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Rewrites (2)
Classic Gin
Thursday, 2005-12-01 | Classic Gin
A rather apt analogy has just come to me.
Think first of all scholarly discourse: all expository writing: as exploratory writing and thus as a sort of exploration. Remember that an exploration is a kind of journey. In exposition, one begins in one place (i.e. the blank page) and ends up in another place (i.e. the filled page, the conference, the newsmagazine TV show, the presidential panel). Later, he might reflect on parts of his journey and, in doing so, alter his memory of them by relating them or articulating them to the whole (i.e. edit his writing).
We can identify and name journeys by recognizing something or things about those who are on them: the pilgrim's raiment is threadbare and humble, the soldier bears his weapons and armor and we identify the sojourner or the refugee by the fact that he travels in a group and carries all of his possessions with him.
Once we have identified what sort of journey a given traveler is on, we understand what sort of origins he can claim and what sort of destination he has. A traveler might be on a pilgrimage, the warpath or an exodus: in each case, he is on a journey that presupposes a specific point of origin and expects to end at a certain kind of destination. When we meet a pilgrim on a pilgrimage, we understand that he has been obliged to hit the road by the gods of his house
or his nation. When we see a soldier on the warpath, we understand that he left from the barracks and his destination is the battlefield (or vice versa). When we identify a traveler as part of a group of sojourners, we understand that he and his are fleeing one place and seeking a place unlike it.
We can tell much about the beginnings and the destination of a given journey from the name we give it or that the traveler gives it.
Various kinds of writing, and we usually name them for their genre, are analogous to types of journeys. We can tell, once we have identified the traveler by what he outwardly expresses, where he began and where he expects to end up (or would like to end up).
Consider the smallest unit of writing in which a genre can be identified, the axiom: the writer sets about asserting and denying certain claims in a few sentences. We can tell from what he asserts and what he denies where he began (with the desire to assert XYZ) and where he intends to end (with the desire to deny ABC). Next, think of something slightly larger: the anecdote or memoir. The anecdote, because it intends to convey the details of an event or events in
order that others might appreciate a given interpretation of the significance of the event or events (i.e. the author's interpretation), is a journey with a beginning and ending. The author sets about the task of conveying a tale and, gods willing, he will have conveyed it by the end of his story.
Following this logic, we can see how increasingly larger bits of writing are analogous to journeys. The travelers on these various journeys demonstrate outward characteristics and these characteristics tell us much about them and the task that have set themselves to. Novels, essays, librettos, etc.
The postmodern analysis/critique is one such journey. We can identify it by the writer's pressing need to <93>reclaim<94> verbs and nouns: to redefine them in order that they might be appropriately (i.e. appropriate for the argument) understood: and a insistent/manic positing of an Other that is radically resistant to our characterizations because our cognitive processes and, indeed, our very language is wholly alien to that which it would describe and therefore irrelevant to the question of how or why this Other exists. We can also account for the destination of such a journey. By the end we expect that a person who bears such things with him on his journey plans to end up in an uncertain place, a place of uncertainty where the familiar has become unfamiliar and the unfamiliar has become unknowable.
What is most telling about the postmodern Odyssey, however, is what we can discern about where the journey begins. It begins in a familiar place, with the modes and mores of a criticism that sought to draw our attention to generic concerns and structural parallels (formal structures, semantic structures, etc.). The sort of criticism we're describing then, by leaving the familiar realm of genre application and structural understandings and then demanding that no
thing should ever be familiar again, appears to be an irrational lashing out at authority: a temper-tantrum.
Imagine the fulminations of an eight year old who hasn't gotten what he wants. He says, <93>you are not my family! I do not have to listen to you! I am running away and I am never coming back!<94>
We know, of course, that he will probably be back before nightfall, before the cards are really on the table and he has to decide if he is really going to forsake what is comfortable and familiar for a life of sleeping in ditches and eating from garbage cans.
This is all, of course, simply an analogy to keep in mind the next time you have to slog through some stultifying postcolonial text about the deleterious totalizing influence of pronouns or a similarly numbing Feminist screed about the social structures engendered by phallogocentrism; the nefarious influence behind all symbols of masculinist oppression and such staples of the phallocracy/androcracy as the rectangular structure that stands perpendicular to the ground, the undeniable connection between the shape and the grammatical function of the majuscule <93>i<94> and the self-centered, single, ejaculatory which the venerable Aristotelian superstructure has enshrined, elevated, valorized, etc..
The affected and ultimately totally untenable rejection of one's own upbringing: the emotional outburst that signifies the angst-ridden teenager in contemporary cinema and clinical literature: is what postmodern criticism is.
The next time they ask you to define it, lay that one on <91>em and watch their guilty consciences rush to the fore.
