I was wondering about what people do when they practice criticism. Everyone here writes out their thoughts about comics, movies, music, etc. What are you doing when you do that?
What I do is to feel my way. Whatever I’m writing about, I want to write about it as if I had never seen the thing before. What is this thing you call “comic”? How could it ever have come to be? Why do people keep it in existence? And how did this particular example of “comic,” the one I’m holding, fluke into being? What can we tell about ourselves from its existence?
I guess at answers by keeping my eyes open and noticing everything (trying to, I mean), and I refine my guesses by comparing them with what I know of the world, including the people and industry that produced the item in question (the comic, movie, or whatever).
So I start out pretending to know nothing, then I pull in what I know or think I know. It’s quite a change of gears, and in either case it’s like I have to take myself by surprise, ambush my perceptions from a direction I don’t expect.
Always getting blindsided and feeling like a dope can get your adrenaline up, even if you’re just typing your thoughts about Civil War. But it can also leave you ragged. The “ah ha” moment come by often enough to keep you playing, but most often it’s like you’re trying to find your cold medicine in an ocean liner and the lights have gone out and the damn floor keeps moving.
Possibly somebody else might follow the same approach that I do, the same “dream it up/check it out” two-step, and that person might not feel at all stupid. Instead of “Everything I know is useless,” the person might think “I see the universe in a plum!” Instead of “I can’t possibly be right,” he’d think, “My flashes of perception are transformed and broadened by my sure knowledge of the world.” Which makes that hypothetical second person sound like a fatuous ass, but whatever. You don’t have to suffer to do good work.
And it’s very likely that other people follow quite a different method. The thing is, I don’t know anything at all about how other people write criticism. I’ve never studied the subject and never thought about it, beyond noticing that critics I like don’t necessarily supply opinions I agree with. (For instance, Pauline Kael and Citizen Kane’s alleged “dime-store Freud.”)
Anyway, how other people write criticism. It involves theory, right? As indicated above, I proceed by sensibility and fact-checking. My ideology (which I won’t try to define) is always there, but it sneaks in. I never feel oriented, never proceed from an overview, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to.
Hey Tom! Nice to have you back, if only for a visit.
It’s too bad Caro is out of town; she’s no doubt the one to bring you to task for your rank empiricism and dismissal of theory. I’ll do the best I can as a sub though….
In terms of theory…theory’s really just a fancy way of saying “things I know before I come to the text.” Or, another way of looking at it, is it’s just making two different texts talk to each other. Somebody like Freud (since you brought him up) has a whole slew of ideas about how stories work, and how that’s related to all sorts of things — gender, sex, desire, power relationships, fantasies, etc. etc. So you can look at a text and say, how would Freud think about this? Does the text fit well into what Freud says? Does it challenge what he said? Does it change the way I think about Freud, or does Freud change the way I think about what I’m reading?
The advantage of theory, for me, is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you start reading —which as you point out, can be a struggle. I mean, obviously, you’re never exactly doing that to begin with — you always come to a book with a lot of previous experience and ideas. But looking through a particular lens can focus what you know, and help you to get further along, or come upon insights, you wouldn’t have had otherwise.
I’d say you use theory too, though maybe in a somewhat more ad hoc way than Caro or I tend to. For example,
“A cunning feminist might say that Jean Grey gets unstoppable kickass powers, but doesn’t get a lot of airtime in which she is seen being unstoppably kickass.”
That’s using feminist theory, albeit a fairly generalized version. Then you go on to argue that the story could also be read as not especially anti-feminist — and ultimately to argue that it’s such a piece of crap that these arguments don’t really matter that much (that’s a great piece, by the way.)
“The advantage of theory, for me, is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel”
Yeah, that’s a big danger of the non-theory approach, plus that a lot of times a person can’t see a thing unless he/she knows to look for it. But there’s the obvious counter: the more things you start out expecting to see, the more likely you are to see them and nothing else. And they may not even be there. I don’t want to be William Blake here, but don’t you worry about running a number on yourself?
“… using feminist theory, albeit a fairly generalized version.” Hey, I did my best!
I guess the Ultimate X remark is me being ad hoc about theory. Just keeping count of who gets what when the storyteller hands out the good things: the white guy gets to punch the villain, the black guy gets to sound authoritative when he radios for backup. That kind of stuff.
To me it’s like picking up on someone’s tics and getting a read on his/her personality, with the personality in this case belonging to us, the audience and makers of the movie/comic/whatever in question. You know something about us? We like to keep our Asian men girly. From this one might extrapolate certain views “we” hold about (nothing really good is coming to me, but whatever) dark and light skin, physical heft, personal effectiveness, penetration and non-penetration. God knows what, just down and down into the crevices of our assumptions. Sometimes I feel like I get a sense of our agreed-upon reality’s ground rules, and what I’m doing is watching a sit-com. But most often I have to cut those sections out of whatever I’m writing. The empirical, touchy-feely approach can get you boggled if you expand your scope too far, which I tend to do.
“but don’t you worry about running a number on yourself?”
That’s the usual criticism leveled at theory, isn’t it? I think if you see it as a conversation between texts — then it’s a conversation, not an effort to impose a particular view. Horror movies (for example) have something to say about how Freud works, not just the other way around.
Besides…you always come to a text with your own preconceptions and ideas. You could argue that having a clearer grasp on what those are puts you less in their thrall, rather than more.
that’s interesting about horror having something to say about freud, i’m up in the air about whether that tends to happen or not. it seems to me that you’re more likely to have freud as a theoretical framework than “horror” as a theoretical framework, so it seems that in the conversation using theory it’s still about dominance or imposing on/controlling the conversation with the dominant theory. can you think of any cases where someone would mix up their freud by applying “horror” instead of the other way around, which seems to be much more common or at least a criticism that is levelled much more often?
Well, I felt like I learned a lot about Freud and feminist and queer theory by thinking about the Thing and Shivers and other horror films. You can decide if you agree if you want to read this essay.
And, as another example, I think Tom’s essay about the Godfather and Mary Sue is as much an effort to use the Godfather to think about the idea of Mary Sue as it is an effort to use Mary Sue to think about the Godfather.
It works this way with Freud himself, really. His theory of the Oedipal conflict came from Oedipus more than he applied the complex to the story.
I think you can have a mechanistic application of a theory, sure, and that tends to be pretty dull — it treats the text like allegory, which usually isn’t very insightful. But when theory is used well, it really is a dialogue where the text guides your understanding of the theory as well as the other way around. A perennial favorite for me is Carol Clover’s “Men, Women, and Chainsaws,” which uses slasher films to invert film theory ideas about identification and sadism (the typical reading of film is that men identify with powerful men in a move that’s sadistic; Clover argues that men cross-identify in slasher films with the female star, and that the main investment is therefore masochistic. This has implications for all of film theory, not just slashers.)
Or, for a lovely example closer to home, Craig Fisher uses deep focus to think about Tezuka, and vice versa.
People tend to feel alienated from Freud or Marx or other theoretical frameworks for various reasons, some of which are reasonable (the prose in academic readings can be quite bad, some of the theories are actually complicated and so can be hard to follow even if they are written well); and some of which are less so (Freud and Marx violate common sense…but, you know, common sense is often kind of wrong.) I think people get balled up thinking that a theoretical reading is showing something hidden in the text, rather than juxtaposing two different sets of ideas and working out similarities and difference.
Or, to look at it another way — you say different things depending on who you’re talking to. Theory is a way to generate insights you might not otherwise have, because the text says different things when it’s talking to different people. When people get upset at using Freud, or queer theory, or whatever, they’re generally arguing, “well, the text didn’t say that to me!” And the counterargument is, well, no, but this is something it does say if you get it talking to the right people.
I wouldn’t rule out theory as an approach, based on your description, but I’m going to caveat your thinking a bit. To me it sounds like the touchy-feely/empiric and theory-based approaches present the usual sort of too hot/too cold tradeoff, and I think your description of theory leaves out the problems found at that end.
“That’s the usual criticism leveled at theory, isn’t it?”
You know, I bet it is. It and “reinvent the wheel” are the twins, or Scylla and Charybdis, I suppose.
“I think if you see it as a conversation between texts — then it’s a conversation, not an effort to impose a particular view.”
Not to be too literal, but the critic winds up doing the talking for both sides, or both texts. That’s bound to up the possibility of distortion.
And a conversation is not in itself the opposite of an attempt to impose a view. People put words around reality to get it into the shape they like, and they talk those words out so the words can be ratified by whoever’s listening.
“I think people get balled up thinking that a theoretical reading is showing something hidden in the text, rather than juxtaposing two different sets of ideas and working out similarities and difference.”
But you’re not really doing that. You’re not saying, “Freud is like this, John Carpenter’s film is like that.” You’re telling us something about the film that most people would never think to find there, and you found that something by means of Freud/queer theory/whatever.
In most cases, isn’t that how it plays out? It’s good to get the counter-examples you gave, but they’re the minority. Or so an outsider would believe; if I’m wrong on the facts, so be it.
Well, sure, you speak for both texts. Though Foucault says (to speak for him) that it’s really texts which speak through us, rather than the other way around.
What I did with The Thing is a little tricky in this regard. The queer theory I was talking about in that context is about hidden meanings specifically — the closet is about people not seeing what’s in front of them. So to say, “people wouldn’t see that” — that’s kind of how the closet works (which I talk about in the essay.)
That’s somewhat true for Freud and Marx too, though, to be fair; they’re specifically about hidden meanings (though maybe not to quite the extent, or in quite the same way, that some queer theory is.)
People wouldn’t necessarily see Superman as a metaphor for modernity either, though, or Alan Moore’s work as an exemplar of geekishness.
I think I am actually saying (in the case of the essay I pointed to) Eve Sedgwick says this, you can look at the Thing and see how that compares — and then you can go back to Eve Sedgwick and rethink some of what she says in light of the Thing. Specifically in that case, I’m looking at Sedgwick’s argument about how bonds between men are about both power and homoeroticism, then looking back at the thing where those tensions lead to apocalypse, then going back to ideas about gay utopia and thinking about how they mirror visions of gay apocalypse. I mean, it really was a back and forth for me; I absolutely learned stuff from Shivers and the Thing and Tabico that I didn’t learn from Eve Sedgwick and Andrea Dworkin and Shulamith Firestone (who were the main theorists I used, I think.)
I mean, this is just me, but I really experience using theory and reading texts as thinking things through rather than imposing my will.
As another take: Suat’s here very gingerly using Christianity as a theoretical tool to talk about Tony Millionaire. I’m not sure he’d say Millionaire taught him something about Christianity exactly, but there’s definitely an emotional charge for him there which comes from the back and forth. (Similarly, part of the reason that the Thing is about my favorite movie ever has to do with the way using theory really increased, or deepened, or what have you, what I got out of the film.)
Or here Caro used French feminist theory to talk about Feuchtenberger. This works a little differently, in that Caro pretty much assumes (almost certainly correctly) that Feuchtenberger is thinking of her own work through the lens of feminist theory as well. Whereas Suat’s almost certain that Millionaire was not explicitly referencing Christianity, and I’m quite certain that Carpenter wasn’t thinking about Eve Sedgwick (though I doubt the sexual connotations of Thingness completely escaped him.)
I find it useful to think of “theory” as simplification for amplification (Scott McCloud’s definition of cartooning): any given theory is going to leave stuff out (so you don’t want to rely on it as your only way to approach a given work), but theory can also really help you to cut to the essence of a work. Lazy use of theory, IMO, is when everything starts looking like the proverbial nail.
Glad I could find out about the conversation view of theory-based crit. Thanks to all.
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there is much ‘theory’ that is employed precisely in order to generate the heightened estrangement of looking at things as if for the first time that you describe as your method.
Yeah, I remember a quote by some French guy about getting drunk on a glass of water.
Well, people can tell themselves whatever they want.
I wanted to ask you about your use of the expression “quaintsy-goysy” in a recent post.
It’s a phrase that Norman Mailer used about Mary McCarthy, I don’t remember when I used it, so you should include a link or quote to refresh my memory.
http://classic.tcj.com/history/enjoying-the-simple-life-of-a-peasant/
Notice the pipe used by Clifford’s dad. The strip is about city kids, but these quaintsy-goysy touches were tough to keep out of family-life sitcoms back then.
A Russian friend asked me what this expression means; you are the only reference I found on Google (besides the original quote from Mailer: “At the risk of making a dozen devoted enemies for life, I can only say the the whiffs I get from the ink of [women writers] are fey, old-hat, Quaintsy Goysy, tiny, too dykily psychotic, crippled, creepish, fashionable, frigid, outer-Baroque, maquillé in mannequin’s whimsy, or else bright and stillborn.”)
~ Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself
I have no idea who you are, but your writing is really impressive. I couldn’t explain Mailer’s expression to my friend: would you be willing to define it for a non-native speaker?
Oh boy, I got the reference wrong — not Mary McCarthy, just woman writers in general. Oh well, that’s Mailer.
As far as I know, Mailer made up the phrase and I’m the only one to parrot it. So it has no set definition. It expresses an attitude, namely contempt for the precious and genteel when those two elements present themselves together. It’s the same attitude that was expressed by the phrase “lady writers” back when people used that term. I suppose Mailer threw in goyishness (that is, being a WASP and not a Jew) just because he liked making trouble.
Come to think of it, there’s nothing quaint about Clifford’s dad having a pipe, so what I meant was probably more like “goyishly genteel.” That’s the way it is with made-up phrases: they take on new meanings every time they get used.
“I have no idea who you are, but your writing is really impressive.”
Thanks, I’m nobody in particular, but it’s nice to hear somebody likes my writing.
http://htmlgiant.com/mean/notes-on-the-testicular-and-penile-theories-of-talent/
Thanks very much for your explanation and discussion. I would say that the sense, or “feel” of the expression “quaintsy-goysy” is exactly “goyishly genteel”, whether it is literally quaint or not. And cetainly Mailer would not have excluded Mary McCarthy from his list. Your literary/linguistic intuitions are right on.
Just looked at the link provided by dffdfd. From Mailer’s original quaintsy-goysy passage:
“Indeed I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman writer until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale.”
Sure, what else could they write about?
Well, I suppose it’s pointless to get annoyed by him.
Tell it to Gore Vidal.
He’s pretty annoying!
Mailer’s is pretty brilliant use of language; nonetheless I doubt I will live long enough to get around to reading anything by him.
he’s nuts!
I loved him when I was a teenager, mainly for the writing. But a few years back I reread one of my old favorites by him and thought it was nothing but wind. Of course his other books might still be worthwhile; he churned out so many titles. But, like cbren, I find his views impossible to take seriously, and he spent so much energy getting them across that he winds up seeming like a huge waste of time.
The Naked and the Dead is solidly okay.
The Armies of the Night has some of the most razzle-dazzle prose I’ve ever encountered.
That’s the one that sucked me in.