Books continue each other

A charming explanation of literary theory before I propose my anti-theory

One thing I love about not being in graduate school is that now I can enjoy the things I read. Being in graduate school is like being an ambitious courtier at the court of a European king – every action must have purpose, every comment must be strategically designed to curry favor with some professor or demonstrate one’s own prowess to fellow students. And then, of course, there’s the literary theory.

A “theory” of literature is sort of like a pair of x-ray glasses. You use the glasses to “read” (with special theory meaning) the text, to understand it from a specific angle, so that things that may have seemed unimportant before suddenly appear as part of a new network of meaning.

Imagine, for example, that all your life you’ve been looking at your sister. You know quite well the color of her hair, the shape of her eyes, the freckles on her shoulders, the curve of her fingernails. But, one day, someone gives you a pair of x-ray glasses and all of a sudden you see her very differently – as a network of bones, as joints gliding soundlessly past each other, holding up the flesh you see with your unaided eyes. This is the kind of thing a theory can do for a text.

Say that for years you’ve been in love with The Great Gatsby. You admire the elegance of Fitzgerald’s prose, you feel connected to the characters, you like the look of Gatsby’s house lit up for a party, you feel Gatsby’s longing for Daisy as he stares at the light at the end of her dock.

Robert Redford as The Great Gatsby

Then, one day, someone shows you a “Marxist reading” of the novel. Karl Marx, of course, was the writer of the Communist Manifesto, who talked a lot about the exploitation of labor and which groups control the means of production in a society. He begins, famously, by claiming that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.”

A “Marxist reading,” then, uses Marx’s claims about class struggle, the means of production, etc. to look for new kinds of connections in a text. Doing a Marxist reading of Gatsby works like looking at your sister through the x-ray glasses: the reading doesn’t change what’s on the page, just as the glasses don’t change your sister’s body, but the level, the angle, at which you see connection has shifted.

Gatsby under x-ray

In a Marxist reading of Gatsby, you’re suddenly paying attention to the significance of money and social class in the novel, in a way you never have before. You begin to see Jay Gatsby, not just as himself, but as a man who grew up poor, then made a fortune in ways Fitzgerald never clarifies, struggling to be accepted as one of the rich. You see Tom, the husband of Gatsby’s love interest Daisy, as a man who owns the means of production. If that’s true, then the contest between Gatsby and Tom for Daisy’s affection is not only about the characters, but also about class struggle, because rich (Tom) is pitted against poor (Gatsby).

The thing about theory is, one text can be read in a variety of ways, just as you might have different pairs of glasses for looking at your sister’s skeletal, circulatory, nervous, and limbic systems. (Just pretend these glasses actually exist, ok?)

I’ve just done a light Marxist reading of Gatsby, but it would also be possible to do a psychological reading, applying the principles of psychology – of Freud or Jung, for example – to the behavior of the characters in order to figure out why they do what they do. It would be possible to do a historicist reading and see every element of the text as a historical detail, helping readers get a clearer picture of the Jazz Age. It might be possible to do a feminist reading of Daisy and Myrtle, Tom’s mistress, and to examine the restrictions put on them by their society and by the men in the text. For any style or color of theory, there’s a way to at least attempt to use it to find new meaning in a given text.

But if, like me, you are also a lover of stories for their own sake, you probably already see the potential danger in literary theory. As deeply interesting as these different theory readings are, as useful as the different sets of glasses may be, they do have a tendency to obscure the experience of the story – just as a vine using a tree for support might eventually strangle the tree.

If done judiciously, a Marxist reading of The Great Gatsby might help us see a fresh, new way of thinking about the role of money in the story. If overdone, a Marxist reading might completely obscure Gatsby and Daisy and Tom as people in order to insist that the novel is just one of history’s calls to workers of the world, an urge to cast off their chains and unite.

An anti-theory

As a writer and reader – as a live-er with and lover of books – I tend to resist any interpretive force that would take me away from the story and the characters. I’m much more inclined to look at connections from the inside of a book, from the way the parts of a text work together. In other words, I end up preferring the tree to the vine, my unaided perception of my sister to the view through x-ray glasses.

So I would like to propose a bit of anti-theory. And in this I mean “anti” in the sense of opposite or balance, as in “antidote” or “anti-matter.” Anti-theory is meant to “prevent, cure, or alleviate” the careless destruction of story.

In my own thinking, I borrow a line from Virginia Woolf: “For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.”

“For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.”

Woolf wrote this in A Room of One’s Own, as a way of claiming that women’s texts are inter-connected. Her premise is that the day-to-day emotional lives of women had been left out of much of Western literature, at least up to her lifetime in the first half of the 20th century, and she claims that a woman’s novel picked off a shelf in the British Library was an inheritor of the work all other women writers had done before her for decades.

Granted, Woolf was speaking primarily about women’s books continuing each other – but I see no reason not to apply her observation to literature on the whole. And to our modern-day versions of novels and epic poems, films and television.

When we create, we draw on our deepest experiences for inspiration and direction. Our warmest or most exciting feelings of love, our darkest feelings of despair, our sharpest memories of the slant of light on a winter afternoon. And when we have to whittle these feelings down so they fit into words, we reach for the best words we’ve read or heard. Our books continue the books we’ve read in the same way a child continues a parent, or an acorn continues an oak. The individual is distinct and different, but the continuity is unmistakable.

When I was in college and graduate school, the feeling seemed to be that, in order to be truly great, a writer needed to free herself from everything she had ever read, to be completely unique, to, in effect, create herself and her text from nothing. Following ideas articulated by Harold Bloom in his 1974 tome The Anxiety of Influence, literary theorists believed that writers, especially poets, had to throw off the shackles of all previous literature before they could write something truly worth reading. They had to, like Oedipus, kill their fathers before they could become king.

But what if the relationships between books are precisely the point? What if literature is less like a war of succession and more like the footrace that passes the Olympic torch?

Imagine: instead of a single torch-bearer, or even ten or twelve, there are hundreds. Each writer is a runner with a particular intensity and color of flame, who has the ability to carry the flame only so far. The routes of influence criss-cross the world, covering all languages and cultures. There are no straight lines, no master plan. When one writer has finished the race, another may see his torch and take it up, and that writer may transform the color, the height, the intensity – the cadence or the language – of the flame.

At the very least, thinking of literature in this way is a chance for writers to feel less alone. To think of the greats who have gone before us as our teachers, perhaps even  our “cloud of witnesses,” rather than our competition.

Read more with Books continue each other, part 2 and Homer’s torch