GRGR(5) Katje: in close up

[rj]

MalignD:
> 
> 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. 

As you say, we've covered some of this ground before, and I think it's
probably ends up as a dispute about the extent to which such
distinctions are relative rather than any real epistemological rupture.
On the above, I guess what I see is that any artist starts off with a
theory -- a set of assumptions about art and the world and the
relationship between the two -- and then this shapes and determines the
form and content and style of the artefact. Most often the theory is
just a subconscious set of beliefs: notions of right and wrong, good and
bad, art and theory, whatever. Take 'The Gothic Novel' for example, or
'Jacobean revenge drama', or 'Impressionist painting'. The works of art
produced are not unpersuasive even though they conform to a specific
genre, which is in effect an aesthetic based upon a certain theory about
the form and content and style of the artefact.

I agree very much with your final sentence, and I think the good (or
bad) thing about postmodernist critiques is that they do just that. They
don't discriminate between the various models of critical
interpretation, and they'll pick up one and drop off another at whim,
even if the models appear to be mutually contradictory.

I think people like Barth and Barthelme, who were revered in the U.S. as
the forefront literary avant-gardists through the 60s, especially
Barthelme, in writing "anti-novels" were actually part and parcel of the
whole 'death of the novel' thing. By saying "YUP, so they're not
novelists" doesn't seem to me to make much of a point in this respect.
Nabokov's another example to throw in. It wasn't just theorists and
critics, it was the artists ("novelists") themselves -- and then the
distinctions between art and theory were challenged, as Paul notes --
and trying to work out who came first or has preeminence is, well, the
wrong question to be asking imo.

best

ps I don't contend that William Gass is a turd. The stories in _In the
Heart of the Heart of the Country_ are wonderful, as is his early novel
_Omensetter's Luck_. And, in fact, his _Willie Master's Lonesome Wife_
is another take on the 'anti-novel' along the lines of Barth's and
Barthelme's and Brautigan's work from around the same time.