On the Ecstacy of Ski Flying

This week, someone asked in class, “Why do this? Why do theory?” This is an excellent question on so many levels.

The infamous and erudite coffee table tome on the subject, Vincent B. Leitch’s The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, delivers a wonderful “Introduction to Theory and Criticism” that includes reasons about the philosophical fuss over why do theory and criticism at all. Leitch says, “What theory demonstrates . . . is that there is no position free of theory, not even the one called common sense” (1). Even the desire for “no theory” implies a theory. If I understand that whatever ideology I personally bring to a discussion might be called the Ramseyism Theory of Literature, then in the broadest sense I can appreciate, even tolerate, that each of us employs our own brand of theory. But theories have developed into systems with rules for membership in the same way that I gravitate to people who have a similar hobby and world view as mine.

Like minds attract each other. If I look at different schools of theories as groups of people who see the world in a similar way, then it is easier for me to understand why and how these schools form. An analogy resides in sports. I enjoy rock climbing. Some people think I am crazy. On the other hand, I don’t understand why curling is an Olympic sport. Curlers(?) would think me intolerant. However, I can appreciate that curling fanatics and rock climbers prefer to congregate with their coconspirators. The formation of a school of theory is tied closely with the personal world view of the congregation members. But there is a definite practical reason why schools of theory might form.

We are literally suffocating in information. The amount of written and spoken word available to us is overwhelming. Whether or not all of this information is “literature” is for another discussion. But, we need systems to help us manage this body of literature.

Most of us take for granted the systems called fiction, nonfiction, science fiction, poetry, novel, gothic novel, romance novel, short story, drama and so on. Theorists replace these everyday practical consumer driven brands with semi-scientific methods for diagnosing literature. Theorists aim their microscopes at the words of artists, sometimes out of appreciation, but some times out of an almost fetish desire to own the objects of their perusal. This is not a negation, but simply another way of saying that like minds attract each other.

Theory is an academic activity. When I read Robert Ludlum, I don’t use semiotics or post colonial questions to enter the Jason Bourne stories. I read to enjoy and to escape. But I can appreciate where and when theory might be useful. Again from Leitch:

Theory raises and answers questions about a broad array of fundamental issues, some old and some new, pertaining to reading and interpretive strategies, literature and culture, tradition and nationalism, genre and gender, meaning and paraphrase, originality and intertextuality, authorial intention and the unconscious, literary education and social hegemony, standard language and heteroglossia, poetics and rhetoric, representation and truth, and so on (28).

For me, Leitch gives the most compelling and interesting reason for theory as:

In addition, theory opens literary and cultural studies to neighboring disciplines and numerous national traditions. And it reinvigorates the field not only by reexamining the canonical list of great works and the tool kit of basic concepts and methods but also by recasting the received interpretations of old texts and frameworks and by revealing interesting new zones of meaning and possibilities for future critical inquiry (28).

But can theory go too far?

Werner Herzog is the enigmatic and complicated director/artist of over fifty films, including such commercial films as Woyzeck and Rescue Dawn and the documentary Grizzly Man, which chronicles the passion that lead Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend to their death in Alaska. In a 2007 video interview titled On the Ecstasy of Ski-Flying: Werner Herzog in Conversation with Karen Beckman and sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia’s Slought Foundation, Herzog says the following:

. . . efforts by academia to over analyze, vivisect, poetry, literature, cinema. . . When you start to create a climate in some sort, in some niches of academia of over theorizing things and just trying to only find nothing else but structures, as if the structures and the core structure of social behavior, structures inherit in history, structures inherit in psychology, to impose it, to enforce it on literature, for example, it doesn’t do any good to any piece of literature. It does not do good anything to movies (sic). Just try to get away from it. That is my advice.

Because the real wonder about cinema gets lost. The great love for poetry can be trampled, this flame that is somewhere there can be trampled out and extinguished easily. That is a danger. Literature, films and music can give you consolation. The post structuralist will never accept a term like “consolation,” and yet it is there. . . .
I thought about my wife who grew up in Siberia in a dictatorship. Many books were forbidden. And she had a fifteen year old hand copied, a secret copy of Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. The entire text secretly (copied) in long hand. And the school girls would pass it around. That is what we need. That is real reception of literature. That is real agitation.
The post structuralist will stamp them out. We should be very very cautious.

Freud and Lacan aid my deeper appreciation for Peter Shaffer’s Equus. I enjoy thinking about semiotics, structures and the under lying symbols lurking beneath the text of a work of literature like Moby Dick, Hamlet or Light in August. Approaching a novel or play with a postcolonial or feminist satchel of tools forces me to engage with the literature. But I never hope to vivisect, as Herzog says, a novel or film to the point where nothing enjoyable remains. When my analytical process is finished, I want my next casual reading of that text to be richer and better informed because of the analysis and in spite of the analysis. I must take off the theory glasses and feel Herzog’s “consolation and agitation” that the text can deliver.

Go forth and love your literature.