Ok, I must admit, my title is pure, dramatic nonsense and probably has nothing to do with what I'm going to talk about. Well. Maybe. We'll see, right? I kind of like these blogs because they feel like they could be very free form and exploratory, so sometimes I discover halfway through my post that I did actually understand the readings halfway!
Let's start with Greenblatt's articles. I like this overall idea of expanding the canon, that everything can be considered a "story" through this idea of anecdote. As someone who has done a lot with periodical literature, I appreciate the idea that even the smallest news bulletin could have the same capacity as a one-line poem. However, then Greenblatt raises this idea of truth or lie: "How can we be certain that what Scott reports in the passage I have quoted actually took place? The answer is that we cannot...it is not enough to differentiate it from fiction, and there are no other formal features that enable us to secure such differentiation" (14). What is this obsession with keeping things "literary?" In Greenblatt's statements, I see the stirrings of a cultural class war. If Scott's discourse was a lie, then that makes it less than. But, if we are intent on having two classes, fictive and real, what changes in our analysis of either? In my own work, I tend to think of the object of my analysis as discourse, what people are saying and what language they are using, so whether it's true or not seems irrelevant. Even if it was a lie, discourse can circulate, proliferate, and shape beliefs, so that should still make it an object worthy of analysis, right?
Then, in "A Touch of the Real," Greenblatt reveals that the purpose of the anecdote is to stabilize the canon: "The anecdote was a way into the 'contact zone,' the charmed space where the genius literarius could be conjured into existence" (48). So, instead of really revolutionizing literary studies, Greenblatt argues that that the anecdote does expand, but it also reifies. Here I realize that anecdotal theory isn't really focused on methodologies for interpreting objects, but rather a theory that comments on the politics of our field. Greenblatt doesn't really see the aesthetics of the anecdote, but acknowledges that the anecdote serves to make the aesthetics of the canon more stable. This "contact zone" allows us to see the relationship between the two objects in a very binary fashion.
Hayot, I think, rightly makes Greenblatt's binary into a "narrative triangle" (44). Though he's not as concerned with canonicity as Greenblatt, he introduces a third discourse into the reality/fiction relationship: "the major shifts in cultural understandings of the meaning and value of the human, of sympathy, and of suffering that occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries" (44). Hayot refers to a third possibility of reference other than Scott's actual experience or fictive imagination. By introducing the idea that Scott's text reverberates with these other texts, whether or not it is true, Hayot draws attention to the constructedness of the language itself. He says it better when he says "The placement of this anecdote into a network, part of a general accumulation of such event-texts, aims to mine the anecdote's referential weight while recognizing the experience of such weight as itself already caught up in the projections of narrative" (47). So inasmuch as we take a novel to be "true" (it shows us something true about the attitudes of a culture or whatever), we also recognize it's heteroglot personality and thus, we should do the same with the anecdote. Instead of regarding the anecdote as a individual source of truth, an empirical observation, we can remember that it has an author and that author is a participant and recipient of many other discourses.
What does that mean when we look at a text in the Hayot fashion? Well, for one, it means that we don't have to authorize ourselves to speak for the Chinese man as Greenblatt posits. Rather, it means we can take that silence and recognize it as part of a historical narrative about the Chinese and let it speak for itself. While this reveals much more to us about the white man, we are much more able to see the hidden power of the Chinese goldsmith, the thing that makes the white man want to silence him.
I'd also picked up on Greenblatt's comment that, for Scott's account to be disproved would make it a lie, though I'd read it totally differently. I took it to mean that it would be a lie not because fiction was less than reality, but because he had claimed that his story was a work or non-fiction, and because the labels "true" and "false" are only meaningful in reference to non-fiction as a genre. (To an extent anyways. Fiction can certainly ring false, but generally speaking its relationship to truth is much more complicated.) In works that are classed as non-fiction, there's quite a lot at stake regarding the accuracy of the story. For a work of non-fiction to be proven false fundamentally changes it. In fiction, there is no expectation of historical truth, and so the fact that something is known to be inaccurate does not dramatically alter the way that we think about the text.
ReplyDeleteRegardless of the difference in our reading, I do think that your idea about how this denotes the difference between real and fictional raises an interesting question about genre. Greenblatt seems to distinguish between false non-fiction and fiction. I wonder what the difference is, exactly, and whether it's merely a matter of how the works are classified (and therefore how we approach them) or if there's something inherent in fiction (that was never meant to be believed) that separates it from false non-fiction (that was).
Oh, I hadn't really considered that reading of "lie," but mostly because I am not really sure how much we care, as literary critics, about the "truth" of a story, even if it's nonfiction. From a historical standpoint, of course, a false account would have tremendous effects..but from a literary standpoint, we could still point to the ways the text has constructed its lie and what that means (for lack of a better word). You know what I mean? Like what's the difference between English and History at that point?
DeleteI think some of the people we've been reading think that there's something in fiction that separates it from non-fiction, some kind of stylistic quality...consider Spivak's idea of parataxis, right? The use of parataxis differentiates Lucy from other diasporic accounts..so maybe the difference is that fiction is obviously constructed?
Oh, I hadn't really considered that reading of "lie," but mostly because I am not really sure how much we care, as literary critics, about the "truth" of a story, even if it's nonfiction. From a historical standpoint, of course, a false account would have tremendous effects..but from a literary standpoint, we could still point to the ways the text has constructed its lie and what that means (for lack of a better word). You know what I mean? Like what's the difference between English and History at that point?
DeleteI think some of the people we've been reading think that there's something in fiction that separates it from non-fiction, some kind of stylistic quality...consider Spivak's idea of parataxis, right? The use of parataxis differentiates Lucy from other diasporic accounts..so maybe the difference is that fiction is obviously constructed?