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Wednesday, October 01, 2008
What and Where is the Text?
As David Bordwell has observed in Making Meaning, much of our thinking about literary texts (& movies & graphic novels, etc.) seems to derive from the metaphor of a container. Some things are inside the text while other things are outside of it. Further, some of the things inside the text are not obvious; they’re said to be hidden. One job of the critic is to reveal and explain what’s hidden.
For casual use, this is OK. But it disintegrates if you ask too much of it. We’ve augmented it in various ways, but as far as I know we haven’t arrived at a more satisfactory set of alternatives. My purpose here is simply to lay out a crude sketch of how we’ve worked at augmenting the container notion.
The basic problem, of course, is that “the work of literary art” cannot effectively be reduced to the physical text. The physical text is just a bunch of markings which are meaningless unless taken up by a human mind. How does one work that “taking-up” into a concept of the text?
Perhaps the commonest gambit is to introduce intentionality, with the author’s intention being the privileged choice:
physical text + authorial intention = the literary work
This idea has been beaten to death over the past 40 or 50 years and has been worked over at The Valve many many times.
Reader response criticism has discarded authorial intention in favor of something happening in the mind of the reader. For critics such as Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish (but only in his brief affective stylistics phase) this reader is, if not an ideal reader, at least a generic reader. The reader moves through the text word by word, phrase by phrase, making inferences, developing expectations, and being surprised every now and then. Thus does the reader build-up a sense of the text’s meaning.
A rather different type of reader response critic focuses on the individuality of readers, as Norman Holland did in Five Readers Reading. Holland wasn’t interested in how his readers moved through the text from one moment to the next. Rather, he was interested in how their individual personalities led them to find their own meanings.
It seems to me that Fish’s notion of interpretive communities is focuses on much the same problem, that different readers arrive at different meanings. Instead of focusing on specific individuals, Fish focuses on groups and argues that such groups authorize explicit and codified interpretive strategies. He’s no longer interested in the reading process, only the result as reflected in community-typical readings.
So, now we’ve got the physical text, the reading process, and differences between individuals and groups. Just where the literary work, in all its fullness, is in all this, that’s not clear. But I don’t see that we can discard any of these various phenomena in conceptualizing it.
In contrast, we should note approaches in which literary texts are seen to reflect the operations of impersonal society-wide systems. There is, of course, language itself. And there are semiotic codes of all sorts, as well as discourses and epistemes. These systems operate outside individual agency but must nonetheless somehow operate through individuals. The general idea seems to be that culture is a collective phenomenon and that texts are nodal points in that collectivity.
A given element in a text – a letter or word, a trope, a motif, a plot element, what have you – also takes its place in one or more of these systems. These systems are somehow both outside and beyond individual texts and yet also deeply inside them, constituting their meaning. These systemic conceptualizations thus problematize the distinction between inside and outside (the text). And if that distinction goes, what happens to the idea of meaning hidden inside the text? What happens is that these systems themselves are said to be hidden and, correspondingly, the job of the critic is to bring them to light.
Now, how do you put all these things together into one coherent account of literary processes in individual minds and in society? What and where is the literary work? Is anything beyond the symbols stable over time?
Comments
What do we do when interpret, when we think about a text?
I don’t tend to imagine this in terms of a container or physical layers. There’s nothing “under” the text. I think of it as configuring defensible associations at various levels of specificity: phoneme, word, phrase, sentence. What are the symbols and tropes but configurations of these elements? Including the trope of the container, and of hidden physical layers of meaning.
Is that the problem with the container metaphor--that rather than directing us to what we are doing when we think about our reading, we set an artificial limit by using this one configuration as prism and filter to measure and evaluate the whole by this single constructed part?
Perhaps the commonest gambit is to introduce intentionality, with the author’s intention being the privileged choice:
physical text + authorial intention = the literary work
This idea has been beaten to death over the past 40 or 50 years and has been worked over at The Valve many many times.
Bill, it’s a mistake to think that literary theory (esp. “postmodern literary theory") has been challenging simply the idea of intention (or intentionality). Rather, it’s been a sustained challenging and critique of all conceptions of “the text”, including—especially—the notion of text as container.
Cf. Derrida: “There’s nothing outside the text”, which was a remark made in relation to reading Rousseau, to be sure, but which can be and has been made in relation to readings “texts” generally. But note that to say there is nothing outside the text is to say also that there’s nothing inside the text, too. There’s nothing inside the text because anything “within” the text that is thought to define the essence or identity (or meaning) of the text owes its own identity to something “outside” the text (e.g. the system of language, the author’s consciousness, the economic structure, the readers’ knowledge of aesthetic codes and interpretative techniques, etc.etc.). By the same token, whatever is ordinarily thought of as being “outside” the text, as being a reference point for explaining the significance of the text, can only be appealed to in an interpretative moment, which thus constitutes it as text: hence there’s nothing outside the text too. Textuality is all there is (which, in case it needs to be said, is not for a second to deny that there are any books, rocks, people, etc. in the world).
So it’s the inside-outside distinction (and the popular notions of text-as-container premised on that distinction) that is being challenged with the statement that “there is nothing outside the text”, and any complication of the notion of intention (or meaning) that may be associated with that statement occurs as a result of the “deconstruction” of the inside-outside distinction. (It’s worth noting here too that the inside-outside distinction is directly addressed in the first half of D’s Of Grammatology.)
Or Cf. Barthes’ “From Work to Text”, where one of what he calls “seven propositions about The Text” directly challenges the idea of the text as container of meaning.
Or again, Cf. Deleuze and Guattari on “the rhizome”, which would provide probably the most direct “answer” to your questions. Or for a good overview of the way a range of figures and/or concepts have pursued those questions, see Niall Lucy’s Postmodern Literary Theory: An Introduction (esp. the last four chapters).
Of course, none of this is to suggest that these questions can’t be pursued in the absence of an engagement with postmodern literary theory, or that what the latter has to say about the question of the text is indisputable, etc. The point is simply that it’s wrong to think that pomo lit theory is concerned primarily with the issue of intention (or of meaning) and that therefore it does not appreciate that the conception of text-as-container is problematic and that it hasn’t been consistently addressing precisely the question of “what and where is the text?”.
To the extent that we can say it has a single answer to that question, pomo lit theory would say that “the text”, understood as an object — empty, filled, or otherwise — does not exist. Rather, there are only text-events.
Rob, I know what pomo theory is up to is beyond the critique of intention (and I note that Wimsatt and Beardsley took shots at intention in the 50s) & I have some little familiarity with early Derrida.
What do you mean by “text-events”? What makes sense to me is that each reading (in the ordinary sense of the word) of a text counts as a performance of the text. If I see Othello, we’ve got a performance for each person in the audience and each person on stage. The various performances in the audience are loosely “coupled” with those on stage as all these people can interact with one another and therefore influence one another. Those on the stage are necessarily tightly coupled.
If I then read the text three weeks later, that’s another performance. If I read it five years after that, that’s another performance. And so forth for every person who encounters Othello.
One can wonder about the relationship between all these performances. That’s one kind of problem. That problem is about literature as a collective phenomenon.
One can also wonder about how any one of these performances unfolds. That’s a different problem. That’s about what happens in the mind-brain of an individual. What happens while watching Othello on the stage is, of course, a bit different from what happens when one reads the text.
It’s awfully hard to address these questions, isn’t it? Not that they aren’t vital--I had exactly this kind of discussion with a student this morning, though we used different terms--but the weight of all those past flogged dead horses hangs so heavy over the proceedings. It’s like trying to talk about the particulars of the bailout without simply repeating opinions one long ago developed about “capitalism” or the “free market.”
Still, to try, I’m struck by this phrasing:
“Just where the literary work, in all its fullness, is in all this, that’s not clear. But I don’t see that we can discard any of these various phenomena in conceptualizing it.”
This feels to me a lot like an argument for the existence of God which starts by presuming the thing its trying to prove and then reasons backward from that premise. If that sounds like a criticism, well, I have the same (or a similar) investment in the idea of the literary as a methodological touchstone, and I don’t want to get rid of it. Which is to say, there’s a methodological move I’m both uncomfortable with and interested in: to posit the idea of a thing called the literary, think about all the arguments for why it falls apart as a stable concept, and then ask again the question of how we can recuperate it from these arguments (without seriously asking the question of whether there even is such a thing), begs the question of why we’re so invested in that concept in the first place. Because we are, aren’t we? And even if we can’t justify it in theory, our practice continues to employ it.
After all, I’m struck by the power of the metaphor of the inside-outside distinction, even as I find it somewhat theoretically incoherent; however difficult it is to defend from a theoretical perspective, it’s nevertheless a structuring principle of reading and writing practice. And if both readers and writers think that there is an inside and an outside to a text, then the Derridean point about sur-texts is not exactly refuted, but at least needs to be contextualized within that perspective.
A couple of years ago I published a longish article in which I argued that we should think of the literary text as a computational form. That article was a systematic attempt to lay out how I saw literary criticism under the rubric of the newer psychologies and the notion of a computational form was embedded in them. It also involved a certain amount of hand-waving.
These days I’m wondering whether or not should attempt to recoupe the hand-waving or whether I should simply abandon any attempt to define the literary work as a coherent conceptual entity. It’s not clear to me that I actually need such a concept. I can talk about whatever processes I need to without needing to posit such an entity. At least I think I can.
Let me offer an analogy: salt and sodium chloride. We all know that they are, physically, pretty much the same. Conceptually they are very different. Salt is a white granular substance with a certain taste, which is more salient in our understanding of salt than its appearance or texture. After all, the taste tells us of salt’s presence even where there is no white granular substance to be seen or touched. Salt is thus rather adequately defined in terms of sensory perceptions.
Sodium chloride is a chemical compound whose molecules consist of one atom of sodium and one atom of chlorine. What in that definition is a sensory perception? “Compound,” “atom,” “molecule,” these are all abstract. And if we start looking behind these abstractions one route will lead us to meter readings on laboratory instruments while another route will lead us to hadrons, leptons, and a handfull of forces, strong, weak, electromagnetic, and gravitational. The conceptual domain in which we find “sodium chloride” is thus quite different from the one in which we find “salt.” To borrow from the language of set theory, the extensions of those terms are much the same (note that salt ordinarily contains impurities which aren’t in the extension of “sodium chloride") but their intensions are different.
“Salt” is defined in the domain of every-day commonsense knoweldge while “sodium chloride” is defined in the specialized domain of chemistry. These domains have different ontologies.
So, perhaps we can think of “the text” as the familiar commonsense notion of a container, etc. That’s the concept we use for informal purposes; we simply cannot get rid of it. For more sophisticated purposes, though . . . We can talk of the physical object, but in this more sophisticated intellectual context, that object is not the common sense “text.” It is just the physical symbols. In addition to those symbols we can talk about whatever else, using the whatever concepts appeal to us.
I suspect that we could treat “the literary” in the same way.
Looked at the Russian Formalists lately and their attempts to define literariness? Just asking because you mentioned Wimsatt briefly but his was a relatively late attempt to codify what many others had been doing from the 1920s up.
Is Bakhtin’s dialogism useful to you at all?
Personally, I find the tenedency toward “scientism” in the pre-structuralist European theorists a little annoying, but you might have a different take.