GRGR(5) Katje: in close up

[MalignD at aol.com]

I've been following this exchange with some interest.  I don't think, as does 
rj, that Terrance is playing fast and loose with terminology or is showing 
prejudice toward literary critics vis-à-vis novelists.  So, to that part of 
the argument I have nothing to say.

But rj says, against (I think) the distinction between novelists and critics: 

 "It worries me that the distinction Terrance is making between 'novelists' 
and 'Critical Theorists and Literary Critics' is an artificial one at best 
" 
and adds "Part of the whole thrust of Literary Theory since de Saussure and 
Shklovsky is that all text --critical, literary and 'factual' -- is 
narrativised and subjective."

This seems true enough, but, as I said in an earlier exchange on a similar 
point, one needn't level all distinctions.  Put another way, is it useful to 
do so?  If one disallows the distinction is clarity lost or gained?  I think 
the former. 

Certainly the authors rj names -- Barth and Barthelme -- play with and along 
the boundaries of the forms discussed. Lost in the Funhouse is a 
demonstration of story structure involuting into story content and vice-versa 
and the book is a kind of text on literary theory and structure posing as a 
story collection.  And vice-versa.  One readily gets that.  Ditto much of 
Barthelme.  But I don't see the purpose of or gain from or justification for 
concluding that, because one can cite the two-headedness of this or another 
exampled text, or because Barthes is sublime and Gass a turd, formal 
distinctions are illusory.  I don't find this logically imperative or 
factually true. 

If a theory compels the theorist rather than the other way round, 
unpersuasive positions result.  (I say this sure that rj will not find the 
shoe to fit.  Nevertheless--)  One should be able to put down a literary 
theory and pick up another, as one might put down a saw and pick up a hammer, 
if the cutting's done and the banging needs begin.