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The Literary Object or, This Thing of Ours
🕑 Added 2023-06-07 03:00:34 +0000 UTCLiterature is not a subject of study but an object of study.--Northrop Frye
Whenever I have a good idea, I find somebody else has had it before, and expressed it better.
A few years back, I started to get annoyed by people constantly saying things like "love is just a chemical reaction," or that your body (or your self) was "really" just a collection of atoms. (A random collection, thrown together by the wind, it is implied.)
OK, so things are made of smaller things. So what? What permits you to say that the parts are real and the thing the parts form isn't? And why couldn't you just reverse the claim and say that these parts aren't real--or perhaps less real (the adjective is already a metaphysical wormcan)--because they are merely pieces of a greater whole that provides them (perhaps retroactively) with meaning, purpose and provisional existence?
How do we determine ontological priority?
All these claims seemed tendentious and glib and obviously wrong, so just like a real philosopher I came up with a categorical term, like a new mousetrap, to catch all these lil basterds: "The Atomic Fallacy."
Like seemingly every damn other thing, the Atomic Fallacy goes back to the ancient Greeks, namely to Democritus, who came up with this idea that every thing was made out of these little "uncuttable" (which is what "atom" literally means) particles. He was said to have said, "Sweet exists by convention, bitter by convention, color by convention; atoms and Void alone exist in reality."
So he was perhaps the first annoying cretin to say, "Oh yeah, you think you're enjoying that sweet red wine? Well ackshewally, you're merely enjoying a sweetlike redlike winelike arrangement of atoms."
And the second guy likely said, "Well I make mine from grapes," or maybe, "Oh damn, for real? Do you know where I can any more?" (He might have asked of another philosopher, Thales, who was reported to have monopolized the wine-presses.)
Naturally I figured there had to be a counterpart to this concept mentioned above, cases in which objects were denied reality in favor of larger wholes. I called this the "Organic Fallacy." Rather than claiming an object is not real because it has parts, the Organic Fallacy claims something isn't real because it is a part of something else.
Why, I thought, would something have to have a completely independent existence in order not to be reduced to a mere nothing? (A named nothing, as if the language machine had randomly coughed up a spare part.)
I never really developed these concepts much beyond what I have described here, but I since then I have often observed a specifically political application of them.
A classic instance of the atomic fallacy comes from Margaret Thatcher, who was said to have said (I'm not fact-checking this; it's not important to me whether she actually said it), "There is no such thing as society."
The statement is a direct consequence of her Hayekian liberal economic beliefs, which are rooted in the notion that only individuals consciously act, and therefore economics ought only to be concerned with the microeconomic interactions between individuals, rather than with aggregates or with social contexts. Now, it may be a fallacious application of this approach--which is called "methodological individualism," and not "ontological individualism"--but that's not really the point. Liberalism, especially in its "classical" mode, tends toward the Atomic Fallacy, while what generally gets called (by liberals) "totalitarianism," whether of the left or the right, tends toward the Organic Fallacy; where the former wants to defund social welfare programs, the latter wants to revoke individual rights.
So that's how "atoms and the void" frequently cashes out. That's what depends on what things are considered real--or what "is a thing" and what "is not a thing." Ontology matters! Who knew?
"X is Not a Thing": I can't tell you often I've heard this phrase bandied about in the last few years. And it seems like there's always some sneaky little political agenda behind it.
Here's Contrapoints talking about how "The West" isn't a thing:
Here's Historiansplaining 'splaining how "Capitalism" isn't a thing:
So I say, with equal tendentiousness: Everything's a thing. Let an infinity of things go thinging into the night. Every time you deny a thing, you affirm it by your very denial. (You can't say "is not" without saying "is". That's basic Parmenides.)
Forget whether something is a thing, and just ask what kind of thing it is. How is that thing? What that thing do? How it be? Can we eat that thing? With what things shall we defend ourselves from that thing?
"Not a thing" is just blatant reality denial. It's cope.
(By the way, the word "Thing" comes from old Norse "husting," which denoted a council, a thing necessarily made of other things. Literally, it meant "house assembly." So the most basic unit of our quotidian ontologies already contains an assemblage; it is many-thinged. The Germanic version of the word had a temporal connotation, as in "So when do we do the thing?")
Now, we do have this problem with language, where the more abstract a thing is, the likelier it is we may be talking about different things even though we're using the same words. Or perhaps, with a complex thing, different aspects of the same thing. (Unrelated: what's Fascism?)
But I'm not going to solve this one here. Sorry.
Let's do a little case study, relating to my own preferred hobby horse: literature. In 1983 Terry Eagleton's classic critical synopsis of literary theory, called Literary Theory, argued that "English Literature" is Not a Thing. And yet "Literary Theory" somehow is a thing. Or at least was. But it shouldn't be. Or something.
Oh, but before I get into that, I was going to tell you how somebody else had my idea but better. The guy in question is Graham Harman, and he has a very thing-positive philosophy called Object Oriented Ontology. Ooo!
(Harman is a pro, so he uses the word "object" instead of "thing." Now, subjects are also things, but for now let's treat the first two terms as interchangeable. I do have some reservations about OOO, but Harman once liked a couple of my tweets so I'm not going to press that too hard.)
Modern philosophy, and analytic philosophy in particular, has often been very thing-negative, very stingy about things. WVO Quine claimed a preference for ontological "desert landscapes," meaning a world with as few things as he could get away with (only one, ideally), while Bertrand Russell found himself quite bugged in the brain by "Meinong's Jungle," an eccentric ontology in which there are unreal things which "subsist" but do not "exist."
Famously, Wittgenstein claimed that the world was made out of "facts not things." Take that, things! What does this mean?! (If by "things" he means spatio-temporal objects then this may even be a step in the direction we're heading. But I would never reduce the world to facts.)
I doubt I completely understand OOO, or Speculative Realism, the other trend in philosophy Harman is associated with. What's important for my purpose here is Harman's categorization of ontological theories that, as I read it, closely corresponds to my to my own Atomic and Organic fallacies, which he calls "undermining" and "overmining" respectively.
1) Undermining. You can say that objects are a shallow fiction of common sense, and that the real action happens at a deeper level: whether it be tinier components discovered through the sciences, some sort of “pre-individual” realm, an outright blob-like apeiron, a vaguely defined mathematical “structure”, or some other variant of one of these options.
2) Overmining. You can say that objects are a falsely deep and reactionary holdover from olden times in philosophy, based on superstitions generated by noun-verb Western grammar, or whatever. What is real is not individual things, but processes, events, dynamism, surface-effects.
Generally, you find undermining theories in scientific materialism, and overmining in either idealism or social-constructionism. I'll reiterate, this is a generalization.
While Physics originally seemed engaged in an undermining project of reducing reality to subatomic "particles," it seems to have abandoned this for a potentially overmining concept of "fields." Speaking of which, mine it ain't, so I maybe wrong, but there's also another direction it's taken in which the basic unit may be more like Wittgenstein's "facts," or rather, information. This appears to be a form of idealism rather than materialism.
Versions of both Overmining and Undermining abound in political discussions where somebody wants to score a cheap point. Now, instead of responding "Stop gaslighting me!" you can say "Stop Overmining me!"
Harman has explicitly compared Maggie Thatcher's statement that "there's no such thing as society" (a common object of Left derision) with one by postcolonial theorist Edward Said, “There is no essence of the Egyptian people” (which makes them soyface).
The reason for the inconsistency should be obvious: the former supposedly makes socialism impossible, which is bad, but the latter supposedly makes imperialism impossible, which is good.
Politics: just define the object out of existence and you're good to go. Depending on the situation. White People Don't Exist and They're Oppressing Us!
Harman points out that the imperialism does not follow from the fact of an Egyptian essence, but from European claims to thoroughly and definitively know it from the outside. (Actually I don't know if that follows either. Knowledge and occupation track together in modern European (Faustian) history much more than ancient: did the Romans think they understood the Jews in essence? Did they care to?)
This points to another interesting element of OOO: not only are objects in the world real, but there is an otherness to that reality. There is an element in objects which will always remain opaque or alien to one another. This obviously makes any kind of reduction impossible. His favorite example is that of fire burning cotton: the fire doesn't exhaust all of the properties of cotton, just the flammable ones. So too with human thought, which can only exhaust the thinkable aspects of objects.
This sounds somewhat Kantian, and is: Harman is extending the noumena/phenomena distinction, Kant's famous frustration of absolute knowing, beyond the human mind to every-thing in the universe.
What's kind of neat about this notion (Overmining/Undermining) is that it doesn't map on to the tired battle between "The Enlightenment" and "Postmodernism," nor to the Analytic/Continental split in modern philosophy. Hume was as prolific an Underminer as Derrida. "Science" does the trick just as well as any soi disant French word-salad-chopper.
Harman calls his conception of existent objects a "flat ontology." By this, he means that every object gets equal ontological value. But I don't really like this term. I prefer "fat ontology." As opposed to the "thin" ontologies, which try to reduce as many objects as they can. This ontology is well-fed. It's rich and juicy.
So back to Terry Eagleton and Literary Theory. Terry tells that there's no good definition of "Literature." Here's a quick survey of attempted definitions and Why They Fail:
1) "Imaginative" or fictional writing:
This can't be right because literature also includes essays and autobiography (or "creative nonfiction"), and also excludes certain fictional writing like comic strips. "Nineteenth-century literature," for example, "usually includes Lamb (though not Bentham), Macaulay (but not Marx), Mill (but not Darwin or Herbert Spencer)."
One could give a pretty could socio-historical account of this: each of the figures not deemed literary has proven very influential in nonliterary (or non-humanities) fields. Into the merely literary category goes the leftovers. If you become too influential in the sciences or politics, you cannot be literature. Freud was initially seen as a scientific figure, if a controversial one. But the field of psychology went in a different direction (a worse one, imo), so Freud becomes literature. Eagleton using Marx is a bad example though, because I've read Marx in English classes, and I doubt he gets much play in the Econ department. But this has more to do with the vagaries of academia than the essence of Literature. This jostling about of names is as much influenced by the sciences as it is by English.
2) A specialized use of language; the "estrangement" argument of the Russian Formalists, e.g. Jakobson: "organized violence committed on ordinary speech."
Since for the Formalists literature was fundamentally a linguistic phenomenon, they considered literary criticism a branch of linguistics. Eagleton's argument against this is that there's no "ordinary language" at all, in a general sense, for literature to deviate from. It's all a matter of context, or time and place. Quite straightforward discourse becomes archaic in time. Furthermore, "slang" does the same thing. Is slang therefore literature? (Perhaps! Check out GK Chesterton's "A Defense of Slang.")
Another problem is that this definition fits some literary genres better than others. Poetry most of all. (The lyric poem was in fact the literary paradigm for most new critics and influenced the kind of novels they elevated or slighted.) But most of the language in most novels is quite ordinary; if it is a realist novel, that is the aim of its language. Eagleton goes so far as to say that "there is no kind of writing which cannot, given sufficient ingenuity, be read as estranging."
3) Non-pragmatic or self-referential discourse:
This definition is similar to the "estrangement" idea in that it isolates literary texts from ordinary, workaday language. The problem here is that, on the one hand many literary works have very pragmatic aims (such as Uncle Tom's Cabin), and that again this is actually a way of reading rather than a kind of writing, leading us to the brink of a Borgesian meta-poetics.
But it is part of the nature of the Literary Object that it is double-sided: there is a writing side and a reading side. And just because it is possible to read a text in a certain way, doesn't mean that is the most reasonable or likely way to read it.
A piece of writing may start off life as history or philosophy and then come to be ranked as literature; or it may start off as literature and then come to be valued for its archeological significance. Some texts are born literary, some achieve literariness, and some have literariness thrust upon them.
This argument repeats the above situation with various authors' body of work, only with specific texts. But if science can treat of an object like water in liquid, solid and gaseous states, why couldn't literary studies treat a text in various states of "literariness?"
4) "Fine" or highly-valued writing:
This, according to Eagleton, "means that we can drop once and for all the illusion that the category 'literature' is 'objective,' in the sense of being eternally given and immutable." Anything can cease to be literature if we cease to value it, even Shakespeare.
Okay, but does that mean it doesn't exist? Subjective value is also a fact among facts, I daresay even, an object of some sort. Money is dependent on subjective valuation and yet the existence of all of our Things depends upon it. But this is a big ontological and epistemological can of worms that would probably involve dialogue with Austrian economics and Jean Baudrillard, so I'm just going to move on now.
Eagleton brings up an interesting scenario:
Let us imagine that by dint of some deft archaeological research we discovered a great deal more about what ancient Greek tragedy actually meant to its original audiences, recognized that these concerns were utterly remote from our own, and began to read the plays again in the light of this deepened knowledge. One result might be that we stopped enjoying them. We might come to see that we had had enjoyed them previously because we were unwittingly reading them in the light of our own preoccupations . . .
When it comes to cross-cultural or cross-temporal reading I think Our Own Preoccupations are an immutable part of the hermeneutic. But they are not absolute. Once you care about the object, you really care about it, and learning more about it can re-shape what your preoccupations are. I don't really know of any instance in which information of the type he describes ruined anyone's enjoyment.
It can be a little surprising when we learn about the original rough and rowdy context of what we now speak of in hushed tones. Boticelli's Primavera first hung over a Medici letuccio, a kind of bench-chest combo. Classical music audiences in the actual classical era were never as quiet and reverent as they are today. (Also, did you know that you don't have to be quiet during John Cage's 4'33? The score instructs the musicians to be silent, but says nothing about the audience. The content of the piece is derived from any accidental ambient sounds, which as the audience you could surely provide. Just you know, fyi.)
Every pseudo-intellectual turd defending their anime addiction can point out that Shakespeare was not considered High Art in his own time, but now he is. Yet I would retort that it's still not all entirely arbitrary, since we are right and his own time was wrong. We still find him entertaining and perceive his depths. Sometimes. If we apply ourselves.
It's not hard to historicize the concept of literature:
The modern sense of the word 'literature' only really gets under way in the nineteenth century. Literature in this sense of the word is a historically recent phenomenon: it was invented sometime around the turn of the eighteenth century, and would have been thought extremely strange by Chaucer or even Pope.
The rise of 'literature' corresponds so closely to the era of Romanticism because it is a reaction to the industrial revolution & to the rise of utilitarianism and its fact-oriented scientific materialism. It becomes the repository of the "spirit." It "appears as one of the few enclaves in which the creative values expunged from the face of English society can be celebrated and affirmed. 'Imaginative creation' can be offered as an image of non-alienated labor. . . .The literary work itself comes to be seen as a mysterious organic unity, in contrast to the fragmented individualism of the capitalist marketplace . . ."
By now you should realize that Eagleton is a Marxist. I'm not a Marxist myself, but I'm not entirely against Marxist analyses of literature. They have their virtues and their limitations. They are often given to overmining and undermining. Marxism is itself also a product of the 19th-century reaction to industrial developments, and also aims at unity not found in post-enlightenment liberal bourgeois society. If I called Marxism a kind of Romanticism, I wouldn't be the first. I won't make this claim, but I will say it rivals Romanticism in its critical and mythmaking aspects.
Eagleton sees the Romantic idea of the "symbol" as a piece of mysticism meant to regain, if only in the imagination, the organic society lost by the growth of technology, materialism and individualism (although many romantics also had liberal individualist politics), while papering over (pun intended) the exploitation of the working class with an imagined "unity," and perhaps first and foremost warding off the critical rationality necessary for exposing the social order for what it is:
The symbol fused together motion and stillness, turbulent content and organic form, mind and world. Its material body was the medium of an absolute spiritual truth, one perceived by direct intuition rather than by any laborious process of critical analysis. In this sense the symbol brought such truths to bear on the mind in a way which brooked no question: either you saw it or you didn't. It was the keystone of an irrationalism, a forestalling of reasoned critical enquiry, which has been rampant in literary theory ever since. It was a unitary thing, and to dissect it--to take it apart and see how it worked--was almost as blasphemous as seeking to analyze the Holy Trinity. All of its various parts worked spontaneously together for the common good, each in its subordinate place; and it is therefore hardly surprising to find the symbol, or the literary artefact as such, being regularly offered throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an ideal model of human society itself. If only the lower orders were to forget their grievances and pull together for the good of all, much tedious turmoil could be avoided.
My first response to this passage is, "Hey, I resemble that remark!" But I really just think it's a caricature and a false dichotomy. Or at any rate, it doesn't have to be that way. On The Forest of Symbols Podcast, I have brought to bear "reasoned critical enquiry," and a "process of critical analysis," that is certainly laborious to me, if not to others. And yet--I also think that the ultimate meaning of a symbol can not be entirely described by words. It must be experienced. Like God. (Speaking of which, there's been endless theological analysis of the Holy Trinity. It's never been considered blasphemous.)
The most thoroughly "irrationalist" thinker I've encountered is the anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan, who I dealt with in episode 0 of The Forest of Symbols ("Symbolon"). He wants experience of nature without symbolization entirely, not even rudimentary language or number. And he reached his position through the grand leftist tradition of Critique and Theory and Critical Theory and Theoretical Critique.
Also, a society in which, "All of its various parts worked spontaneously together for the common good, each in its subordinate place," sounds rather close to the ideal model of Communism, whereas the ideal mental model for Eagleton, that of rational analysis (from the Greek "loosen up," as in separate the parts from the whole--a bit, at least) is contemporaneous and congruent with Liberalism (which demanded a loosening up--then a noosening up--of the ancien regime).
At any rate, if the purpose of Symbolism was to imagine a spurious organic unity to industrial civilization, the idea of "literature" as a whole was, Eagleton believes, palliative and propagandistic. "If the masses are not thrown a few novels, they may react by throwing up a few barricades."
The masses? Since when did they ever read? Well, Eagleton points out rather interestingly that English
was first institutionalized not in the Universities, but in the Mechanics Institutes, working men's colleges and extension lecturing circuits. English was literally the poor man's Classics . . .
In a reversal of opinion from the elite view in the 18th and early 19th centuries that novel-reading was a plague of the masses (when novels were about as popular as movies and television have been in our time), literature was now seen as a vehicle for diffusion of bourgeois values (like movies and tv):
Literature would rehearse the masses in the habits of pluralistic thought and feeling, persuading them to acknowledge that more than one viewpoint than theirs existed-- namely, that of their masters.
It would communicate to them the moral riches of bourgeois civilization, impress upon them a reverence for middle-class achievements, and, since reading is an essentially solitary, contemplative activity, curb in them any disruptive tendency to collective political action. . . the pill of middle class ideology was to be sweetened by the sugar of literature.
He also points out that this, quite naturally, was the era of high imperialism in England, and that a wartime nationalism (talking WWI here) helped to booster this new discipline. It was supported partially as a response to the Germano-centric discipline of Philology.
Again, I can't help thinking about television, which I've seen in my own lifetime ascend from the status of mass trash to art (the "prestige tv" of Mad Men, The Wire, The Sopranos et al.) But I don't want to digress to far into pop and politics.
The point is that Eagleton has two reasons for abolishing not just "Literary Theory" but English altogether: it has a nefarious political function and it doesn't really exist anyway. You wouldn't think these arguments would bolster each other but you'd be surprised how often this rhetorical double-shot gets used. Instead of "It's not happening and it's good that it is," we have "It doesn't exist and it's bad that it does."
Put simply, he wants to stop studying literature and start studying ideology. But I see no test in which ‘literature’ fails to pass as a coherent object that would not also bar ‘ideology.’
Eagleton describes a real epistemological problem in the field. But he doesn’t take it seriously enough, so it amounts the cheap parlor trick of undermining & overmining. The goal is to get you to think less about the greatness of Shakespeare & more about how capitalism sucks. (Since I am not a retarded teenager, I can do both.)
Another of Eagleton's complaints about the English department and its various theories, which I think has obvious validity, is an incoherence of method.
Literary criticism is rather like a laboratory in which some of the staff are seated in white coats at control panels, while others are throwing sticks in the air or spinning coins. Genteel amateurs jostle with hard-nosed professionals, and after a century or so of 'English' they have still not decided to which camp the subject really belongs.
Here's how I see it: the 'genteel amateurs' belong to the early era of capitalism, mostly the 19th-century but with plenty of remnants in the 20th. This is the era of the rugged individual, the robber-baron, and the gentleman. The 'hard-nosed professional' belongs to the era of managerial corporate capitalism, an era in which the hard sciences have all the prestige. For all their vaunted theoretical differences, the postmodern critic as an archetype is just a kooky version of the New Critic; they wear the same labcoat. We've already moved beyond this era, into, let's call it Silicon Globalism. Mighty as the Sciences remain, they've been reduced to a function of the global economy. And English, along with all the other poor humanities, can only prove its usefulness in terms of political activism.
Literary Theory appears to be dying on the vine, having outlived its usefulness. This is a subset of the larger Crisis in the Humanities, but it has an internal logic to it also.
The problem with literary theory is that it can neither beat nor join the dominant ideologies of late industrial capitalism.
Because there is no "literary object" (what Eagleton, following the post-Saussurean conventions of Theory, calls a "signified"), what literary theory teaches is not a canon but a "discourse," a way of speaking about things. Specifically a prestigiously bourgeois way of speaking about things. The texts to which this discourse refers is incidental.
The discourse itself has no definite signified. The fact that this canon is usually regarded as fairly fixed, even at times eternal and immutable, is in a sense ironic, because since literary critical discourse has no definite signified it can, if it wants to, turn its attention to more or less any kind of writing. Some of those hottest in their defense of the canon have from time to time demonstrated how the discourse can be made to operate on 'non-literary' writing. This, indeed, is the embarrassment of literary criticism, that it defines for itself a special object, literature, while existing as a set of discursive techniques which have no reason to stop short at that object at all.
If literary theory presses its own implications too far, then it has argued itself out of existence.
It's a dubious claim that because a method can be applied to more than just literature, literary criticism isn't valid. It just means that literature is more than criticism, and criticism is more than literary.
But in fact it may be the case that literary theory "argued itself out of existence." It certainly argued literature out of existence. I would be the last to point out that you can't glean any profundities from pop culture. But something destructive happened to the world of letters when English departments turned their theory loose on any cultural object they could. The most influential book for this kind of Culture Studies was Roland Barthes' Mythologies, which appeared in 1957 (in French) and applied structuralist linguistics to novels, films, professional wrestling, ads for soap. Precisely in the bourgeois-debunking Marxist way we might expect Terry Eagleton to approve of, I might add.
Don DeLillo was already satirizing a post-literary academe in his 1985 novel White Noise:
Murray was new to the Hill, a stoop-shouldered man with little round glasses and an Amish beard. He was a visiting lecturer on living icons and seemed embarrassed by what he’d gleaned so far from his colleagues in popular culture.
“I understand the music, I understand the movies, I even see how comic books can tell us things. But there are full professors in this place who read nothing but cereal boxes.”
“It’s the only avant-garde we’ve got.”
This was and is the terminus of an academic "discipline" with an rhetorical array termed "Theory" but no Canon or special body of texts as a "natural object." You can end up reading nothing but cereal boxes. But the next turn of the screw, as Eagleton helpfully points out, is to deconstruct Theory itself.
The final logical move in a process which began by recognizing that literature is an illusion is to recognize that literary theory is an illusion too. . . . literary theory, as I hope to have shown, is really no more than a branch of social ideologies, utterly without any unity or identity which would adequately distinguish it from philosophy, linguistics, psychology, cultural and sociological thought . . . this book is less an introduction than an obituary . . .
So now we have it at last: the moment of overt overmining! I may have to remind you, after detouring from my objective a bit (see what I did there?), of the overminer's basic assumption: "What is real is not individual things, but processes, events, dynamism, surface-effects." Ideological discourse!
But if Literary Theory cannot separate itself off from the other "ologies" as a distinct Thing or Object, then presumably we could perform the same overmining procedure on those other disciplines as well, be they Marxism or Rhetoric or whatever, and be left ultimately with One Big Science. This science may be something like what we have come to refer to as "Science" (and this is, as far as I understand him, the project of the analytical thinker Quine, and is reflected in a crude form when popular science figures like Neal Degrasse Tyson dismiss philosophy tout court), or it may be (all together now, Marxism) which is what I assume Eagleton believes.
Eagleton is not just an overminer, though. His procedure early in the book, where he fails to find a stable body of texts that constitute "literature" always and everywhere, is more like undermining.
This variety of undermining, rather than referring to constituent parts which are more "real" than the supposed object, refers to the fact that these parts change over time or from place to place. (I.e. the parts of the object called "Literature,": the individual texts, which can gain or lose literary status, or can mean different things in different times and places.) So do the parts of your body, and yet the body can still be treated by medicine. Each and every part of you, in fact, changes from time to time and place to place.
If being an object of systematic study requires absolute unchangingness, then lets drop Marx and pick up our Plato. We can go down this road if you want. I ain't scared. But I just don't think it's at all reasonable to say that words like "Karl Marx" or "Soviet Russia" or "Literary Theory" don't refer to anything, which is what such undermining implies. None of things have any more immovable essences than "literature" does. We could go on. Capitalism, socialism, Christianity, Judaism-- I don't think any of things meet the standard. (And note that this is where we began. The "West"? "The" West? That's not a Thing. The West has been different over time and place. The East? Not a thing. To think so is a thing, called "Orientalism.")
These taxonomic problems would still exist in the neo-rhetorical/cultural studies field Eagleton wants to create.
It should now be clear why I invoked Graham Harman's Object-Oriented Ontology. Since literature is invariably implicated in larger systems, of writing, language, myth and history (to name the big ones), it's quite easy to "overmine" it and say that it's just an "illusion" produced by a larger thing that is more "real" than literature. Since the history of literary theory seems to be just all the different ways in which one can do this, Eagleton's book is none too original. To say that if you're studying literature you're really just studying language is both true and irrelevant as it is true and irrelevant to say that if you're studying chemistry you're really just studying physics.
I find myself torn between my deep sympathy with Romanticism (especially in its symbolist and aestheticist forms) and certain strains of Modernism in their demand that we find in Art not just signs taken for wonders or the hope of a better world to come, but the desiderata, the very Thing Itself, if only a piece of it (a shard, which is the original meaning of the word "symbol"), but I also admit the utility of Marxism's insistence that Art not surreptitiously slip past us ideas and impressions which would screw us down tighter to a system that means us harm. But above all, I find myself tone-deaf to those who tell me I have to choose between these two good things.
The word "theory" derives from a Greek word for "spectator." In the theory I envision, objects are neither solved nor dissolved but perpetually turned like jewels in the light of an evermoving sun, creating a kaleidoscope of real images, in which everything old is new again.
Our endeavor shouldn't be ontological reduction but phenomenological elaboration. Questions like "does literature exist" or "does the literary canon exist" are simply less meaningful than questions of how they work, or what they do. This might not in practice be too different from Eagleton's proposed rhetoric, but my guess is that, starting from such a different ontological assumption, it would be. I can immediately think of three precedents from the last century in treating Literature as an object that can be described.
1) T.S. Eliot's conception of tradition, in "Tradition and the Individual Talent":
Eliot famously weights the scale in former's favor, but the real point is that the two exist in a reciprocal relationship, without which neither can exist. I think this is a true description of the relationship between those two terms (given that "Tradition" here is synonymous with "Literature"), but I see it as incomplete, since there are many intermediate literary objects (such as genre) between a single writer and the whole of literary tradition.
2) Northrop Frye's archetypal or myth criticism, delineated in The Anatomy of Criticism:
I see Frye's model as splitting the difference between two modes of European thought: a mostly continental historicism and a mostly Anglo-American empiricism. He borrows historical stage-forms from continental cycle-theorists such as Giambattista Vico and Oswald Spengler, but he makes the cycle entirely internal to literature. The Spring-Summer-Fall-Winter model does broadly map onto the history of literary forms and styles but it's not strictly speaking a historical cycle because all of his forms are present in each of the stages, just in different proportions. (It might be seen as a kind of literary fractal.) Likewise he borrows the term "archetype" from psychologist Carl Jung, but Frye's archetypes are literary, not psychological. Frye is as distant from psychology as New Criticism. His sense of the literary text is actually quite similar to the New Critics, only that for Frye the text in question is not a single literary work, but all of literature. (I am reminded here of Quine's famous quote, "The unit of empirical significance is the whole of science,"; I think this agrees quite well with Frye's grand literary kaleidoscope, but admittedly I understand Frye a lot better than Quine.) Essentially, Frye is the Linnaeus of Literature, and nobody has mapped the territory as extensively as he has. Quite disappointingly, no literary critic has even really followed him along the path. His major acolyte, Harold Bloom, basically swerved left, as we shall see.
3) Harold Bloom's poetics of influence, or "Map of Misreading":
Bloom is the main defender of the Canon in our time, and if he hadn't fallen victim to the culture wars, we'd see his explorations of it in as weird a light as it deserves to be seen. Early in his career he was lumped in with the deconstructionists, while in his latter days he was often as not confused with the neoconservative Allan Bloom. His model of literature is archetypally Jewish (even as Frye's descends ultimately from the ancient Aryan concept of the Yuga, & where Frye appropriated the European historical cycle, Bloom borrows from Kabbalah): a fractious family romance in which rival sons battle for the patriarchal blessing, and in which every text is a commentary on a prior text. His idea of the "anxiety of influence" or "creative misreading" is a double motion of continuity through discontinuity. As in Judaism, interpretation is power. Bloom's favored writers are so many Jacobs prevailing against so many Esaus. Emerson's Israel is the American Mind, while Poe squanders his birthright to become the Jingle Man. Bloom is at the other pole of Eliot, favoring the "individual talent" and, at least equally if not more, the individual reader, to a nearly solipsistic degree.
Of the three models, I'd say Frye's is the closest to what I understand literature to be. Literature as writing is no good, because clearly not all writing is literature, even if I can conceive of exercises that read non-literary texts in a literary way (I have read, for instance, an analysis of the DSM as a Borgesian encyclopedia). Literature as myth is no good either, because myth is conveyed in non-literary media such as oral folklore and film or television. Literature as the intersection of myth and writing, however, I think hits the mark as well as anything could.
Literature is an intermediate zone, and not an autonomous one, but that doesn't make it an "illusion." I don't find it an embarrassment at all that the tools used for literary analysis could be used for non-literary texts, nor do I believe it's required to be hermeneutically sealed off from the rest of life, as it is in Frye. Frye believed what he was doing was scientific, a notion I'm quite skeptical towards. If someone were to say call the models outlined above "meta-literature," which is to say that they too are myths, I wouldn't disagree. (I don't think this is quite the same thing as the "Theory is the new literature" idea that was popular among academic types for a while.) But then, I'm the type of person that believes that science, too, is a myth.
In this essay, which really fulfills the oldest meaning of the word "essay," as an attempt, an initial stab into the darkness, I have largely utilized the more negative aspects of Object-Oriented Ontology, the positive aspects of which I think leave a lot to be filled in, frankly. For that I will have to just recommend delving into his work. The reality of things seems to be purchased at the price of a certain alienation, gaps inserted between them. That would be one problem, but it's one for another essay.
Terry Eagleton wants to get rid of the idea of literature as an object of study so that we can see more clearly the society which makes it. I say, if there's no such thing as literature, there's no such thing as society.
There's been a great deal of resentment against the Western Literary Canon, supposedly because it's a racist, sexist, imperialist, homophobic production of Dead White Cisgendered Males. But I think the real reason is simply that people don't like being told what to read. They should get over it, in my opinion, but I can try for the sake of argument to sympathize with this perspective. What is presented is usually a prescribed list of books: you must read these, all of these, and only these. People understandably balk or bristle at this because, on the one hand it's homework, and on the other it seems subjective: different critics or supposed experts have different lists.
But what if the Canon is something different than a list of important works or some averaged out consensus of such lists? What if instead it is an indefinite number of texts and the relations between them, which together form a real and unified structure which was built by myriads of minds and hands, which is in fact still under construction, so that it is simultaneously ancient and brand new (much like a nation or a people)? I feel as if I ought to present a metaphor for such structure, and my mind brings forth examples both organic and architectural: a garden, a castle, a labyrinth. The labyrinth satisfies for complexity (and perplexity) but a labyrinth is meant primarily to be escaped, even those unicursal versions you find in cathedrals or gardens which are not prisons but are meant for meditation: one way in to the center, one way out to the periphery. Whatever kind of structure it is, there is an indisputable core that includes Shakespeare, Dante, Homer et al. and a fuzzy boundary that may or may not include Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings (in Harold Bloom's opinion) and Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (in mine).
TS Eliot and Harold Bloom, despite their many disagreements, concur that Literature primarily consists of a relation between individual writers and some kind of real object called either the Canon or Tradition. Frye has gone the farthest in literary monism, analyzing the Canon according to a fourfold, a grand mythic mandala with a Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, giving us the basic genres of Comedy, Romance, Tragedy, and Irony. I'm not going to lay out the whole scheme, but if there's any place to start looking at what kind of object literature is, it's with Frye (his metaphor is one of cosmic rhythm, so it borrows from time where my architectural one borrows from space).
Like society, literature is real, although it is as perpetually new as it is old and nobody can fully understand it or define it. And that's a good thing.
