I’ve not read much of Stephen Henighan’s work, just a few things in The New Quarterly, and I’ve generally found his work to be thoughtful, if unimpressive. His latest book, When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing, however, is certainly better than “unimpressive”. I particularly enjoyed the essay, “The Truth About Appropriation of Voice”. In it he articulates a number of ideas that I have been trying to express in one form or another in my own work, with varying degrees of success.
My favourite passage follows an assessment of Timothy Findley’s Headhunter, but that is not the essay’s primary subject matter:
The rampant essentialism embodied in Findley’s advocacy of ‘appropriation of voice’ underlines the central contradiction implicit in the notion’s adoption by the literary establishment. In terms of literary history, ‘appropriation of voice’ is a concept properly belonging to the 1830s. In order to believe in such an anachronistic dictum as ‘being yourself entirely’, it would be necessary to toss overboard most modern philosophy and literary theory—particularly that of the last forty years—in order to return to the tenets of Romanticism. ‘Appropriation of voice’ depends for its legitimacy on the assumption that there exits an undiluted, ‘authentic’ core to each culture, reflected in its traditional art. Yet most of this century’s literary criticism, from Bakhtinian polyglossia to New Criticism to Derridean deconstructionism to Cixous’s efforts to ‘write the body’ to Bloom’s descriptions of the ‘anxiety of influence’ to Marxist and Lacanian approaches, has developed, in different ways, from the notion that literary language is a hybrid, impure comglomeration of coded assumptions and shadows of half-absorbed past systems of writing. One of the most bizarre spectacles induced by the ‘appropriation of voice’ carnival has been the sight of trendy fellow-travellers of literary fashion simultaneously proclaiming their allegiance to the mutually exclusive assumptions of contemporary literary theory and ‘appropriation of voice’.
That friends, is excellent criticial thinking. I’ve recently been researching a short essay on literary ethics and have found in almost all cases that critics dislike, or perhaps fear, any literary confrontation with “the other” (being subjectivity besides the author’s own). Critics don’t want writers to explore any position other than their own, and that sort of thinking hamstrings literature. There are only so many stories to be told about writers pecking away at keyboards, and there is only so much autobiography we will accept in literary fiction. (Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is perhaps an exception, but I doubt a second piece along the same lines would be as well received.) Eventually we want our writers to make things up, and that means exploring areas outside their own experience; outside their own time, their own space, and sometimes their own ethnicity. Frankly, we can’t have it both ways. Writers can either make things up, or they can’t.
Interestingly this is the same place where feminist theory starts to wear thin. Feminist critics (and many post-colonial critics as well, living, as they are, in the house that feminism built) by-and-large accept the Barthes/Foucault/Kristeva/Tel Quel precept that the author is not relevant when discussing texts, because the author is a tool of the sociolect; social and linguistic pressures created the text, not an author. At least, they accept it if the author has white skin and/or a penis. Beyond that the subjectivity of the author is the sole reason for literary criticism.
Northrop Frye looks better every day.
