that it caught me by surprise. What surprised me, I guess, was that I liked it at all. I’d only read it because because of a book club – this is a group that pays me to attend and facilitate the discussion (not a bad gig!) – and I assumed Olive Kitteridge wasn’t for me. After all, it’s a collection of quiet stories either directly about, or tangentially related to, its eponymous character: a gruff, retired math teacher in Maine. In other words, it sounded like a “mom” book – a book meant for women older than me, women different from me. I’ve written about this phenomenon before:I catch myself viewing such books (written by women, and read mostly by women) as somehow not important or challenging enough, even though when I’ve given in and read, say, Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, I’m met with something both ambitious and moving, and I need to check my attitude.I have a complicated relationship to this question of the Mom Book. It’s sexist, for one, as it assumes that mothers have uniform reading tastes, and that books that are popular among women are suddenly embarrassing, or not worthy of serious discourse. All untrue, obviously. I understand that these are my own weird beliefs and assumptions, and that I must be careful, as someday, I might be a mom, wearing my Mom Jeans, reading (and writing!) my Mom Books. I should be so lucky. For the record, my own mother reads everything from John Irving to Lisa See to Phillippa Gregory. She read Mason and Dixon. In hardcover. (From now on, I’m going to refer to Thomas Pynchon’s books as women’s fiction, and see what happens to his reputation.)I understand, after having read Olive Kitteridge, that it is a Mom Book, if a Mom Book is one that’s interested in the lives of women, and if it’s emotionally affecting. There’s also little irony in Olive Kitteridge, which is probably absent from a lot of Mom Books. If Strout’s book errs on the side of sentimentality once or twice, well, I can forgive that, because nowadays it’s easy to be ironic, detached, cynical, and merely intellectual. It’s harder to be lyrical without slipping into overly purple prose. It’s harder to write about feelings. And I guess, in the end, Mom Books want you to feel something.But I’m getting away from the original purpose of this post, which is to recommend other books to those Millions readers who enjoyed Olive Kitteridge (all you mothers out there!). Since writing reviews takes the fun out of reading for me – I can only handle the bookstore clerk’s “hand sell” recommendation model – I’ll say only this to those of you who haven’t yet read it: Strout has created a thoroughly flawed, compassionate, vulnerable, frustrating character. In the world of this book, people commit suicide (or don’t), they grow old and die on you, and your children grow up and leave you. The moments of connection between characters, or those connections that are recalled after-the-fact (which “day after day are unconsciously squandered”), are at once fleeting and immense. It’s a lovely book.Stories like “Pharmacy,” about Olive’s husband’s infatuation with his much younger employee, were reminiscent of Joan Silber’s work, for it covers time in the same efficient, fluid way. I recommend Silber’s Ideas of Heaven, which, like Olive Kitteridge, is a collection of stories linked by character (though not always the same one, and the eras and locations change.) Still, you’ll get that same zing! when a character from a previous story appears in the next one.Olive Kitteridge also reminded me of Alice Munro’s work. Like Munro, Strout values backstory; for her characters, the past resonates in the present, and shapes it. And like Munro’s work, Strout’s stories aren’t predictably structured. I often wasn’t sure where her tales were taking me; I’m not referring to plot – I mean that I was uncertain of a story’s purpose, of what it wanted to tell me about its characters and their lives, and maybe my own, until I’d reached its end. Alice Munro is the master of this kind of storytelling; it echoes what Flannery O’Connor once said, (and I’m paraphrasing), about good fiction having not abstract meaning, but experienced meaning. You’ve got to move through the stories in Olive Kitteridge if you want to be changed by them.And… let’s see…I’m trying to think of other writers whose work is similar to Elizabeth Strout’s, and I’m drawing a blank. This is a good thing, certainly. I will try to think of more… but first, I have to read Loving Frank for the aforementioned book club. Oy vey.
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Why Are So Many Literary Writers Shifting into Genre?
The Transcendent Power of Triangular Fiction
Like most other art forms, fiction has undergone many configurations over the years, but its core has remained, as always, the aesthetic pleasure of reading. When we read, we connect to the immaterial source of the story through its outstretched limbs. The “limb” or variants of it are what the writer has deemed fit for us to see, to gaze at and admire. It is not often the whole. But one of the major ways in which fiction has changed today — from the second half of the 20th century especially — is that most of its fiction reveals all its limbs to us all at once. Nothing is hidden behind the esoteric wall of mystery or metaphysics.
The writers who do well to divvy up their fiction into fractions of what is revealed to the reader are the writers who tend to achieve transcendence, which, according to Emmanuel Levinas is recognized “in the work of the intellect that aspires after exteriority.” In fiction, a form of art expressed through letters, exteriority in this sense approximates meaning. For the writer endures himself to turn that which is interior inside out for the reader to see. Writing, then, is an act of turning out that which is in. The triangular writer then is he who projects meaning relentlessly yet systematically to the reader, and in the process of which readers glimpse something else. And then, something else. They see a man standing on the top of a cliff about to descend to his death, but they also see a cause — perhaps a nation’s communist past — standing there, about to plunge to its end.
When, in a text written more than 2,000 years ago, a character says, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again,” the percipient reader hears at least two things: (a) In keeping with His miracles to this point, the said temple could be destroyed and this man, Jesus, can raise it up again with his miraculous power; (b) Once one has read to the end of the gospel of Matthew, one understands that “the temple” in fact means the man himself. It is he who will be killed, and he who will be raised again. This multi-layered meaning is, in the biblical concept, necessary because of the spiritual property of the book, and hence deemed “exegetic.” But the writers of triangular fiction achieve this in their fiction too. This is because the “divvying up” into fractions or parts that eventually become one and whole often works to more than one level of interpretation. The works of fiction that achieve transcendence are those works that lend themselves to this multi-layered interpretation.
I believe that fiction should work on at least three levels of interpretation: The personal, the conceptual, and the philosophical. In other words, the shape of the core of great works of fiction must be triangular — it must be emotional, cerebral, and sublime.
The personal level of interpretation is that basic level where the story meets the reader at his most human level. I will prop up three novels by some writers of this kind of fiction, Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye), Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita), and Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart).
A young black girl in Jim Crow America who desires blue eyes. We know such a child has existed, and probably still does, and we cringe at the futility and even folly of such a desire. But we cannot deny its unvarnished humanness. A middle-aged man who has a crushing desire for a young pubescent girl whom he names his “nymphet.” We appreciate the humanness of his lust, and are disturbed/moved by it. Or a pre-colonial strongman of an Igbo village who has risen through hard times and established himself, his small kingdom, his traditions, and all that exist within the boundaries of his compound — and even beyond — “with a strong hand,” and then an encounter with a group of foreigners destroys all of that and brings him to become the lowest among his kinsmen, an akalaogoli, who cannot be accorded the common honor of a burial.
We can understand these characters and their stories as the writers, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, and Chinua Achebe have created them on this personal level. But we can see, too, that much more lies behind these personal stories. The marigolds blossom, desire the bleak sun, and die, and in their protracted destinies share equivalent fate with Pecola. We see that the lust that fuels and drives Humbert Humbert, the lust in which he is imprisoned, is revealed in the thickets of language in which he is caught. But the aggregate meaning of the entire enterprise stretches beyond the page to the authorial intention expressed in the account of the monkey who, on being given a paper and pencil and taught the human art of drawing, draws the first thing in its mind: the bars around its cage. From this bar, its existence is enclosed and constrained. It cannot leave it. Its desire to leave comes and dies, unfulfilled, in futility, until it again surrenders to the reality that it will remain imprisoned. This is the distinct quality of the lust that possesses, and eventually destroys, Humbert Humbert and Lolita.
In Things Fall Apart, we can see, too, the ascension and power that Okonkwo acquires, and its flourishing when, at its peak, he receives various titles, and even has his daughter wedded. Then, an internal crisis erupts within him and slowly tears him apart. As he breaks down because Nwoye, his first son, has joined the ranks of the enemy, we also see — simultaneously — the villagers of Umuofia trying to understand what to do with their own brothers who have joined the white man’s religion and ways, causing the tribe to fall part. It is at this point that it becomes clear that Okonkwo isn’t merely an individual; he is Umuofia, he is an entire civilization, and it is not he alone but everything that falls apart.
The marigold, the monkey, the village of Umuofia — these become philosophical images on which these writers have constructed the personal stories of individual characters. On these things and on the vested characters, these triangular writers make profound philosophical statements while carrying through with strong, engaging plots. They are able to achieve this synchrony of vision because of the conceptual layer of their narratives. Morrison’s introspection into the head of her primary character is matched with an unblinking gaze from the outside through a girl her age, in Claudia. Thus, we are looking into Pecola, and looking at her at the same time. Humbert Humbert’s story is itself caged in bars. The writer within the story has died by the time the story is being published, and thus cannot change or touch anything in the manuscript. He cannot answer for anything that has been said, nor make restitution for anything that may require restitution. And within the precincts of the story itself, he is enslaved by an effusive, unguarded language as fecund as a wasteful forest, within which he himself gets lost. It is an imbroglio that yields, nonetheless, affecting flights of lyricism and ambient prose. And on the man on whom a poor beginning had been bequeathed, his rise is chronicled through a third person voice that intermittently strays into the omniscient. We see the knife that tears him within as it slides through the civilization of the Igbo people.
It is thus too difficult to not say, most definitely, that these three novels — The Bluest Eye, Lolita, Things Fall Apart —were conceived because their writers had diligently set themselves “the design of rendering the work universally appreciable” according to Edgar Allan Poe. Poe provides in that seminal essay that he had hoped to achieve this by seeking to “contemplate” the “beautiful,” a literary esotericism reached only by focusing on the effect of that which inspires beauty, and not the commodity of the beautiful itself. This is because “when indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect — they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of soul…”
This is the trajectory by which writers of triangular fiction approach literary truth. For, in their works, that which is personal is at the same time a philosophy, and at the same time a conceptual/artistic conceit. And as we read, we can not help but notice the transcendent power of triangular fiction.
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