Page 234 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes 20.3 Textual Analysis

It may appear strange to speak about something or someone as holding a textual attitude, but a
student of literature will understand the phrase more easily if he will recall the kind of view
attacked by Voltaire in Candide, or even the attitude to reality satirized by Cervantes in Don
Quixote. What seems unexceptionable good sense to these writers is that it is a fallacy to assume
that the swarming, unpredictable, and problematic mess in which human beings live can be
understood on the basis of what books -- texts -- say; to apply what one learns out of a book
literally to reality is to risk folly or ruin. One would no more think of using Amadis of Gaul a to
understand sixteenth-century (or present-day) Spain than one would use the Bible to understand,
say, the House of Commons. But clearly people have tried and do try to use texts in so simple-
minded a way, for otherwise Candide and Don Quixote would not still have the appeal for
readers that they do today. It seems a common human failing to prefer the schematic authority of
a text to the disorientations of direct encounters with the human. But is this failing constantly
present, or are there circumstances that, more than others, make the textual attitude likely to
prevail?
Two situations favor a textual attitude. One is when a human being confronts at close quarters
something relatively unknown and threatening and previously distant. In such a case one has
recourse not only to what in one's previous experience the novelty resembles but also to what one
has read about it. Travel books or guidebooks are about as 'natural' a kind of text, as logical in
their composition and in their use, as any book one can think of, precisely because of this human
tendency to fall back on a text when the uncertainties of travel in strange parts seem to threaten
one's equanimity. Many travelers find themselves saying of an experience in a new country that it
wasn't what they expected, meaning that it wasn't what a book said it would be. And of course
many writers of travel books or guidebooks compose them in order to say that a country is like
this, or better, that it is colorful, expensive, interesting, and so forth. The idea in either case is that
people, places, and experiences can always be described by a book, so much so that the book (or
text) acquires a greater authority, and use, even than the actuality it describes. The comedy of
Fabrice del Dongo's search for the battle of Waterloo b is not so much that he fails to find the
battle, but that he looks for it as something texts have told him about.
A second situation favoring the textual attitude is the appearance of success. If one reads a book
claiming that lions are fierce and then encounters a fierce lion (I simplify, of course), the chances
are that one will be encouraged to read more books by that same author, and believe them. But if,
in addition, the lion book instructs one how to deal with a fierce lion, and the instructions work
perfectly, then not only will the author be greatly believed, he will also be impelled to try his hand
at other kinds of written performance. There is a rather complex dialectic of reinforcement by
which the experiences of readers in reality are determined by what they have read, and this in
turn influences writers to take up subjects defined in advance by readers' experiences. A book on
how to handle a fierce lion might then cause a series of books to be produced on such subjects as
the fierceness of lions, the origins of fierceness, and so forth. Similarly, as the focus of the text
centers more narrowly on the subject -- no longer lions but their fierceness -- we might expect that
the ways by which it is recommended that a lion's fierceness be handled will actually increase its
fierceness, force it to be fierce since that is what it is, and that is what in essence we know or can
only know about it.
A text purporting to contain knowledge about something actual, and arising out of circumstances
similar to the ones I have just described, is not easily dismissed. Expertise is attributed to it. The
authority of academics, institutions, and governments can accrue to it, surrounding it with still
greater prestige than its practical successes warrant. Most important, such texts can create not
only knowledge but also the very reality they appear to describe. In time such knowledge and
reality produce a tradition, or what Michel Foucault calls a discourse, whose material presence or
weight, not the originality of a given author, is really responsible for the texts produced out of it.
This kind of text is composed out of those pre-existing units of information deposited by Flaubert
in the catalogue of idées reçues. In the light of all this, consider Napoleon and de Lesseps.

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