#3 The Literary Beyond the Referential

Three literary critics went to the James Joyce one evening for drinks. It had been awhile since they had seen each other and they were in the mood to tell stories. Stephen Greenblatt, a well-known Shakespearean told a story about a piece he’d come across about a Chinese goldsmith who was brutally tortured. Gayatri Spivak, inspired by the story's racial imperialism, shared one about a young migrant governess named Lucy. The third critic, Eric Hayok, couldn’t let go of Greenblatt’s story and pointed out all of its holes. Spivak, feeling slighted from lack of attention, stormed off. The two men remained going around in circles about literary forms and history.

         The anecdote can be a useful entry point. Or in Greenblatt’s words: “the anecdote has at once something of the literary and something that exceeds the literary, a narrative form and a pointed, referential access to what lies beyond or beneath that form” (5). Obviously, my weak attempt at an anecodote could hardly be called “literary” yet, it provides a brief (while fabricated) summary of the critics’ essays. Of course they are modified to fit my goals, similarly to what Greenblatt did in his anecdote, which then Hayok devoted his chapter to exploring as well as complicating Greenblatt’s usage. One of the problems, he finds, with Greenblatt’s assumption that Scott’s story is so upsetting is that he arrives there through historical anecdotes on race.

         Hayot distinguishes his argument from Greenblatt’s by extending it: “[j]ust as the anecdote points us to the referential beyond the literary, so does it point us to the literary beyond the referential” (Hayok 49). Greenblatt works within a horizon of social relations to approach the Scott story and uses the interaction between the goldsmith and the torturerers to provide a framework on which to critique the situation. Hayok, however, points to the metaphorical language as being the driving force to convey meaning. He uses the example of reading about pain and its effect on the reader occurring through a threefold process with metaphor, metonym, and identification, finally resulting in a “constructed fiction of that pain” (52). It seems, then, that Hayok implies that the problem with approaching the goldsmith’s story empathetically (because it is painfully provoking) is that it could potentially complicate our reading of it. While his argument contrasts somewhat from Greenblatt’s, he still works within the horizon of social relations, but from a linguistical standpoint rather than a historical or cultural, as Greenblatt did.

         Spivak’s main point seem to tie in with Hayok’s regard of the anecdote, or text as in Spivak’s case, as the literary is beyond the referential. On the surface, she points out, Lucy can be read as a diaspora novel where the heroine is on an identity quest. The complication is found, however, based on the novel’s paratactic structure. Parataxis works by affecting the structure to emphasize the absence of conjunctions, or detachment the protagonist experiences. Further, “[p]arataxis [operates] between the mindsets of the colonizer and the colonized, but also bewteen species-life and species-being—being nature and being human” (Spivak 266). While this sentence can be interpreted in many ways, I think that in relationship to Hayok, the referent here is the dichotomy of mindsets (offset by the paratactical structure) and the literary existing beyond the referential. In other words, the structure of the text serves to emphasize the meaning while simultaneously containing it by the confinement of words on the pages.