In a well known essay by a well known author of a trilogy of very well known books, the poem Beowulf is compared to a tower, built by a man on his farmland. In this allegory, his "friends" come along, and see that the tower is made of many structural elements. They tear down the tower, and begin a process of dissection, of analysis -- they bring the tower to it's foundations, and attempt to extract all manner of information from it. Meanwhile, the helpless builder looks on an weeps, because from the tower, he could see the ocean.
J. R. R. Tolkien created his metaphor to specifically address the problem of critics searching for older structural elements in Beowulf, but the allegory could be extended to much of the field of literary criticism. The text, the tower, is seen, not in its original beauty, neither for the architecture nor for the view, but instead for what it could be. The tower is dismantled, examined. The foundations are checked, the surrounding setting analyzed, the individual stones checked for wear, for structural strength. These, in turn, are broken apart; each stone becomes shattered into individual word choices; it becomes both what the author did and did not say. The ideologue then might come along and see the now sorted pile of stones, and use these elements to build some sordid mockery of the original text. "But look," he says, "I started with the same text you did!" Meanwhile, the original work has been so dismembered that there now exists no trace of the common structure binding the tower together -- the mortar, the heart, the blood that the author injected into the text has been discarded as slag. The critics will rebuild the work with their new, (scientifically proven!) mortar, and the unhappy author will look upon the work and at the scars on his hands, and say like J. Alfred Prufrock, "That is not what I meant, at all. That is not it, at all." The more fortunate authors, those who died before the critics could get their hands upon their works, will wander, lonely, the banks of the river Styx, and wait for Charon -- but he won't ferry those souls who still turn over in their graves.
This is not an argument for the destruction of an ideological literary criticism, but instead only a reminder that such a criticism is just that -- an interpretation. We usually do not have the builder of the tower to speak to; we cannot know his or her intentions nor his or her desires. All that we have is the tower, and we must not destroy the work to find the author, to find the intent, or to find the meaning. The bastion of the humanities must not lose its human element in favor of a more rigid science, and the core of the work, the beauty of the text, must not be lost in favor of information, not necessarily encoded by the author, but necessarily decoded by the student of literature who finds his or her self forced to approach the text that he or she loves, not with the passionate embrace of a lover, but with the clinical handshake of a business associate.
Nor does this say that all forms of criticisms are clinical and emotionless -- one can construct a very beautiful building from a dismantled text's original parts -- it merely is to say that one must not lose sight of the beauty of the original. That beauty, to be trite, exists in the eyes of the beholder, certainly, but there exists also a certain human beauty to the text, a level on which the text communicates, not only on an intellectual level, but on an internal, emotional level. There are elements of a work which register to the reader with such loaded and possibly meaningless terms as "true," "real," "human," or at least their negations. The literary text, more than simply communicating intellectually, also resonates. "I love this passage," "I love this idea," "This book enthralled me!" -- those become the pillow talk of the true paramour of literature. Unfortunately, those are the communications between the reader and the text, and leave little room for communications between readers themselves. Barthes writes of "the pleasure of the text," but through his semiotics of aesthetics, ignores those true elements of the text which instruct in favor of those which give pleasure, beauty. His text is something to be read in bed at home; he ignores the idea that a text can be read from a pulpit.
What then is the purpose of the written work? Such a general term as literature by necessity requires an equally general organizing principle -- words are written, words are used to communicate. The word, a name, a translation for an otherwise unnamed mental image or idea, is believed to have the same mental conception in two readers -- when they see the same word, both readers can agree that they have a mental conception of that work, though perhaps not precisely identical, that is in kind (OE gecynde), with the original English meaning of that word -- the two conceptions are of a form that both readers would agree have something innately in common.
The level of this mental construct can be seen as the plane of communication. The word level, I must add, does not necessarily imply a hierarchy, but instead a more abstract channel of communication -- this is the plane on which the text communicates, and only that which is on that plane can communicate with the text on that plane. Ideologies are their own planes of communication, but usually, only ideologues are communicating on those levels. The levels also have no definite boundary, but instead flow into one another, and the points of their interactions become new planes of communication. Any literary criticism must exist on some specific, and chosen, plane of communication -- though that plane can have as much dimension as one should like, and the choice of a plane becomes a choice of scale: What in the text do I consider a sign; what do I communicate with?
These planes are those places wherein more than one person can have the same reaction to the text -- were it only one person, that person could be assumed to have perfect communication, and to speak only to his or her self. As this would be an argument for relativism -- that if any two readers can agree upon the text than that reading must be valid -- it must be tempered by a less general definition than simply communication, or the definition of communication itself must be modified.
The author, in writing a text using words, recognizable signs, thereby means to communicate. Herein, we can present the model reader, the audience which the author imagines. The nature of this reader, however, is as unknowable as the nature of the author itself -- save that the author might give textual clues as to with whom he means to communicate. However, it must be also acknowleged, both by the author and by the reader, that any reader is able to communicate somewhat with any text, be that level of communication as abstract, and possibly irrelevent, as "Is this written in a language that I speak?" However, since the choice of plane is arbitrary, a priori, axiomatic, and somewhat abstract, we must have a reason to chose the plane, and since that plane is chosen a priori, that choice must become a matter of belief. Universal truth n'existe pas. Instead, what exists are rational systems, founded upon beliefs which must be assumed true. Most literary criticism works upon the level of the rational -- this is so.
However, and here I make a step into the abyss -- I hope that there's no bottom -- much of the text does not communicate on the level of the rational. What of those scenes in books which, to misquote Nabokov, "erects those dorsal hairs?" What of the nervous heartbeat, the thrill of suspense? What of the tear that graces the page where Hamlet falls, slain? In short, what of the physiological, the psychological, and the emotional effects of reading itself? Those, perhaps, exist on a level deeper than simple rational communication. Of pathos, Aristotle wrote -- but he attempted to create reason for it! Reason, founded as it is upon belief, cannot explain that which lies beneath reason. Anthropologists have found that facial expressions are pancultural -- can not pathos, sympathy, and in fact, elements of the text also be so? In the work which evokes a physiological response, there exists something which runs deeper than simple reason. It touches a well used and not understood part of the mind, that which governs emotion, that which is known to exist, and that which is not ruled by the principles of reason so desperately sought by philosophers and scientists.
This level of communication, which I here will use the rather loaded and absurd term the human, could perhaps form the backbone of a new, and dangerously irrational form of literary criticism. The reading of a text is not merely an unaffective rational exercise, but instead communicates to a level deeper than our reason can go -- that we can find ourselves affected by the words on the page, not only rationally but internally -- speaks to a deep level of communication -- these are the "more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophies."
Of course, we could ponder "Why," dream up some axioms and logic, and come up with conclusions as to why these parts of the text affect us. Such would create a sort of rhetorical analysis. It would leave the reader in a place in which he or she might attempt to predict passages which will have the said emotional or rhetorical impact. However, in doing so, it would lose it's power -- it would stop communicating on that level. Instead, it would be better to address the level of communication, not by "why does this happen," but instead by, "what has this effect, and what can I learn from it?" The scale of the sign, then, is the scale in which the text affects us on a physical or emotional level -- this is not the scale of the grammatical level or the level of semantic differentiation, but instead on a scale of a different sort of structure, an emotional structure. One can admire the architecture of the tower by the mastery of the craftsman, or by the mastery of the designer -- a well crafted text might have no emotional impact, whereas the most poorly constructed tower might have the most staggering of vistas. Ideally, of course, a text will couple craft with content. This content, this communication -- that is on all planes, but the plane with which I most am interested is the plane on which it affects -- the plane on which the text rings true, the plane on which we believe the text to be true.
So, the first step of the process is to use the instruments with which the reader is equiped, namely his or her self, and tune them carefully. The text must be read in a mindset aware of and yet not rationalizing the emotional impact. Upon a line striking the heart, the emotional structuralist must record his or her emotion, the line, and move on -- not analyze that line, yet, for rationalize is to tame, and the beauty of the text is untamed. The method of becoming aware -- that is difficult. Lovecraft wrote of "the sensitive" in the society, who are affected by horror; I write of "the sensitive" who are affected, not only by horror, but by any emotion. By becoming aware of the emotional impact of parts of the work, we can become aware of ourselves; we can touch into the humanity of the text.
Once that has been done, though, what then? For such is a seemingly personal adventure on the part of the reader, and only speaks of the reader's communication with the text. What benifit does the reader have in then distributing this analysis -- why must the reader's analysis become a text in its own right?
The human, ie those parts of the text which have emotional affect, are partially symptoms of the reader's associations -- memories, experiences, et cetera, but they can also have the possibility of creating experience. We read Hamlet, not because we are looking for justification to extract revenge, but because we would like the experience of extracting revenge. In the text, we can live vicariously through the characters, and we can live the parts of people who have known those characters -- we read to interact with the text on a social level, on a human level, and not merely on an intellectual level. If we analyze the text, not through pop psychology but through our own psychology, we can examine human interaction, and we can develop experimental psychology through ourselves (cf. Jung?). Regardless, we need to enter into dialogue, not only with others about the text, but with the text itself, and we need to do so, not only intellectually, but relationally. The project is to form a relationship with the narrative, with the characters, and with the text. This reading form is not the simple pleasure, the eroticism offered by Barthes, but a loving of the text on a deeply human level.
