Why Your Theory of Reading Matters
It actually affects everything
“Of all the ‘simple’ plots and actions, the ‘episodic’ ones are the worst. By ‘episodic’ I mean a plot where there are scenes disconnected from one another, and which are unlikely and unnecessary. These types of plots tend to be written by bad poets because they cannot help it.” Aristotle, Poetics 1451b
Aristotle’s Poetics is still popular amongst screenwriters and producers. Many people will recognize the Greek tragedy (the primary subject of the Poetics) as the ancestor of the modern film industry. Aristotle described a number of tenets about the nature of tragedy that were profoundly influential on the development of literary theory which is one of the most consequential areas of human thought that exists.
But if you are the sort of person to think that the terms “literary theory” or “literary criticism” are either scary or useless, you might want to reconsider. Literary theory is actually at the basis of everything. Everyone who reads, consumes media or participates in internet debates has a literary theory.
If you want “proof” of this, just go look at the way difficult court cases about cultural/societal issues are decided (e.g. questions about how to interpret the US Constitution). The arguments can often boil down to “what is literally on the page” vs. “that wasn’t what was really intended by those words.” No matter the outcome, someone is mad about the interpretation that led to the outcome.
What about the bad movies coming out of Hollywood that everyone loves to hate? Those are a product of bad literary theory, and they do have quite a palpable effect on society. At the very least, the profusion of boring and preachy films from Hollywood/Disney/Pixar has provoked a lot of discussion about what even constitutes a “good” film, or a “good” story.
The problem is that there are as many opinions about this as there are people, and we can’t even agree on basic definitions about what some words mean. And when we can’t even agree on what words mean or on the notion that words mean things for reasons external to ourselves, we are experiencing difficulties on the basis of literary theory.
But for the sake of clarity, let us backtrack for a moment. “Literary” in this case means anything to do with literature and the written word, and that can also encompass how you interpret mundane communications as well. However, depending on your understanding of the word “literature” you will have a very particular view about words themselves, and about meaning, and where meaning comes from.
The parties that generally like to campaign to “rethink,” reinterpret, reclaim, or even reject literature tend to be persuaded that the literal words on the page are not necessarily binding to one particular context, and that if we apply various lenses to our vision, we can see new and exciting things. We can gain new perspectives if we put on the “queer” lens or the “intersectional” lens or the “oppressed minority” lens. It doesn’t have to be completely invalid in all cases, but it can go too far if the tint of the lens stops you from seeing things that are there, or causes you to see things that aren’t actually there. An ever-present danger.
The main problem is simply that establishing the validity of one perspective over another is difficult. Perhaps what you see through the lens is interesting or maybe it even illuminates one aspect of something, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s binding on anyone else who has a different lens. And everyone has some kind of lens through which the observe these things. Some are clearer than others.
The parties that like to campaign for the preservation and respect of literature as it exists do tend to affirm the notion of “Truth” as it exists outside of us, and as it can be affirmed or discovered outside of ourselves, or by means of our faculties. However there can still be disagreement about how “Truth” can be apprehended, and the role that our faculties play.
There is a lot of philosophical legwork that one must do to flesh out the differences between these two groups but I hope my gross oversimplification will suffice for the nonce. If you are reading this substack, you likely belong to the latter group, though I do not necessarily assume this is so.
Here is my overall point: the way you understand language is determinative of how you interpret everything around you. Literature is the logical end point of language, and literature forms the foundation of a culture (and I think I can fairly say that all our various forms of media today are a part of that literary cultural foundation). Thus a society’s way of interacting with their literature is going to have a lot of downstream effects on how people think about anything.
A lot of the deconstruction of language that many of us complain about is ultimately downstream from what goes on in the realm of literary theory and criticism. There is, as you may or may not know, an entire literary theory called “Deconstruction” that was founded by the French philosophy Jacques Derrida in the mid-20th century, building upon the existing threads of existentialism, structuralism (more on that in a moment), and Marxism.
Deconstruction has emerged alongside a number of other literary theories such as “Post-Colonial Theory” which is a near descendent of Marxism and was championed as such beginning in the 1960s with a book called The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, or Edward Said and his book Orientalism which was published in 1978.
Post-Colonial Theory is especially relevant in literary study because it holds that colonized (and subsequently decolonized) people groups will develop their own identities that are intertwined with the subjugation and oppression that they experienced at the hands of their colonizers or oppressors. The name of the game in post-colonial theory is to try to view the world through the lens of X colonized group.1
It’s a somewhat reconstructive and, by its very nature, speculative pursuit because the oppressed groups often don’t write things down. Those times when members of oppressed groups do write things down are thus very precious, but also subject to interpretation that may or may not be a priori committed to certain assumptions if one is not careful. A written account from a member of a colonized or oppressed minority isn’t always as simple as the theorists might wish.
We are invited by post-colonial theory (or even intersectionalism, if you are familiar with that term) to imagine the experience of the minority and oppressed or underrepresented. It’s not a bad impulse since we ought to have compassion on those who have suffered, but in the realm of literature it is also difficult to do without falling prey to one’s unexamined assumptions.
This is, nonetheless, a theory of reading, and it has affected pretty much every aspect of our cultural discourse. It has bled into how films are made and how new literature is being written. We prize the perspectives of the oppressed minorities, and search for it in everything that we read to the exclusion of any other factors.
That’s how literary theory makes its way into cultural discourse and fuels arguments and endless YouTube video essays. “A rose but by any other name…”
The other thread that has wound its way into our everyday modes of thought is deconstruction, generally rooted in the thought of Jacques Derrida, who was in turn influenced largely by Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of “structuralism” which was a dominant mode of thought in the 20th century intellectual scene. It was and remains a theory of reading because it affects how we understand words and language, and thus also literature.
The ideas most pertinent between these two thinkers can be boiled down thus:
Saussure taught that words fit into self-referential structures. For example, the meaning of the word “hot” is defined against its natural opposite “cold.” This is perhaps a bit of an oversimplification, but that’s the first “gist.” If we make it a little more complex, we see that words are defined against each other even when they aren’t strictly binaries. The meaning of words is constructed from other words in a “closed system,” so to speak.2
Another example is this: we tend to think of “dog” in terms of its cultural opposite “cat.” We use phrases like “they fight like dogs and cats.” There is an eternal cartoonish enmity between dogs and cats and we eventually just grow used to seeing them as natural “opposites,” defined against one another. Saussure judged such things to be arbitrary societal distinctions that we become acculturated to as we live in a particular context.
This idea has enormous consequences intellectually. The basis of language is now internally determined and not based on anything external to language.
Derrida builds on this foundation by consciously “politicizing” the language game. Not only is meaning internally and societally constructed, it also revolves around power dynamics.3 It is taking Saussure’s structuralist view of language and recasting it in Marxist terms. Power structures become the means by which words come to have meaning. He who uses the words most effectively wields the most power. Hence language is about power without any need for an external referent.
This combination of Saussure + Derrida has lent itself well to post-colonial theory, as I said above, which focuses heavily on the voices of the oppressed and the minorities.4 These intellectual threads have all come together (with the threads of Freudianism and Existentialism) in recent years and affected pretty much everything. We now societally believe that words have meaning only insofar as people can agree to use them a certain way. Thus the war over “pronouns” is really just a variation on this same theme. If we can just get enough people on board with using our preferred pronouns, we can then affect societally-determined “truth.”5
It’s not particularly new, I hasten to point out. Plato’s dialogue Protagoras and Cratylus revolve around this question. In the Cratylus particularly the question of “how words mean” comes up. The central question is whether words are determined by societal usage or because of some inherent quality within the words themselves. No definitive answer is achieved.
Aristotle’s “answer” to some of this comes in his work Poetics, which is largely a description of what makes the best tragedies in his own time. He also has a fair amount of discussion of what language is, and the different kinds of language possible, such as metaphor and what constitutes “common” language versus “elevated” language.
One of the maxims that comes forth most strongly from the Poetics is simply that a literary work ought to be appropriate to its genre and subject matter. That is, if you are writing a tragedy, you should use language that is appropriate for the writing of a tragedy.
Now, the things that Aristotle describes in particular are verse forms and concerns of Greek dialects and vocabulary that aren’t relevant to the lay person. But there is an underlying principle that is broadly applicable and should be drawn out from the discussion about iambics or whether one should use specific “common” words. That principle is this: the language and plot needs to be appropriate for the situation, whatever it is.
The situation (say, a tragic plot) simply exists and there are ways of relating to that tragic situation that “fit.” The effective poet writes to reflect that situation as it is, not how he wants it to be.
This may be one of the most important things that we can draw out of Aristotle’s Poetics. A tragic plot is a tragic plot. Let’s just say for a moment that that tragic plot is “reality” in this paradigm. The world as it really is. Language exists to describe that world as it really is. If this weren’t true, then we really have absolutely no reason to get angry about bad movie plots and unfunny jokes. Clearly there is something that underlies it all and language exists somehow to describe it and relate to it. A movie (in our context at least) fails when it simply doesn’t reflect what is.6 We don’t resonate with it because it’s just not reflective of anything we perceive to be real.
This means that the language in a great tragedy by a master poet isn’t just self-referential words being used cleverly in a power play. Such a concept is rather alien to the bleakly fatalistic worlds of Greek tragedy. Instead, the language comes together with a well-constructed plot to describe a tragic situation appropriately and to reach the hearts of the audience appropriately. A tragedy, or any work of literature, thus becomes an immersive experience that reflects something true and real, even if that is something spiritual and outside of our sense perception. That is why the masterpieces of literature just ring true, even when we don’t know why.
This quote from a favorite Bob Dylan song came to my mind as I was writing this:
“Then she opened up a book of poems
and handed it to me
written by an Italian poet
from the thirteenth century.
And every one of them words rang out
And glowed like burnin’ coal
Pourin’ off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you
Tangled up in blue.”From “Tangled Up in Blue.”
Bob Dylan, the American poet-troubadour, seems to understand this resonance. But for this Aristotleian vision of literature to work, it helps if we admit that there is more than the merely self-determined language at work that seeks to gain power.
A Deconstructionist interpretation of a tragedy would see the operation of tragic language as a manipulation of its audience. It cynically plays upon emotions through emotive and elevated language. A great artist is not much more than a master manipulator. That’s how we treat artists now, certainly.
But you could see it another way: a great masterpiece of literature is one built on this concept from the Poetics: metaphor. “Carrying across.” Aristotle describes it as finding “likeness” between things, and the mark of genius is someone who is able to find the likenesses between things [1458b. ff.]. Ultimately that’s all that great literature and art is: describing what something is like.
If adjectives exist to tell us what nouns are like, the poet exists to tell us what stories are like. It creates bridges between seemingly different things that exist outside of ourselves. The aptness with which a poet can create these bridges of meaning is the marker of his genius.
The genius of the tragedy Macbeth lies in the fact that William Shakespeare depicts what happens when a man tries to win a crown and loses his soul. The story of Macbeth is like a man (any man) choosing hell and damnation; the plot and setting of Macbeth are important but ultimately incidental to the notion that this is one of an infinite number of ways Shakespeare could have chosen to tell the story of a man choosing to sin and reap damnation.7 That’s why it is so bone-chillingly effective.
Not unlike the Iliad, telling us through Achilles what it is like to choose death and glory over long life and obscurity.
The genius of Oedipus Rex is that Sophocles tells us the story of what it is like to be spiritually blind to reality, and the horrific consequences that can ensue. Euripides’ Bacchae pursues a similar theme through the Pentheus the king of Thebes who willfully ignores the reality of Dionysus’ existence, and persecutes the god’s followers.
Most people, whether they realize it or not, have fallen under the spell of Deconstruction, and Post-Colonial Theory, and Structuralism. We now just assume language and stories are things we use to manipulate ourselves and each other. That’s why Hollywood feels so compelled to preach sermons on Progressive dogmas in their films, or why some segments of the Christian world are so insistent on using literature as a way to manipulate children into good behavior. We think it all exists to manipulate, but it’s fine as long as we manipulate people in the way we think they ought to be manipulated.
The reason why everyone is so unsatisfied with this is simple: very little of what is now calling itself “literature” and “art” embraces that it is there to tell us what something is like. It rather embraces the idea that it exists to manipulate people.
If an artist tapes a banana to a wall, what kind of likeness is he making? It seems like such an artist is more interested in communicating all the unlikenesses rather than a likeness. The result is confusion because there isn’t any real meaning in it. At least a painting of fruit or a seashore is a likeness of something that exists in nature. The meaning comes from its likeness to that thing in nature.
So I think there is at least one foundational assumption in the Poetics that can be helpful for us now, and even expanded beyond Aristotle. Great art consists of being an effective “likeness” to something that exists outside of the language or medium itself. Language is an imperfect medium. Oils and watercolors and pencils are imperfect media, but nevertheless we use them to grasp at something beyond us, and ideally something vertical rather than merely horizontal. The painter’s skill usually lies in his or her ability to create a likeness through their medium.
The Iliad and Oedipus Rex and Macbeth and Canterbury Tales and even Harry Potter all resonate deeply with us because they strike notes that ring true even when we don’t know why. We perceive spiritual likeness just as much as we perceive natural likeness. We always respond favorably to paintings that look just like its subject. We respond favorably to literature that is like those things that we all perceive somehow.
But what this means is that art, particularly literature, exists not to manipulate but to show us what reality is like. All we need to do is be humble enough to behold it in silence, and let it do the rest.
“The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.” Matt 13.31-32 ESV
This idea of course as a close descendent of Marxism has partly fueled the various waves of the LGBTQ+ movement and provided their philosophical justification for claiming status as an oppressed minority, while a lot of the sexual ethics underpinning the movement are descended from Existentialism and Freudian psychology.
The “locus classicus” of this idea is in this book by Saussure, originally written in French. I first encountered this book in a sociology course I took in my undergraduate studies.
I derived my understanding here (such as it is - Derrida is very difficult to read either in French and translation) from his article “Plato’s Pharmacy” in his book Dissemination, first published in 1983. This article helped me understand what he was getting at, though it may not be the “best” place to start with Derrida. I have primarily been interested in how Derrida interacts with Plato’s language theory.
This is not a bad impulse, certainly, since it is tragic that world empires have such a long, bloody history of mistreating less powerful people groups. But the usual “solutions” to the problems posed by post-colonial theory or Marxism tends to be just as morally repugnant as the original actions that provoked the theory in the first place.
I think one of the best philosophical “answers” to this, although chronologically it happened well before Derrida wrote, is Wittgenstein’s language theory as developed first in Tractatus and then in Philosophical Investigations. Language is rooted in something external, and can even be mathematically and abstractly represented.
One might be tempted to argue, “but what about science fiction and fantasy? Those aren’t reality.” They are no less filled with stock plots and stock characters and archetypes, and yet they come to have a function that points to things beyond our immediate perception. The Chronicles of Narnia are the most clear example of this; that series depicts the difference between the earthly and the heavenly, and what it means to belong to a spiritual kingdom. C.S. Lewis also manages to draw these themes out in the Space Trilogy, but he is far from the only author who can so clearly show them. Even skeptical authors like Isaac Asimov or Terry Prachett catch these resonances, perhaps without really knowing it.
This point is not original to me by any means, but I arrived at it by a combination of Angelina Stanford, Northrop Frye, D.W. Robertson, and Harold Goddard. Reading literature, art and even architecture “spiritually” in this way is a very central aspect of Medieval and Renaissance literature especially. Robertson’s book A Preface to Chaucer does a fantastic job describing and proving this.