After reading the "fallacies" I've come to the conclusion that CW folks who advocate for a workshop and pedagogy informed by New Critical theory can't be totally serious. Or fully informed. One or the other.
To ascribe to New Criticism is to adopt untenable distinctions between "internal" and "external" aspects of poetry, between what a poem "is" and what it "does." It also means ignoring the social, political, rhetorical dimensions of creative writing. It's not just "Theory," some abstract French import, that suggests these dimensions can't be ignored; it's also Comp theory, contemporary life, common sense. Or what has become common sense in the Global Age. We can't afford anymore to ignore the social and environmental impact of anything we do, not even poetry.
Sure it makes sense to sit around and talk about how to make stories better, but better by what standards? Better for what purpose? There is no objectively better poetry. Aesthetic standards, like all cultural norms, are culturally relative. Relativity might have smelled like a bad egg some years ago, but these days it goes without saying. How can anyone write relevant poetry or fiction when he/she is stuck in the 50s? How can such work expect to speak to the needs to today's readers?
Besides, the folks who talk up New Criticism in CW don't really mean (I don't think) that the fully theorized version of New Critical dogma should be applied at all times in the discipline. They mean, I'm fairly sure, that they like CW as is, and don't want to monkey around with Theory. They want to continue with the "close readings" and the focus on the text without the intrusion of social or political considerations. But they don't want to have to defend the practice, either. For to defend the practice might mean having to fall back on New Critical dogma in a way that just won't work.
It's sort of a "it ain't broke so don't fix it" attitude. And that's not such a bad thing. I figure that when it comes to Theory, every writer has to be, at some level, a pragmatist. (Maybe even a Pragmatist, capital P. But that's another post.) Writers must go on writing no matter what's going on in Theory. Perhaps next year some hot new philosophy will come across the Atlantic from France and convince every last American academic that language *qua* language is not only unstable but impossible. We can't make words. This post does not even exist. All the major journals would buzz with activity. Left and right academics speaking and writing to one another about the non-existence of language. English departments enraptured. Many papers written on the non-being of Shakespeare's work. The impossibility of literature at all. And still, the Creative Writing department must go on with its job, teaching writing, suffering the criticism that they are "anti-intellectual" or "outmoded" or what have you.
For some in CW, this farce approximates the current state of things. Theory is so distant, so counter-intuitive in so many ways. One can read it and play with it, but to take it seriously in terms of pedagogy and the actual practice of the craft strikes these writers as ludicrous. Theory and CW represent different epistemological methods, different ways of knowing. The CW epistemology is and untheorized one, and it is meant to be. It is simply intuitive. Creative. Something like that.
The point is that a writer's yard stick for the validity of any axiom is whether or not it produces good prose. If I'm publishing novels on a regular basis, whatever "theory" or "untheory" I've got is the one I want to keep, call me what you will. The fact that successful literary authors have had many different ways of approaching the writing process and conceptualizing their craft is only further evidence that what a writer thinks about writing (concept) is less important that what he or she actually does when writing (precept). Even the most theory minded writers, those with avant garde manifestos and such, are generally interested in their theories mostly for the results they produce. Concept is second to precept every time. That's a Pragmatist. That's a writer.
Maybe it's different for some. I suppose there may be writers that "do" fiction or poetry simply as proof of their theoretical stance...Or who feel the two are equal partners; that's more likely.
In any case, those of us who think there is some pedagogical value to introducing theory into CW practice have the burden not of proving a need for Theory (no "proof" could ever be sufficient) but of demonstrating that Theory, taken seriously and taken properly, produces results. At least, this seems to be the case in the States, and to some extent in the UK. Australia may be in a somewhat better position (I confess I skimmed that chapter of Dawson).
The very loosely "New Critical" status quo won't change, and shouldn't change, until Theory becomes Practice in a way that produces writing and writers in a way preferable to what we've got now. Show us how it works. Inspire us. Get our creative juices flowing. Introduce us to Theory in a way that makes it workable.
That's what the discipline wants, I think. They want something they can put on the page.
No comments:
Post a Comment