The Three Literary Pigs of Postmodern Criticism

Here is some good news. Spotlight: An Up-Close Look at the Artistry and Meaning of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Novels is off to the publisher and should be available for purchase at Amazon.com in a few weeks. I’ll post information here, of course, when that happens and what you can do to pre-order the book if you want an autographed copy before Christmas.

Something I cut out of Spotlight was my defensive explanation of why I thought the two avenues of interpretation I took — iconological and, for lack of a better word, psychological — were better than other more conventional approaches. I left this out because I thought a positive explanation was sufficient justification for the four layered “deep mining” and dream interpretation I give Mrs. Meyer’s novels.

But I thought I’d discuss here the three accepted approaches to reading books critically, what I call ‘The Three Literary Pigs,’ that are prevalent in the academy and in public reviews today. Understanding how professional book readers analyze and categorize a work of fiction is helpful in understanding why Twilight gets such dismissive and flippant treatment from critics as a rule despite stratospheric sales and reader following. Sadly, these consensus driven approaches tell us nothing about the meaning, artistry, and power of the Twilight books, specifically, and all reading, really, in general.

The Three Literary Pigs: Deconstruction, Taxonomy, and Aesthetics

From this critical layman’s perspectives, there are three approaches to text that rule the roost in the Ivory Tower barnyard and in the provincial enclaves of periodicals. Let’s take a brief look at each to see what they tell us about the experience and joys of reading.

Deconstruction or, as often, Post-structuralism is, as you might guess from the word ‘deconstruction,’ the analysis or breaking-down of text. Instead of moving from compounds to chemicals, though, here we start with the idea of text as a whole vehicle of meaning and artistry and break it down into a collection of linguistic particles or an assemblage constituting a social artifact. The purpose of this faux linguistic laboratory scientism is to reveal how the work, like every work or text, includes irreconcilable internal meanings that render the whole essentially meaningless. Wordsworth noted that we “murder to dissect” and his words were never more worthy than when applied to the exercise of literary deconstruction.

The attempt to bring to humanist endeavors something of the authority (and funding?) of the “hard,” physical sciences is transparent in this attack on metanarratives that is even on the surface contradictory and politically motivated. Is not the deconstructive exercise itself in need of deconstruction and meaningless? Why is it that all texts not explicitly Algerian or about Affirmative Action or anti-Archie Bunker are texts which are colonialist, racist, and misogynist?

More to the point, this heady approach to text essentially ignores the real world experience of the reader who the deconstructionist assumes enjoys the book, play, or poem only insofar as each confirms his or her prejudices. A truly liberating text, a consciously meaningless one, is almost by necessity unpopular because it does not play to the audience’s preconceptions about self and ‘other.’ Deconstruction cannot tell us why people enjoy books because it is a critique founded on people using books only to confirm their own prejudices; the only good literature is what will disturb and confront rather than delight and edify its reader or audience.

Literary Taxonomy has not been part of the public, published curriculum in University English departments to my knowledge but it makes up in sway among popular critics, unfortunately, for what it lacks in visibility. Taxonomy proper is the mechanical science of sorting animals and plants into a hierarchy of categories. To review what you learned in high school biology, the most important of these categories are, with human qualification in parentheses: kingdoms (animals), phyla (vertebrates), classes (mammals), orders (primates), families (hominidae), genera (homo), and species (sapiens). When Linnaeus set up the first classification of animal and plant species, this was largely a way of seeing in detail and great order the ‘Great Chain of Being’ and hierarchy whose pinnacle was Man, the ensouled image of God.

Literary taxonomy is not so ordered or open in its hierarchy of value as Linneaus’ biological taxonomy, but it is as absolute in its classifications. At the peak are Canonical Works, especially those sometimes given passes on political correctness because they are accepted as the most real, vital, important, or evolved species of writing. Next to these ‘Greats’ of poetry, prose, and stage-craft on the heights, are the modern or literary novel, with the works of James Joyce, Proust, and Faulkner constituting something of a pantheon. All other literary genres of our times are as far from this summit as a panda bear or an oak tree is from homo sapiens sapiens. Which is to say, “a long way away.”

A list of works in descending order of merit begins with Shakespeare at the summit with his fellows Chaucer, Dante, Spencer, Milton, and Cervantes among the Medieval unassailables, followed by Swift, Blake, the Romantic, Gothic, and Victorian ‘Greats,’ with special deference for the Lake Poets, Poe, the Brontes, Austen, and Dickens. All of these, of course, are still subject to small rebukes for their PC insensitivities and crimes against the Progressive world-view.

From this height, we take one step down to the Moderns and the beginnings of the Literary Novel. From the great Russians, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Pushkin, we arrive at the ‘lost generation’ novelists – think of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck – who enjoy a special place at this plateau beneath the summit but poets like Eliot, Stein, and Pound are giants demanding special attention. Joyce, Proust, Lawrence, Miller, Faulkner, and Orwell overshadow even them.

Beneath this group and the names we all were exposed to in Survey of English Literature classes, we find the literary novelists per se of the post war generations. Here think of Salinger, Updike, Plath, Nabokov, Bellow, Borges, Marquez, and Mailer, and those writers anointed by Yale’s Harold Bloom as the greats of our time: Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy and Don DeLillo (with admiration for A. S. Byatt and Jose Saramago). The only rivals such writers have to the esteem of literary critics and academics like Bloom are the existential playwrights and novelists like Beckett, Camus, and Satre.

I don’t believe, with the exceptions of Catcher in the Rye or Lord of the Flies forced on them in high school classrooms, that most folks not pursuing degrees in Literature have ever read anything by the majority of these writers. To find those books people actually read and love we have to descend from the thin air of the literary novel pinnacle to first the lower elevation plateau of literate but suspect Christian writers and then into the plains of genre fiction.

And it should be noted here that this jump is the great divide between “heights” and “valley” in my mountain metaphor for literary taxonomy. Christian writers from MacDonald, Carroll, and Chesterton to the Inkling Titans Lewis, Tolkien, Sayers, and Williams are considered laudable by most critics and beloved by readers but, because of their faith, they are somehow deficiently “serious” to be ranked with the Greats.

Surveys at millenium’s end for a ranking of “Greatest Novel of the 20th Century” uniformly found two victors: academic lists were topped by Joyce’s Ulysses and popular polls had Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. The breadth and depth of the divide is so great that Tolkien’s fantasy masterpiece did not even make the Random House list of the century’s Top 100 novels.

Beneath the Inkling greats are the various types of writers and writing usually dismissed with the patronizing tag of “genre fiction.” Here you will find the published work that keeps book stores and publishing houses in business: fantasy and science fiction, detective mysteries, courtroom drama, techno-thrillers, horror, children’s literature (especially serial fiction), graphic novels, and, at the bottom of the heap if often the top of sales charts, romance.

Writers in these categories may receive some critical attention, but, just in belonging to the category of writing that is accessible to readers and marketed for commercial success, they are as a rule not taken seriously as artists. As reviewer and author Lev Grossman suggested in his Wall Street Journal Piece with the contrarian title, the assumption is that “good books, real literature, has to be hard.”

This unofficial and arbitrary sorting of fiction into a never explicitly acknowledged hierarchy would be laughable except it is taken so seriously as a gauge of merit by critics. A few naives like Mr. Grossman are willing to tell the critical club’s naked Emperor that his preferred novels don’t sell relative to those books he disdains. As we can see in the vicious and visceral response to Mr. Grossman’s common sense plea-for-plot, the Emperor is quite happy in his nudity and established hierarchy of merit. Twilight, as a young adult romance novel, per se, cannot and will not be taken seriously because it is in the classification of literary taxonomy the equivalent of a tapeworm or house-fly.

Which brings us back to the irony of Stephen King calling Mrs. Meyer a “terrible writer.” This is borderline hilarious coming from Mr. King because he is the exemplar of the genre writer neglected by critics because of genre revulsion, the reflex rejection of work not high up the taxonomic ladder. The difference between him and Mrs. Meyer isn’t quality of writing but that he writes “horror stories” and she writes “Young Adult” romance fiction.

Doubt that? As I’ve mentioned here before, the Dean of American letters, Yale’s Harold Bloom, had nothing kind to say about Stephen King’s winning the National Book Foundation Award:

The decision to give the National Book Foundation’s annual award for “distinguished contribution” to Stephen King is extraordinary, another low in the shocking process of dumbing down our cultural life. I’ve described King in the past as a writer of penny dreadfuls, but perhaps even that is too kind. He shares nothing with Edgar Allan Poe. What he is is an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis.

The publishing industry has stooped terribly low to bestow on King a lifetime award that has previously gone to the novelists Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and to playwright Arthur Miller. By awarding it to King they recognize nothing but the commercial value of his books, which sell in the millions but do little more for humanity than keep the publishing world afloat.

Mr. King is not a literary novelist or playwright like Bellow, Roth, and Miller and is therefore unworthy of critical attention. To Prof. Bloom, if writing horror genre slop wasn’t sufficient reason to disregard King as a writer, his success with millions of readers certainly is.

The great part of this, especially in light of Mr. King’s saying Mrs. Meyer, like genre hack Erle Stanly Gardner, is “successful [but] a terrible writer,” is in King’s response to critics who dismiss him as a terrible writer He believes, contra Bloom, that good sales demonstrate empirically that he is a talented writer. “If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn’t bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.”

“Genre revulsion” means simply that a reader cannot get past the icing on the cake. The surface of the story, through which layer of meaning all the others must come, puts off the critic because it is too low in the hierarchy of merit established in the salons of postwar literary fashion. Take the critical reception of Harry Potter, a classic example of genre revulsion.

If Harry Potter is Schoolboy fiction and Anthony Holden in the UK thinks that genre is “in the weariest tradition of English children’s literature from Tom Brown’s Schooldays on,” then it’s no surprise that he hates Harry. Holden has only disdain for Ms. Rowling’s core genre, which makes him think of Hogwarts as “a neo-Dotheboys Hall, complete with such arcane rituals as weirdly named hierarchies and home grown sports with incomprehensible rules” and the Potter series as ”a tedious, clunkily written version of Billy Bunter on broomsticks.” Harold Bloom, too, the Shakespearean scholar of our times, is blind to the alchemical drama in Ms. Rowling’s Schoolboy books because her “ultimate model” is Tom Brown “reseen… in the magical mirror of Tolkien.”

As tired and pedestrian as snobs may find Schoolboy fiction or serial books like Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys, those genres are classics to be venerated and imitated compared to horror, pulp mystery, and Young Adult romance. Mrs. Meyer might as well be writing Archie comic books.

This view is changing, fortunately. Not only has Ms. Rowling’s writing stood up to critical review when it was given, with whatever hesitation, but serious readers and writers are leaping genre barriers like never before, as Mr. Grossman made clear. We may be finally emerging from the era in which only overwrought “modern novels,” realist and psychological pieces by the writers Prof. Bloom admires, are thought of as literature.

Personally, I disagree with both Bloom and King about the meaning of sales as an indicator of a writer’s talent or of any book’s value. Dickens was more popular than any writer of the 19th century and his reputation among critics has only improved with time. Sinclair Lewis was bigger than Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930 but is now largely forgotten by readers and despised by critics.

Really, the whole idea of a “literary taxonomy” or “Genre Hierarchy” is ludicrous upon examination. The briefest look at critical tastes in past times and the ‘Greats’ having been neglected during their lives by contemporary critics as “slop” shows this ranking to be not an absolute science but a reflection of prejudices of the times. Taxonomy is academic fashion not physical chemistry.

Shakespeare, for instance, was just another Elizabethan playwright until his revival in the early 19th century by critics and artists such as Coleridge and Dickens. And Dickens was destined for the ash heap except for 20th century champions like Chesterton and Joyce. The absence of poetry in even academic or critical tastes today, too, while its central place in English literature and even popular reading through the Georgian and Victorian eras made it the biggest block to the critical consideration of the novel as a legitimate art form, speaks to the self-important blindness of prejudice against popular genre writing today.

And, in relation to my argument, sorting books according to this taxonomy based on academic fashion tells us exactly nothing about why people read or what they get out of the experience of better books. If anything, it is an obstacle to clear thinking or reflection.

Aesthetic Criticism: The last of the prevalent measures of a book’s goodness today is a simple aesthetic judgment of any work’s seriousness. It is largely a sense of difficulty, eloquence, or majesty in the writing. I only mention it because it seems to be the greater part of the reviews written for newspapers and magazines, i.e., those readers actually look at.

Check out this dismissal of Lev Grossman’s questioning the naked Emperor’s discerrnment:

To be fair, [Grossman] goes on to say, “Meyer is doing something very very well, or at least giving people something they really really want, and I don’t think we have a good critical vocabulary yet for talking about what that something is.” She might be doing something well, yes, but writing isn’t it. That’s why a lot of people who are literary and/or like good writing don’t think much of her.

Well, yes. But Grossman’s point was that, this being the case, why do millions of people love the books? Is the point of literary criticism only to anoint those books as acceptable which meet certain relatively arbitrary standards of “majesty”?

An aesthetic judgment by definition is a purely subjective measure, and, I think, is most likely only a reflex judgment of how high any text places on the hierarchy of genre listed above. A novel’s obvious proximity to or distance from the truly literary novel, which is to say,

• its being a psychological exploration of our postmodern lack of objectivity or our subjective experience of the world,
• the consequent collective and individual amorality of our times, and
• the tasks involved in getting on or getting by as nihilists,

are the gauges of its value as art and writing. The short-cut litmus strip is simply difficulty in understanding the work or if it leaves the reader feeling desolate.

Critical aestheticism and its celebration of inaccessibility has had a funny echo in popular literature’s rival fandoms. Readers who adore Tolkien’s Middle Earth epic, neglected as it has been by the academy relative to, say Faulkner or Joyce, look down their nose at Joanne Rowling’s Hogwarts adventures because Harry Potter lacks the majesty of Tolkien’s language and, supposedly, the depth of his themes and meaning.

Potter maniacs, not to be out done, rarely have anything kind to say about Twilight, the genre and lowliness of “romance fiction,” not to mention the “quality of writing” being so much beneath them. So what if the heart of Potter fandom thinking for the greater part of a decade was whether Hermione preferred Harry or Ron? Potter-philes know “romance” fiction is trash the way Tolkienites know schoolboy novels are junk and Pynchon readers know fantasy, even epic fantasy, is for the nursery.

Again, though, aesthetic criticism and this reflex literary snobbishness beyond its inability to provide a standard for what constitutes magisterial prose (besides being difficult to understand and an attendant obscurity in meaning) yields no insight about why people read. None of the three literary pigs — deconstruction, taxonomy, and aestheticism — provide a language or framework that explains the manias for certain books or the continued popularity of reading itself.

For that I think we need to understand why people read and which books satisfy this need. I explain in Spotlight, as I have in previous books, that Eliade’s thesis that fiction serves a mythic or religious function (and that books brimming with anagogical meaning and symbolism of some weight will be the most popular, consequently) is spot-on. I add here an argument from Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism and his spectrum of story types, myth to realist, that the best stories are sufficiently realist or natural to be credible but include idealized types or actual supernatural elements to cause the reader, disbelief suspended, to experience the suprapersonal qualities of myth. Frye calls this initiatory and inviting idealized middle ground between realism and mythos “Romance.”

Understanding Twilight as an example of both Frye’s “Romance” and a paranormal Harlequin “romance” explains the greater part of the delight her readers have in the books. The reason that TwiHards go head over heels into these adventures, frankly, is the exact reason critics despise them; they are as easily entered and spiritually engaging as myth or story can be (think “comic book” archetypal experience in contrast with modern, literary novel grittiness). Spotlight’s iconological and dream interpretations of Mrs. Meyer’s books bring that out in a way that the Three Literary Pigs of Deconstruction, Literature Taxonomy, and Aestheticism do not and cannot.

Your comments and corrections are coveted, as always.