Problems of Literature (Part 2)

The question inevitably arises then, how is one to proceed in the face of these problems of interpretation? In light of the competing drives for individual experience and supposedly universal impulses, all implications of interpretation become suspect. We can assume two extremes; one which assumes not only the possibility but the necessity of absolute interpretations; and the other which assumes ‘interpretation’ itself is not possible per se but sees literature and the examinations of texts as ideological constructions to be used documents of possibility. At the first extreme, literary critics continue to write who contend that there exist ‘correct’ interpretations of literary texts for which one simply needs to supply the appropriate textual and contextual evidence and arguments in order to establish the truth of the matter. Such is the case with the ongoing debate over the issue of Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost. A number of Romantic era authors (William Blake, William Godwin, and Shelley primary among them) contended Milton, regardless of his intention, made Satan the hero of Paradise Lost. The Romantics suggested that this portrayal made Satan an example of a revolutionary character who was rebelling against arbitrary authority and asserting the possibility of individual identity against tyranny. Many critics, even contemporary ones, contend that such is an improper ‘interpretation’ of the work of Milton. Stanley Fish, a well known authority on Milton, wrote a book recently entitled How Milton Works, in which he goes to great length to say how Milton intended his poem to work and what interpretations are appropriate given Milton’s beliefs. Such authoritative notions are steeped not only in academic elitism but inevitably hide ideological intentions which, if they are to retain their authority, must remain under wraps. In recent years, of course, the winds have shifted a great deal – even if many people do not realize the gravity and significance of the change. The great shift toward political, feminist, and psycho-analytic criticism has naturally allowed people to recreate textual significance in light of non-formalistic issues that swirl around both the text and our own experience. But while these complex debates churn through academic and intellectual realms, the problem exists on a more prosaic level where general readers play with textual meanings in ways that relate to their experience but which magnify their sense of personal significance through their perceived connection to universalism. And so our culture generates continual chirping of discourse on literature which combines basic notions of literary criticism with personal self-importance. This discourse, which has become familiar in popular culture, assumes this dichotomy discussed above and never looks for reconciliation of the opposites which it simply does not recognize as existing.

Romanticism and popular culture

The German Philosopher Theodor Adorno open his book Aesthetic Theory with the provocative observation: “It goes without saying that nothing about art goes without saying anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.” Although made over forty years ago this clever remark expresses the modern confusion about art that continues to prevail long after Adorno’s demise. I believe that the roots of this confusion extend back to a fundamental change in the function and status of the arts in age of Romanticism, a change to which our psyche has never properly adjusted. The Romantic age was the end of traditional art which functioned largely as process of craft and ushered in the age of art as an individual endeavour. Cut loose from the explicitly religious and public aspects of its functioning, and being slowly separated from the exclusivity of aristocratic sponsorship, art became, I believe, something distinctly different from what it had been. For the Romantics and those who came after them, art was a more personal expression and an investigation into the inner life of the self. Being a process of self-exploration, art immediately began to suffer from a crisis of identity at a social level and artists have, since that time struggled to produce work that serves the individual function of exploration while, at the same time, speaking to an audience in a meaningful way. Thus the more personal and esoteric an artist’s aesthetic investigations are, the more alienated they are from their potential social function, while, on the other hand, the popular culture industry has taken over the functions once fulfilled by many artistic endeavours prior to the Romantic age. Just as no one in the Renaissance would question the legitimacy of, say, the production of Michelangelo, no one today questions whether Steven Spielberg has a meaningful role to play in society. On the other hand, artists who often devote a lifetime to intimate and intricate exploration of the individual and her place in society and history lacks social legitimacy unless she manages to capture a mass audience or is defended by an increasingly smaller group of critics and intellectuals who speak for the importance of the work.

Thus art now lives in a continual state of limbo. Art as an in-depth investigation of the individual’s inner life and of how the individual interacts with society will perhaps always exist in a dubious state. On the other hand, popular culture not only satisfies many people’s needs for entertainment, it also sooths people, diverts their attentions, and, perhaps most importantly, often serves to legitimize prevailing ideology, in a similar, if magnified, way that church sanctioned art in the Renaissance did. Adorno suggested that popular culture functioned to create a process of pseudo-individualization, which I take to mean a false sense of unique individual experience but in fact functions, in large part, as a kind of mass hypnosis. This is not to put forward an elitist theory that claims that there is nothing of interest in popular culture or that no popular work of art can speak to the intimate demands of the human experience. However, there is a clear, if sometime apparently arbitrary, delineation between art that lives in the shadow of the great Romantics and art that serves a more popular and social function.

The problem is that I believe that appreciation of Romantic art and the work that follows its basic motivations, requires a relatively high degree of sensitivity, a fairly solid sense of individual identity, and often times a high degree of [self]education in the humanities. There are great discoveries to be made in the realm of art as a psychic exploration but in an age of pseudo-individualization these discoveries will continue to lay mostly fallow in the soil of the human sole.