The following is my proposal for a paper I will be writing shortly. I won’t bore you with my multi-page tentative bibliography. The question is:
What is literature? Why write? To whom does one write? Why read? What is the significance of studying literature? Articulate your defence of literature in the context of our globalizing consumer culture. Papers are required to engange contemporary theories by making reference to such writers as Jeanette Winterson, Trinh T. Minh-ha, bell hooks, and Joseph Gold.
And now my proposal:
My paper will explore the issue of what motivates readers to read, and writers to write, rather than trying to determine the relevance of literature. To try and do so would be akin to demanding a Message in, or from, literature. As to that, I will let Robertson Davies speak for me, from his introduction to Fortune, My Foe & Eros at Breakfast:
Canada was, and still is, full of such people … [who] think of art of all kinds as a kind of handmaid to education; it must have a Message and it must get across.
The truth is that art does not teach; it makes you feel, and any teaching that may arise from the feeling is an extra, and must not be stressed too much. In the modern world, and in Canada as much as anywhere, we are obsessed with the notion that too think is the highest achievement of mankind, but we neglect the fact that thought untouched by feeling is thin, delusive, treacherous stuff. (8)
There is little, if anything, that I can add to that, and it would be a disservice to try. In any case, Northrop Frye’s 1963 Massey lecture, “From Motive to Metaphor”, available in The Educated Imagination, covers more ground than ever I could, and with a much keener intelligence than mine. I highly recommend it.
Critics and authors from all schools have written in the defence of literature and reading, from Robertson Davies, Harold Bloom, and J. Hillis Miller, to Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, and Jeanette Winterson, from all sides of the issue, or very nearly all sides, and it is from their arguments that I will chiefly draw when I make my own.
The question itself is a humanist one, assuming, as Graham Good would assert, the sanctity of the individual and the power of individual will. It is a commonplace today that we live in an alliterate society; a society of people who can read, but don’t. If the dominant discourse of our society is to promote “aesthetic egalitarianism” (Good 84) as Good suggests, then why would even radical postmodernists such as Barthes and Winterson bother with literature at all? The answer may lie in the humanist concept of choice, of individual will. In Barthes we find jouissance; in Davies, Frye, and Miller we find an appeal to emotion and intellect. In Winterson there is appeal to human nature, which is a more subtle appeal than it appears, evoking both the centre and the periphery at the same time. Hutcheon makes no appeal at all, but her explanation of contemporary artistic engagement is perhaps the most telling. Bloom, as in all things, occupies a category all his own.
I have taken care of opinions, and of course they must be weighed and measured, but against what? What constitutes “our globalizing consumer culture”, and if culture, global, consumer, or otherwise, is the fractured multiplicity that Baudrillard, Haraway, and other suggest, then what sort of touchstone might have any authority? A multiplicity of touchstones will answer. Joseph Gold and bell hooks may have interesting things to say, and Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter’s Zone Six: Incorporations will certainly prove an ample resource. Likewise, I think, Adam Greenfield’s V-2.org.
The task before me is one of Hegelian synthesis, to bring together the disparate and sometimes oppositional opinions of critics, with the likewise disparate and oppositional nature(s) of contemporary society, and to arrive at something that is both of my sources, and above them.
