Abstraction and Self-Bludgeoning

In case the title hasn't already tipped you off, abstract thinking makes me want to bash my own brains in. That's really the short version of this post, so if you don't care much more beyond that, read no further. (See, this is what I've been telling my students about audience: hook them at the start, make sure you appeal to them, state your thesis up-front, and if they don't care, fuck 'em. I do, in fact, practice what I preach sometimes.)

Being an English major is great for two big reasons: 1) so many people think of reading as entertainment or diversion, so the prospect of receiving monetary compensation by participating in such an activity is both mind-blowing and wonderful; and 2) the field encompasses so many different areas that you're bound to find an area of great interest and be able to make exciting new headway in that direction.

As one might expect, though, with this freedom and expansiveness comes the need for some self-limitation. I consider my professional specialty to be 19th-Century British literature, but I frequently read things outside my field both for critical purposes and for pleasure. (See my running commentary of recent reads for indisputable proof.) Granted, some of this is the result of class requirements, which is in all academic disciplines the nature of the beast. But even if I were a rabid fan of science fiction, American Modernism, Romantic poetry, Renaissance drama, and post-structuralism, the truth remains that pursuing them all in a professional career will leave one hopelessly behind all those fields and an expert at none of them. Thus, specificity.

The hardest part of the task of specificity is narrowing down one's likes to the far smaller set of one's loves -- and, in the ultimate test of professional commitment, narrowing the set of one's loves to the (usually single-membered) set of critical and publication-worthy interests. The easy part, by consequence, is figuring out what it is you don't particularly like -- or, even easier, what you don't want to do for the rest of your life. For instance, I like Chaucer but I'm not especially fond of the rest of Medieval lit: that's out. I'm a grammar freak, but I don't really want to teach or write on grammatical properness (or even impropriety) until I'm settled into a pine box: that, too, is out. Even one's loves -- contemporary fiction, for instance -- can be quickly discarded when one considers that the skills he brings to Modern, Post-Modern, and other such "weird" texts may not be sufficient to allow for eventual expertise.

For me, though, I've decided that the single easiest thing to knock off the list of potential specialties is theory. Why? Because it's a complete enigma to me, one that is wrapped in so many layers of further mystery and riddle that its messages, conclusions, and even purpose cannot in any way be elucidated by my feeble, insufficient mind. It sails way over my head, like a fly ball you think you'll be able to catch but ends up buried in the cheap seats of the upper deck. I swat feebly trying to grasp it, but it just never seems to work.

It must take a special kind to truly appreciate theoretical work, which only confirms my belief that I'm not special at all. Consider my adventures, this week, with a single theorist, Jacques Derrida, in my Introduction to Graduate Study class. In no other class have I yet experienced reading that is so dense and practically unintelligible that I can read 10 pages, put the book down, and confidently say aloud, even in an empty room, "Okay, seriously, what the fuck did he just say?"

My frustration with theory is two-fold. Firstly, it's such an inextricable part of what we as English majors do -- because, really, how can you deconstruct a text if you're not familiar with the tenets of deconstruction, and how can you possibly hope to enter the modern critical conversation if you don't know precisely what the critics are doing to a particular text? The ends justify the means by necessity, but they don't make any kind of sense on their own because theory is like reading your reading of a text, which takes things to (in my opinion) an excessively meta-level.

This is not to say that a solid knowledge of the history of theoretical discourse is not a useful, practical part of a solid liberal arts education; I'm just saying I can bring a lot to the text without reflecting that it's coming from, say, the school of New Criticism. What I bring to the text reflects my own feelings and assumptions, my own doubts and expectations, and a critical eye that is deep, wary, and always, always skeptical. Reading like this works for me, and I have no idea into which school of theory that falls. And frankly, I feel it works better for me. It's useful to know what trends in theoretical discourse inspired the approaches of the teachers that have in turn inspired the frame of mind I bring to texts, but I don't feel it's a necessity to successfully read a text in a critical sense.

The other frustrating part about theory is that it's so goddamn abstract. Theory, by definition, is theoretical; it involves seeing beyond the structure to see the underlying structure of the structure itself. For instance, not just why Rousseau said what he said, but why the language of Rousseau is constructed in such a manner as to render his argument contradictory. That's just way too much for my feeble brain to handle.

I read. I like reading. It's fun. I enjoy reading critical essays as much as I enjoy reading primary texts because it's like a peek behind the curtain while a magician is performing: for once, the master lets you in on the trick, or the observer is able to see the smoke and mirrors and explain how it's done. That, to me, is truly fascinating, particularly since I fancy myself to wear the always-dangerous double-brimmed hat of a writer and a critic. Seeing how, for instance, A.S. Byatt established the metaphor structure of the two novellas in her Angels & Insects helps me see my own writing in a new light, helps me plan better for getting past those first few sparks of inspiration (something I'm still struggling with) and actually creating a complete, dense, complex, and engaging work of art.

What doesn't help me do that is having to grapple with looking at the structure of the structure, of seeing why the magician used a particularly kind of cross-beam in his props and how that beam helps us to understand the box as a whole. It's a kind of literary carpentry that, frankly, doesn't interest. I don't give a shit how the box was built, but I'm intensely fascinated with how it works and how that working reflects on the magician as an artist and performer. Surely, the design of the box says something about what the magician planned, but is it really all that important to know why he chose balsa wood instead of mahogany? Not really, I don't think.

Theory, to me, concerns itself with so many intricate details that it takes much of the fun out of reading. Derrida's critique of Rousseau, from Of Grammatology, highlights this perfectly for me. Why concern ourselves so much with the intricacies of things that are not so obvious when there's a whole world waiting there in the words themselves. Granted, some will say that it gives new light and meaning to a reading, but too often theory concentrates on what's not there instead of what's staring you down on the page itself. That's both frustrating and, to me, counterintuitive to my task. I'm trained to see words for their meanings, and to see what is and isn't implied by a choice of diction: that's a more-than-fair expectation for a critic. But why consider the "knowledge that is not knowledge at all" when the page presents us with so much to know and work with. And what the fuck does that mean anyway?

Theory will always remain a paradox to me, I fear, and perhaps then it's appropriate that I should finish by criticizing the paradoxes that appear too frequently in theoretical discourse. It's a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't kind of game to me: I must be conscious of it, I must learn to use it, but I must reject it because it confounds things that otherwise have great clarity to me. But I don't have to like it, and I'll go on record as saying I don't. Theory, I'm sure can be useful, and will be throughout my professional career, but as far as I'm concerned, I need theory like I need a cudgel to the cranium.