Oh You Theory People and your Wind Shouting...

I ran into Becky in the library today, which struck me as a little ironic considering I was going to the lab to blog on the extremely dense Hacker’s Manifesto, having failed to get my internet at home to bend to my will. Becky of course inquired as to how the class was going, and I of course immediately launched into my usual tirade about theory, this time with an additional paragraph explaining the lead-in of Marx and his own manifesto as it fed so directly into our reading for today. I am not anti-Marxist by nature, nor am I even anti-theory; I have always actually been intrigued by the ideology behind most of it, despite its tendency to embed itself in turgid, exclusionary prose. I find Marxism intriguing because the economic lens is one through which we must inevitably view the world, since it permeates our lives so entirely. But cultural economy, or put another way, cultural capital – this is a concept that just turns my stomach.

Explaining the whole thing to Becky, who is herself a Lit student and thus ass deep in all of that theory jazz, I think I was able to put my finger on what I found so difficult about the whole thing: the obsolescence of the style, in its obvious imitation of Marx, cheapened the argument and made the idea itself seem obsolete. Ironic, I think, because the whole point it seemed to make was that the whole theory of Marxism, which proved impractical at least inasmuch as “communism” didn’t pan out, needed to be updated because it was outmoded. Paying homage to him or just raping the original style – couldn’t decide in the end.

What I think got left out of the argument in its rush to explain the commodification of art and the hacker’s responsibility to fill a continuous need for the “abstract” was something Becky and I both agreed lies at the center of the artistic experience: the individual. While I think this attempts to address that notion, I’m not sure it quite makes it, or, more accurately, ends up contradicting itself in its adherence to the language of universals borrowed from our dear old Karl. We’re both reader response people through and through; in other words, we are both big believers in throwing out the application of a lot of traditional theory and coming back to a very basic, personal place. While I agree that commodification can determine what we experience and how we do so, I feel like this is a bit of a cop-out. The personalization of creative experience, both from the creative and receptive perspectives, can only be co-opted so much. Art is not material. And no amount of “vectoralist” intervention will make this so, not entirely anyway.

On a slightly divergent but similar note, I’ve just begun reading Michael Chabon’s recently released book of essays about reading and writing called Maps and Legends. He has some thoughts along similar lines: puts in his two cents about theory, fiction as entertainment, the fallacy of genre, and how much we seek to over-analyze art and categorize the hell of it. A lot more readable (and yeah, I’ll give you that he’s one person whose prose I will consistently pimp for anyone who’ll listen). It felt like a good companion to this piece for me. The essay is called “Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story,” for anyone interested.

A couple things from the essay that stuck me as particularly relevant, for those interested:

With regard to his feelings as to why he reads/writes:
"I could uncork some stuff about reader response theory or the Lacanian parole. I could go on about the storytelling impulse and the need to make sense of experience through story. A spritz of Jung might scent the air. I could abduce Kafka's formula: 'A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.' [...] But in the end--here's my point--it would still all boil down to entertainment, and its suave henchman, pleasure. Because when the axe bites the ice, you feel an answering throb of delight all the way from your hands to your shoulders, and the blade tolls like a bell for miles."

How so-called genre writers of any tack distinguish themselves:
"When it comes to conventions, their central impulse is not to flout or to follow them but, flouting or following, to play."

The Trickster in the evolution of fiction:
"Because Trickster is looking to stir things up, to scramble the conventions, to undo history and received notions of what is art and what is not, to sing for his supper, to find and lose himself in the act of entertaining. Trickster haunts the boundary lines, the margins, the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore. And that is where, if it wants to renew itself in the way the novel has done so often in its long history, the short stort must, inevitably, go."

These are particularly relevant if you are willing to play a little bit with his references to "entertainment" and the "short story" as his ideas gestate.