post 3

Farah Khan- Blog Post 3

In this week’s blog post, I’d like to focus primarily on Greenblatt’s “A Touch of the Real” to work through and really understand what he is getting at here. Right from the get-go, I was reminded of last week’s class where we touched on the insecurity that we often find within the field of “literary criticism.” Those who are in literature or English departments are and have always been insecure about their field, which leads to a lot of effort to try to prove that we are doing is scientific, it is objective, and it helps us come up with ideas that we can absolutely prove. I think this brings up more than a couple problems- the most significant being the obsession with objectivity. The more we work through these readings the clearer it becomes that there is actually no such thing as an objective or universal reality or truth, yet many of the essays we read still seem hung up on finding the objective truth and proving it through literary analysis (whether they come out and say it in so many words or not).  Greenblatt starts out by quoting anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who throws literary critics a bone by saying that anthropologists must analyze more like literary critics than “cipher clerks.” Greenblatt’s ensuing discussion of Geertz is centered around bring literature in contact with “reality.”

            Much of this revolves around the distinction between thin description and thick description; a thin description “merely describing the mute act” and a thick description “giving the act its place in a network of framing intentions and cultural meanings” (Greenblatt 21). This brings us to the question of what sort of texts we can use in order to conjure up a “thick description.” The anecdote is offered up as something that is “as Geertz puts it, ‘quoted raw, a note in the bottle.’ As such, it is meant not only to convey the idea of the ‘empirical’ (as distinct from the philosopher’s ‘artificial’ stories) but also to arouse the bafflement, the intense curiosity and interest, that necessitates the interpretation of cultures” (Greenblatt 22). There is an emphasis on finding texts- specifically anecdotes- that are used as “raw” or untouched empirical truths- in anthropology, for example, this could be an uncensored story recounted in an ethnography that has not been tampered with by the anthropologist. Assuming that the anecdote has not been touched by those who have collected it, the idea is that we should then be able to work with the anecdote to come up with more generalizable ideas about the culture as a whole that the anecdote comes from. This is where the thick description comes: “Thick description, as Ryle uses the term in his essays on thinking, entails an account of the intentions, expectations, circumstances, settings, and purposes that give actions their meanings” (23). So, basically, a thick description is a description that situates a text (or an anecdote) in its culture of origin. However, as Greenblatt explains, Geertz’s understanding of “thickness” is less centered on the description than on the object being described. “Thickness no longer seems extrinsic to the object” (25). So, Geertz comes up with the argument that any type of cultural significance or generalization that can be included in a thick description does not really come from the description, but rather is inherent within the text itself. “Part of Geert’z power was his ability to suggest that the multilayered cultural meanings by which he was fascinated were present in the fragments themselves” (26). So, from what I can understand,  this is where the idea of the “real” comes into contact with “literature.”  Assuming that the anecdotes or texts we are working with are “raw,” we can also assume that they are made out of pieces of the “real.” Geertz’ referencing to the “real” emphasizes the point that things that make literature important are often not literary. This also begs the question of what exactly is literature? Greenblatt is most interested in what looks like a reflexive relationship between “real” and “literature.” It seems obvious that literature is shaped and created by the culture it emerges from. And similarly, literature has an impact on the people in that culture, as well. For example, a poet will bring their own lived experience into their work. Similarly, the poem created by said poet will have an impact back on its audience. As Greenblatt writes, “The greatest challenge lay not simply in exploring these other texts – an agreeably imperial expansion of literary criticism beyond its borders- but in making the literary and the nonliterary seem to be each other’s thick description. That both the literary work and the anthropological (or historical) anecdote are texts, that both are fictions in the sense of things made, that both are shaped by the imagination and by the available resources of narration and description helped make it possible to conjoin them; but their ineradicable differences- the fact that neither is purpose-built for the other, that they make sharply different claims upon the actual, that they are incommensurable and virtually impossible to foveate simultaneously- made the conjunction powerful and compelling” (31).