The Fall of Literary Theory. Liana Vrajitoru Andreasen
predicament of economic, artistic, and social bankruptcy.
I refused to believe the rumors. True, theory had uncovered in literature and other cultural artefacts insidious hidden agendas of various sorts of hegemony, and it offered no antidotes. But ugly truth is still truth, right? Besides, colleagues discussed my novels with me in terms of some of these theories, and I learned a great deal from them. Theory was taking a beating, but I was convinced that it was not down for the count. Someone with better skills than I surely could get it back on its feet and in fighting form again.
Liana Vrăjitoru Andreasen does so in this book. She pushes us to reconsider questions such as: What should be the practical effects of literary interpretation? What should theory, or any kind of critical apparatus, do for readers? Most importantly, she insists that such questions cannot be separated from one more fundamental—what is literature? Andreasen rightly sees that every important work of poststructuralism or postmodernism forces these questions, and if we are in a post-theory era, have we abandoned the questioning to which literature, by any estimation, naturally leads?
Andreasen makes a brilliant and thoroughly original move by showing that we can use theory to auger towards the essence of literature by engaging the categories of identity and fallenness. Literature is largely about identity and how the many forms of identity are illuminated by the questioning inchoate in literature. The questions, however, are only the start. As each stratum of linguistic concealedness is scraped away, the remaining substrata crystallize in response, requiring ever-sharper shovels to break through to the central, ultimate meaning of a work.
Such an endeavor cannot, of course, reach fulfillment. Andreasen explains that our failure to find completion in our literary archaeology is due to fallenness. Her selection of this term is an ingenious example of retrieval, which is largely what this book is about. The obvious connotation is a biblical one in which humankind is fallen from grace and lost its divine immediacy. For anyone raised in or touched by the Judeo-Christian legacy, is not this fallenness exactly what literature addresses? Without it, why the Bible? Why the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Ibn Rushd? Why the Divine Comedy? Why Paradise Lost? Patching the wound created by religious fall is not restricted to outright religious works. With no notion of human infirmity and the limits of reason and writing, would we have Hamlet, Don Quixote, Candide, Crime and Punishment, Heart of Darkness, The Waste Land, Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, or the works upon which Andreasen focuses, Billy Budd, Absalom! Absalom!, and The Crying of Lot 49? Each of these pushes identity to its literary precipice, beyond which it plummets.
The other sense of fallenness Andreasen draws upon is from Heidegger. In Being and Time, Heidegger deems Dasein fallen to its core, rejecting its “ownmost” identity for an ersatz notion of self that is defined by das Man. We relinquish our authentic selves to “the they,” so that any possibility to own our future is covered up, buried in anonymity, and nearly impossible to excavate. In his later works, Heidegger speaks of fallenness in a broader sense, of how the original sense of awe of presocratic philosophers that signaled the birth of philosophy has been lost and of how the history of thought itself—the ability to ask fundamental questions about the nature of Being—has been usurped by calculative thinking endemic to our technological age. For Heidegger, phenomenology is the auger that can bore through Dasein’s fallenness to the existential structures that make possible its authentic identity (a process that he calls fundamental ontology) as well as the balm for reversing the concealedness of thought to its restorative sense.
The thinkers whose work led to poststructuralist and postmodernist theory were immensely influenced by Heidegger. Andreasen is well aware of this connection and how those theorists moved beyond the boundaries of phenomenology to develop their own notions of how to ask questions about the nature of Being through the medium of literature yet succumbed to their own distinctive kind of fallenness. Perhaps theirs was a series of failed projects, but the failures were nevertheless grand ones that left clues to how they can be rejuvenated to help us return to literature without plunging into the endless maelstrom of fallen identity. Andreasen convincingly argues that we can reverse theory’s failures, but we may have to make a few sacrifices and amend a few assumptions about what literary criticism is all about.
Theory is not dead. It was at an earlier time no match for an opponent such as fallen identity that carried the freight of era upon era of writing. Like a skilled boxing coach, however, Andreasen knows her fighter’s strengths and weaknesses, and has studied the same in the opponent. She has devised a new strategy hitherto unforeseen and has secured a rematch. I know where I shall place my bet.
Ron Cooper, College of Central Florida, author of Hume’s Fork,
Purple Jesus and The Gospel of the Twin
PART I
BRINGING BACK THEORY
INTRODUCTION
WHERE HAS THEORY GONE?
In times of confusion, people want answers and seek comfort in the strength of conviction. Whenever there is uncertainty and a shift in the precarious balance of power, there are many who will embrace those with the strongest statement. It is no wonder that, along with the advance of new ideas, there is a parallel stream of terrified people swimming against the current and trying to hold on to their respective versions of social values. They conjure, mostly from an idealized past, their preferred methods of re-centering the axis mundi, or rather a retroactively-proclaimed golden age that would turn back the clock and erase the confusion brought by change. In the United States, “Make America great again”—the campaign catchphrase that, no doubt, had some contribution to Donald Trump winning the electoral vote in 2016—reassured a lot of people that the center can push back the racial, gender-based, or other threats. At the dawn of the 21st century, such threats have been edging closer with the advent of a black presidency, or the legalization of gay marriage, among other manifestations of the unrelenting need for change. In every age, power pushes back when the disempowered take steps toward that mythical center, and the tug-of-war, just like earthquakes, exposes fault lines of absolutist thought.
The fault lines need to be turned into momentum, or else when the quaking subsides a new “greatness” emerges, resurrected from the past, congealing power anew in its appearance of absolute stability. After, say, an event such as Vietnam, once the fault lines of imperialistic ideology were forgotten, it was easy to plunge the country into other unjustifiable wars, such as the post-9/11 wars targeting questionably defined enemies in the name of re-stabilizing Western values.
Who, one may ask, is responsible with exposing the fault lines? Who makes sure the center does not recoil and regain its appearance of eternal stability? In the 60s, the academia managed to shift from the dry terrain of abstract dialectics and various philosophical critiques of idealism to a more practical incarnation that broadly gained the name “theory.” Drawing from psycho- and socio-linguistics and earning legitimacy through applications in literary analysis, “theory” quickly spilled over into the streets, with Jacques Derrida marching along with the hippies and demanding the de-centering, de-construction of traditional structures of power. The fault lines, or rather, the cracks that expose the constructed nature of power have always been there in one form or another, and people are quick to cover them up if the change seems too abrupt. In the middle of the second decade of the new millennium, many rushed to embrace the phrase “Make America great again” because it is frightening to think the center is unstable. A sweeping, purist, idealistic phrase such as “great again” implies both the fear of being insignificant (falling from an assumed former greatness), and the belief that the past holds the key to regaining significance. I have no doubt that, if society today seems in danger of becoming too certain of its center again, “theory” can be useful once more (after falling into a slight disgrace), as it was in the 60s and 70s, as the tool for exposing the constructed—and violent—nature of power.
At the height of its popularity, literary theory, or criticism, seemed to have taken over English departments to the chagrin of those who believed it to be a fad. Poststructuralism was expanding in different fields, shattering walls and causing confusion, while its close kin, deconstruction, was the ultimate test for true scholarship: does one, or does one not “understand” it? Is