What is Literary Theory?

Hello and welcome to this course titled Introduction to Literary Theory. In a today’s
lecture we will try and understand what constitutes literary theory, and we will also
familiarize ourselves with some of the topics that we are going to cover as part of this
lecture series. However, before we start discussing the term literary theory we will
need to keep in mind that there is no readily available definition of the term that is
universally accepted. Therefore, our task would be to analyze the various available
discourses about literary theory and to arrive at a working definition. We will then go
on adding nuances to this tentative definition as we proceed with our course, so that
by the end of it we should have a thorough understanding of the subject.
Now according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term theory means, and I am
quoting from the dictionary, “the conceptual basis of a subject or area of study”, and
this conceptual basis is understood in opposition to the notion of practice. Ok. So, one
easy way to understand literary theory is to read it as a conceptual basis of the area of
study that we know as literature. And this can then be opposed to the more practical
side of literary studies which deals with analyzing and evaluating particularly literary
texts. And this second bit is usually identified as literary criticism as opposed to
literary theory. So, literary criticism takes up the practical part of literary studies. So,
in other words literary theory deals with the broad picture, attempting to give a
comprehensive vision of what constitutes the field of literary studies and literary
criticism concerns itself with the practice of reading individual texts by transforming
abstract concepts of literary theories into analytical tools. However, in spite of this
being a rather neat and ready definition of literary theory this does not take us very
far, and this is because for most of the students of English literature, the term literary
theory usually presents itself as a self-contradictory concept. Here, I should, would
like to digress a little and make clear that throughout this course I would be talking
about literary theory as it is usually taught within the disciplinary framework of
English literary studies. I would therefore, request you to keep in mind that I teach
English literature in an Indian institute and it is from this location that I will try to
intervene in the field of literary theory. As in fact, you will see during the course of
our discussion that the location of the scholar crucially determines the approach to
this subject, and so I thought it would be better to clarify my own position, my own
location at the very onset.
Anyway coming back to where we left, I was saying that the definition of literary
theory that we can construct from the dictionary meaning of the word theory does not
take us very far. And the reason for that is literary theory, the term usually appears to
be self-contradictory to most of the students of English literature. And there are
several reasons for this: for a start, most of the intellectuals that we normally study as
part of any standard syllabus of literary theory, are not literary critics. To give you an
instance, Jacques Derrida, one of the most common names that we encounter in any
course of literary theory was, in fact, a professor of philosophy. Jacques Lacan,
another important name, was a practicing psychoanalyst. Claude Lévi-Strauss one of
the founding figures of Structuralism which is an integral part of our study of literary
theory today, in fact, taught social anthropology in France. Therefore, as you can see,
for someone situated within the framework of English literary studies, most of what is
discussed under the rubric of literary theory seems to be concerned not primarily with
literature but with other things; with things like philosophy for instance, or
psychology, or sociology, or history. Indeed for someone like Jonathan Culler, and
Jonathan Culler is a Professor of English at the Cornell University in America, the
two words that compose the term “literary theory” appear to be so distinct from each
other that he insists on calling it simply “theory”, without the objective “literary”
attached to it. In his book Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, Culler defines
theory in literary studies as a self-contained genre, which might be concerned with
anything and everything under the sun, but not with, and here I quote Culler, not with
the “nature of literature or the methods of its study”. In Culler’s account, this kind of
theory, which originates outside the discipline of literary studies and remains an alien
presence within it, is associated with a particular date and with a particular decade
rather, and that particular decade is a decade of the 1960s.
I would like to underline this date because in a significant number of textbooks you
will find the 1960, repeatedly mentioned as a moment of origin for what we now
consider as a literary theory. I will have to come back to this date and why it is
regarded as a watershed moment, later on, but right now let us move on to another
peculiar point about literary theory, which seems problematic to most of the students
of English literature. Now if you are doing a course on a literary theory as part of any
English literature programme, I am sure you will be struck by the number of French
authors that you encounter in your course. So, you will encounter for instance Claude
Lévi-Strauss, you will encounter Jacques Lacan, Simone de Beauvoir, Louis
Althusser, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Julia Kristeva, Hélène
Cixous, and I can go on – the list seems to be endless. And these are figures who now
form a permanent part in any syllabus of literary theory within the field of English
studies. But they were scholars who worked from within the French intellectual
tradition and are therefore, in some sense, outsiders to the world of English literary
studies. In fact, most of their works were available to the English speaking world only
after a very significant delay. Thus to give you an example Michael Foucault’s
famous book Folie et déraison, which was published in French in 1961, was available
to the English speaking world all after a delay of 4 years when R. Howard translated it
and brought it out under the title Madness and Civilization. However, this 1965
English version translated by Howard was a highly abridged edition of Foucault’s
original text and in the English version about 300 pages of the original text along with
800 footnotes were left out. Indeed the first unabridged edition of the text by Foucault
was not available to the English readers before 2006, 45 years after the original text
was published in French. You remember the date is 1961) and the final version
becomes available in English only in 2006. Similarly, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s
celebrated translation bearing the title Of Grammatology was published 11 years after
Jacques Derrida’s French original, De la Grammatologie. (And of course, Derrida’s
work was originally published in French). Thus, as you can see the very core authors
and texts who are studied as part of a literary theory course, in the English speaking
world reaches the Anglophone readers from outside and only after a very significant
delay. This notion of literary theory arriving from outside to the universities of the
English speaking world is translated into a devastating, but witty metaphor by Terry
Eagleton in his book Literary Theory: An Introduction. So, Eagleton speaking as a
professor of English literature located in England, (again I need to remind you that the
location of the scholar is very important as far as this course is concerned) so,
Eagleton located in England as a Professor of English literature describes how the job
of a section of British literary critics was reduced to waiting at the port city of Dover
to receive the latest shipment of theory dispatched from Paris, which on an average
took a decade or so to sail across the channel separating France and England. For
those of us who study literary theory within the English departments of India or other
places in the global south like Africa and Latin, America, the texts and theorists
appear to be even more foreign and the delay in accessing them is much longer. For
us, therefore, waiting to acquaint ourselves with the latest in literary theory not only
means waiting for these works to be first conceptualized by theorists sitting in the
continent then translated in English, but it also involves waiting for the publishers to
bring out affordable editions for our local markets, so, they can be purchased and
readily studied by our students in the class. In what follows my effort would be to
reduce these feelings of alienation and confusion that usually surrounds the concept of
literary theory. And I wish to do this by addressing two issues. The first is how, what
is labelled as “theory” is connected with the idea of literature. This is the first issue
that I would like to address and as I have said earlier, for some, the general impression
is that theory is external to the field of literature. But I would like to question is that
so? Is that really the case, or are they both part of a wider cultural scene which
integrally binds them together? The second point that I would want to focus on is how
we, the students of English literary studies in India are connected with the evolving
story of literary theory. Here again, the general impression is that we are at least twice
removed from the main source of action. As I said, first we wait for the European
continental philosophers, sociologists, psychoanalysis to come up with the theories
and then we wait for them to be translated in English and subsequently handed down
to us in the form of affordable local editions. But I think our location in India might
not be as marginal to the evolving story of literary theory as is usually made out to be.
But before we go into these issues, let us concentrate on the connection between
literature and theory and see how tenuous or how strong the links are between the
two. And to do this we will need to go back to the decade of the 1960s. In the month
of May in the year 1968, the streets of Paris were on fire. Open battle was going on
between graduate students and the police. The ranks of the students were swelled by
workers and they were putting up barricades in the famous university area in Paris
known as the Latin Quarter, and the graffiti on the walls read anti-authority slogans
like “Il est interdit d’interdire” (It is forbidden to forbid). Many of the French
intellectuals that we had listed a moment ago as prominent theorists of our time,
including the two most famous names Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, were
student participants in the events of May 1968. And it is generally agreed that these
events which came to a head in Paris in the May of 1968 have had a transformative
influence on how literature is read and theorized, but why were these anti-
establishment riots taking place in Paris, and what is the connection between these
scenes of violence and anti-establishment protests with how literature is read and
theorized? To understand or to answer this question we need to look beyond 1968. In
fact, the story of the events of 1968 actually starts from after the end of the Second
World War after 1945. In spite of the huge amount of devastation that was wrecked
by this war the years following it saw significant economic growth and all round
prosperity, especially in the developed capitalist countries, but also in the communist
ruled Soviet Bloc. America whose economy had got a great fillip in the war years
continued to grow even after the war was over. But it was the economy of the non-
communist countries in the Europe that were more successful, and they were almost
completely transformed by the 1960. The USSR was also faring equally well in terms
of economy and grew at a rate that was comparable to the developed capitalist
countries. But this prosperity what was not just confined to the USA, or Europe, or the
USSR. Rather it was a worldwide phenomenon and as a historian Eric Hobsbawm for
instance observes in his book Age of Extremes, between the end of the world war
1945 and the 1970 there was a spectacular growth in world population but at the same
time there were no mass starvation except as a product of war and political madness
as in China of the 1958. And this was because there was a boom in food production,
which rose faster than the population. The average life expectancy also shot up by an
incredible 7 years and this is the global average. So, there was all round prosperity in
the years following the Second World War. And one of the key social features that
characterize the changing times after the Second World War was a sharp decline, in
the number of people engaged in farming and this in spite of the fact that food
production actually increased. And this decline in the number of people engaged in
farming was complimented by a parallel trend – a dramatic rise in occupations that
required higher education. And this requirement for higher education in turn was
matched by growing number of families worldwide, who because of the economic
boom could afford to send their adolescent children to secondary schools and then to
universities, rather than forcing them to go to work early to support the family
income. So, from the 1960s to say the 1980s, the student population in different parts
of the world multiplied by anything between 3 to 9 times. In France alone, the student
population which was roughly around 100,000 at the end of the Second World War
grew to become 651, 000 by the end of the 1960s, and most of this increase was
noticed in the departments of humanities and social sciences. This enormous rise in a
student population had profound consequences, because most of these new students
were first generation learners and had a very different class profile from the group of
social elites who attended universities till the Second World War. There was
therefore, a sense of a natural class resentment that most of these students felt towards
the university authority which was geared for hundreds of years to serve only the
social elite. This class resentment felt by the students found echo within the ranks of
the workers and so in the May of 1968 we see students and workers coming together
to build barricades and to resist authority in general. However, these anti-authority,
anti-establishment unrests were not just limited to Paris. Paris was indeed the
epicentre. But similar student revolts were witnessed all over Europe as well as in
America where it usually took the form of anti-Vietnam war movement protesting
against the American military action against Vietnam. And these student protests and
the erosion of the social status quo that it is represented had deep reaching impact in
the field of humanities and social sciences, and this of course, includes the field of
literary studies. In countries that witnessed the student unrest during the 1960s, the
socio-cultural vantage point from which literature was read and analysed till the pre-
Second World War era was not the point of reference that was shared by the new
students in the post war generation. This resulted in a breakdown of the meaning
making process that is necessary for communication. The social and cultural norms
which had stabilized the meanings of words and which had structured them,
structured the process of meaning making till recently, were now put under question.
The old figures of authority who had fixed the meaning were now being dismantled.
This crisis of meaning was most powerfully put forward by Jacques Derrida in a 1966
lecture which later became the essay, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of
Human Sciences”. In this essay Derrida posited, or in fact, posits the idea of discourse
as a decentred structure which is devoid of any central figure of authority. The
meanings of words, therefore, do not get fixed but in a free play continues to lead
from word to word. For students of literature, this crisis in meaning making due to
lack of an authority figure was perhaps even more clearly stated by Roland Barthes.
Barthes in his famous 1967 essay, announced the death of the author, the figure who
was assumed to be the ultimate authority on what his words on the printed paper
might mean. Refusal to accept any authority meant refusal to accept the power that an
author might have in controlling the meaning of his words – a central tenet that would
inform the school of Post-Structuralist literary theory which is one of the things we
are going to take up in one of our future lectures. Now, this erosion of authority which
erupted in the form of violent riots in the 1960s in Europe and America was, however,
not merely confined to the university campuses and streets but was also felt within the
intimacy of the family structure. In the years following the Second World War the
number of women in the higher education section rose considerably. And I am here
stating figures from all over Europe and from the USA. So, whereas, till the Second
World War women constituted only 15 to 30 percent of the student population
enrolled in higher education, by the end of the 1970 the number had risen to almost 50
% in most of the developed countries. So, this means that the wave of new student
population that we have been discussing so far also had a large number of women in
them – women who were as disaffected, if not more, at least as disaffected with the
authority and with the old established order as their male counterparts. The rise in the
women student population across Europe and America was complimented by another
trend. It was complemented by an equally dramatic rise in the participation of women
in workforce. And such an expansion of the social group of educated and
economically independent women resulted in obvious tensions within the family
structure which was inherently patriarchal, and within which the superiority of men
over women was almost taken for granted. This tension gave rise to the social and
intellectual movement that is referred to as a second-wave of feminism – a movement
that took up issues of female sexuality, reproductive rights and position of women
both in the workplace as well as within the family, and in the field of literary studies
this movement manifested in the form of a quest to find new parameters for writing
and reading literature as a woman. Women were however, not the only marginalized
section of the society who gained prominence in the change scenario after the Second
World War. Another previously marginalized social group now enjoyed a similar kind
of emancipation and a similar kind of foregrounding. And here I am thinking about
the inhabitants of the vast stretches of colonized area in the global South which gained
independence in the decades immediately following the Second World War. So, it
started with the independence of countries like India and Pakistan, but soon it spread
across to Africa, and most of this continent, most of Africa, was decolonized during
the 1950s and 1960s. There was again a huge impact of this emancipation on how
literature is read and analysed. So, by the 1960s the literature produced by authors
from erstwhile colonies managed to carve out a niche in the global book market. In
England for instance the publisher Heinemann started bringing out the African
Writers Series which published and brought to the metropolitan readers the work of
authors like Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa’ Thiongo, Ama Ata Aidoo, Buchi Emecheta,
and so on. And these are authors, that we will have to remember, they would not be
considered part of mainstream English literature even say 50 years ago. Also, just as
the second-wave feminism gave rise to various intellectual debates regarding how
women as a reader should engage with literature, the new sense of emancipation and
prominence gained by the people in the global South gave rise to a whole new field of
literary theory concerned with how the once colonized subject should intervene in the
field of literature. And we will talk more about this particular kind of literary theory
when we discuss postcolonialism again in one of our future lectures. So, as you can
see therefore, the world changed radically between the end of the Second World War
and the end of 1970 beginning of 1980s. This meant that not only the context in which
literature is studied and made sense of underwent a very significant transformation,
but also this means that the profile of producers of literature as well as the students
who critically analysed these literary texts within the classroom setting they changed
dramatically. The new prominence that literary theory enjoyed in the second half of
the twentieth century was therefore a result of students and scholars trying to connect
their study of literature with this changed context – an effort which involved
redefining the very conceptual basis of literary studies and connecting it with the new
streams of thought in the sister areas of humanities and social sciences like as I have
already mentioned philosophy, psychology, sociology, history and so on. Now one of
the reasons that the post-1960s boom in literary theory is often regarded, as we saw,
as an alien intervention within the field of literary studies is because the scholars who
made use of these new theories who still make use of these new theories are actually
challenging the prevalent ways in which literature was being read and understood, till,
say the Second World War. However, what we need to remember here is that no
matter how alien theory might appeared at a particular historical moment no reading
of literature can be ever bereft of theory altogether. So, those who portray the literary
theories that has emerged in the post 1960s often forget that existing ways in which
literature was being read and understood till that point in time, were themselves
underlined by certain conceptual basis which echoed certain other philosophical or
sociological or historical outlook of that time. And therefore, with each major shift in
the economic social and cultural context we can see fresh attempts to put literary
studies on a new conceptual basis. That is not only more in tune with the changed
world, but also in tune with the changing perspectives in other academic disciplines.
So we need to remember that the reading of literature has never been an isolated
practice that is cut off from other disciplines of human enquiry. An attempt to create
an inside outside division and place literature on one side and theory on the other side
is therefore, something which cannot be sustained for very long. In other words that
significantly changed global context of the Second World War or the post-Second
World War era might have led to a previewed profusion of new literary theories, but it
was definitely not the first attempt to theorise how to read and how to engage with
literature. Here I would like to give you an example, and I would of course, borrow
this example from within the field of English literary studies: Near the very end of the
18th century William words worth and Samuel Coleridge two friends and literary
collaborators significantly changed the ways in which literature is created, is
conceived, and is read. This revolution in the field of English literary studies is
usually referred to as the Romantic Movement. But if we look deeper we will see that
this reconceptualization of literature also had a broader, social, political and cultural
context. On the one hand these urge to think about literature a new was fuelled by the
great political and intellectual changes that were brought about by the French
revolution. Indeed Wordsworth was present in Paris immediately after the most iconic
act of French revolution the storming of the Bastille Prison had been performed and a
republic had been declared in place of a monarchy in France. And the revolutionary
political change that was worth witnessed in France had such an impact on him that
he sought to express this paradigm shift in poetic form in his autobiographical piece
The Prelude. And I will read out some lines from the prelude here. (It was in truth an
hour of universal moment, mildest men were agitated and commotions, strife of
passion and opinion, filled the walls of peaceful houses with unique sounds. The soil
of common life was at that time, too hot to tread upon.) I am sure some of you were
able to hear the echoes of the events of 1960s, in these lines written about how things
were unfolding in the 1790s. But it was not just this political agitation that led to a re-
conceptualization of literature within the domain of English literary studies both
words worth and Coleridge in their efforts to rethink the very process in which
literature is created and consumed also drew significantly from French philosophers
like Jean Jacques Rousseau, and also a German idealists like Immanuel Kant, Georg
Hegel, Friedrich Schelling, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. So, as you can see through
this comparison 1960s was not the only moment when English literary studies was
opened up to external influences, and theories were imported from other disciplines to
arrive at a new conceptual basis for literature. The theory of literature forwarded by
the English Romantic Movement was in fact, equally dependent on the ideas of
intellectuals who were firstly, neither literary critics, secondly, nor were they working
from within any English tradition. Literary theory in the field of English studies,
therefore, does not start in the 1960s. The 1960s is just one watershed moment one of
the watershed moments in the evolving history of literary theory. You need from the
vantage point of being a student of English literature we can spot a number of such
watershed movements, one of them being of course the emergence of the English
Romantic Movement, about which we just discussed, and the 1790s when a new
theory of literature emerged along with the writings of Wordsworth and Coleridge.
But we can spot another watershed moment at the beginning of the 18th century when
the English word “literature” started acquiring its modern meaning the meaning that
we understand now. As Raymond Williams notes in his book Marxism and Literature,
the term which, the term literature, which has its origin in the Latin word “littera”
started being used in English from around the 14 century and in its earlier forms
which was by the way spelt with a double t, so the spelling was l-i-t-t-e-r-a-t-u-r-e and
this was because the Latin word “littera” was also spelt with a double “t”, right. So, in
this earlier form it signified just someone’s ability to read. So when the late 16th
/early 17th century English scholar Francis Bacon for instance mentioned someone
being “learned in literature”, he was actually simply referring to the fact that the
person was able to read. Now, therefore, and we still retain something of this earlier
use when we use the term literacy for instance which was initially connected with the
word literature right. Now that connection, of course, has been lost, the connection
between literature and literacy. William Caxton, if you know your English history you
will know this that William Caxton had introduced the printing press in England in
the fifteenth century. So, by the end of the 17th century when printed reading material
was available in sufficient abundance literature had come to signify not only ones
ability to read, but also more specifically the ability of someone to read printed books
or the practice of reading printed books. Moreover, literacy and the availability of
printed books, whereas is, I think, obviously limited to a small section of elite within a
society. Think of India even now and you will get the meaning of what I am trying to
say here. And so by the 18th century literature was also associated with this with a
kind of elitist aura. Why? Because literacy and availability of printed material was
restricted to only to a group of social elite. And by the 18th century literature was also
associated with a certain degree of cultural sophistication. It was associated with
everything that social elite is associated with. Engaging with literature therefore, was
a way of gaining as well as displaying cultural values and civilizational attainments.
Raymond Williams also notes that by the 18th century the use of the word literature
changed in another fundamental way. During this time it acquired the meaning of
imaginative composition or imaginative writing and while it gained this meaning it
subsumed within itself the earlier category of poetry or poesy which had signified
imagined imaginative composition before then. Now, with the development of the
term literature poetry was confined primarily to metrical composition. Even now we
associate poetry primarily with metrical composition, but it is important to remember
that at one point of time, it was not just one kind of literature, but poetry or poesy
signified a much broader thing. It signified imaginative composition in general. And
why I am saying it is important to remember, because we will often come across
terms like poetics, which actually signifies more than just a commentary on poetry. It
signifies more than that. It signifies a commentary on literature in general as we
understand the term now. Coming back to the point it is in this time of change, 18th
century, when literature gradually became what we understand it to be now that I
would like to locate the origin of literary theory or literary criticism. Because it is only
when certain works started being identified and thought as literature that we encounter
the growth of theories to sustain it as a field of studies as a separate field of
independent studies. Interestingly India and Indian students of literature played a very
significant role in this 18th century story of how English literature developed as a
separate field of study and how a complementary field of literary theory developed
along with it. And this is, because India was one of the earliest places in the world
where English literature was studied as an academic discipline. So, you can see rather
than being marginal to the story of literary theory we those of us who teach and study
English literature in India are actually at the very heart of it. Not only during the
moment of its origin in the 18th century, but also in later times when India again
comes to prominence with the rise of post-colonial literature and post-colonial theory
and with the emergence of theorists like Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak and Homi
Bhabha. We will encounter these names again in our lectures of postcolonial literary
theory later on. I would like to point out that though I have just mentioned the early
18th century as the point from where we should start our discussion of literary theory,
because the very concept of literature was absent within the field of English studies
before that. But, in practice, in actuality our syllabus will go will begin far back in
time. And this is because ancient Greek and Roman philosophers like Plato for
instance, or Aristotle, or Horace, or Longinus also known as Pseudo Longinus they
had a very significant impact on the theorists of the 18th century and these
philosophers, therefore, form an integral part of the history of literary theory as it is
taught and studied within the academic discipline of English literature. In our next
lecture therefore, we will first discuss Plato and Aristotle. And we will discuss their
commentary, on the idea of mimesis. You will discover that this term mimesis has
been crucial in guiding all later understandings of literature in particular and art in
general. So, we will first discuss that and then we will in turn move to Longinus and
his theory of the sublime and how that theory of the sublime relates to literature. And
it is only after these initial lectures that we will be able to start discussing, how
literature and literary theory started being studied in the field of English studies from
the 18th century. So, when we will move to the topic of literary theory in the context
of 18th century England, we will see how there was an effort to mould the emerging
field of literature in accordance to the rules borrowed from the writings of ancient
Greek and Roman philosophers. This is why, in fact, the kind of literary theory that
we see developing in England between the second half of the 17th century right up to
the first decades of 18th century is referred to as the new classical school of literary
theory. And here the word neoclassical refers to a renewed interest in the writings of
classical authors of Greek and Roman antiquity. Now the interest in these classical
authors of ancient Greece and Rome were already kindled in England during the
Renaissance, but it was not until the late 17th and early 18th century that we
encounter substantial body of theoretical writings based on the thoughts and insights
provided by the classical authors. Incidentally and also very interestingly the classical
authors often did not influence the literary theoreticians in England directly. Rather
they were influenced via the works of French intellectuals like Nicolas Boileau-
Despréaux, better known as just Boileau, and therefore, in the debates and discussions
through which English literary theorists tried to modify and expand or even contradict
the ideas of the classical authors of Greek and Roman antiquity to arrive at a new
understanding of literature. Often these discussions had French intellectuals like
Boileau as powerful interlocutors. And, so you see, Terry Eagleton complaint about
certain twentieth century English literary critics waiting in the port City of Dover for
their intellectual shipment to arrive from France can in fact be extended back to the
late 17th early 18th century, because even back then what was happening in France in
the intellectual circles of France had a major impact on the intellectual life of England
and of the Anglophone world in general. By the end of the 18th century, however, the
edifice of neoclassical literary theory was crumbling. The world was changing and it
was changing primarily under the influence of two major revolutions the industrial
revolution and the French revolution and there were also new intellectual currents
which were at work. By the end of the 18th century, all this resulted in the new set of
literary theories that I have mentioned before as forming the Romantic Movement
forming part of the Romantic Movement. So, after discussing the neoclassical theory
first, of course, we will begin with the works of Greek and Roman intellectuals like
Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, etcetera. Then we will move on to a discussion of
neoclassical literary theories as it developed in late 17th and the first half of the 18th
century. And after that we will move to this new kind of literary theory that developed
at the very end of 18th century early nineteenth century, which we see as part of the
greater Romantic Movement. In our subsequent lectures, after we have completed
Romanticism, completed discussing Romanticism, we will again move forward
roughly a 100 years from the Romantic Movement. And we will see that a fresh set of
literary theories had started emerging during the early twentieth century and here we
will deal with how different strategies of reading literature were experimented with by
the American school of New Critics for instance by the Russian Formalists. And we
will also pay special attention to Mikhail Bakhtin who was part of the Russian
Formalist movement, but he was also a major theorist in his own right and terms like
dialogism, for instance, which is today integrally associated with literary theory and
how we understand literature goes back to the writings of Bakhtin. So, when we will
discuss Russian formalism we will also especially focus on the works of Mikhail
Bakhtin and we will also focus on the German Phenomenologists like Russell for
instance or Heidegger, who initiated a school of literary theory that later developed
into what we now call what we now know as the reader response theory. After these
discussions we will then move on to a set of lectures that would help us connect
literary theory with three major developments that marked the beginning of the
twentieth century. We will start here with the development that is perhaps least
discussed in the world outside the academia, but nevertheless which has had an
astonishing amount of influence within the field of literary theory. Here, I am talking
about the 1916 publication of the book titled Cours de linguistique générale, or
Course in General Linguistics, that is the title under which its English translation was
published. And this book is basically a collection of lectures collection of lectures
delivered by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and he, Saussure, delivered
these lectures between 1906 and 1907 and by the time the book was published in
1916, Saussure was already dead. But it is to this book, to this collection of lectures,
that we can trace the beginning of Structuralist theory, which not only influenced the
field of linguistics, but also had a profound impact on the field of sociology and
literature. For instance, earlier in this lecture we have mentioned someone called
Claude Levi-Strauss for instance who was a sociologist but who may have used this
Structuralist insight in his analysis of societies and Strauss, in general, influenced
literature and literary theory, which goes under the name of [Structuralist] literary
Structuralism. It’s, in fact, the influence of Saussure and his text continued even after
the 1960s. And we see for instance even Jacques Derrida taking his cue from
Structuralist theory, indeed he states, in his famous essay “Structure, Sign and Play in
the Discourse of Human Sciences” by critiquing the work of Levi Strauss. So, the new
kind of theory that emerged after the 1960s and that is associated primarily with the
name of Jacques Derrida is also referred to as post structuralism. This is because of its
close links with structuralism often structuralism and post structuralism do not agree
on major points, but nevertheless there are a significant number of links between these
two kinds of theories for us to place them together and to learn about them one after
the other from a discussion of Structuralism and Post-structuralism. We will then
move on to the second major development that shaped the twentieth century and this
one is the Bolshevik revolution which happened in Russia in 1917. Now, with this
revolution the revolution in 1917 Karl Marx’s economic theory first gained the major
politically expression. There was always political undertones in the writings of a
Marx, but it was primarily document which critiqued economic theories. With 1917
this economic theory now transformed into a major significant political movement.
And the communists took over the reign of Russia by bringing to an end the rule of
the Romanov monarchs. However, the Bolshevik revolution did not merely bring
Marxism to the political foreground, but also expanded it as a field of debate and this
expansion was also felt within the field of literary studies. And throughout the
twentieth century Marxism continued to remain a very strong intellectual force
guiding theories about how to read, how to analyze, and indeed how to create how to
produce literature. The third major movement was marked by the 1899 publication of
Sigmund Freud’s Die Traumdeutung which was translated in English under the title
The Interpretation of Dreams. And this was a major publication because it assured in
the new science of psychoanalysis. And from the very beginning psychoanalysis had a
very strong relationship with literature and Freud for instance borrowed character
names like Oedipus from ancient Greek literature to express psychoanalytic concepts
we have for instance the Oedipal complex. And also apart from borrowing literary
terms Freud also used his insight as a psychoanalyst to interpret various literary texts
including William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. This strong connection between
psychoanalysis and literary theory has continued well beyond Freud. And throughout
the twentieth century we have had intellectuals like Carl Gustav Jung, for instance,
Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and all of them have either used
psychoanalytical insights to interpret literature or whose works on psychoanalysis
have been borrowed by other theorists to explicate specific literary works. Next after
completing this we will move to the topic of literature and gender and in this lecture
we will try to see how the different waves of feminism have impacted literary theory.
But in this lecture we will also try and move beyond feminism to see how the more
recent queer movements have also played a part in building a new set of literary
canons and promoting a new kind of discourse around literature. As is common
knowledge perhaps the prefix post plays a very significant role in any syllabus of
literary theory almost as significant as a suffix -ism. In fact, we have already
encountered quite a few -isms in the form of Romanticism, Structuralism, Marxism,
Feminism. And we have also come across the prefix post- in the form of Post-
structuralism, but we will focus on two more examples of this prefix post, when we
do Postmodernism and Postcolonialism. Again two very important topics as far as
literary theory is concerned. And from there we will move on to theories of
Ecocriticism. And this in a way we will actually bring us up to date, because much of
the contemporary literary theory is emerging out of concerns about our shared
environment and ecology. In the final lecture I will try to give a brief introduction to
certain literary theories that have had their origin in ancient India within ancient
Indian tradition. And here I will be talking about things like the Rasa theory and how
Dhvani can be used as a tool of literary analysis, but it is also important to note that
these “Indian theories” are not usually included in courses of literary theory within the
field of English studies. However, it would be agreed to try and expand the already
eclectic field of literary theory a bit more and make it slightly more relevant to us who
study literary theory from within the context of Indian institutes. So, as you can see
we have a lot of ground to cover in this course. And we will continue our journey in
the next lecture, where we will talk about the ancient Greek philosophers Plato and
Aristotle and we will discuss their lasting impact in the study of literature and literary
theory. Good bye till then.
Greek classical philosophy. Plato 1 mimesis
Hello and welcome back to another lecture in the series titled Introduction to Literary
Theory. In today’s lecture we are going to look back at the legacy of the Greek
classical philosophy. And we are going to see how the impact of classical philosophy
was felt among the later generation of literary theorists. The Greek philosopher with
whom we will start this exploration of ancient Greece and its philosophical legacy is
Plato. And the influence of Plato in the European tradition of thoughts and ideas has
been so enormous that the 20th century intellectual A. N. Whitehead had famously
declared that the whole of the European philosophical tradition was little more than a
series of footnotes added to the writings of Plato. It is therefore, only fitting that we
start our discussion of literary theory by looking back at the writings of Plato.
However, interestingly enough, Plato is usually remembered in the discussions of
literary studies for the way in which he famously or some might even say in famously
banished the poets and exiled them from his conception of an ideal republic. Why is
then Plato still important for a discussion of literary studies? Also, why would
someone who is known for his wisdom seek to banish poets from an ideal city?
Hasn’t literature been an expression of human culture and civilization attainment
throughout its existence? And, has not Greece itself, ancient Greece, been one of the
most brilliant sites of literary productions; starting from Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, down
to Aeschylus, Socrates and Euripides. We will come to these questions soon enough,
and we will see what relevance Plato might have on an effort to theorize literature in
the modern context.
But to start with let us briefly acquaint ourselves with the figure of Plato. Plato was
born somewhere in the second half of the 5th century BCE. One of the probable years
of his birth is 427 BCE, but I say probable, because there is no absolute consensus on
this date. Today we think Plato as an eminent Greek philosopher, but back in the 5th
century BCE, we would not have come across any notion of Greece as a single
national cum political entity. Rather, Greece at that point of time represented a culture
sphere. And it represented a culture sphere which spread across not only what we
know today as the modern day Greece, but also it spread across southern Italy, some
parts of northern Africa, and also some regions of modern day Turkey. This vast
culture sphere was dotted by independent city states. And it was with reference to
these city states that the Greeks of the 5th century BCE primarily defined their
identity. And the city state with which Plato was associated with was Athens. And it
was here that he had his training under one of the most remarkable intellectuals of all
times, Socrates. After the execution of Socrates in about 399 BCE, Plato left Athens,
and he went to southern Italy. But later on in his life he came back to his native city
state. And he established there his famous school known as Academy. And it is here
in Academy that he trained one of the most notable philosophers of the European
tradition, whose name is Aristotle. And Plato died, here again, we do not have an
exact date, but Plato died somewhere around the middle of the 4th century BCE.
The years through which Plato lived were remarkably eventful. The first 30 years of
Plato’s life was spent under the shadow of the second Peloponnesian war between
Athens and Sparta. And this war saw a thorough destruction of the Athenian form of
government which had sustained its golden era in the 5th century BCE. Plato’s career,
therefore, in a way marks both the high point of the achievements of the classical
Athenian civilization. And also it bears witness to the beginning of the end of that
civilization. And ironically, some of Plato’s own relatives were responsible in siding
with the rival power of Sparta, and bringing down the earlier form of Athenian
government that ultimately led to the downfall of the Athenian civilization as a whole.
But even more significant in this regard is Plato’s association, direct association, with
Socrates, that mercurial figure who was greatly responsible for questioning and for
undermining some of the very foundational beliefs that held the Athenian way of life
together. In fact, Socrates was executed in around 399 BCE, by the Athenian state for
not recognizing the god of the city and this was a charge brought against Socrates, he
did not recognize the god of the city and he was said to corrupt the minds of the
young men of Athens, through his novel ideas, through his system of questioning
some of the foundational beliefs.
But what was this Athenian world order this old Athenian world order that Plato saw
crumbling during his own lifetime? This world order can perhaps be summed up by
using a single word. And that single word is democracy. The road to democracy for
Athens began early in the 6th century when a Greek statesman named Solon reformed
the existing model of Athenian governance. Under Solon, governmental power which
was previously held by a group of 9 Athenians of noble birth passed on to a council of
400 Athenian citizens who now formed the government of the city state. About a 100
years later, this inclusive expansion of the political structure was furthered even more
significantly by a man named Cleisthenes. Now, Cleisthenes also like Solon was a
statesman. And he was the one who finally, severed the connection between political
power and the wealthy nobles of Athens. Because Cleisthenes gave every free male
citizen of Athens the power to vote and it was through this voting process, that the
government of the city now came to be elected. Thus in 507 BCE, the democratic
form of government was born in Athens. Though most of us are now accustomed to
living under democratic regimes all over the world. In 507 BCE democracy was a
revolutionary idea, where small tradesmen, wealthy citizens, aristocrats, all of them
became equal partners in the Athenian government. But we have to remember that
this sense of equality and political agency was shared only by the free male citizens
and though this of course, represented a major increase from the days before so long
when only 9 aristocrats ruled Athens, it was still only about 20 percent of the total
people living in Athens who had the right to vote. So, free male citizens of Athens
actually consisted not more than 20 percent of it is entire population. Women, slaves,
and foreigners were still excluded from the political scene in democratic Athens and
they did not have the right to vote. And we will see during the course of our lectures,
how this exclusion of women, how this exclusion of sleeves of foreigners played an
important role in Plato’s theorizing about literature in his book The Republic.
Incidentally The Republic which is the book that we will be focusing on is, in fact, the
text where we find the idea of banishing the poets from the ideal city state to which I
had referred to earlier. And therefore, it is on this book that we would pivot our
discussion on Plato and his theorization of literature during the course of today’s
lecture. Having said this, I would also like to point out that The Republic is not
primarily a treatise on literature. Rather it is main focus is on the idea of governance.
It is focus is on what are the best ways to run, to govern a state. And as I have already
mentioned the Athenian democracy which had sustained the classical golden age of
Athens during the 5th century BCE was already being questioned during Plato’s
lifetime. Not only by external threats posed by such neighboring city states like
Sparta, but also internally by individuals like Socrates. And situated in this twilight of
Athenian democracy, Plato in his treatise The Republic, tried to look into the possible
forms of governance that might prove best for the running of an ideal city state. Now
the very fact that literature is conceived as part of this broader social political
framework and not as an isolated practice is something to be noted. Because if we
understand this, then we will not be taken aback when we see contemporary theorists
trying to read literature by placing it within a broader interdisciplinary context,
because this is precisely what has been happening with all theorization of literature
since at least 360 BCE when Plato wrote the public.
But before we started discussing about Plato’s theorization of literature, with respect
to The Republic, let me point out one very important aspect about the writings that
have come down to us bearing the name of Plato. These writings are mostly in the
form of dialogues. With perhaps only a major exception being the work titled
“Apology”. In these Platonic dialogues, we usually see the figure of Socrates
occupying the centre stage. And we see various other people engaging in disputation,
engaging in conversation with the philosopher Socrates. It is this conversational style
that Socrates uses to expound his theories, and also to demolish received ideas
presented by his interlocutors; this means, firstly, that Plato’s dialogues themselves
reflect the kind of literature for which classical Athens was most famous for, which is
the literary form of drama. Secondly, this means that in Plato’s dialogues like The
Republic for instance, we do not directly hear the voice of Plato himself. What we
hear primarily is the voice of Socrates. But this opens a number of questions of
course, because is Socrates his voice that we hear in a text like The Republic, is it
representative in a transparent way the voice of Plato, or is Socrates’s voice a
reflection of what the historical Socrates had to say on the matters around which these
dialogues are constructed? Or a Socrates’s figure like a character in a play, whose
words though they are written by the playwright, does not necessarily reflect the
playwright’s opinions or even the exact sayings of the historical figure on whom the
dramatic character might be modelled?
As we shall see these questions will have a direct relevance to what The Republic has
to say about literature. And therefore, it is to this text The Republic that we now turn.
The main problem that Socrates of The Republic appears to have with poetry, is that it
is imitative in nature. That is how Socrates defines poetry in The Republic. By the
way, here I should point out that in this context poetry stands for the wider field of
literature that was known to Plato. And therefore, it has a sense that is slightly
different from what we understand by poetry today. Anyway coming back to Socrates
the problem that he identifies at the heart of poetry is it is imitative nature. And the
Greek word that refers to imitation is mimesis; this will be a key word for the few
lectures following this one. In book 10 of The Republic which is the last chapter of
this dialogue, Socrates mentions that the kind of poetry that he thinks should be
banned from the ideal city state, is characterized by imitation or mimesis of and I
quote: “the actions of men whether voluntary or involuntary on which a good or bad
result has ensued, and they rejoice or sorrow accordingly”. In other words, Socrates
has a problem with poetry that imitates men and their actions, and show how these
actions produce good or bad results, thereby creating joy or sorrow for an individual.
In the same chapter Socrates also states, the reason why he has a problem with such
kind of imitative poetry, and according to Socrates here again, I quote: (“The
imitative poet implants an evil constitution, for he indulges the irrational nature which
has no discernment of greater and less, but things the same thing at one time great and
at another small. He is a manufacturer of images and is very far removed from the
truth”.) If we bring down this statement, we will see that for Socrates imitative poetry
is problematic because of 2 reasons. Firstly, he argues that imitative poetry has a
corrupting effect upon it is audience. It “implants and evil constitution”. And
secondly, Socrates argues that imitative poetry manufactures images that are far
removed from the truth. Both of these so called problems that Socrates mentions
incorporate some rather complicated reasoning and would need a significant amount
of unpacking. But let us start with the first problem. Imitative poetry is corrupting and
“plants and evil constitution among it is audience”. Let us see how this unpacks. In
some earlier chapters of The Republic, namely book 2 and book 3, we find a rather
straightforward explanation in fact, of this moral objection that Socrates levies against
imitative poetry. In these books Socrates argues that stories told by the poets have as
profound an influence on the mind of young children as gymnastic exercises have on
shaping their bodies. Therefore, given the significant ways in which stories can
fashion the impressionable mind of young children, they should not be exposed to
certain kinds of imitative poetry. And what are these kinds of poetry? Well, the kind
of poetry that Socrates has in mind here is a one which depicts bad characters or
which depicts morally degenerate actions. Socrates argues that if impressionable
young children are exposed to such imitative poetry, the unsavoury characters and
their actions depicted in them might have a corrupting influence on their minds;
thereby making them incapable of developing into good and upright citizens of the
ideal city state. By way of an example Socrates refers to the story of the Greek God
Uranus and the strife that he had with his son Cronus. And this story is depicted
famously by Hesiod. According to Socrates such stories of quarrels between a father
and a son who are also on top of that divine figures said a very bad example to the
children who are to become the future guardians of the ideal city state. This is because
and I quote Socrates’s own words: (“The young man should not be told that in
committing the worst of crimes he is far from doing anything outrageous; and that
even if it just chastises his father when does wrong in whatever manner, he will only
follow the example of the first and the greatest among the gods”.) In the light of this
argument the moral objection that Socrates voices in book 10 can be elaborated in a
very simple manner. Some imitative poetry should be shunned because by portraying
immoral men and their dubious actions they set bad examples in front of the
impressionable children and young men. These are the examples of imitative poetry,
these are the kinds of imitative poetry, which corrupts the souls and implants an evil
constitution among the audience. However, this explanation that Socrates only wanted
to ban one particular kind of imitative poetry cannot be sustained till the end of the
dialogue. Because by the time we reach book 10 we find that Socrates is condemning
imitative poetry in general. So, in book 10 he does not make a distinction between
imitative poetry representing bad characters and immoral actions and imitative poetry
representing good characters and their noble actions. In light of this fact, the source of
Socrates is objection therefore, needs to be located not in the morally good or morally
bad content of the poetry. Rather it needs to be located in imitative poetries essence as
a product of mimesis. Socrates seems to think that imitation itself is ethically
corrupting. Irrespective of whether what is being imitated is morally good or bad. But
this leads to the question why is mimesis, including mimesis of good men and their
noble actions, morally corrupting? What is it in the very idea of imitation that is
problematic? And it is to this question that we now turn. According to the character of
Socrates in Plato’s The Republic and I will keep repeating this because I am not
talking about the historical Socrates, I am talking about the Socrates as we find him in
this particular dialogue, mimesis is corrupting because of two distinct, but
interconnected reasons. The first reason has to do with the nature of reality or nature
of truth. And this is associated with a philosophical theory that is usually referred to
as Plato’s theory of forms. To understand this theory of form, let us look at the
example of a bed that Plato mentions in book 10 of The Republic. Now what do we
understand when we try to think of a real bed or a true bed? According to Plato’s
theory of forms, the true and original bed is and I quote: “one, existing in nature
which is made by god”. Now this might sound slightly counterintuitive given the fact
that when we think about a bed we usually think of an object that is made by a
carpenter. However, according to the theory of forms what the carpenter makes is in
fact, a copy of the original form of the bed that already exists in nature. And this
original bed is unconnected which specific instances of beds that we might come
across in material reality. To understand the logic of this argument here, let us assume
that by using some high-tech weapon, we managed to destroy all the specific
instances of beds that exist in material reality. According to the Platonic theory of
forms, even then, even with all the material beds gone, we will still retain the idea of
the bed; because the idea is universal , and that idea is not dependent on the existence
of specific individual beds. So, in this theory the original and the true bed is the ideal
form; that is universal and non-material. The material bed is only an imitation of this
non-material ideal form. But what happens in case of mimeses or mimetic art which
imitates from the world of material reality? Well in those cases we move even further
from the true and original form. Thus, for instance the painting of a bed is an imitation
of a material bed that is manufactured by a carpenter which in itself is an imitation of
the original and universal idea of the bed. Socrates in Plato’s The Republic builds his
critique of mimesis in general and mimetic poetry in particular on this sense of
distance from the original and true form of a thing. And according to this theory of
forms, this theory which shows us the distance between an imitation and the original,
mimetic art is problematic because the painting of a bed for instance is situated at a
third remove from the true and original bed. If you look at this slide, you will clearly
see this three-step relationship, where the first state is a ideal form of the bed, the
second remove from that is the material bed made by the carpenter, and the third
removed from that is a painting of the bed, mimetic expression, mimetic
representation of the material bed. Now, there is a problem here which is, that even if
we assume that the process of mimesis as depicted by the act of painting a bed is
situated at a third remove from the truth from the reality of the ideal form, why should
it be considered as something which has the power of corrupting, something which is
deceiving, something which is morally not right? Well the argument is that since
material bed is a specific representation of the ideal form, it only represents an aspect
of the universal, that is to say a very small part of the whole. When the painter in turn
imitates the material bed, he imitates not the material bed as it is in reality, but rather
as it appears to him. So, for instance, the painter standing next to a material bed will
only paint the bed as it appears to him from that angle. This appearance does not
encompass the entire reality of the material bed. This is because as soon as the painter
changes his position, and here of course, we are talking about realistic painting, the
form of painting that would be known to Plato. As soon as the painter changes his
position, a new angle is achieved and a whole new appearance of the bed is revealed
to him. And this new appearance is separate and distinct from the earlier appearance.
Therefore, a painting of the material bed is again a small part of what the material bed
is in reality. So, as you can see with each shift in the chain that takes us from the ideal
form to the material expression to the artistic imitation of that material expression, we
moved more and more away from the original essence of a thing. And this in itself is
problematic, but this sense of becoming further and further removed from the truth as
we pass through different levels of mimesis, is even further augmented if we consider
that the faculty of human perception is notoriously prone to folly. Let us again
consider an example. Let us say that there are 2 objects which are of absolutely same
dimensions and they are situated at 2 different points, one nearer to me, and one
farther to me. When I look at both of them, the one nearer to me will appear to be
larger, and the one farther to me would appear to be smaller. Now if I were to try and
paint them I will paint according to this perception and represent one body as small
and the other body as large. But in reality the dimensions of these 2 bodies are
absolutely the same. So, my artistic imitation we will be based on a faulty appearance
and not on the true reality. Similarly, if I look at a stick immersed in water, I might
paint it as crooked, because that is how it will appear to me. But in reality the stick
might be straight and might only appear crooked in water because of refraction. Here
again my imitation of the material object would be faulty since it will necessarily be
based on appearances rather than on the truth, rather than on the reality. Thus since
mimesis is susceptible to deception, because it is based on appearances rather than on
truth and reality, imitative art is realized as problematic. But as you have noticed in
my discussion so far, I have explained the objection to my message the objection to
imitation only with reference to visual arts. So now, the question is how does this all
connect to the topic of literature, and more specifically to the suggestion of banning
the poets, imitative poets, from the ideal city state. We will address this issue in our
next lecture.
Plato 2 : mimesis2
Hello and welcome back to this lecture series Introduction to Literary Theory. As you
know we have been discussing Socrates’s famous suggestion to ban poets from the
ideal state as mentioned in Plato’s The Republic. And we have established that this
objection to poets stem from the association with mimesis or imitation. And we have
been trying to understand this objection of Socrates through the arguments that he
presents with reference to imitative painting to the form of visual mimesis. In this
lecture we will see how all of this connects to a Socrates’s criticism of poetry and of
poets. However, before we can get to that discussion, where we move on to Socrates’s
arguments about poetry and poets in particular, we will have to stay with our
discussion on mimesis and the art of painting a little longer. And we need to clarify
certain other things before we can enter the domain of literature proper. So, as I
mentioned in my previous lecture, Socrates in the republic considers mimesis to be
corrupting for two distinct but interconnected reasons. The first reason, as I have
already explained, is that mimesis deals in appearances rather than in reality and is
situated at a third remove from the true form of a thing. The second reason for which
Socrates considers mimesis to be corrupting is because he thinks that it confuses our
sense of distinction between knowledge and ignorance. Since, this is a somewhat
complex argument that Socrates makes we will try and unravel it slowly. And to
begin with let us consider these lines that Socrates utters in book 10 of The Republic:
(“A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter or any other artist though he knows nothing
of their arts. And if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons
when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance. And they will fancy
that they are looking at a real carpenter”.) Now, the wording of this passage is slightly
deceptive, and indeed a cursory reading of these lines might suggest that here Socrates
is talking about something that is similar to the kind of experience that, we might have
when we go to watch a 3D movie in a cinema hall. The 3D projection in the movie
theatre can fool us or at the very least children and simple minded persons, into
believing that they are looking at real human beings rather than at simulations or
images. Similarly, we might think that what Socrates is saying is that a crafty painter
can fool children and simple persons into believing that the carpenter on his canvas is
a real 3-dimensional person rather than a painted image. However, if we read the
passage in the broader context of a book 10 of The Republic, we will realize that this
is not a really the kind of deception that, Socrates has in mind here. In fact, what
Socrates is referring to here is the painter’s ability to make us believe that he is so
knowledgeable in the art of carpentry that the man he has painted as a carpenter. He is
precisely what an ideal carpenter looks like in real life. Similarly, he can also make us
believe that he knows the art of cobbling shoes so well that his portrayal on the canvas
is a true representation of how a cobbler looks and behaves like in real life. In other
words, a painter who represents through his paintings different kinds of men engaged
in different kinds of profession might fool people into believing that his portraits are
realistic, because he personally knows all about these professions and these crafts that
he is portraying on the canvas. Therefore, the painter poses to the people as an all
knowing person. But of course, this is problematic and is in fact, a deception in itself
as Socrates points out and I am quoting Socrates here: (“Whenever someone tells us
that he has met a person who knows all the crafts as well as the other things that
anyone else knows, and that his knowledge of any subject is more exact than any of
theirs is, we must assume that we are talking to a simple minded fellow, who has
apparently encountered some sort of magician or imitator and been deceived into
thinking him omniscient and that the reason he has been deceived is that he himself
cannot distinguish between knowledge, ignorance and imitation.”) Simply put, a
painter who is merely an imitator can pass himself off as knowledgeable in various
crafts, only by confounding and deceiving a person, who is himself ignorant. And let
us explore this thesis further with the help of an illustration. Socrates asks if we are to
consider a flute, then who is the most knowledgeable person in that matter. Of course,
the answer is the person who plays flutes will be the most knowledgeable, because he
is the one who has genuine knowledge about whether a flute is good or bad. Similarly,
if we take another instrument, a cricket bat for instance, we will agree that the most
knowledgeable person about a cricket bat is someone like Sachin Tendulkar for
instance. So, just like a flutist will know about a flute because he is a master in the
craft of using flutes, a cricketer like Sachin Tendulkar will be in the best position to
discern whether a cricket bat is good or bad because he is a master in the craft of
yielding it. If we extrapolate from these individual examples, we arrive at a general
truth. And that truth is the user or practitioner of something is a person who is really
knowledgeable about that thing. In the words of Socrates, the beauty and correctness
of each manufactured item, living creature and action is related to nothing but the use
for which each is made or naturally adapted. So, the person who makes the flute or the
cricket bat or any other such instrument of craft is therefore, not as knowledgeable as
the user of that instrument or the practitioner of the craft. Thus a maker of a cricket
bats we will necessarily be guided by a master cricketer, because it is the latter who
has the true knowledge about what makes a bat good or bad, or in the case of flutes
for instance, and here I will quote Socrates, the “flute-player will tell the flute-maker
which of his flutes is satisfactory to the performer; he will tell him how he ought to
make them, and the other we will attend to his instructions”. Therefore, as we pass
from the user to the maker, we already shift from real knowledge to a lesser form of
knowledge. But the maker, be it of flutes or of cricket bats, or any other such thing is
still aware of the true value of the items that he manufactures, because he is guided by
the user. However, when we come to a painter who imitates on his canvas the material
flute produced by a flute maker, this connection which true knowledge is absolutely
lost; it is completely severed. Or rather knowledge about the value of the flute
actually becomes irrelevant to the painter, and why is that the case? Well, imagine if
you were to paint a flute by copying a material sample. Would you need to be able to
play the flute? Or would you need to be able to judge the sound of the flute before you
start painting? No, of course, because how good the flute sounds and how worthy, it is
of performance is irrelevant to the process of imitating the flute on the canvas. So, in
other words a painted flute might appear to be good without really being good. Here
again we come to the distinction between appearance and reality that we had
encountered earlier in our discussion. And we come to the same conclusion that
mimesis or imitation is problematic because it deals in appearances rather than in
reality. But there is another level of deception going on here. The painter who imitates
the flutes need not know anything about flute playing to create realistic images of
flutes. However, the very realism of his painting might trick children and simple
minded people to assume that the painter knows all about flutes, because his painting
of the flute is so nice. So, the imitator appears to be knowledgeable even though in
reality he may be ignorant. So, from this discussion of mimesis, in the context of
realistic paintings, we arrive at 2 main arguments. The first argument is that mimesis
deals in appearances that are situated at a third remove from the reality. The second
argument is that mimetic artists lack true knowledge of the things that they imitate
though they might fool one into believing that, they are greatly knowledgeable.
Now let us take these insights on mimesis, and see how they apply to the work of the
poets who imitate the actions of men. It is very easy to explain the opposition to poets
and poetry that imitate morally reprobate characters and their degenerate actions.
What is difficult to explain is how this opposition might equally apply to poets
imitating noblemen and virtuous actions. Let us start here with an example in book
Four of The Republic. Socrates points out that a virtue like the virtue of justice for
instance does not have anything to do with the outward nature of a man. Rather it has
to do with the harmonious condition of his inner life which and I quote, “is the true
self and concernment of man”. But a poet who wants to represent the virtues of a just
man can only imitate the outward appearance of such a man. And not his inner self,
which is after all the true source of his virtue. Therefore, we are here again confronted
with the argument of mimesis being imitation of appearances, which are situated at a
third remove from reality. And this slide would help explain the overlapping
arguments. The relation established in the first row are already familiar to us. The true
reality of a bed is it is universal non material form. The material expression of that
form is situated at a second remove from the original. The painting of the material bed
is an imitation of an appearance which in turn is situated at a third remove from the
reality of the universal form. Following the same logic, we can read the second row
thus. The true seat of a virtue like justice for instance is a soul or the inner self of a
man, his outwards action are particular manifestations of that original virtue and are at
a second remove from the soul. The poetic mimesis of virtuous men is only an
imitation of this outward appearance of virtue and is therefore, situated at a third
remove from what originally constitutes virtue. But this however, does not explain
why poetry that imitates virtuous men can be morally corrupting. To arrive at an
answer to this question, let us try and understand how the binary of knowledge and
ignorance plays out in mimetic poetry. As already mentioned, the painter in spite of
being ignorant about flute playing or about carpentry can appear to his audience to be
knowledgeable in these crafts, because his paintings of a flute or his paintings of a
carpenter look nice, and they look pleasing. Similarly, a poet like the poet Homer, for
instance, in spite of being ignorant about virtue can appear to know all about it
because his poetic representation of virtuous men might be appealing. Now according
to these this argument there are 2 ways in which a poet like Homer deceives and
corrupts his audience through poetic representation of virtue. The first way is by
pouring things which are not virtuous as expressions of virtue. And the second is of
course, by pretending to be knowledgeable while really being ignorant.
Let us take the first of the 2 points, how or why does a poet portray things which are
not virtuous as expressions of virtue? As I have mentioned before, virtue according to
Socrates of the Platonic dialogue is a matter of the inner self it is a matter related to
the soul rather than the outward man. And one of the key feature of virtue is a
harmoniously organized inner self. The most identifiable sign of a man possessed
with the harmonious inner self is his quiet and controlled nature. So, in book 10
Socrates says that a virtuous man with a rational and a quiet character will always
remain pretty much the same under any given circumstances, he will remain
unmoved. Indeed, this very calmness this very unchanged ability of a character under
varied circumstances is what marks him as virtuous in Socrates scheme of things.
However, as Socrates also points out in book 10 of the republic that such a virtuous
character is difficult to portray through imitative poetry. And this is because a poet
depends on imitating the outward actions and emotional expressions of a man to
portray his characters. So, they cannot portray a virtuous character if there is no great
outward manifestation of that virtuousness. What the poets therefore, end up
representing as virtuous characters are characters, who act in an exaggerated manner
and try and express the inner nobility of their character through those exaggerated
actions. Yet according to Socrates’s worldview, this exaggerated outward
manifestation of the inner life represents not a virtuous soul at all, but rather it is
opposite, it represents a soul, which has not achieved the inner harmony that is
essential for virtue. So, all the men of apparently noble character who are represented
through their virtuous actions in poetry are according to Socrates not virtuous men at
all. They only appear to be virtuous, and as we already know appearances are
deceptive, removed from reality. So, just as a flute which may look good in painting,
but might not be good in reality a character, who appears to be virtuous in poetry
might not be virtuous at all. This is one of the ways in which an imitative poet
deceives his audience even while apparently portraying virtuous men and their noble
actions. The second way that the imitative poets deceive and ultimately corrupt their
audience is by posing to be knowledgeable about virtues. It was a common practice in
the Greek world to which Plato belonged to make a young children read poetry of
poets like Homer or Hesoid. So, that they are able to learn the nuances of a virtuous
character, and they learn how to be virtuous themselves. And today’s context this will
mean something like exposing the children to good movies or good novels so that
they can grow up to become like the virtuous characters portrayed in these movies and
fictions. But Socrates identifies a problem here. Just because a poet like Homer
portrays virtuous characters, we assume that he will know a great deal about how to
be virtuous. Yet, this might not be the case at all. Because following Socrates’s
arguments we have already established that a painter who imitates a flute on canvas
might make the image of a good flute without knowing anything, about flute playing
or about the distinction between good and bad flutes. Similarly, Homer might not
know anything about how to be virtuous in spite of his ability to portray characters
who appear to be virtuous. Since we will not go to a painter we do not go to a painter
of flutes to learn the art of flute playing, we should also not therefore, go to poets who
represent virtuous characters to learn the art of being virtuous. Yet, we often confuse
mimetic portrayal of virtue with true knowledge about virtue and, therefore, we start
regarding the poets like Homer for instance as our teachers. This confusion, Socrates
suggests, can have serious consequences for the impressionable minds of young men.
And this is why he wants to ban the poets from his ideal city state.
Apart from these reasons that I have already stated, Socrates in the book 10 of The
Republic also raises another objection against mimetic poetry. For Socrates to develop
into a virtuous individual one should be guided by reason, and keep in control that
irrational part of one’s nature, which gets easily excitable under the influence of
images and appearances. Thus, according to Socrates, when confronted by calamities
a rational individual would try to keep calm rather than get swayed by it. He would
use his reason, this rational individual, would use his reason to keep in check the
desire for weeping and wailing and showing exaggerated manifestation of his grief.
Yet, as I have already mentioned, it is precisely this exaggerated outward action that
forms the basis of imitative poetry. So, poetry rather than enhancing the faculty of
reason according to Socrates, appeals to the baser passionate nature of an individual.
(In his own words, “poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up
poetry let us them rule although they ought to be controlled if mankind are ever to
increase in happiness and virtue”.) Thus gradually under the influence of poetry
individuals feel to become or remain upright rational men, and turn into baser human
beings like children, or fools, or women who are slaves to their uncontrolled passions.
And here I must note that this association between mimesis and women, children, and
insane people can indeed be very strongly traced throughout The Republic, but this
bias should not surprise us. Given the fact that in the Athenian democracy which form
the political context for Plato’s writing. It was only the free male citizens who were
considered to be equals, and who were considered to be people who were worthy of
voting. Everyone else including women and children were considered inferior human
specimens. Thus, it is not incomprehensible as to why the effects of mimesis would be
characterized by associating it with the nature of women, children, or individuals with
limited intelligence. At the end of this discussion, I would like to note that even while
criticizing mimetic art, Plato’s the republic resembles the form of a drama which was
the mimetic art per excellence in ancient Athens. Can we therefore, critique the
content of Plato’s The Republic by referring to it is form? I will leave this question
open for you to answer. But I should tell you that a strong criticism of Plato’s
portrayal of mimesis as evil and as corrupting was indeed launched soon after his
death. And it was launched by none other than his own celebrated disciple, Aristotle.
It is to Aristotle’s views on my mimesis that we will turn to in our next lecture,
goodbye.

Mimesis Aristotle(I)
Hello and welcome back to this lecture series on Literary Theory. In the course of
todayís discussion, we will shift our focus from Plato, and we will shift from Plato to
his most famous student and rival in fame, Aristotle. As you will remember from our
earlier lectures, the main term that we are focused on in our discussion of these
ancient Greek intellectuals is mimesis. And we have already discussed how the
concept of mimesis was at the very heart of Platoís understanding of art in general and
literature in particular. In our discussion of Aristotle too, we will see that the concept
of mimesis plays a very key role and during our lectures on Aristotle we will
therefore, keep an eye on how his conceptualization of mimesis resembles or departs
from Platoís understanding of the term. But before we start discussing Aristotleís
engagement with the concept of mimesis, let me briefly give you some biographical
details about the philosopher.
Aristotle was born in contemporary Macedonia, but as you will know from our
previous discussions in this course. Our contemporary understanding of the world
geography in terms of distinct and separate nation states; is not the right lens through
which to approach the world of the ancient Greeks. During the time of Socrates or
Plato or even Aristotle, Greece was simultaneously a smaller as well as a larger entity
than what we know as Greece in todayís form of a nation state. Why smaller? Well, it
was smaller than todayís Greece, because, politically the whole of the Greek
peninsula was fragmented into several small city states, or as they were known as
polis. And each of these polis or city states, they had their own independent identity,
political identity. However, on the other hand this ancient Greece that we are talking
about was also a larger entity than todayís modern nation state. And the reason for this
is because Greece was not merely a cluster of independent political entities, but it was
also a culture sphere. And this culture sphere not only included the city states of the
Greek peninsula, but it is stretched across northern Africa, southern Italy, and western
Turkey as well. So, it was a much larger entity than what is covered by todayís Greece
as a nation state. Aristotle who was born in Macedonia in 384 BCE was very much a
part of this larger Greek culture sphere. And at the age of 17 Aristotle came to Athens
and joined the circle of researchers and scholars who had gathered around Plato in his
academic. This association between Plato and Aristotle has had a tremendous
influence in the history of human thoughts. And as I have suggested at the beginning
of todayís lecture with reference to mimesis, we see the two intellectuals working on a
number of similar concepts which have gone on to form the very basis of western
philosophy. And in this famous painting by the Italian renaissance artist Raphael, and
the painting is titled the school of Athens, we can see Plato and Aristotle occupying
the center stage amidst a host of other philosophers. They are completely engrossed in
a conversation with each other even as the figures around them look on with awe and
veneration. Between 347 BCE which was if you remember the year when Plato died,
and 335 BCE, Aristotle stayed away from Athens, most probably because of certain
political reasons and in these 12 years he was associated with another important figure
who has cast a very long shadow in the human history. Here I am referring to the
emperor Alexander who is also known in history books as Alexander the great. A few
years into his political exile from Athens, Aristotle was appointed as a tutor of
Alexander by his father king Philip. The number of years that Aristotle taught
Alexander is uncertain. And we also do not know much about the amount of influence
that Aristotle might have exercised uh upon the young Alexander. However, it is
tempting to make certain connections here. As we have already discussed Plato the
teacher of Aristotle was born during a time when Athens was going through a political
change. The time tested mode of democratic government was faltering in Athens. And
Plato himself was one of the most prominent critiques of the democratic form of
government, and we have discussed this when we were discussing the republic.
Platoís student was Aristotle and it was Aristotle who taught Alexander, the man who
would comprehensively wipe away the vestiges of democracy from the Greek world
and who would become the founder of one of the largest empires that the world has
ever known. However, tempting though it might be to connect Plato, Aristotle, and
Alexander in this way, we really cannot be certain about how much Aristotle moulded
Alexanderís political views and his desires to establish an empire. What we can be
sure of, however, is Aristotleís influence on a later generation of Greek philosophers
who gathered in his school Lyceum which Aristotle established in Athens after
returning back to the city state in 335 BCE. He would stay in Athens till the very end
of his life and till almost the very end of his life actually, but he would retire from the
city in 322 BCE and in fact, he died that very year in a place called Chalcis.
So now, that we have a rough sketch of his biographical details, let us move on to his
work. One of the earliest catalogues of Aristotleís work that is still extant today was
produced by the Greek biographer Diogenes Laertius. And Laertius lists about 550
books that were supposedly written by Aristotle. Now this list is not absolutely
reliable and in fact, it does not mention some of the very key works that is today
attributed to Aristotle while at the same time mentioning some works which might not
have been authored by Aristotle. So, this list is slightly dubious, but in spite of these
ambiguities, the list bears witness to the staggering achievement of Aristotle as a
scholar. What is even more astonishing than the number of books that Aristotle wrote
is a number of topics that he covered in these books. The scope of Aristotleís work
included, among other things, rhetoric, poetics, sciences especially the science of
biology, politics, ethics, metaphysics and in all of these subjects Aristotle remained an
undisputed authority for more than a 1000 years after his death. It is therefore, not
surprising that the medieval Christian poet Dante, even while relegating the pagan
Aristotle to the zone of hell in his famous book the Divine Comedy would
nevertheless refer to him as, ìthe master of those who know. Unfortunately, the
writings of Aristotle, that have survived, is only about one fifth of the total corpus that
is mentioned by Laertius. And even more unfortunately, most of the writings that
Aristotle consciously prepared for publication and for circulation have been lost.
What survives are mostly lecture notes which are often cryptic and which lacks the
polished quality of a work that has been expressly prepared for publication and
circulation. Thus reading the available writing of Aristotle, after being exposed to the
exquisitely wrought dialogues of Plato, can come as a disappointment in terms of
literary style; however, if we can put aside the question of literary finesse, we are
bound to be enthralled by the quality of discourse that we encounter even in the
surviving writings of Aristotle. The work of Aristotle with which we will specifically
concern ourselves in our lectures on mimesis is a volume titled Poetics. Like most of
his surviving writings Poetics too reads like a set of cryptic notes that Aristotle might
have prepared for his lectures in Lyceum. Therefore, it has an unvarnished quality and
carries a sense of incompleteness, because many of the key ideas including the idea of
mimesis are often mentioned but not elaborated. However, Poetics has an incomplete
character in another very different way. It is assumed that the volume that we are
familiar with today is only one part of a larger work. Indeed the present volume which
focuses especially on the literary form of tragedy had a complimentary volume on
comedy which is now lost. So, even while we prepare to delve on to the extant
volume of poetics dealing with tragedy, I would urge you to read a wonderful mystery
novel written by the Italian author Umber to Eco titled † I l N o m e D e l l a R o s a o
rTheNameoftheRose,whichhasatitisheartthequestforthe
lostvolumeofpoeticsthatdealswiththesubjectofcomedya
n d l a u g h t e r . B u t , n o w l e t us commence our exploration of the surviving
volume of poetics, and see how it relates to the idea of mimesis that we have been
discussing in this course. The volume, the surviving volume of Poetics, can be divided
into three related segments. The first segment which includes chapter one to chapter 5
or part 1 to part 5 acts as a kind of general introduction to artistic mimesis, and its
classifications. The second segment covering chapters 6 to 22 discusses in details
tragedy as a form of mimesis. And the last segment covering chapters 23 to 26
situates the form of tragedy vis-a-vis the form of epic poetry and presents us with a
comparative study between these two forms. It is however, important to note at this
point that in our discussion of Poetics, we are not really going to you know
summarize the different sections of the work or even find out how one part of the
book connects to the other. Rather we would be more interested to know how Poetics
contributes to our understanding of mimesis and how it carries forward, or alters, or
even negates the discussion of mimesis and mimetic art that we have encountered in
Platoís Republic.
So, our lens through which we would view Aristotleís Poetics is Plato and his work
in The Republic which we have already discussed in our previous lectures. Now, it
has long been part of the received knowledge, that Aristotleís Poetics was a conscious
effort to challenge the negative views that Plato posed about artistic mimesis in his
works like the Republic. But it is very difficult to conclusively prove this assertion
and it is difficult because the text of the Poetics, the surviving volume of Poetics, does
not mention explicitly either Plato or his book The Republic. In fact, to anyone who
approaches this text without having read about Platoís writings on mimesis, Poetics
will appear to be perfectly self-sustained in it is scope. And therefore, it does not
require another earlier work for better understanding. However, those who are more
aware of Platoís writings will glimpse unmistakable traces of Aristotleís engagement
with his teacher in the Poetics, both in what the text mentions, and also in what the
text neglects to mention. Thus when Aristotle in his Poetics sings high priests of
Homer it becomes difficult not to read it as a counter to Platoís condemnation of
Homer in his The Republic. This is also true about the more general idea of artistic
mimesis. Whereas, Plato banished the mimetics and especially the mimetic poets from
his ideal republic, Aristotle invites back the poets with open arms and establishes
artistic mimesis as an integral aspect of our human identity. But I think Aristotleís
engagement with Plato reveals itself even more interestingly by something that
Poetics neglects to mention or neglects to really elaborate upon. As I have already
mentioned, though mimesis is the key focus in Poetics, the text does not define what
mimesis means. Now, this lack of definition gives the reader the strange impression of
starting in medias res, of being suddenly thrown into the middle of the discussion
about mimesis without first getting her bearing, right. One of the reasons why
mimesis is not defined at the very onset in Poetics may perhaps be because it was
written in the shorthand form of lecture note, and certain things when we prepare for
lectures we take certain things for granted, and we assume that our intended audience
will already have a knowledge about what mimesis is or what some other things might
be and, therefore, we do not go into a definition. However, I think a more probable
explanation is that Aristotle intended Poetics to be an engagement with Platoís idea of
mimesis. Therefore, it was expected that the reader of poetics will already be familiar
with the general contours of the discussion about mimesis from the work of Plato, and
thus would not require a separate introductory definition. In other words, Poetics was
conceptualized as a continuation as well as a critique of Platoís writings like The
Republic, and not as a separate work with a separate starting point.
However, be as it may Aristotle quite significantly reworks the concept of mimesis in
his poetics, and by the time we finish our discussion on Aristotle you will see how
different and distinct Aristotleís idea of mimesis is from Platoís. Now, the first major
distinction that we observe while comparing Aristotleís treatment of mimesis in
Poetics with Platoís treatment of the same idea is the insistence of the former which
means the insistence of Aristotle that mimesis is ìnaturalî. Now, if you remember our
lectures on Plato, you will know that for him mimesis was a fake, it was an illusion, a
deceptive copy which was far removed from the true nature of things. In sharp
contrast to this, Aristotle writes in the 4th chapter of his Poetics and I quote: (ìPoetry
in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our
nature first the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood. One
difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of living
creatures. And through imitation learns his earliest lessons. And no less universal is
the pleasure felt in things imitated.î) These lines closely pack a number of assertions
and we will be taking up most of the points made here later on, including poetry being
a form of mimesis or imitation and the connection between mimesis and pleasure that
Aristotle makes here. But here what I would ask you to note is that Aristotle identifies
imitation not only as a natural instinct, which is to be found in us even as children.
But he also underlines it as one of the key features which makes us what we are as
human beings and which distinguishes us from other animals. Clearly, for Aristotle
mimesis is neither fake nor is it insignificant. But this idea that mimesis cannot be
simply dismissed as fake comes out even more strongly in the introductory segment
of Poetics, when it emphasizes the fact that mimesis including the mimetic form of
poetry involves craft. Which means each mimetic form of representation involves it is
own distinct medium, it is own distinct objects and it is own distinct manners. Let us
take for instance the craft of furniture making. The furniture maker uses implements
like a chisel or lead machine to work on pieces of wood in order produce various
pieces of furnitures like the chair, the table, beds, cupboards and so on. And these
furnitures might resemble the Louis Quinze style of furniture, or the Art Deco style of
furniture, or the Queen Ann style of furniture. Similarly, in the first 3 chapters of
Poetics, Aristotle draws our attention to how a mimetic artist depending on what kind
of a craftsman he is chooses his medium of imitation, like, language for instance or
tune or rhythmic movements. He selects the object which he seeks to express through
his mediums of my mimesis, they may be actions of exalted individuals or they may
be actions of lowly men. And he also selects the manner of his craft of imitation. Thus
a poet for instance after choosing language as his medium, and the actions of exalted
men as the object of his imitation will still need to decide whether he is going to
present his imitation in a manner of a tragic drama or in a manner of epic. So, this
means that depending upon the medium of mimesis, depending upon it is object of
imitation, and depending upon the manner employed to imitate the object, we will
encounter different kinds of mimetic products. And though these may be all forms of
artistic mimesis, they are not one and the same thing. A tune played on a bamboo flute
is a very different kind of mimetic product compared say for instance to a picture
painted on a canvas using colours, or a dance performed in the rhythms of a drum for
instance. So, at the root of this difference lies the fact that mimesis is a craft. And just
like different kinds of crafts produce different kinds of end products, similarly
different kinds of mimesis produce different kinds of artistic imitation. But the
question here is: why is this insistence on the nature of mimesis as a craft important at
all? Now, let us look at this point carefully, and let us look at it by comparing it with
Platoís understanding of mimesis. As you will remember from our discussion on the
theory of forms, for Plato mimesis was primarily a mirroring activity. One of the
reasons why mimesis was considered as fake by Plato was because this attempt at
transparently mirroring an object was prone to deceptive illusion. According to Plato,
the mimetic artist fails not because he deliberately wants to misrepresent his object of
imitation, but rather because his very effort to produce a mirror image of the object
was underlined and undermined by his faulty perception. So, if a stick which is
immersed in water is painted by a painter as a bent stick, then it results in a fake
representation of the stick, not because the painter deliberately wants to mislead us.
Rather, because he wants to produce a mirror image of what he perceives in front of
him. Aristotleís insistence that mimesis is a craft critiques this notion of transparent
mirroring. Let us again take the case of painting for instance. A painting no matter
how realistic, it is, is not a mirroring surface. It is distinct and different from a mirror.
And the reason why it is distinct and different from a mirror, even if it is a realistic
painting is because the ability of a painter to represent or mimic an object is shaped as
well as limited by the tools mediums and manners of his craft. His canvas, his colours,
his palette and all such things that he employs to create his painting shape the kind of
imitation that he is able to produce. And therefore, a painterís imitation of an object is
different from say a sculptorís imitation of the same object. Because, these two crafts,
painting and sculpting are different and neither the end product of a painterís craft,
nor the end product of a sculptorís craft would produce a transparent mirroring of the
object, irrespective of how realistic they are.
Which means that to judge a mimesis as a faulty mirroring would be a misplaced
judgment. Because no mimesis is an act of mirroring faulty or otherwise, and all
mimesis are determined shaped and limited by the requirements of particular mimetic
crafts, be it flute playing for instance, poetry writing, painting, sculpting or dancing.
Now two important things follow from this change in perspective. The first is that
looking at mimetic products as pale and faulty mirror images of the original is
incorrect. A mimetic product should be studied and appreciated by itself. And it
should be studied and appreciated as an instance of a particular kind of craftsmanship.
This is in fact, highlighted at the very opening of Poetics which begins with the words
and I quote, ìI propose to treat of poetry in itself and not as a copy of something elseî.
The second thing that follows from this reorientation of our understanding of mimesis
is that a mimetic product relates to it as object of imitation in ways other than
transparently mirroring. If the relationship . . . but then this opens a number of
questions, for instance, what is this other way or these other ways in which mimesis
relates to it is object of imitation? If the relationship is not that of mirroring, then what
other kinds of imitation is possible? Moreover, in this changed perspective what
happens to the other objection that Plato has against mimesis, namely, that mimesis
promotes emotional excesses and thereby suppresses the rational faculties of man.
Mimesis Aristotle (II)

Hello everyone. Today in this lecture series on Literary Theory, we will continue
with our discussion on Aristotle and his contribution to the concept of mimesis. As
you will know the text by Aristotle, which frames our discussion on this topic of
mimesis is the extant volume the surviving volume of Poetics. And in my previous
lecture, I have already pointed that this text can be read as a sort of dialogue, between
Plato’s concept of mimesis and mimetic art, and Aristotle’s critique of that concept.
Indeed, Plato’s conception of mimesis forms a point of departure for Aristotle in
Poetics. And in our previous lecture, we had, already we had started analyzing how
Aristotle while agreeing with Plato’s basic idea that all art is mimetic defends
mimesis against Plato’s accusations.
Now, one significant way in which Aristotle critiques Plato’s position on mimesis is
by redefining the relationship between the mimetic process, and the object of
mimesis. And I have argued in my earlier lecture on Aristotle that he does … Aristotle
does not consider mimesis as a simple mirroring of an object. Rather than looking at it
like a mirror image the process of mimesis according to Plato presents a more
complex relationship between the mimetic end product, mimetic product, and the
object of mimesis. And this relationship can be best understood through the concept
of icon. In other words, whereas Plato presents mimesis as a flawed mirroring,
Aristotle presents mimesis as an icon-making process.
In today’s lecture we will elaborate on this idea of a mimetic product as an icon, and
we will see how this understanding redeems mimesis from being regarded as merely
flawed mirroring. After that we will move on to the idea of catharsis, and see how
Aristotle uses it to counter Plato’s argument that mimesis or more specifically
mimetic poetry is harmful, because it stirs passionate emotions and thereby suppresses
the rational faculty of human beings. But let us start with the issue of mimesis as icon
making. Here, I would like to reiterate the question with which I had ended my
previous lecture. And the question that I had posed was this. If the relationship
between mimesis with the object of mimesis or imitation is not that of transparent
mirroring, then what other kinds of imitation is possible? If mimesis is not mirroring,
then what other kind of mimesis is possible, what other kind of imitation is possible?
To answer this question, let us first look into these lines which we find in book 4 of
Poetics, I quote from Aristotle: (“Objects which in themselves we view with pain we
delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the
most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. The cause of this again is that to learn gives
the liveliest pleasure. Not only to philosophers, but to men in general whose capacity
however of learning is more limited. Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness
is that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring. And saying
perhapsthat is he for if you happen not to have seen the original. The pleasure will be
due not to the imitation as such, but to the execution the coloring or some such other
cause”.) Note here that according to Aristotle the chief pleasure that mimesis or
mimetic art offers is the pleasure of recognition. A likeness is produced through
mimesis, and when the audience or the reader or the spectator of this mimetic product,
confronts the likeness she experiences a rapturous sense of recognition – ah, that is
he! Indeed, without this act of recognition in which likeness of the object of mimesis
is located by the audience within the mimetic product, the effect of mimesis seems to
fall flat. As Aristotle points out and I quote from the section which I have already
referred to, “if you happen not to have seen the original, the pleasure will be due not
to the imitation as such but to the execution, the coloring, or some such other cause”.
The word likeness here and the stress on the idea of recognition; however, might lead
us to believe that Aristotle like Plato is presenting here mimesis as a form of
transparent mirroring. We might assume that for Aristotle the chief pleasure offered
by a mimetic product like the painting of an animal a horse for instance, is provided
by the spectators recognizing how accurately the artist has reflected or mirrored a real
horse upon the canvas by working on the minutest of details. This interpretation
which might seem very logical, if we take these lines from book 4 out of the context,
however, is problematized if you place the lines from book 4 or chapter 4 of Poetics,
against these lines that appear in book 25, and again I quote Aristotle: (“Within the art
of poetry itself, there are 2 kinds of faults. Those which touch its essence, and those
which are accidental. If a poet has chosen to imitate something, [but has imitated it
incorrectly] through want of capacity, the error is inherent in the poetry. But if the
failure is due to a wrong choice, if he has represented a horse as throwing out both his
off legs at once, or introduced technical inaccuracies in medicine for example, or in
any other art, the error is not essential to the poetry”.) Though here Aristotle is talking
about the mimetic art of poetry, the kind of reference that he makes to the horse will
help us connect these lines with our ongoing discussion of mimesis vis-à-vis painting.
In the quoted lines Aristotle talks about 2 kinds of errors that we can encounter in a
mimetic production: and he classifies them as essential and non-essential. This
classification is in fact, also a kind of gradation. The latter kind of error, non-essential
error is not a very serious one whereas, the former the error that touches the essence
of the mimetic production can seriously degrade the quality of the mimetic product.
Now what is a non-essential error? Let us take the example of the horse. According to
Aristotle if mimetic artist represents a galloping horse throwing both of it is front legs
up in the air, then it is regarded as a non-essential error. Since horses in real life do
not throw their off legs together while galloping, it is an error, but nonetheless an
error of a kind that is not essential to the mimetic product. Indeed, in book 25
Aristotle even excuses the portrayal of such impossibilities by mimetic artists by
saying that, and I quote: “if he describes the impossible, he is guilty of an error, but
the error may be justified if the end of the art be thereby attained, if that is the effect
of this or any other part of the poem is thus rendered more striking”. Now as far as
transparent mirroring is concerned, porting a galloping horse with both it is front legs
up in the air be it in poetry or painting or any other mimetic form is a grave error.
Because if what is being portrayed is an impossibility, then it cannot be called a
mirror image of a real life object, yet, Aristotle seems to be perfectly accommodative
of such errors as far as mimesis is concerned. Again I quote, “not to know that a hind”
(A hind is a female deer) “not to know that a hind has no horns is a less serious matter
than to paint it inartistically”. The inherent or essential error here is the lack of the
artistic skill of the painter, which may arise for instance of the painter does not know
how to use the tools of his craft properly. If, let us say, he cannot properly paint with a
brush or he cannot properly mix his colours. The question of how accurate the
painting of the hind is vis-à-vis a hind in real life is; however, regarded as a less
serious or non-essential error. So, even if the painter paints a hind with horns, though
hinds do not have horns in real life, then that error is regarded by Aristotle as an
insignificant error, as a non-essential error, which does not degrade the quality of the
mimetic product. Now, this clarifies one thing. As far as Aristotle is concerned the
pleasure of the likeness that the mimetic artist produces is not dependent upon the
degree of accuracy with which the details of a real life object are portrayed by him. In
other words, the way to judge mimesis is not through the lens of strict referentiality.
But if such inaccurate depictions of hinds with horns and galloping horses, with both
of its front legs up in the air are acceptable in mimesis, then what happens to the
notion of recognition that we had encountered in book 4? As I have said before the
pleasure of mimesis is derived from recognizing it … recognizing in the mimetic
product a likeness of some other object. How can you recognize the likeness of an
original in a mimetic product if the mimetic artist portrays the details inaccurately?
So, this is a question that we are confronted with. And it is here that we need to bring
in the notion of icon. Now if you think about it, you’ll realize that a mirror image is
only one of the many ways in which things can be represented to our consciousness.
The semiotician C. S. Pierce talks about 3 major ways in which representation can be
done. They can be done through symbol, they can be done through index, and they
can be done through icon. All of these 3 things have 2 constant elements in them. And
one of those constant elements is called the signified, which is the object that is being
represented, and this object can be something concrete like a pencil or a horse or an
aero plane for instance or it can be something abstract, like a concept, a thought, a
plan. But there is also another constant element in each of these three things that I
mentioned symbol index and icon. And that second constant element is called the
signifier, which is basically a visual or an auditory mark which is used to represent the
signified. Now, let us take in the case of a symbol. In a symbol, there is no inherent
connection between the signifier and the signified. The connection is in fact,
absolutely arbitrary, and to give you an example, when I utter any word, and I use it to
refer to some object in the outside world, then that word is actually a symbol that I am
using for the purpose of reference. For instance, when I utter the word tree, you will
immediately recognize that I am talking about a thing rooted in the soil with brown
woody stem supporting a green leafy top. But the word tree is a symbol because there
is no inherent connection between that word, and the thing with a woody stem and a
green leafy top. This is proved by … this sort of arbitrariness that sort of separates the
word tree from the signified … is proved by the fact that I can refer to the same
signified, the same green leafy object with a brown stem by using completely
different sounding words if I shift from one language to another. If, for instance, I
were to signify the same thing in Bangla, I would call it a gaach. And again if I were
to shift to German, I would refer to the same thing as baum. I can do this shifting and
refer to the same thing by using different words like tree, gaaach, or baum, because
neither of these 3 words have any inherent connection with the signified, rather the
connection is arbitrary and is culturally learned. Now you will understand this better if
you contrast it with an index. For instance, an index is a way of referring to a signified
by drawing attention to a mark, which establishes the presence of the signified. To
give you an example, fire produces smoke, right there is nothing arbitrary about this
connection, there is almost a causal relationship. Fire produces smoke, therefore, is a
mark of the presence of fire. Smoke is thus categorized as an index of fire. To give
you another example of an index for instance a thumbprint is an index of a thumb. If
you see the poor mark of a tiger somewhere around you that is a fair indication that is
a fair index which would signify that there is a tiger roaming somewhere around. Now
let us come to an icon, an icon is a way of representing in which there is a significant
and inherent overlapping between the signifier and the signified. Here let us try and
understand the idea by taking an example. And let us say I take a picture of your face.
In that case, your face will be the signified and the picture of your face will be the
signifier. And as you can guess, there will be an inherent connection between the
signifier and the signified in this case. The picture would be an exact likeness of your
face, and it will contain all the accurate details of your face, and when you post that
picture on social media, let us say the people who know you might derive pleasure
from the mimetic product by recognizing the likeness and exclaiming: , that is he or
that is she! The picture can therefore, be classified as an icon of your face. Now here
let us look at another kind of iconic image. Now, as you can see these are 2 images
that we regularly encounter on lavatory doors, and recognize them as one standing for
man and the other standing for woman. The reason why we are able to recognize the
man as man and the woman as woman is because we can recognize their likeness with
the signified. However, unlike the photograph, they are not accurate portrayals or
mirror images of the object. However, then we come across a question: how do, we
then recognize in these iconic signifiers the likeness of the signified they are not
mirror images? So, how do we recognize? Well, we recognize them because even in
these simplified forms the images build upon certain features. The arms for instance,
the legs the round head, and these features are inherent parts of the signified as well,
so, there is a great degree of overlapping. But here notice one very interesting thing,
in either of these images, iconically representing a man and a woman we do not see
the neck, the neck region, yet it is impossible to find a human beings or at least living
one’s without neck. So, the representation here is of an impossibility. That is similar
to the image of hinds with horns or horses galloping with both their front legs thrown
up in the air. But this does not disrupt the process of recognition. This is because the
process of recognizing mimetic production happens within the shared conventions of
a cultural matrix, that connects the mimetic artist and the reader or the audience of the
spectator who recognizes in the mimetic representation the likeness of the object of
mimesis. Since the cultural conventions that we share help us perfectly well to
understand the 2 necklace figures to represent man and woman, we do not feel the
need to question why the neck is missing, right. Thus as you can see from this
argument though mirror images can be part of the vast array of mimetic objects that
are possible, factual very similar is not a yardstick to judge the quality of mimesis.
Mimetic products can hold value even without a strict referentiality. And
consequently the Platonic argument that mimesis produces flawed mirror images does
not hold because though I mean through Aristotle we understand that mimesis is not a
mirroring activity. It is a production of iconic representations. And iconic
representations can be mirror images but there is no compulsion that they have to be
mirror images. They can also be something like the figures of the necklace human
beings. Now at this point I would briefly like to touch upon the issue of probability.
And it is relationship to plot structure which for Aristotle is a quintessence of poetry
as a mimetic product. Now as our discussion on mimesis as a production of icon has
revealed, mimesis is an imitation not just of possible things, rather mimesis can also
be of impossible things like necklace human beings for instance. But in order for it to
be a successful mimesis, it has to be recognized as a likeness or a representation of
something else. If that recognition is not there, then the effect of mimesis falls flat.
Now whether or not it will be recognized, the mimetic product will be recognized by
the reader or the spectator or the audience will depend upon the notion of probability.
And the sense of what is probable and what is not probable will, in turn, depend upon
the conventions that underline the cultural context shared by the mimetic artist and
her reader, or audience, or spectator. To give you an example in the cultural context
that is shared by me and my students sitting here in this room, a man biting a tiger is
an improbable event. This is not to say however, that such an event is impossible,
because there may be some instances of humans biting tigers that we do not know of
but even if such an event is possible, it is not probable to us. Aristotle argues that a
mimetic production yields the pleasure of recognition because it deals with
probability. A Shakespearean tragedy like King Lear for instance is a successful
mimesis not because we actually know of a king called Lear, who had to undergo
such torture in the hands of his daughter’s name Goneril and Regan. Rather, it is a
successful mimesis because the plot narrates a sequence of event that is accepted as
probable. Or at least it is accepted as probable by people who share the cultural milieu
that enables an understanding of Shakespearean tragedy. Now, this probable plot
structure can have technical faults like for instance, the probable plot structure of king
Lear might have horses galloping with the two front legs shown up in the air, but as
you will understand now that this impossibility does not impede the process of
recognition. According to Aristotle it is precisely this notion of probability that
distinguishes a tragedy from say a history. History can only narrate events, which has
actually happened, and which are therefore, all in the domain of possibility because if
something has happened then it is of course, possible. A tragedy on the other hand
depicts human actions based on probability and not on possibility. Therefore, a man
eaten live by a tiger might find it is place in a tragic plot. But a man trying to bite a
tiger, irrespective of whether it is possible or not will perhaps not be very readily
incorporated in the plot by a tragic playwright. Therefore, to judge any mimesis, on
how accurately it is imitating a real life object is perhaps to miss the point. Because
we must remember here that in the Aristotle world of mimetic art something like the
Mona Lisa is as valid a representation of human likeness as the gendered images on
the doors of the lavatories. With this in mind, let us now move on to the concept of
catharsis. Now, as you know one of the reasons why Plato complained about mimetic
poetry, was because it stirred emotions and thereby suppressed the functioning of
reason, or at least that is Plato’s argument. Now here again Aristotle uses Plato’s
theory as a point of departure. Referring to a tragedy which is a variety of mimetic
poetry, Aristotle argues that it does indeed stir up such give rise to such emotions like
pity, like fear; these are the two predominant emotions that Aristotle talks vis-à-vis
tragedy. But he then goes on to argue that stirring even of such painful emotions like
pity and fear, does not pose any problem, they do not have any harmful effect. And
his argument is that a rational man experiences a catharsis of these emotions when he
encounters them in a form of a mimetic product. So, catharsis does not allow these
emotions to have a harmful impact on the spectator. But, this sentence or this
argument has a problem at least it has a problem for us modern readers. And the
problem lies in the fact that what is the exact meaning of the word catharsis;
especially, what is the exact meaning within the context of poetics, that has become or
has remained for more than 2000 years now a matter of dispute. And therefore, there
are a number of differing interpretations regarding why Aristotle considers catharsis
as a valuable end product of tragedy. In this lecture, I will mention only two of the
popular interpretations of catharsis. And we will then try to see how each of these
interpretations can be used to critique Plato’s complaint about mimetic poetry. Now,
the first popular interpretation that I would like to consider here is catharsis -
understood as a process of purgation. And this purgation theory is mostly associated
with the German scholar Jakob Bernays. And this German scholar suggested that the
pity and fear evoked in a tragedy acts like Pharmakon. Now this Greek word
Pharmakon, from which we have derived our modern English word pharmacy, can be
understood in two ways it can be understood simultaneously as a medicine, but also as
poison. And the basic idea behind Pharmakon is that the same substance which is
poisonous, when administered in well regulated doses can act as a medicine and can
cure the affects of that very poison. So, looking from this perspective someone like
Bernays for instance would argue, that tragedy by producing emotions like fear and
pity in a regulated way helps purge the excess of these noxious or troubling emotions;
fear, for instance, is rather problematic emotion if not pity, but even pity is a
problematic emotion it is a painful emotion, nonetheless. And the other theory so, this
is the theory of purgation catharsis is understood as purgation, but I want to refer to
another theory which is also very popular. And this is a theory regarding catharsis
understood as an educative process. In this theory fear and pity, the argument goes,
that the that fear and pity when encountered in real life are problematic to deal with,
and they can easily overwhelm us. However, when experienced in the form of a
mimetic product, we can observe and study them from a sufficient distance, even
though they are painful emotions. And by repeatedly encountering the emotions like
pity and fear, a tragedy evokes within the spectator an urge to associate them with the
right kind of objects, right. So, it is a matter of repeated habituation. The more you
encounter these emotions, the more you will learn. It is an educative process the more
you will learn the right objects onto which you need to invest these emotions. And in
fact, through such a process of repeated encountering of such emotions the spectator
gets to know, as well as, to train his emotions in a way which is not possible
otherwise in circumstances where the emotion overwhelms that person. Now as you
can see each of these two interpretations of catharsis are very different from each
other. Yet, both of them can be used to produce a critique of Plato, Plato’s view on
mimesis. For instance, of catharsis is understood as purgation, then mimetic poetry
like tragedy for instance does not suppress reason by arousing emotions. Rather, the
action of a rational man is made free from the ill effects of noxious emotions, through
the purgative cleansing of those emotions by catharsis, catharsis cleanses emotions,
right? And therefore, makes rationality all the more possible. If on the other hand
catharsis is understood as an education of emotion, even then reason is not
suppressed, because catharsis then becomes a training process through which a young
spectator might learn to guide his emotions rationally towards the right objects. So, in
either of the two cases, in either of the two interpretations, we can see that we can
critique Plato’s argument that mimetic poetry suppresses reason as Aristotle shows
through the instance of tragedy, an example of mimetic poetry, that it does not
suppress reason, it affects a catharsis of emotion, which helps a rational human being.
With this we end our discussion on Aristotle and this is also the end of our discussion
on minuses. In our lecture, next lecture, we will move forward in time and see how a
first century Roman text titled “On the Sublime” expanded and modified our
understanding of literary theory. Thank you.
sublime
Hello and welcome back to this lecture series on Literary Theory. In today’s lecture,
we are going to move ahead from the word my mimesis which had anchored our
earlier discussions on both Plato and Aristotle. And we are going to move towards a
new keyword and that word is the sublime. Like my mimesis, this word the sublime
has also played a very significant role in the history of English or even Western
Literary Theory and the text which is most intimately associated with this new
keyword is a work that bears the Greek title “Peri Hypsous”. Now, in my previous
lecture, in fact in all of my previous lectures, I had started by trying to put in historical
context authors like Plato and Aristotle as well as their works, which were relevant to
our discussion. But today I will only be able to make the most cursory comments
about the context that frames the text “Peri Hypsous” because almost nothing is
known about the origins of this text that can be stated with any degree of certainty.
The text which was originally written in Greek, today exists in a number of editions
and the oldest of these editions is found as part of a 10th century manuscript, which is
now preserved in the French National Library in Paris which is why it is also often
referred to as a Paris edition. This text, kept in Paris, exists in a fragmentary form and
it has various sections missing, but in spite of these missing bits, it is possible to grasp
most of the main arguments as well as the general plan of the work. And if we are
looking at the general plan, then we see that the entire text can be divided into three
sections really. The text begins by defining “hypsos” a word to which we will have to
return in a moment and then, the text goes on to describe the five elements that are
necessary to produce this thing that I am calling “hypsos”. I am using the Greek word
right now, but we will see how it translates in a moment and finally, after elaborating
on these five elements which are necessary for producing “hypsos”, the text concludes
by connecting the discussion on “hypsos” with a sociopolitical commentary. So, these
are the three broad sections which the text has, and we will be dealing with each of
these sections one by one. But before we delve into the content of the text, let me
briefly talk about whatever little is known about the date of this text and its
authorship. The 10th century manuscript that we have, mentions the author of the text
as Dionysus or Longinus. The most famous Greek author bearing the name Dionysus
lived between 60 BCE and 7 BCE, whereas the most famous classical author bearing
the name Longinus lived between 213 and 273 CE Common Era. But there is no
definite clue within the text itself, that would allow us to identify this text as authored
either by the historical Dionysus, that we know about, or with the historical Longinus.
And the present consensus is that, it was written by a Greek author living in room
around the 1st century CE, which means that the general consensus is that the text
though we do not know definitely who the author was, that text was produced closer
to the time of the historical Dionysus than to the time of the historical Longinus.
However when the 10th century manuscript containing “Peri Hypsous” was
discovered by the Italian humanist Francesco Robertiello, it was assumed that the text
has been written by one Dionysus Longinus. Robertiello had missed out or separating
the two names. So, the text actually mentions that it is a work of either Dionysus or
Longinus, but this went missing and it was assumed that the text was produced by
someone called Dionysus Longinus. And this confusion prevailed even with Nicolas
Boileau, who translated the text in French in 1674 and actually made it very popular
within the field of Literary Criticism. In fact, this mistaken notion about the text’s
authorship was prevalent till almost the 19th century, but since there was no classical
author known by the name of Dionysus Longinus, it was assumed till the 19th
century, that the text was actually authored by the 3rd century historical figure of
Cassius Longinus. Now, however as I told you that the text is no longer attributed to
the historical figure of Cassius Longinus, but because it has for so long been
associated with the name of Longinus, it is now referred to as being authored by
Pseudo Longinus, which literally means false or fake Longinus, and this allows us to
distinguish the unknown author of this text “Peri Hypsous” from the more well known
historical figure. So, throughout this lecture, I will keep on referring to the author of
“Peri Hypsous” as Longinus, but I will ask you to bear in mind that when I refer to the
author of this text as Longinus, I am referring to an unknown author Pseudo Longinus
and not to the 3rd century Cassius Longinus. Please keep this in mind. Now, let us
come to the title of the text “Peri Hypsous”, which is usually translated in English, as
“On Sublimity” or it is also translated as “On the Sublime”. So, the Greek word
“hypsos” is translated as sublime, but the Greek word “hypsos” literally means
something that is high or elevated or lofty. But we encounter a problem when we try
to understand the Greek word through English translations like these, English
translations like elevated, high, or lofty, and the reason we encounter a problem is
because the word “hypsos” in Greek is not usually associated with material objects,
but rather with non-material things like for instance language or idea or artistic
expression. However, English word elevated or lofty for instance does not have this
distinction because we can equally speak of an elevated language or a lofty speech as
an elevated ceiling or a lofty mountain, right. So, this is why the word sublime is used
as a more specific translation of the Greek word “hypsos” because like “hypsos”,
sublime too conveys the sense of loftiness, but it conveys a sense of loftiness, that is
usually associated with non-material things like art, like ideas, like the use of
languages for instance. Now, because we have now arrived at this word sublime and
this is our key word in this lecture, let us have a more detailed look at this word. If we
break down the word sublime, we first get the prefix “sub-” which literally means up
to the level of and the other part of the word sublime that we have is a root word
“lime”, which is derived from the Latin word “limen”, which means threshold. And
this Latin word “limen” has been carried forward in English today in the form of the
word lintel, for instance, which means the horizontal beam of wood or stone or other
such materials that is used on the top of the doorway to support it. So, the word
sublime literally means up to the level of the lintel, up to the top of the door, up to the
very top of the door indicating there by a sense of loftiness, but as I said sublime and
lofty are slightly different as far as their usage is concerned because sublime is more
specifically associated to signify the loftiness or the elevated quality of things like art
for instance, thoughts, ideas, language expressions. So, just like “hypsos” we can talk
about the sublime beauty of words, poems or Mona Lisa's smile or of Bhimsen Joshi's
singing, but we will not use sublime to signify merely the elevation of a platform, for
instance, or a multi storied building or a mountain even. But, how does this idea of
“hypsos” which is translated through the word sublime related specifically to the
theorization and understanding of literature. This is now what will concern us and to
know this let us move from the dictionary meanings of sublime and try and see how
the text by Pseudo Longinus actually elaborates this crucial idea. The first chapter of
the text tells us and I quote: “the sublime wherever it occurs consists in a certain
loftiness and excellence of language and it is from no other source than this that the
greatest poets and writers have derived their eminence and gained an immortality of
renown.” These lines which identify the sublime as a special quality of a language as
it is used by great poets and writers is immediately followed in Pseudo Longinus’s
text by lines which locate sublimity in the effect that certain kinds of literature
produces in their audience and I quote again from the text: “The effect of lofty
language upon an audience is not persuasion, but transport”. In other words, sublimity
of a text language is realized only when it produces a particular effect upon the
audience. This effect is described in the quoted line as the effect of transport. It is
therefore different from say the rhyme sequence that underlines the language of
poetry. The language of a Shakespearean Sonnet like let us see, “Shall I Compare thee
to a Summer's Day” will always have the same rhyme scheme a b a b c d c d e f e f g
g and it will have the same rhyme scheme irrespective of whether the reader actually
recognizes that rhyme scheme or not, however, the language of that sonnet can only
be identified as sublime as and when it produces the effect of transportation on the
reader. The sublime therefore at least as far as literary studies, is concerned is found
associated both with the text and with the reader. So, it is a quality that adheres to the
text yes, but it is also something that needs to be activated by the reader and in fact, as
I would show later the author also plays an important role in creating the sense of
literary sublime. So, the sublime as far as Pseudo Longinus is concerned is to be
understood as a triangular relationship between text, author, and the reader, or
audience. So, let us try to unfold this relationship, this triangular relationship that I
have just talked about, by going back to that important line, “the effect of lofty
language upon an audience is not persuasion, but transport”. Now, the key word in
this line is transport and the Greek original which it represents is the word “ekstasis”.
Now “ekstasis” has been variously translated in English and apart from the word
transport, we also find other translations like for instance taking the reader out of
himself. So, the word “ekstasis” has also been represented as something which takes
the reader out of himself, but its most simple translation is perhaps to be found in the
word ecstasy. So, what does Psuedo Longinus mean by saying that the sublime
produces the effect of ecstasy within the audience. If you look at the text, you will
find an answer to this question in the form of a metaphor and again I quote from the
text: “Our persuasions we can usually control, but the influences of the sublime bring
power and irresistible might to bear, and reign supreme over every hearer. Sublimity
flashing forth at the right moment scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt and
at once displeased the power of the orator in all its plenitude.” So, ecstasy, the feeling
produced by the sublime is to be understood as an overwhelming sensation. When the
reader encounters the sublime, he is stunned and even ravished as if by a thunderbolt
and he loses his normal sense of equilibrium. It is precisely this sense of being
mightily overwhelmed that some of the translators have tried to capture by rendering
“ekstasis” as a sense of being transported or as a feeling of being taken out of oneself.
Here, in order to understand the use of the word “ekstasis” or ecstasy or transport
more fully, we will also have to pay attention to how it has been contrasted with the
idea of persuasion. Now, persuasion usually happens if I convince you through logical
arguments that would appeal to your rational faculties. So, what does Longinus mean
then when he says that sublimity or the sublime in literature produces ecstasy that hits
us with an irresistible force which is quite unlike persuasion; because persuasion we
can control, ecstasy is beyond our rational control. Well, one way of interpreting this
would be to conceive ecstasy and persuasion as binary opposites. Persuasion is then
associated with reason with logic and by contrast the sense of ecstasy that the sublime
creates is associated with irrationality and with a kind of a mad frenzied passion.
Now, if you are approaching Longinus’s text after having read Plato’s The Republic,
this kind of analysis will evidently seem to be very appealing - because according to
Longinus, sublime is an integral aspect of good poetry in particular and good art in
general which means that poetry and here, I am using poetry in the broadest sense of
the term would produce ecstasy rather than persuasion. This will fold neatly with
Plato’s argument that poetry appeals to the irrational faculties of human nature and
therefore, undermines rational faculties. As you will remember from our earliest
lectures, this was one of the main reasons why Plato wanted to banish poets from his
ideal republic. So, here if we read Longinus from this perspective, we can very well
construct an argument where Longinus would seem to support Plato’s assessment of
poetry as evoking a mad frenzy of emotions. However, if the passage that I quoted
from chapter 1 of “On the Sublime” which spells out this distinction between
persuasion and ecstasy is compared with what Longinus proposes in chapter 7, then
the interpretation of sublime ecstasy as a state of irrational frenzy seems to be
undermined. It is no longer sustainable if we read chapter 1 and chapter 7 together.
Because in chapter 7, Longinus argues that one of the marks of true sublimity in
literature is that it and I quote: “dispossess the soul to high thoughts and leave in the
mind more food for reflection than the words seem to convey. So, the feeling of
ecstasy that is evoked by the true sublime does not simply produce a state of mad
frenzy, but rather elevates the human mind and guides it to higher thoughts and
reflections. So, ecstasy produced by the true sublime rather than leading to frivolous
irrationality actually ultimately leads to a state of deeper intellectual contemplation.”
And a good example to understand this would be chapter 11 of Bhagavad Gita for
instance, because till chapter 10 of Gita, we have a dialogue between Krishna and
Arjun, where the former which is Krishna tries to convince the latter Arjun to fight the
battle of Mabharata by using various arguments that might appeal to the reasoning
faculty of Arjun, but in chapter 11 Krishna gives Arjun, a glimpse of what is usually
known of his “vishwarup” or cosmic self which overwhelms Arjun and produces a
sense of ecstasy. Indeed verses 10 to 13 of chapter 11 of Gita presents this sublime
vision that Arjun has through a kind of poetic language which is meant to produce an
equivalent sublime experience for every reader. So, every time you read those verses,
it is as if you are relieving the sublime experience that Arjun had on the battlefield
and the result of all this is not logical persuasion, but it is ecstasy, it is a sense of
transportation which the reader like Arjun feels and the reader finds himself almost
taken out of himself. But this ecstasy does not lead to a state of irrational frenzy;
neither does it cause a rational frenzy in Arjun, nor does it cause irrational frenzy in
the reader. Rather it leads to what Stephen Halliwell calls in his analysis of Longinus
texts as an surplus of meaning and this surplus of meaning produced through ecstasy
discloses to the reader deeper layers of reality that is otherwise not available through
the exercise of mundane logic. Now, from this discussion of ecstasy, let us move to
the discussion of the elements that are identified by Longinus as necessary to create
the sense of sublime in literature. According to Longinus 5 elements are key to the
creation of a sublime style and these 5 elements are divided by him in two broad
categories. Elements are categorized either as natural or they are categorized as
products of art or skill. So, the natural category which is the 1st category includes 2
elements, the 1st of which is described as the ability to conceive great or elevated
thoughts. This is the 1st element in the natural category and there is also another
element which is also natural, and this is, the evocation of strong emotions. So, these
are the two elements in the natural category. The category related to art or skill in turn
involves 3 elements. The 1st one is figures of thought and speech, the 2nd element
deals with elevated diction, or elevated choice of words, and the 3rd deals with the
noble arrangement of these elevated words. Now, though Longinus mentions these 5
elements that are necessary for the sublime style, he also holds that the first two
elements which are described as natural are more important than the set of elements
which are dependent on skills. Indeed, Longinus believes that it is only when the
natural elements are present that the true sub lime is produced. So, a literary work
might be produced with great technical skills, but as far as Longinus is concerned,
without elevated thoughts or without strong emotions in forming that work, it will
never attain the heights of sublimity. Thus, since the main source of the sublime style
is identified in this text as the two natural elements, let us have a closer look at each
of them one by one. The first of these elements that is great or elevated thought is
identified as a most important requirement for a sublime style. According to Longinus
elevated thought is first and foremost the product of a great and noble mind. So, in
order to think about elevated ideas, you will have to first have a noble mind and in
chapter 9, we find that this greatness of mind, this nobility of mind is presented by
Longinus as a natural endowment something that naturally occurs to some people
which means that some people are born with a noble mind and therefore, they are
born with a capacity to conceive elevated thoughts. But this idea of a natural genius, a
person born naturally with a noble mind is at the same time coupled with an argument
that says that even if someone is born with a great mind, he needs to develop it and
regularly push it towards the direction of greatness, so that it becomes filled with
elevated thoughts. So, clearly greatness can also be cultivated and is not entirely
limited to natural endowment. This notion of cultivation is also evident in the idea of
imitation or emulation that Longinus talks about. He argues that elevated thoughts can
be generated by emulating other writers whose works are known for the sublimity and
the intention here is not to merely copy them. Here we are not dealing with the kind of
ideas that we were talking about when we were discussing the term mimesis rather the
intention is to seek inspiration from these earlier works and maybe even to finally
surpass them. So, apart from greatness of mind and emulation of great works,
Longinus also talks about a third characteristic that helps to create elevated thought
and he describes this third quality, third characteristic as “phantasia”. Now, this Greek
word “phantasia” is usually translated as imagination, but I think it is more helpful if
we try and understand “phantasia” as an ability to visualize something in great details
and present to the reader ideas or thoughts in the form of vivid images. So, these are
the three things: noble mind, emulation and imagination of visualization that results in
the production of great or elevated thoughts which was the first element in the natural
category that we had discussed. So, now let us move on to the second of the 5
elements, which Longinus identifies as important for the production of the sublime
and according to the text, this vital aspect of the sublime style is its ability to arouse
strong emotions, its ability to evoke strong emotions and this is not difficult to
understand especially after our discussion of ecstasy because the reason why ecstasy
overwhelms us is precisely because it is associated with the arousal of strong and even
vehement emotions. Thus, for instance the verses of 10 to 13 of chapter 11 in
Bhagavad Gita which both records and reproduces for the readers the sublime
experience of Arjun is followed in verse 14 by a description of an Arjun, who is taken
out of himself by the effect of emotions which are so strong and so vehement that they
are almost of violence that is done to him. So, the effect of the sublime beauty of the
cosmic form of Lord Krishna is to produce a sense of vehemence of emotion which
almost comes across as a violation of Arjun. Finally, after having discussed these
elements, I would like to comment on the last chapter of Longinus’s of the sublime
because as I have said that Longinus’s theory of sublime presents a complex
triangulation of the reader, the author and the text, but the last chapter of on the
sublime adds another layer of complexity because it connects this triangular
relationship between the reader, the text and the author with a socio-political
commentary. This last chapter begins by quoting the argument of a certain
philosopher which points out that the sense of the sublime is apparently missing in the
contemporary social milieu to which both the philosopher and Longinus belongs to.
The putative reason for this absence of the sublime is not the lack of literary skills, or
the use of charming language, but rather, the absence is supposedly caused by the lack
of “transcendent natures”. Now, this statement neatly dovetails with the relative
importance that Longinus ascribes to the natural elements of the sublime style over
the technical elements or the elements related to skill, because this means that the
reason for which sublime is found to be missing in Longinus’s contemporary society
is primarily because the people around him are no longer able to conceive elevated
thoughts which might produce ecstasy. They do not have the transcendent nature to
produce elevated thoughts which are crucial to the sublime style, but why is there a
lack of people with transcendent nature, with noble minds who can think of elevated
thoughts. Well, Longinus first looks at the argument that is given by the philosopher
because philosopher booth makes this statement and also, gives a reason as to why
this kind of situation was prevalent during his time. His argument is that transcendent
natures are no longer abundant in the contemporary society, because 1st Rome was no
longer a democracy. In other words, the ability to transcend the mundane, which is the
essence of the sublime can only flourish in a political setup which encourages
individual freedom and I quote this is what the philosopher thinks: “freedom has
power to feed the imaginations of the lofty minded and inspire hope. This individual
freedom according to the philosopher is ensured by democracy”. Now, those of you
who are familiar with ancient Roman history will know that Rome was a republic till
27 BCE and after that it transited to a form of monarchical government. Thus the
social milieu that the philosopher is talking about is a result of this political transition
that had in the not too distant past and he is connecting this transition, this socio-
political transition, with the absence of transcendent natures in the society around
him. However as far as Longinus is concerned, the connection between democracy
and the sublime is not quite sustainable, because according to Longinus, it is just out
of nostalgia for the lost democratic order of the Roman republic that the philosopher
is trying to connect the flourishing of the transcendent nature with the democratic
political setup. It is just nostalgia. There is not much truth to it. For Longinus, rather
than democracy, or the absence of democracy being the reason, the real reason for the
loss of transcendent natures that can produce the sublime is the widespread social
tendency towards avarice. So, according to Longinus it is not democracy, rather it is
the widespread social tendency towards avarice that is causing the lack of
transcendent nature and therefore, the lack of sublime. For Longinus, avarice or the
desire to accumulate boundless wealth makes one too heavily engaged with ones
mundane mortal existence. In such a case, greatness is sought not to transcendence or
the desire for immortal fame, but rather through an extravagant lifestyle Longinus,
therefore opines that it’s better to live in a political milieu which does not encourage
individual freedom because that freedom invariably leads to the pursuit of avarice and
all the other concomitant evils and I quote from Longinus: ““It is perhaps better for
men like ourselves to be ruled than to be free, since our appetites if we let lose
without restraint upon our neighbours like beasts from a cage would set the world on
fire with deeds of evil”.) These differing opinions regarding the connection between
the sublime and the political milieu that we encounter in the last chapter of
Longinus’s text is rather interesting. Primarily because for us reading this text, we are
clearly located in a different juncture of history where most of the world, the norm is
to have democracy rather than to have other kinds of government. So, I would
therefore encourage you to deliberate on your own and see if you agree more with the
philosopher and the connection that he makes between sublime and the production of
individual freedom and the political setup of democracy or whether you agree with
Longinus more. So, I will leave it open-ended for you to decide. In our future lectures
we will see how this theorization of sublime resonates with the way literature and
literature criticism was redefined by the Romantic Movement during the late 18th and
early 19th century. But before that we will be seeing how the category of literature,
the modern category of literature and indeed English literary studies as we understand
it now gradually emerged during the 18th century. So, in our next lecture we will take
up briefly the things that were happening in the field of literary studies in England
during the 18th century and then, we will move towards the Romantic Movement.
Thank you.

Neoclassical Literary Theory

Hello everyone and welcome back to another lecture on Literary Theory. As you
know we had ended our previous lecture on Longinus’s theory of sublime by noting
how similarities may be drawn between the notion of sublime and the Romantic
Movement. But before we move on to discuss the romantic movement of the late 18th
and early 19th century, we will have to dwell upon the story of the preceding 100
years. This is because it was during these 100 years, so, I am talking roughly about
the period from late 17th century to late 18th century, these were the years that saw
the emergence of an attempt to theorize literature within the field of English literary
studies. Now, this statement might sound controversial, so let me elaborate. It was
during the period between late 17th and 18th century that English literature gradually
became a subject of critical interest and scholarly discussion. Now, it is important to
note here that English literary studies as an institutionalized academic discipline
would not be established till 19th century. The late 17th and 18th century emergence
of English literary studies was not connected with academic institutions, but rather
with what is known as the growth of the public sphere in Britain. So, here I am
making a distinction between the emergence of English literary studies and the
emergence of English literary studies as an academic discipline. As an academic
discipline, it will emerge only during the 19th century, but as a field of debate and
discussion, it gradually emerged during this period from late 17th to 18th century. So,
it is within this public sphere that English literature first started being discussed in a
comprehensive and coherent manner. The development of literary theory vis-à-vis
English literary studies was at the heart of this 18th century enterprise to engage with
literature in general and English literature in particular in a systematic manner. In
today's lecture, we will discuss how the emergence of a public sphere in Britain gave
rise to English literary studies as a new field of discourse. We will also discuss how
this in turn was connected with the development of the first set of critical theories that
was inherently connected to English literary studies, a set of theories that are today
identified by the name Neoclassical Literary Theory, but I want to open this
discussion by looking at the term literature itself, and here I would like to reiterate
some of the things that I have already mentioned in my first lecture in this series.
Literature which has its roots in the Latin word Littera was associated in English till
the 16th century with the notion of literacy which is simply the ability to read. Ever
since Caxton established the first printing press in Britain in the 15th century and
printed books started becoming more and more available, the ability to read printed
material became one of the prominent signs of literacy. So, the literacy that was
signified by the term literature, now after the establishment of the printing press in
Britain started to mean the ability to read printed material. The ability to read printed
books and literature even today retains this strong link to the ability to read printed
books, indeed this is precisely why oral forms of literature are regarded as a kind of
special or even marginal category within the field of literature. Furthermore, in an age
where drives to achieve mass literacy was unheard of, the ability to read was a sign of
accomplishment that could only be achieved by a leisured class. A leisure class would
undergo a fairly prolonged training in order to achieve literacy. This kind of time was
not available to everyone in the society. The ability to read which signified having
literature in oneself also had a limited class basis, a limited class base, because
reading material including printed books was only available to a very few. They were
enormously expensive compared to the prices that they have today and at that point of
time, they were available only to a very few group of people within the society. So,
literature ability to read printed books was something was a practice that was fairly
limited to a very small social class. Thus, by the 18th century, literature was firmly
connected to the idea of social distinction … to it was a mark of belonging to that
small social group, a privileged social group literature at least in the sense in which it
was associated with literacy and printed books was an activity that was far removed
from the presence world of back breaking manual labour. Acquaintance with literature
was therefore, a sign of belonging to the upper echelons of a class bound society, but,
the question is who constituted this upper echelon of society? In Britain of 17th and
18th century, the answer to this question was actually fast changing because in 1640s,
England had experienced a bloody civil war which had culminated in the beheading
of King Charles, the first and the establishment of a Republican state. This led a
severe blow to the existing power structure of the society in which the long
entrenched aristocrats headed by an absolutist monarch held complete sway over the
affairs of the state. The bourgeoisie as a distinct class was making their presence felt
on the political arena through trying to establish the primacy of the parliament over
the arbitrary dictates of the monarchs and the establishment of a republic in 1649
significantly tilted the skills towards their favor. These gains of the civil war were
retained by the bourgeois and even further enhanced through the glorious revolution
in 1688, another major event in 17th century British history. And 1688, though it saw
the return of the monarchical form of government, this return to monarchy was
significantly different from the kind of monarchy that Britain had known till before
the civil war. William Mary who had made the new monarchs of Britain following the
Glorious Revolution were also administered a coronation oath in which they had to
swear that they would govern according to the statutes and laws that have already
been discussed and agreed upon in the parliament. Therefore, the new centre of power
no longer remained the court of an autocrat when a voice of one man reigned supreme
over all other voices. Now, the sight of true power became the parliament where the
members conversed as equals and not as subordinates. This spirit of holding a
discussion amongst equals which informed and indeed still informs the idea of our
parliament was replicated in the 18th century more locally by such informal gathering
places like clubs, coffee houses, and chocolate houses. And these were the places
which formed what is known as a bourgeois public sphere in Britain. And it is in this
broader story of the rise of the bourgeois politics and bourgeois public sphere, that we
can locate the emergence of English literary studies and its quest to develop a
coherent theoretical discourse about literature here. However, I need to clarify
something in British literary history. Every major socio political change has resulted
in the creation or adaptation of some new kind of literature or the other. For instance,
the Norman conquest of England in 1066 resulted in a great social as well as political
shake up of the country and as a direct result of it we see the emergence of the
metrical romances which occupies such a crucial place in medieval literary history of
Britain. Similarly, the rise of the bourgeoisie in Britain during the 17th and 18th
centuries also brought with it a new form of literature and this new form was that
novel. But my focus in this lecture is not the rise of this new bourgeois form of
literature, but rather the rise of a new bourgeois form of looking at literature in
general of studying it, of studying literature and of talking about literature. What is
unique and unprecedented here is, therefore not the development of a new literary
genre like the novel, but rather the development of a shared parameter for critically
judging literature as an art form within the general field of English literary studies. In
the rest of the lecture, I will talk about two very important things. First, I am going to
talk about the idea of public sphere, what it means, and what was the kind of public
sphere that we see developing in Britain during the 17th and 18th century? And the
second thing that I am going to talk about is a kind of literary theory that this British
public sphere gives rise to, and why this particular kind of literary theory is today
known by the name of Neoclassical Literary Theory?
So, to begin with the idea of the public sphere, now this is a term that is most strongly
associated with the work of German intellectual Jürgen Habermas, who in his book
titled, The Structural, and I am referring to the translated English title of the book,
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere which was originally published in
1962, the German version … Habermas in that book describes public sphere as
constituted by social institutions which provide a platform for debates and discussions
through which public opinion is shaped. So, according to urban mass, public sphere is
constituted by different kinds of social institutions which provide platforms for
debates and discussions through which public opinion can be formed, public opinion
can be shaped and if we look around us, we can see numerous instances of such
platforms of open public debates and discussions ranging from village squares to
television studios. Now, I think you will realize that these social institutions become
especially relevant within a democratic political structure because it is precisely in
such a political system that public opinion gets shaped through open debates and these
open debates, then shape the function of the government, the shape of the
government. So, within the political system of a democratic country, these platforms
of open public debate which constitute the public sphere becomes very relevant and
very important. And in the western world, the public sphere became more and more
important as feudalism gave way to more democratic structures of governance and for
Britain more specifically those social institutions constituting a public sphere of
debate discussion and opinion making became significant from the late 17th century
onwards following the beheading of the absolutist King Charles, the 1st and
subsequently through the assertion of the parliament’s supremacy. Now, in this public
sphere which in Britain came to prominence during the late 17th – 18th century had
two very strong influences. The first was the influence of Enlightenment and the
second influence was that of Capitalism. Now, Enlightenment which swept through
Western Europe during the 17th and 18th century prioritized reason, prioritized
rationality and it foregrounded the ability of human reasoning to make sense of the
world around us, God, or the faith in divine authority was no longer called upon to
explain human existence or the universal order which framed that existence. And this
privilege of the rational, this privilege of reason, the faculty of reasoning formed a key
aspect of the late 17th and 18th century public sphere as well. If we consider the court
of a monarch, we will see that it is the voice of one person which has absolute sway
over all other voices and the reason why this single voice has an absolute sway over
all other voices is because the voice of the monarch is considered to be divinely
guided. And this is at the heart of feudalism. The monarch does not need to convince
others through reasoning. His words are taken for granted simply because he is the
monarch and is situated at the top of a hierarchical social and political pyramid, where
unquestioning obedience is the norm. If you compare this to the public sphere
informed by the values of enlightenment, you will see that public opinion is shaped by
people who appeals to the reasoning faculty of their fellow participants. So, unlike the
court, the members of the public sphere are perceived by each other as equals and the
argument or opinion of one member can only trump the argument and opinion of
another member if they are perceived as more rational, if they appeal to the reasoning
faculty more. This privileging of rationality, like all the other forms of discourse
emerging from within this public sphere, also influenced the discourse of Neoclassical
Literary Theory. Thus, we find John Dryden who was one of the most influential
British poets and literary theorists of the 2nd half of the 17th century argue in his
work titled “Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy”, that literary criticism should be and I
quote “founded upon good sense and sound reason rather than on authority”. Now,
let us come to the influence of Capitalism on the emerging public sphere of the late
17th and 18th century. As noted earlier, the institutions that made up the public sphere
during this period replaced the monarch’s court as a site of social, political and
economic formation and, whereas, the courts were the domain of the aristocrats, the
institutions of the public sphere were primarily the domain of the bourgeoisie whom
the growth of capitalism had pushed forward. Thus, the public sphere that emerged in
Britain during the period under discussion was essentially a bourgeois public sphere
and it was informed through and through, this public sphere, by the economic and
political interests of the bourgeois class, but the discourses that took shape within this
bourgeois public sphere were not merely limited to the economic and the political.
Rather it also included the cultural and the public sphere was also used by the
bourgeois to shape a cultural worldview which was in sync with their economic and
their political views. It was as part of this broader bourgeois cultural project that we
see the development in Britain of the field of English literary studies and the
associated field of literary theory. So, from this general discussion of context within
which Neoclassical Literary Theory emerged, let us now move to some specific
aspects of this literary theory. As I have explained while discussing the etymology
and the development of the term literature within English language, engagement with
literary texts was associated during the late 17th and 18th century with culture taste,
with cultural refinement. Possessing or reading literature signified a degree of cultural
sophistication which was supposed to distinguish the new bourgeois from the peasants
and industrial labourers. Attempts to critically engage with literature was indeed,
perceived by the bourgeoisie as a mark of an elevated social status. That was earlier
exclusively enjoyed by the aristocrats and during this period, we therefore see the
emergence of a literary theory that is deeply concerned with the issue of developing
cultural refinement and with the issue of developing social sophistication. A clear
instance of this is to be found in the 18th century journals like The Tattler for instance
or The Spectator where people like Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, but using
these journals highly, effectively to instruct the bourgeois readership on what
literature to read in order to develop a cultural taste that would distinguish them as
gentlemen. Now, it is important to note here that in the matter of judging what is good
and proper literature and developing a refined cultural taste through it, the literary
theorists of the bourgeois public sphere relied heavily upon the classical literary and
theoretical texts and this was primarily, because the values of the classical texts were
already well established. This means that the key classical texts that we have
discussed in our previous lectures like for instance Aristotle’s Poetics or Pseudo
Longinus’s “On the Sublime” formed a sort of template on which the new kind of
English Literary Theory was scripted during the late 17th and 18th century. It is for
this reason that the literature criticism that emerged during this period from the
bourgeois public sphere is referred to as Neoclassical Literary Criticism, because it
revisited in such a significant way the classical literary canons. Now, one of the chief
ways in which literary theories of the bourgeois public sphere were using the classical
texts was by treating them as the repositories of stylistic decorum and literary rules
and conventions. The works of Aristotle, for instance, or, Longinus, or Horus while
being used to formulate a set of literary dos and don’ts which could then be applied
either to produce new literary works which were good and proper or to judge existing
literary works, and then to see how well they were fitted to develop one's cultural
taste and one's social refinement. Indeed for the 18th century British poet and theorist
Alexander Pope, these rules which he could find in the classical texts went even
beyond the issue of stylistic decorum because according to Pope, the literary
conventions devised by the classical author were a reflection of the rules that
underlined nature itself. So, for a literary critic or an author acquaintance with these
classical rules were not simply a matter of cultural taste, but also a matter of truthful
reflection of nature and of man’s place within nature. So, as Pope writes in his famous
“Essay on Man” and I a quote, "Those Rules of old discovere’d, not devis’d,/ And
Nature still, but Nature Methodiz’d" and then, a few lines later we find Pope advising
both the author and the critic and I quote again: "Learn hence for Ancient Rules are
just Esteem;/ To copy Nature is to copy Them". It is now important to note that these
rules and conventions which are the new classical theorists culled from the texts of the
classical predecessors did not evoke an unquestioning admiration. Take, for instance,
the rule of the three dramatic unities. Now, this is a particular rule which enjoyed a
great degree of popularity among the 17th and 18th century theorists which stated that
any play in order to attain the elevated status of a classical Greek drama needs to
abide by three important things, three unities. The first is that it needs to have unity of
place, which means that it needs to confine its actions to a single location. Second is it
needs to have unity of time and resist any attempt to randomly jump forward or
backward in time, and thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, it needs to have unity of
action where the plot remains uncontaminated by any subplot that might divert the
audience from the main story, main focus. Now, though many new classical theorists
believed in the sanctity of these rules which they could see being abided by sort of
Classical Greek tragedians, there are also others who questioned these rules by
pitching the plays of against these rules, because if you read Shakespeare’s tragedies,
you will see that almost all of them regularly violate each of these three unities. Thus,
though on the one hand we have someone like Pope who insists that we learn just
esteem for the ancient rules and on the other hand, we have texts like Dryden's essay
“On Criticism” for instance, where the matter of following rules and conventions of
the classical authors is placed within the structure of a rational debate. So, it is not
something that is presented as you know a set of rules that is written in stone; it
becomes a matter of debate and discussion at least in Dryden. In many ways, Dryden's
text is perhaps more representative of the spirit of open debate that informed the
bourgeois public sphere than Pope's admonitions to follow the rules laid down by the
ancient. But in spite of acknowledging this diversity, there is no denying the fact that
an excessive concern with rules, with conventions and with stylistic decorum
occupied Neoclassical Literary Theory of the late 17th and 18th century and this
concern would remain strong, till it will be displaced by the emergence of a radically
new conceptualization of literature within the field of English literary studies during
the late 18th and early 19th century. It is to this new conceptualization of literature
that we will turn in our next lecture, where we will start with our discussion of
Romanticism. Thank you.

Romanticism
Hello and welcome to another lecture in this series on Literary Theory. Over the next
two lectures we will take up the topic of Romanticism and we will see how this late
18th and early 19th century phenomenon impacted the field of English literary theory.
This period under consideration was marked in the history of Europe by a major
political upheaval and here of course, I am thinking about the French revolution of the
1790s, which established the first Republican government in France and which,
thereafter, went on to inspire several political movements throughout the world. This
political revolution created a radically changed cultural milieu and in today’s lecture
we will see how this change cultural scenario created new notions about creating and
theorizing literature.
But, apart from the political upheaval the period between late 18th and early 19th
century was also a time of a deeper and more profound revolution of ideas, a
philosophical revolution if you will about how man and the universe around him is to
be conceptualized is to be connected with each other. In the lectures on Romanticism
we will also do well upon this revolution of ideas and we will see how romantic
theory of literature made use of it to create some very lasting notions about literature,
about nature, and about the role of the poet.
But before we move on to these different revolutions and their relation to a romantic
theory of literature, we need to look at the term Romanticism and spend a little time
discussing what the term might actually mean. Now, the term “romantic” or
“romanticism” as it is applied within the field of literary theory literary studies is
ultimately derived from the word Rome. Now, Rome is today known to us as merely
the name of a city. But, in the first three centuries of the Common Era, the city also
gave its name to a huge empire radiating from it to cover much of Europe, the whole
of modern day Turkey, and also the fringes of Africa, northern Africa. One of the
chief binding features of this Roman Empire was the language Latin and the term
“romance” thus came to be associated and indeed it is still associated today with
languages which originated from Latin. So, for instance Italian, French, Spanish,
Portuguese these languages which originated from Latin are all referred to as romance
languages. So, the connection therefore is Rome, its association with the language
Latin, its association with certain other modern languages like for instance Italian,
French, Spanish etcetera. Now, by the middle ages the word romance also acquired a
more specialized meaning. When it was used not just to designate languages derived
from Latin, but also writings in these languages, in these romance languages. The
meaning was even further narrowed down when romance was used to mean not
merely writings in certain languages, but also specific kinds of writings of depicting
the tales of chivalrous adventures depicting tales of magic and of courtly love, which
were filled with knights, princesses, and a host of fantastical creatures. Now, these
particular kinds of writings which were usually in the form of metrical tales referred
simply as Romances later on form the mainstay of medieval European literature. Thus
if we look at the history of English literature for instance we find a large collection of
these metrical romances based on the lives and adventures of king Arthur and his
famous band of courtiers. The word romance and the adjective form romantic
registered another shift in meaning in English language during the late seventeenth
and early 18th century, as you will know from our previous lecture on neoclassical
literary theory this was a period when enlightenment prioritized reason and mid
rationality the touchstone of judging the value of everything related to man and his
universe. During this period the terms romance and romantic with their association
with the magical and the fantastical were turned into pejorative words. In fact, the
very first use of the adjective romantic that Oxford English Dictionary records is from
1650 and here the pejorative connotation is already noticeable and the quotation is as
follows: “Being a history which is partly true, partly romantick, morally divine”. Note
here the way in which the word romantic is placed in opposition to the word truth.
This gives the impression that the romantic involves things which are fabricated,
which are fantastical and therefore, not quite true. And if we go down the list of
references provided by the oxford English dictionary we soon realized that by the mid
18th century the pejorative quality of the objective romantic is fully established. Thus
in the year 1740, we find the reference of this following line and I quote: “This
Account, as Whimsical and Romantic as it is, was told to the Lady Cowper … by Dr.
Patrick.” Romantic and whimsical these two terms have become synonymous here
and both signifies the notion of something which is capricious, which is fantastic, and
in general which is not amenable to reason. Now, as you will know from our
discussion of neoclassicism that during the late seventeenth and 18th century the
valorization of reason within the field of literature was translated into various forms
of valorization of the classics, and it involves celebrating the rules which putatively
underlined the classical literary world of the ancient Greek and Latin authors. Thus
within the field of late 17th century, early 18th century English literature, we find the
term romantic being used to designate a kind of negative literary space within which
the classical rules and conventions were not in operation. One example of such use
can be found in the preface to English dramatist Thomas Shadwell’s 1668 play The
Sullen Lover. In that preface Shadwell writes how he has meticulously tried to abide
by the classical conventions of the three unities and how in the matter of obeying the
class rule he has found Ben Jonson to be his only worthy predecessor. Shadwell then
goes on to add this line and I quote: (“Most other authors that I ever read have wild
Romantick Tales, wherein the strain Love and Honor to that Ridiculous height, that it
becomes Burlesque.”) The romantic is here identified almost as a wild site that is in
sharp contrast to the meticulously organized garden of neoclassical literature, but
these various attributions like wild, fantastical, magical, whimsical only gives us a
rather vague idea of what exactly does the word romantic mean and this is precisely
the problem. Because, if we study the use of the word romantic in late 17th and early
18th century, we find it to mean more or less just a negative space, that is beyond the
pale of Enlightenment reason, that is beyond the pale of rule governed Neoclassicism.
And, throughout the course of the 18th century this negative space identified by the
name romantic is filled with various different and even contradictory attributes most
of which are again pejorative. The negative space identified by the term romantic will
only gradually come to acquire the prestige of a positive and influential category of
creating and thinking about literature and the world in general during the course of the
19th century. The process starts actually from the very end of 18th century, but really
happens during the course of 19th century. But, even after the term romantic gets
stabilized during the course of the 19th century it will not have a clearly defined
meaning. Thus for instance, as late as 1924 we find the American scholar A. O.
Lovejoy arguing this and I quote: (“Any attempt at a general appraisal even of a
single chronologically Determinate Romanticism – still more, of Romanticism as a
whole – is a fatuity. When a Romanticism has been analyzed into the distinct strains
or ideas which compose it, the true philosophic affinities and the eventual practical
influence in life and art of these several strains will usually be found to be
exceedingly diverse and often conflicting”.) And this is in 1924. So, the point here is
that in our quest to explore romantic theory we will actually be dealing with various
strains which are exceedingly diverse. my lecture today therefore, would not attempt
at a comprehensive analysis of either romanticism in general or of romantic theory of
literature in particular, primarily because, such generalizations at least in the case of
romanticism is not quite possible.
So, with this in mind let us turn to the first major strand which informed the romantic
theory of art that emerged during the late 18th and early 19th century, and this is the
strand of the French revolution. On the fourteenth of July in 1798, the fortress of
Bastille in Paris which was used by the French aristocracy primarily as a political
prison was stormed by a raging crowd and with this iconic act the French revolution
burst onto the world stage. Within a few years the French monarch Louis XVI was
beheaded along with his wife Marie Antoinette and in many ways these scenes of
violence and even of regicide that were playing out in the streets of the late 18th
century were repetitions of what had happened in England during the 1640s and we
have already discussed this period in English history in our previous lectures. So, in
both the cases the absolute monarch was removed from the throne and that act was
followed by an attempt to restructure the political system, so as to end the autocratic
rule of one person or a small section of the society who formed the aristocracy and to
bring in a more representative form of government. In both the cases absolute
monarchy was replaced, for varying periods, by a republic, where the hierarchy of the
monarchical system gave way to the dreams of creating a more egalitarian society.
And, in both cases again, the dream was only partially fulfilled, because political
agency was indeed expanded beyond the narrow domain of aristocracy, but it was still
not extended to a large section of the population. In fact, in both the cases the initial
attempts to revolutionize the way political power was structured within the society
ended with the return of monarchy. In England it ended with the return of Charles the
second on the throne and in France it returned in the form of emperor Napoleon. But,
in spite of these many similarities it has to be noted that the French revolution had a
much wider global impact than the beheading of Charles I and the establishment of
the British republic. The democratic and the rebellious spirit of the French revolution
produced a much more pronounced sense of exhilaration among its followers. And its
followers were really global not just restricted to France or even to Europe. We
witness some of this wild exhilaration in the lines of poetry written by William
Wordsworth in which he recounts the emotions he felt while he was in Paris during
the tumultuous years when the French revolution was unfolding. These are the words
of the poet: (“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very Heaven!
O times, In which the meager, stale, forbidding ways Of custom, law and statute, took
at once The attraction of a country in romance!”) Look at the use of the word romance
here. The distinction that had developed in English language by the mid 18th century
between romance and romantic on one side and customs, laws, rules, and classical
conventions on the other is preserved here, but what is interesting is that the values of
the two sides are overturned. So, rules, conventions, and laws, which were so dear to
the intellectuals of the neoclassical period is turned here, into a negative thing through
it is association with the oppressive regime of the old guard and romance acquires a
positive charge which is identified with the transformative spirit of the French
revolution. Now, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the two
pioneers of English romanticism were both eager enthusiasts of the French revolution
and the possibilities of change that this revolution embodied, but like many
enthusiasts of the French revolution both Wordsworth and Coleridge were also fast
disillusioned with the revolution as it failed to live up to its more radical promises and
as it ended up with a monarch coming back to the throne. Now, these radical promises
which so inspired romantics like Wordsworth and Coleridge and which also propelled
the French revolution at least in it is early days were found most clearly in the
writings of the French intellectual Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And, to really understand
the impact of the ideas of French revolution on the English Romantic Movement, we
need to understand some of the key arguments that Rousseau produced. The dates of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau are 1712 to 1778 and he was one of the most influential
figures, he still remains in fact, one of the most influential figures in the history of
modern West. Rousseau through his writings like Discourse on the Origin and Basis
of Inequality Among Men, Emile, The Social Contract, Confessions, strongly shaped
almost all aspects of French social, cultural and political life during the second half of
the 18th century and it were these influences which formed much of the intellectual
basis of French revolution. One of the key ideas that Rousseau proposed in his work is
that of a noble savage. Now, as we have discussed in our earlier lecture, the
neoclassical intellectual tradition primarily conceived man as a social creature. The
most representative human being of this era was therefore, a man engaging with his
peers within the institutions that made up the bourgeois public sphere. Rousseau
expanded this narrow perception of man and introduced in his writings the idea of a
pre-social man. This pre-social man is innately good in nature according to Rousseau
and therefore, the term noble savage, and this pre social man is also characterized by
two basic instinctual drives. One is the drive of self preservation and the other which
keeps the first drive in check is a drive of compassion; compassion for the others in
their misery and troubles. Now, this pre-social existence which Rousseau presented as
an original state of human beings proved to be a very attractive idea to the British
romantics. Indeed they hailed this natural quote unquote natural state of being as a
source of all human virtues and profusely wrote about returning to this stage by
removing themselves from the social species within the cities and embracing a state of
solitude within the lap of nature. The romantics also valorized this idea of the pre-
social existence by celebrating the state of childhood because, a child, like the noble
savage, has not yet entered the social domain and is mainly a creature of its instincts.
But, here I want to flag a problem. Since the classes of English literary studies
Rousseau is usually taught and he is usually read as a prelude to the romantic literary
movement. It is often assumed that Rousseau not only presented the idea of the noble
savage, but also valorized this idea and indeed argued for a return to that state of
being, but the thing is that Rousseau, in fact, did no such thing. He never valorized the
concept of noble savage, because for Rousseau the state of being a noble savage is
only the first stage in a complex process of human evolution. So, according to
Rousseau noble savage is the first stage, originary stage, and man will and, in fact,
man needs to evolve from that stage into a social animal because things like morality
for instance it is absolutely absent among the noble savages. So, in other words
Rousseau does not present a binary where the noble savage in the lap of nature is all
good and then suddenly turns bad as he evolves into a social being. Indeed for
Rousseau the noble savage irrespective of how noble he is, lacks valuable qualities,
lacks qualities like reason for instance, or morality, as I mentioned ,and is really a
creature of instincts. So, while studying Rousseau and while studying him to
understand his influence on the romantics we have to be alert to the ways in which the
English romantics not only adapted their ideas from Rousseau, but also modified
these ideas to create their own worldview. However, let us now move from Rousseau
idea of the noble savage to some of his political ideas which will again bring us back
to the context of the French revolution. The fundamental basis of Rousseau’s political
ideas is a radical egalitarianism in his Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality
among Men, Rousseau writes and I quote: “It is manifestly against the law of nature
that a handful of men be glutted with superfluities while the starving multitude lacks
necessities.” This is clearly directed against the socio-political order, where a
monarch along with a group of entitled aristocrats, hold absolute sway over the affairs
of the state. In a place of such “unnatural system” unnatural, at least according to
Rousseau, system of social and political existence Rousseau proposes a radical
alternative and this alternative is based on a social contract which and I again quote
from Rousseau: . “Establishes equality among the citizens in that they are all
obligated under the same conditions and are all entitled to the same rights.” It is these
political ideals of Rousseau which sought to destabilize the entrenched privileges of a
small group of social and political elites, and these ideals inspired the leaders of the
French revolution. And, these were also the same ideals which inspired the British
romantics like Wordsworth, like Coleridge and even the next generation of romantics
like Shelley, for instance, or Byron, or Keats and they were swayed by a sense of
tremendous enthusiasm that the early phase of the French revolution produced a phase
which was really propelled by these revolutionary ideas of Rousseau. Both the ideas
of the pre-social noble savage and the idea of sociopolitical egalitarianism resulted in
the fore grounding of a new image of man in romantic literature. Thus whereas, for
the new classical authors the ideal human representation was the adult rational mature
man of the bourgeois republics sphere, for the romantics it became a motley crowd of
individuals who symbolized the oppressed, the marginalized and the disenfranchised.
This centering of individuals from the social margins is already evident in what is
usually categorized as the pre romantic poetry of William Blake, whose Songs of
Innocence and of Experience was published in the same year that Bastille was
stormed, 1798. Thus for instance we find Blake writing poems about orphaned
chimney sweepers for instance, who sleeps in soot and dreams horrible nightmares
about him and his friends “Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack/ […] all of them locked up in
coffins of black.” Such a tendency to bring to the foreground the marginalized and the
oppressed is also prominently evident in Wordsworth’s poetry. Consider for instance
two of his poems; the first is the “Female Vagrant” and the second is “Resolution and
Independence”. At the heart of the first poem the “Female Vagrant” is a story of a
woman living at the edges of a strongly class divided society. Her life leads her from
one misfortune to another and she finally, ends up as a homeless vagrant wandering
across the fields to eke out whatever meager living is possible. The second poem
introduces us to another rendering figure situated at the margins of the society and this
figure is the figure of an old leech-gatherer during 18th and 19th century, it was
common practice to gather leeches for medicinal purposes because leeches were used
to suck bad blood out of the body that was a very common medical practice and so,
there were leech gatherers and this poem “Resolution and Independence” talks about
one such old leech gatherer pacing “About the very moors continually,/ wandering
about alone and silently”. Now both Blake and Wordsworth foregrounds figures from
the social margins, rather than seeking their inspiration from the bourgeois public
sphere, but they also have important differences and I would like to bring to your
attention one of the key differences that distinguishes Wordsworth’s representation of
these marginalized figures and Blake’s representations of them. Thus unlike Blake,
Wordsworth situates all of these marginalized figures within a very close proximity to
nature, so much so, that the distinction between these human figures and their natural
surroundings starts blurring. Consider for instance these lines from the “Female
Vagrant”: (“I lived upon the mercy of the fields, /And oft of cruelty the sky
accused; /On hazard, or what general bounty yields,/ Now coldly given, now, utterly
refused. /The fields I for my bed have often used:”) Now, in these lines the vagrant is
entirely turned into a creature of the moors into a creature of the fields in which she
wanders and completely exposed to the nature; she almost becomes one with it. This a
blurring of the distinction between the human and the natural is even more
pronounced in Wordsworth’s description of the old leech-gatherer where the leech
gatherer is first introduced not even as a human being, but rather as almost looking
like a stone a static thing of nature situated by the lakeside. I quote from the poem:
(“As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie/ Couched on the bald top of an eminence;/
Wonder to all who do the same espy,/ By what means it could thither come, and
whence;/ So that it seems a thing endued with sense:/ Like a sea-beast crawled forth,
that on a shelf/ Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself;/ Such seemed this Man,
not all alive nor dead, Nor all asleep […]”) So, as you can see very clearly that the
distinction between the human and the natural is really absolutely blurred here. The
figure looks almost like a part of nature like a massive stone standing next to the lake
or like a creature from out of the lake who is bathing itself in the sun and this close
intertwining of the human and the natural forms the basis of a larger romantic view of
the world and in need of the romantic theory of literature as well. It is to this man
nature relationship that we will turn to in our next lecture. Thank you.

‫مهم جدا‬
1- ‫خصائص الرومنسية‬
2- ‫كيف تختلف الرومنسية عن النقد الجديد‬
3- ‫مراجعة افالطون و ارسطو‬
Hello and welcome, back to another lecture in these series on Literary Theory. We
will continue our discussion on Romanticism and we will see how a new relationship
between man and nature formed the basis of the Romantic worldview in general and
romantic theory of art in particular. But, we will enter into this topic by picking up the
thread from where we had left it in a previous lecture. If you remember, we had talked
about in our previous lecture, about how the human image that is to be found at the
heart of the romantic worldview is not the mature adult man of the bourgeois public
sphere which was the ideal image of man for the earlier generation of writers and
intellectuals. But rather in romanticism we find oppressed, disenfranchised and
marginalized figures residing at the edges of the class based patriarchal society and
these are the people who are foregrounded by the Romantics. We have also discussed
in our previous lecture how in the pioneering Romantic poetry of William
Wordsworth we find these figures from the social margins located amidst nature.
Indeed we find their distinct human existence almost blurring and disappearing
against their natural backdrop, so much so, that they become one with nature. This
we have discussed with reference to the poems the “Female Vagrant” and “Resolution
and Independence”, but if we were looking at the whole body of Wordsworth’s poetry
we can easily go on adding other such instances like, for example, the figure of the
solitary reaper cutting and binding greens while her melancholy strain overflows the
veil profound, or for example, “The Idiot Boy” whose mother goes out in search of
him and finds him standing in the lines of the poem: (“Near the waterfall,/ Which
thunders down with headlong force,/ Beneath the moon, yet shining fair,/ As careless
as if nothing were.”) However, it is not only in Wordsworth’s poetry that we see such
intertwining of the human and the natural. The motif of such figures intertwine with
their natural surrounding occur again and again in the poetry of all of the major
Romantics really and though their status as marginalized individuals might not always
be as apparent as they usually are in the poetry of Wordsworth. They are always
almost without an exception depicted as lonely figures, far removed from the world of
the adult male bourgeois engaged in conversations with his peers within the public
sphere. Consider for instance the poem “Frost at Midnight” by Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, who was incidentally another pioneer of the British Romantic Movement
and who co-authored with Wordsworth the seminal book of versus titled Lyrical
Ballads. . In this poem “Frost at Midnight”, we see Coleridge imagining a future for
his baby son where he will, “wander like a breeze/ By lakes and sandy shores, beneath
the crags/ Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds.” If we move beyond these
lonely figures wandering and laboring amidst nature that we encounter in Wordsworth
and Coleridge, and we come to the next generation of Romantic poets like John Keats,
for instance, or P. B. Shelley, we find even more interesting instances of the
intertwining of the human and the natural. For instance, in Keats we find the haunting
image of the Autumnal season personified as a lonely reaper: (“on a half-reap’d
furrow sound asleep,/ Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook/ Spares the
next swath and all it is twined flowers.”) In here, the two concepts of nature and man
so completely dissolves into one another that the reader is left with an image that is
perhaps best described as nature made human made nature again. Such an intense
human-nature relation were the two terms almost fused into one another is also
witnessed in that other great romantic poet of the second generation Shelley and if we
read his “Ode to the West Wind” we see that the poet invokes the westerly wind too
and I quote from the poem: . (“Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is/ Be thou, Spirit
fierce,/ My spirit Be thou me, impetuous one!”) Now, as I have said before it is this
fused image of nature and human that formed the basis of a radical new literary theory
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. To understand the ways in which
this new theory departed from the new classical theories of literature prevalent during
the most of the eighteenth century let us briefly revisit the idea of mimesis which is at
the heart of the classical literary theories and, therefore, also at the heart of the
neoclassical revival.

First let us go back to the theory of mimesis proposed by Plato. As you will know
from our previous lectures, Plato’s theory of mimesis was based on a notion of the
world of ideas. According to Plato, this super material world of ideas constitutes the
original non-substantial forms of every created thing. The craftsman, like a
furniture maker, for instance, copies that original form and gives it a material shape
in the form of a bed, in the form of a chair, and almirah, and so on and so forth.
Now, in Plato’s view this job of the craftsman involves a process of mimesis or
imitation in which the material bed for instance is produced as a pale and partial
copy of the non substantial original form as it exists in the world of ideas. In this
scheme of things the artist or the poet is also an imitator who copies from the world
of objects that he finds around him. This means that for Plato the work of an artist or
a poet is at least doubly removed from the idea, which represent the true reality of
the world of forms. As we have discussed in the past, these processes of successive
mimesis or imitation is considered by Plato as a movement from truth to falsehood.
The furniture builder can only make a poor and partial copy of the original non
substantial form because he is constrained by the limitations of matter. The poet of
the artist is further constrained when his imitation of the world of objects by the
limitations of his sense perceptions. A straight stick that is immersed in water will
appear to the eyes as bent and this according to Plato will then falsify the
representation of the stick in the work of the artist or the poet who only mirrors
what he finds in front of him. So, in other words, Plato’s theory presents art and
poetry as a kind of faulty mirroring of the truth. I would like to draw your attention
to the role of the artist or the poet that is being assumed here. In Plato’s scheme of
things the best artist or the best poet is a person who does not exist. Let me elaborate
this. If art or literature is to be considered as a mirroring activity, then the more
transparent the mirror is, the better. Any form of intervention or subjective input
that the artist or the poet brings into play is considered as potentially dangerous
because it then tempers with the transparency of the mirroring process. Thus all
artistic interventions are regarded within the Platonic scheme of things as
interventions which lead from truth to falsehood. Thus the moment the poet or the
artist asserts his identity by making visible his subjective position within his work of
art he gets exposed as a liar and a fraudster, who leads the audience away from the
truth. It is this understanding of the poet as a liar, which is behind Plato’s famous
injunction that, poets should be banned from the ideal republic.

Now, this Platonic theory of mimesis remain one of the mainstays of literary criticism
in the western world, right from the renaissance when the spirit of classicism was
rediscovered down to the eighteenth century, when the wave of neoclassicism swept
through much of the European literary scene. M. H. Abrams in his important study on
a romantic theory and critical tradition titled The Mirror and the Lamp traces how the
Platonic metaphor of art and literature as mirrors of the truth and the ideal reality is
repeatedly used by theorists between sixteenth and eighteenth century. But, during
this period when art in general and poetry in particular was being conceptualized as a
mirroring activity, an attempt was also made to raise the status of the poet from being
identified merely as a liar or a fraudster. But, before we come to how Plato’s idea of
art and literature as mimesis was modified between the sixteenth and eighteenth
century we need to note that Plato’s denigration of the poet was already challenged by
his disciple Aristotle. If you remember our discussions on Aristotle’s Poetics, you will
know that Aristotle presented the poet as a craftsman. So, just like a furniture maker
makes a bed by using wood, and chisel, and saw and things like that, a poet also
makes poetry by using rhythm, by using melody, by using words as his tools. So,
Aristotle does not really go out of the Platonic frame of mimetic theory, but he
tweaks it in important ways, so that the poet no longer remains doubly removed
from the truth of the world of ideas, but at least enjoys the same status as any other
craftsman. So, the poet becomes a craftsman who is trying to represent an ideal, the
ideal truth through his work using a separate set of tools definitely from say a
furniture maker, but basically doing the same kind of work that a furniture maker
does.

The ways in which literary theorists working with Plato and with his concept of
mimesis between the sixteenth and eighteenth century tried to rescue the poet from
the ignominy of being branded a liar was, however, slightly different to what Aristotle
was arguing. They did it primarily by revisiting the notion of ideal truth and its
reflection in the natural world around us. One important argument which emerged
during this period and, indeed, emerged following the Platonic scheme of things, was
that the natural world if perceived through individual instances is not a perfect
reflection of the ideal or the truth. Thus, for instance in the enormous variety of
humans, plants and animals that we see around us it is impossible to find one single
instance of perfection. It is a poet, or the painter, or the sculpture who can rectify the
shortcomings of the real world around us and create a world of perfection. So, this
was the idea that we find coming to the foreground between the sixteenth and the
eighteenth century.
And if you want to understand this idea, just think about this – Michelangelo’s David,
for instance, is closer to the truth according to this argument; Michelangelo’s David is
closer to the truth of the ideal man than any of the individual human beings who live
on this earth. So, for the English neoclassical literary theorists like Doctor Johnson for
instance Doctor Samuel Johnson the poet or the artist even while engaging with the
natural world must do it selectively, so that he can create an ideal world bereft of the
several imperfections that are present in nature. Let me quote from doctor Johnson: “It
is justly considered as the greatest excellency of art, to imitate nature; but it is
necessary to distinguish those parts of nature, which are most proper for imitation.”
So, by the eighteenth century the role of the poet was already being elevated from the
marginalized position of being just a liar to the exalted position of being a mediator
between the ultimate truth and reality of the world of ideas and the human conception
of that truth. So, the poet was a one who really selected from the nature around him.
The things which were most perfect and which could then be used to represent the
true ideal form – the truth.

Now, in studying the movement of literary theory towards the romantic period of
late eighteenth, early nineteenth century we also need to take note of the influence
of another major figure, whose name was Plotinus. Plotinus was a third century
Greek philosopher, Greek speaking philosopher rather actually, he was born in
modern day Egypt and Plotinus is widely known for modifying the Platonic relation
between ideas, the world of ideas nature, and the poet and he did it in a very
important way which had widespread implications. Plotinus argued that the poet
was closer to the realm of the ideas which was also interpreted as a realm of gods
than the natural world. In Plotinus’s word we must recognize that they, poets or
artists, give no bare reproduction of the things seen but go back to the ideas from
which nature itself derives. Now, observe how in this new theoretical orientation
that Plotinus introduces, the artist or the poet gradually moves from the role of a
mere imitator to that of being the creator the movement is not quite complete in
Plotinus and the notion of the artist as a creator will only reach its peak with the
Romantics. But, here the artist is raised almost to the level of god himself. This is
because Plotinus argues that the poet or the artist can directly represent the non-
substantial ideal forms because even more than nature they are reflected upon his
mind upon the mind of the poets. So, it is not the nature which is perceived as a
reflection of the unsubstantial and divine ideas, but rather it is the other way
around. Nature for Plotinus represents imperfect representations of the idea. The
artist’s mind is on the other hand the site where the non-substantial ideas are far more
perfectly reflected, which is why the artist or the poet can act best only selectively
borrow from nature, as Doctor Johnson would also later argue, and borrow only those
components, which will help him to bring out the true representation of the ideas
lodged in his mind. So, now, that we know how the Platonic theory of art as imitation
evolved till the eighteenth century.
Let us see how the Romantic theorists built on them to create a new concept of art in
general and of the artists as well. The first important point to be noted about the
Romantic literary theory is how it distances poetry or art from the notion of imitation.
The school of thoughts initiated by Plotinus had already established the primacy of
the poets mind in the artistic process and the Romantic theorists retained this notion of
primacy, but they interpreted the poets mind slightly differently from Plotinus. So, for
Plotinus, the poet was not an imitator of nature, but was an imitator nonetheless,
because rather than copying nature he copied the ideas directly as they were reflected
in his mind. On the other hand for the Romantics, the poet’s mind was not a
storehouse of readymade ideal forms to be truthfully imitated in their artistic
expressions. Rather, the poet’s mind was conceptualized as a site of vibrant creativity
where forms and ideas were generated from within. It was a space of vital energy
which in the English Romantic Poetry gets repeatedly identified through the metaphor
of a roaring and bubbling water body that is spontaneously overflowing. And, the
most famous depiction of this image of a roaring and bubbling water body that
overflows onto the surrounding is perhaps to be found in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
poem “Kubla Khan”, where he talks of a romantic chasm from which and I quote
from the poem: (“With ceaseless turmoil seething,/ As if this earth in fast thick pants
were breathing,/ A mighty fountain momently was forced:/ Amid whose swift half-
intermitted burst/ Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,/ And mid these
dancing rocks at once and ever/ It flung up momently the sacred river.”) The use of
such metaphors like river or an overflowing fountain, were frequently used in
Romantic poetry to depict the creative mind and here I am reminded of another very
powerful instance of the use of such metaphor which occurs in the famous ‘Mount
Snowdon’ section in Wordsworth’s long autobiographical poem “The Prelude”. But
the new theory of the poetic mind which these poetic metaphors represented was
nowhere more thoroughly elaborated than in Coleridge’s 1817 prose work a very
important work as far as romantic literary theory is concerned, which is titled
Biographia Literaria. But, before we turn to Biographia Literaria, I would want you to
note how with Romanticism we are again brought back to the notion of the poet and
his genius mind capable of creating artistic sublimity that was, in fact, championed by
Pseudo Longinus. So, just like Longinus who believed that the ability of the poets
mind to conceive great and noble thought out of it is own depth was the key
ingredient of producing good poetry, the Romantics too believed that the recesses of
the poets mind were the haloed and mystical repositories of artistic creativity.
Now, for the Romantics, the key element which informs the haloed and mystical site
of the poet’s mind is imagination. This is a very important term as far as Romantic
theory is concerned, but then what is imagination? Coleridge answers this question in
his Biographia Literaria by drawing a distinction between two terms. The first term is
fancy and the other term is imagination. Now, in order to understand the meaning that
Coleridge gave to these two terms, we will have to first understand what is memory?
Throughout our life our minds are impacted almost constantly by various visual
images in a stream of succession. When we recall these images in the same order of
succession as we have experienced them it is referred to by Coleridge as memory.
Now, Coleridge speaks of a faculty of mind, which often breaks down these images
into fragments and then juxtaposes these fragments into fantastical new orders which
have no exact relationship with the images as they were experienced by us. This
juxtaposition is what we would usually call the work of imagination in our mundane
language, but Coleridge makes a distinction. He calls this ability of the mind not
imagination, but fancy and I quote Coleridge: . (“The Fancy is indeed no other than a
mood of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended
with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by
the word choice.”) Coleridge contrasts this faculty of the mind which he calls fancy
with another more potent faculty that characterizes the poet’s mind which he calls
imagination. Now, imagination, according to Coleridge, is very unlike fancy and it is
unlike fancy because it does not simply juxtapose fragmented images of memory,
rather it is a vital creative force that is organic to the mind. It does assimilate the
images that are impressed upon the mind from outside, but then it synthesizes them
with its own organic structures that grows and overflows out of its own impetus. So, I
hope now the connection between imagination and the metaphor of a romantic chasm
seething and roaring with it is own energy that Coleridge uses in “Kubla Khan” is
somewhat more clear. Now, Coleridge further divides up imagination into two
segments; the first is primary imagination and the next is secondary imagination.
According to Coleridge the primary imagination is somewhat akin to the concept of
poetic genius. It is the inherent vitality that gives the mind of the poet it is creative
force. Secondary imagination, on the other hand, is an echo of this primary
imagination it is the conscious attempt to exercise this imagination to assimilate and
fuse elements imbibed from the outside into an organic whole. In Coleridge’s own
words: “The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, that is primary
imagination co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary
in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its
operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process
is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify.”
Now, the thing to note here is that within this theory of imagination art or poetry can
neither be conceptualized as a mirroring process, nor even as a process akin to
craftsmanship. Rather art or poetry is to be conceptualized as a natural process,
because the imagination according to Coleridge works in the same way and with the
same vital energy as a seed for instance organically grows into a plant while
assimilating external influences like sunlight and water.
And, this brings us to a very important point. For the Romantics, nature and the poets
minds are symbiotically connected. Nature revives the faculty of imagination even as
imagination assimilates from nature and grows. It is for this reason that we find
Romantic poets repeatedly situating themselves within nature to connect to their
internal fonts of creative energy. It is also for this reason that all the key personages in
the Romantic poetry, whom we have encountered so far like for instance a female
vagrant or the idiot boy or Coleridge’s young child they are all situated amidst nature.
So, much so, that they have become one with it thereby fusing the human and the
natural. With this we end our discussion of Romanticism. In our next lecture, we will
move forward to the twentieth century to study New Criticism. Thank you.

New criticism
Hello and welcome back to this lecture series on Literary Theory. Today, we are
going to start our discussion on the on a school of literary criticism that is usually
identified within the field of English studies as Anglo-American New Criticism, or
simply as New Criticism. It is a way of approaching and understanding literature that
held sway in the field of English studies both in the universities of Britain and of
America, roughly during the second and the third quarters of the 20th century. So, we
are basically moving forward by about a 100 years or so, from the Romantic literary
theory which we discussed in our previous two lectures. Now, I think that by now you
have already been able to notice a trend that is emerging in this series of lectures. So,
whenever we take up any new literary theory for discussion we see that its emergence
is strongly tied up with some kind of socio-political change or even turmoil. And, this
goes on to show actually how integrally the politics and revolutionary social
movements are tied to changes in the cultural world. So, in my introductory lecture
for instance, I have already discussed how what is today often labeled as literary
theory or even simply as theory was an intellectual product of the political turmoil of
the 1960s, when students and workers gathered in the streets of Paris to protest
against authoritarianism. But, as I have also explained earlier the 1960s though
important, is not a one-off moment, rather in the history when socio-political
revolution has led to the emergence of new cultural theories about how to create and
how to read literature. Indeed, as we have seen in our previous lectures the very
emergence of English literature as a subject of systematic study and indeed also as a
subject of systematic criticism was connected with its own history of socio-political
upheavals. This, for instance, was the history of the decline of the power of monarchy
and aristocracy in England and the emergence of a new bourgeois public sphere
during the 18th century. Similarly, while discussing the emergence of Romantic
literary theory, we have seen how the ideals of French revolution have shaped it.
In today’s discussion of New Criticism, we will see how a political epicenter of this
new intellectual movement might be located in the outbreak of the First World War.
And as you all know that this war started in 1914, and continued till 1918, and it
resulted in a manslaughter that was unprecedented in human history, and this was
really a world that was at war. So, even though the immediate incident that triggered
the war was a rather localized issue of European politics which was the killing of the
crown prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire named Franz Ferdinand. It soon grew
to involve not only the whole of Europe, but also America for instance, Russia, it
triggered Bolshevik revolution there, and also a large part of Asia and Africa,
primarily because these places were European colonies. So, just to give you a
perspective a war that began with the murder of an Austrian prince ended up killing
more than 1 crore or 10 million soldiers worldwide, out of whom 70000 were Indian
soldiers. So, amidst this widespread killing and destruction there was a pervasive
sense of losing one’s grip on the world as it was known till then, and of course, this
sense of alienation and this sense of loss was the sharpest in Europe which was at the
epicenter of the whole political turmoil. So, the German intellectual Walter Benjamin
writes very eloquently about this feeling in his essay titled “The Storyteller”, where
Benjamin observes that it was noticeable how after the First World War and I quote
from Benjamin: “Men returned from the battlefield grown silent – not richer, but
poorer in communicable experiences?” Benjamin argues that this was because of all
their past experiences that allowed these people to communicate with the world
around them and to understand how things functioned within that world was
destroyed by the First World War And, I quote from Benjamin again: “For never has
experienced being contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical
warfare, (again something that was employed during the First World War), economic
experience by inflation, (so, there was runaway inflation during the First World War),
bodily experience by mechanical warfare, morale experience by those in power. A
generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open
sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged, but the clouds, and
beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the
tiny, fragile human body.” New Criticism in many ways is the literary product, is a
sort of literary theoretical product, of this fragile human being who has been shorn of
all certainties of the world that he knew of by the destructive torrents and explosions
of the First World War. Hence, it is a literary theory that sways between two desires,
between the desire to rediscover for oneself the lost sense of tradition through
literature and literary appreciation, this is one of the poles of that desire and the other
pole is the effort to read literature without the help of any context, without the help of
any socio-cultural tradition. Because, all of these have been made meaningless by the
experiences of the First World War and I think the first pole is best represented by the
theoretical works of T. S. Eliot. And, the other pool is best represented by the school
of practical criticism initiated by I. A. Richards and during the course of today’s
lecture we will explore both these poles, but we will start with T. S. Eliot.
Now, T. S. Eliot is too famous a figure within the field of English literary studies to
need any introduction and in any case we will have to return to the works of T. S.
Eliot as a poet when we engage theories of Modernism in one of our future lectures.
So, for now I will just mention his dates which are 1888 to 1965 and I will also like to
mention the fact that Eliot was born in America, but spent the most part of his adult
life in England, which was in contrast to the other major theorist of a New Criticism I.
A. Richards who was born in England, but then went on to teach at the Harvard
university in America. So, this explains why New Criticism is also regarded as an
Anglo-American critical tradition because this theory really spans the two sides of the
Atlantic in more than one ways. And, since we are talking about nomenclatures, let
me also note here that the term New Criticism was derived from the 1941 book titled
The New Criticism written by the American scholar John Crowe Ransom who used
this name to bring under a common umbrella the critical thoughts of intellectuals like
Eliot, Richards, and others. So, the name New Criticism actually came much later and
only after the critical positions of a people like Eliot and Richards had become
mainstream within the Anglo-American academia. So, coming back to Eliot again, the
piece of theoretical work that I want to focus in this lecture today is an essay titled
“Tradition and Individual Talent”. It was published in 1919 which means it was
almost immediately published after the end of the First World War and it contains
basically two interrelated sections followed by a very brief conclusion. The first of
these sections revolves around the idea of tradition and at the heart of how Eliot
defines tradition is the notion of what he calls historic sense and I quote from the
essay: Eliot says, “The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness
of the past, but of its presence”. In other words, tradition which is posited on the
historical sense is a constant folding in of the present into a temporal continuum and
thereby a fitting in of the present within the template of the past. And it is important to
note here that this constant fitting in of the present within the past is a dynamic
process. So, the present and the new become meaningful only when inscribed onto the
template of the past, but in being so, inscribed it also simultaneously changes what the
past is, thereby also modifying the sense of tradition. Now, all of this might sound
rather complex and vague. So, let me try and produce a concrete example of how
tradition connects the present with the past. So, let us say I write a poem of fourteen
lines today praising the beauty and intelligence of my pet cat. Now, this poem written
in the present will not make much sense from the view of literary criticism and
literary appreciation until and unless we have what Eliot calls the historical sense and
until and unless we connect the poem on my cat with the poetic tradition of sonnet
writing which uses the fourteen line form. And it is only when the present poem is
enfolded within the sonnet tradition that we will be able to see how the cat in my
poem plays the same role as a beloved named Beatrice in the sonnets written by the
medieval Italian poet Dante. Indeed this comparison is important for my cat poem
work at all as a piece of literary creation. Therefore, Eliot argues and I quote, “No
poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his
appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You
cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the
dead.” Now, it is also important to note here that the influence of the past tradition on
the present poetry or work of art is not unidirectional, but rather it works both ways.
So, in other words my cat poem does gain in meaning by being folded within the
sonnet tradition, but it also simultaneously changes the sonnet tradition. That is to say
if any of you try your hand at writing a sonnet tomorrow you will now have to engage
with a tradition that is constituted not only of the sonnets written on the beloved by
Dante, but also my cat sonnet. So, my poem of fourteen lines written in the present is
subsumed within the existing tradition even while altering the contours of that
tradition for the future generation of poets like you. But, having established the fact
that a historical sense of the tradition is significant for any poet or any creative artist
in general, to produce a work of art, we are confronted with a very important question
and the question is: how does the individual artist relate to tradition? Now, Eliot
makes two very important points here. The first point that he makes is that, an
individual artist can only engage with tradition at the expenditure of tremendous
amount of labor. It cannot be simply inherited; tradition cannot be simply inherited by
someone by just being born within a particular socio-cultural milieu. The second point
that Eliot makes is that an artist can only properly engage with tradition through a
process of and I quote, “continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of
personality”. Now, the first of these two points is easily understood if an order to
write a sonnet you would need to know not only about sonnets written by the
medieval Italian poet Dante or the 16th century English poet William Shakespeare,
but also an obscure cat sonnet written by me, then this would require tremendous
amount of labor and as Eliot rightly points out “a ridiculous amount of erudition”. So,
that is something that you require in order to engage with tradition. And, that this
sense of tradition cannot just be passively inherited is also easily understandable,
especially if we put this statement within the context of the years immediately
following the First World War. Since, the experience of the war had so radically
severed the connection of an individual with the familiar past. A sense of tradition
could only be gained through a painstaking reconstruction of this past in order to
make it usable again. But, the problem is actually with the second point that Eliot
makes. What does it mean to sacrifice one’s personality in order to creatively engage
with tradition? This is the question that Eliot answers in the second half of his essay
“Tradition and Individual Talent”. And, to understand his answer we should start with
Eliot’s assertion that and I quote, “The poet has, not a ‘personality’ to express, but a
particular medium”. Now, if we go back to our lectures on Aristotle’s Poetics, we will
see that one of the things that Aristotle keeps stressing is that poetry is essentially a
craft which uses mediums like rhythm, language, and harmony to express itself. Even
like a carpenter, who uses mediums like wood, chisel, and lead machine to create his
almirahs, and beds, and things like that. And the point that Eliot makes in his essay is
similar to this point made by Aristotle. In Eliot to the understanding of poetry is that
of a craft which uses phrases and images to construct itself. So, what the poet creates
is a combination of these phrases, images and even feelings which are not exclusively
his own, but already available to him and also to others in the form of tradition. So,
for instance in writing my cat sonnet, I will not only be recycling the poetic form of
the sonnet and some of the phrases available to me through the sonnet tradition but,
also the feeling of awe and reverence that is to be directed towards the subject of my
poem. And, in this combination nothing actually needs to come from my personality,
not even the feelings that I put in my poem, because it is not necessary to personally
feel any sense of awe or reverence, or even great love towards my cat or towards my
beloved for that matter in order to poetically use that feeling of great love of
reverence and awe that is already part of the sonnet tradition and therefore, already
available to me in it is poetic form. In fact, Eliot argues that it is an error in poetry,
“To seek for new human emotions to express;” because and as he justifies, “in this
search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse”. This explains why
for Eliot, poetry is and I quote, “not the expression of personality, but an escape from
personality”. Now, as you can see here, this position is radically different from the
Romantic literary theory that was based on the cult of the poet’s personality. This is
precisely the reason why we find Eliot attacking again and again the view of poetry as
forwarded by Romantics like Wordsworth for instance. Indeed, this disappearance of
the poet or even the author from critical consideration is to be among the chief
identifying traits of a number of theories that emerged during the 20th century and we
are in fact, going to look at some of these theories during the course of our next few
lectures.
But, right now let us move on to I. A. Richards and see how this denial of the
personality of the put shapes his theoretical approach to literature. I. A. Richards was
born in 1893 and died in 1979 and he is today most well known for an experiment that
he conducted while teaching at the University of Cambridge and the principles of
reading literature that he was able to build from that experiment, and the experiment
was basically very simple. Richards gave his class a number of poems and asked them
to submit back to him their readings of those poems. So, they were supposed to write
their interpretations of those poems and they were supposed to return back those
interpretations to Richards anonymously. But, there was something very interesting
that Richards did and that was that the poems that he offered to his students were
devoid of any references that might allow them to connect these poems either to any
particular author or to any particular historical social or cultural context. In fact, the
poems that Richards provided his students did not even have their titles. And,
Richards analyzed the interpretations and the readings that he received from his
students in his seminal study titled Practical Criticism which was published in 1929.
And, in this study he observes how irrespective of whether the poem was actually
produced by a great poet, “great poet”, or by an obscure one, what the students mostly
produced, in the form of interpretation, were stock responses which had little to do
with the texts that the students actually encountered. And this, Richards argued was a
widespread problem with literary criticism itself. So, in Richards own words and I
quote, “We should be better advised to acknowledge frankly that, when people put
poems in our hands […] what we say, in nine cases out of ten, has nothing to do with
the point, but arises from politeness or spleen or some other social motive. […] It
would be an excellent thing if all the critical chitchat which we produced on these
occasions were universally recognized to be what it is, a social gesture […]”. In this
experiment with the nameless and context-less poems, we again come across a
critique of the Romantic theory, but this time it is a critique that is even more radical
than the one provided by Eliot because, whereas, Eliot stressed on the irrelevance of
the personality of the poet in creating and reading poetry, Richards talks about the
irrelevance both of the poet as well as the historical context of the poem. Any
commentary about these issues results in what Richards would, in fact, consider to be
banal chitchat and not literary criticism because what matters for Richards are just the
words on the page and this intense concentration on the text forms the hallmark of the
new kind of literary criticism that Richards initiated and which is known as Practical
Criticism. At the heart of this new kind of critical practice is a reading strategy. It is a
reading strategy that is widely recognized as ‘close reading’, and in close reading we
do not seek to understand the poet’s personality through the poem nor do we seek to
gain knowledge about the social political or cultural milieu which might have
produced a poem. Rather a close reading focuses on things like the poems structure,
its use of rhyme, the way in which it brings together a particular choice of words, a
particular choice of metaphors, of images, the way these metaphors images words
interact with each other and create a sense of tension or create a sense of ambiguity.
Now, ambiguity is an interesting term and we will come to this later in our discussion
today, but in other words, in a close reading we basically focus only on those things
that are before our eyes when we see a poem in the form of black words on a white
page or a screen if you are reading your poem on a computer. So, according to
Richards, the reason that we can subject, to such an intense scrutiny, the internal
structuring of the language of a poem a poem in particular and literature in general is
because it employs a special kind of language which allows this scrutiny to happen.
And, this language which Richards refers to as “emotive language” is different from
the “referential language” of the more mundane and non-literary forms of
communication. So, in case of the referential language it is used solely to refer us
truly and reliably to the world outside language. So, if I say I need a pencil it is a
referential language because I want you to be directed towards a pencil in the world
outside language and to pick it up and give it to me on the other hand the language of
poetry or literature can be studied and indeed should be studied according to the new
critics by focusing not on it is ability to refer the reader to an external reality, but by it
is ability to internally structure metaphors and symbols and figures of speeches to
create a complex pattern of meaning. This distinction between literary and non-
literary language will also play an enormous role a very significant role in the
literary theory identified as a Russian Formalism which we are going to discuss in
our next lecture. But, before we move on to Russian Formalists, let me briefly
mention here at the end of my lecture today some of the work of the later new critics
who carried forward the legacy of I. A. Richards and the first name that I want to
mention here is that of William Empson. Empson who was student of a Richards
presented in his book titled The Seven Types of Ambiguity which was published in
1930, the first sustained attempt to read literature, following Richards Principles of
Practical Criticism, which is to say by focusing exclusively on the language of
literature and on the production of what he calls ambiguity through the employment
of poetic devices. Now, ambiguity is common enough term and it results from a
multiplicity of meanings and it is usually considered as a negative thing within the
domain of referential language where clarity is of the utmost value. So, for instance, if
my message to you about the pencil is ambiguous, you will not know what to give me
or what to do. But, in the literary language this ambiguity is something which is
celebrated by New Critics like Empson. And this celebration of ambiguity is also
something that is easily understood if we consider an example like Shakespeare’s
sonnet number 18, for instance, “Shall I Compare thee to a Summer’s Day”, where
the phrase and I quote from the poem, “in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st”, gives
us the kind of pleasure that it does primarily because of the multiple possible
interpretations of the word lines. Because, that word might mean the lines of progeny
that the poet and his beloved might have if they unite together or even the lines of the
poem itself as they grow and develop during the course of our reading. And, it is
precisely because the pleasure of poetry rests in such linguistic ambiguity, in such
linguistic indecisiveness that we must shy away from what another New Critic,
Cleanth Brooks warns us, which is the “heresy of paraphrase”. Since the way
language is used in poetry and in literature in general is of utmost importance. It does
not make any sense to create paraphrases of literary pieces because then the entire
pleasure is lost. The other critic whom I would like to refer before I end this lecture is
the Yale University professor W. K. Wimsatt, who along with his collaborator
Monroe C. Beardsley produced two very influential essays in the 1940s. And, the first
essay was titled “The Intentional Fallacy” and the second essay was titled “The
Affective Fallacy”. In the first of these two essays, Wimsatt and Beardsley argue, that
it is an interpretive error to read a literary work by trying to decipher the intentions
[with] which its authors wrote that piece; not the least because the author is usually
not available to the reader to testify what exactly his or her intention was. The second
essay makes a complimentary argument by highlighting the fallacy of reading a text
based on the kind of emotional effects that it might give rise to in the readers. The
claim here is that both in the case of intentional fallacy as also in the case of affective
fallacy we are moving away from the real basis of literary criticism which is the
literary text itself and what constitutes that literary text is neither the putative
authorial intention nor the possible psychological effects that it may produce among
its readers. It is constituted simply of the medium of language, of words on the page.
So, as we can see with the New Critics and during the first half of the 20th century
literary criticism takes a definitive linguistic turn. In our upcoming lectures we are
going to follow this linguistic turn in the 20th century literary criticism as it is
manifested in various theoretical forms like Formalism for instance, or Structuralism,
and Post-structuralism, but in the next lecture we will pick up Formalism first. Thank
you for listening.

Russian Formalism

Hello and welcome back to yet another lecture in this series on Literary Theory. In
our lecture today, we are going to discuss Russian Formalism. As you will remember,
we had talked about a linguistic term in the domain of literary theory in the 20th
century when we were discussing New Criticism in our previous lecture. In this
lecture on Russian Formalism we will continue with our exploration of that linguistic
turn.
But, before we proceed with our discussion of Russian Formalism I would like to
clarify something about the way in which I have organized lectures in this course. So,
some of you might have noticed that in my previous lecture on New Criticism, almost
my entire discussion was focused on the writings of primarily two theorists T. S. Eliot
and I. A. Richards. I did briefly touch on the works of William Empson and also on
the works of Wimsatt and Beardsley, but there were other critics who I did not discuss
at all. So, for instance, I did not discuss the works of F. R. Leavis, I did not discuss
the works of Cleanth Brooks, or even of John Ransom Crowe, and I do admit that this
is going to be one of the limitations of this lecture series. The time constraint of each
lecture will allow me to take up for discussion only certain representative figures and
only certain important aspects of a particular theoretical school. And in preparing
these lectures my aim actually has been to make you understand some of the very key
theoretical concepts better, so that you can actually put them into practice, rather than
to provide you just with a comprehensive list of all the theoreticians and a superficial
account of all their major works. And, in doing so, I am assuming that you will be
using my lectures as a sort of starting point for your own exploration in this field of
literary theory. So, for instance if you did find my elaborations of some of the aspects
of New Critical theory interesting, I would definitely expect that you would go
beyond the theoreticians that I have discussed and read more about the other new
critical theories that I have not had time to discuss more elaborately. And, not only
that I have also mentioned only a very few works of even T. S. Eliot and I. A.
Richards and I would expect you to go beyond those few works and do your own
study and own exploration if you found my lecture interesting. So, please keep in
mind that none of these lectures provide an exhaustive list of all the theoreticians and
theoretical positions of a particular literary critical tradition. Rather you are meant to
use these lectures as samplers or as aids for your more elaborate study of the field.
Main focus
So, with this clarification in place, let us now move to our discussion of Russian
Formalism. So, what is today known as Russian Formalism, emerged as a school of
literary theory from within two intellectual circles in Russia; one of the intellectual
circles was situated in Moscow and the other intellectual circle was in Petrograd,
which is now named Saint Petersburg and that the functioning of these two
intellectual schools started around 1915 and 1916. And these two intellectual circles
primarily constituted of linguists and literary historians and their main focus was to
discuss and debate the essence of literariness of literature. In other words, their work
was to find out what is it that enable us to identify a particular work, a particular piece
of writing for instance as literary and distinguish it from another piece of writing
which is regarded as non-literary? So, in the words of Roman Jakobson, who was a
major Russian Formalist, and I quote: “The subject of literary scholarship is not
literature in it is totality, but literariness that is that which makes of a given work a
work of literature”. We will have to return to the theoretical works of Roman
Jakobson to study them in more details during the course of this lecture, but right now
let me give you a very brief overview of the ways in which the Russian Formalists
attempted to explore this peculiar quality that made something into a work of
literature, the essence of literariness. Now, there are three related points that the
Russian Formalists made in this regard. The first point is that according to them the
source of literariness in a particular work is neither the author of that work, nor the
context of that work, nor is it the theme or the subject on which the work is produced.
So, this was a first point. The second point that they made and which follows from the
first one is that the source of literariness of a piece of literature is its language. And
the third point is that this literary language is different from non-literary uses of
language because the literary language is structured differently. So, the difference lies
in how language is structured in literature and how this structuring of language and
literature follows particular rules and particular laws.
Now, let us take each of these three points and see what they actually mean. As
mentioned according to the Formalists, the source of literariness of a piece of
literature, a poetry for instance is not the poet, nor is it the subject on which the poem
is written, nor even the context within which the poem is produced. The source of
literariness of the poem is precisely what constitutes a poem – which is the language
or the words on the page. Now, while discussing the New Critics we have already
seen how words on the page was prioritized by someone like I. A. Richards, for
example. So, this might look like a familiar argument, but nevertheless let us try and
see the logic behind the assertion of the Formalists that, literariness can only emerge
from languages and from nothing else.
Formalism vs. Romanticism
Now, if for instance we follow the romantic theory and try to locate literariness in the
personality of a poet or of an author, then the problem that we encounter is that we are
not able to distinguish between the literary and the non-literary creations of that
author. So, if you are discussing Wordsworth for instance and if it is Wordsworth’s
personality that makes something poetical, then the question is how are we to
distinguish between the poems that Wordsworth wrote and his laundry list for
instance, because after all both are products of the same mind and the same
personality. Similarly, a particular theme or a subject cannot also be the source of
literariness of a poem. Why? Because, it is quite possible to write a medical thesis on
the beatings of human heart for instance, while it is also quite possible to write a very
nice poem on that very same subject. Therefore, the subject alone cannot help us to
make a distinction between literature and non literature.
The social, cultural or historical context too is ruled out by the Formalists from their
study of literariness because of similar reasons and this is also understandable because
the same historical milieu might frame the production of various kinds of literary as
well as non-literary pieces. So, the context too cannot be the determinant of
literariness. So, here we come to the second point the source of literalness according
to the Formalist is what actually constitutes the physical poem which is the language –
the words on the page.
Now, here we of course, encounter another problem because language which is used
by a poet to create poetry is also used by the same poet to speak about more mundane
things which are not counted as literature. Language is used by Wordsworth to
produce poetry; language is used by Wordsworth to produce his laundry list. So, how
do we make a distinction? So, here the Formalists will argue that, what makes the
language of a particular poet literary and thereby different from that poet’s other non-
literary users of the language is the special way in which the language of her poetry,
the poetry of a particular poet is structured. So, the primary focus of Russian
Formalism therefore, boils down to this issue of how language is uniquely structured
in literary works which make them identifiable as pieces of literature. And, since the
effort of the Formalists were to turn literary theory into a science of literature, their
exploration of the structuring of literary language took the form of trying to find rules
and laws that shaped and controlled the structuring processes. In this lecture, we will
follow this search for rules of literariness by focusing on two major Formalists and
again given the limitation of time we can only focus on two. They are representative
figures, but they are not the only Russian formalists. So, the two theorists that we are
going to focus on, is Victor Shklovsky and Roman Jakobson. But, before we move on
to these two theorists let me briefly dwell upon the relationship between Russian
Formalism and the contemporary Russian politics.
Historical context for Formalist emergence
Now, soon after the establishment of the two circles of Formalist critical theories,
Russia underwent the Bolshevik revolution and in 1917, the Russian monarchy was
replaced by a communist government. Now, during the next decade or so, the Russian
government came up with it is own theories about how literature should be created
and what role it should play within the society and the officially sanctioned literature
was of course, supposed to portray the realities of economic class dynamics within the
society, as well as, the goodness of the proletariat, and also, of course, the qualities,
the good qualities, the virtues of the communist regime. Formalism, with its exclusive
focus on the literariness of language and it is refusal to the social and political context
in studying literature, unsurprisingly, made it particularly unpopular with the
government of the day. So much so that, the … that Formalism as a school of thought
was officially suppressed during the late 1920s and 1930s. In fact, Formalism actually
became a major force in the wider field of Western literary studies only much later
when the two schools of Formalism were actually already gone – the Russian
government had already suppressed them. In fact, the Russian Formalists gained
widespread recognition only after 1965, when one of their group members Tzvetan
Todorov published in French, from Paris the translation of a selected number of works
by the Russian formalists. So, as you can see here political events can not only aid the
emergence of literary theories, but also can suppress them.
Victor Shklovsky
And with this in mind let us now proceed to a discussion of the two Formalists that
we have selected and we are going to start with Victor Shklovsky. The dates of Victor
Shklovsky are 1893 to 1984 and the concept that he is famously known for is called
“defamiliarization”. Now, according to Shklovsky, defamiliarization is the process
that structures language in literary pieces and gives them the quality of literariness. In
his important 1917 essay titled “Art as Technique”, Shklovsky observes how in our
regular exposure to the world around us we grow accustomed and habituated not only
to our surrounding material reality, but also to ideas, to concepts, and to various
narratives that we encounter frequently. Our perception regarding these material
things as well as these ideas are dulled to such an extent that we stop mentally
processing them, sometimes not processing them at all.
For instance, to give you an example, the house in which I grew up as a child was
very close to a railway crossing and as children we were so habituated to the sound of
trains passing through that crossing day in and day out that we often did not even
notice the sound. Because of such regular exposure, our minds had stopped processing
the sound altogether as something that was disturbing or that was intrusive. In fact, we
were only reminded of these sounds when some guests who had come visiting would
complain about them.
Thus, as Shklovsky argues, perception when it becomes habitual turns into something
that is automatic and not thought out. In his own words and I quote, “If we start to
examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual it
becomes automatic. Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the
unconsciously automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of
speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at
performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us.”
Now, this process of a perception disappearing into the area of the unconsciously
automatic has a profound effect on the language that we use in our day to day life.
This language too thus echoes the deadening of our perception and in our familiar
settings therefore, we use expressions and phrases that are usually half-formed and
incomplete. So, for instance, if we do public speaking we will realize how carefully
we have to speak and if you compare that to how you speak when you are among your
friends you will see your language used is really very lazy. But, what is even more
important is that whereas, our deadened perceptions result in a language use which
reflects that deadening, our ordinary use of language also contributes to the diluting of
our perception by repeatedly exposing us to certain words and to certain phrases. Thus
for instance thanks to the 24*7 news channels we have grown so habituated towards
like rape for instance towards like murder and war, that they do not often allow us to
perceive with full force the horror and violence that each of these words actually
signify. Shklovsky argues that literature is unique and different from our more
mundane modes of communication because it structures the language in such a way
that it defamiliarizes for us things and ideas to which we have become so accustomed
that we have stopped perceiving them fully. The language of literature returns us
back to a state of innocence, this is what Shklovsky claims. It returns us back to a
state of innocence where we perceive what we already know as if we are perceiving
them for the first time. It does so by making strange, by defamiliarizing what is
already familiar, so that we cannot recognize that thing very easily. In his essay,
Shklovsky explains this technique by borrowing an example from one of Tolstoy’s
writings, where he defamiliarizes the idea of flogging by describing it as follows and
this is how Shklovsky quotes Tolstoy: “To strip people who have broken the law, to
hurl them to the floor, and to rap on their bottoms with switches”. Now, according to
Shklovsky this language is literary because by spelling out in such gruesome details
what the act of flogging actually involves, it makes strange the action and helps us
perceive it in all it is vividness that is otherwise not available when we just encounter
the familiar word flogging because we do not process it properly when we hear it.
Now, one of the ways in which Shklovsky applied this theory of defamiliarization to
the domain of literary criticism was by suggesting a distinction between what he
called a story and a plot. According to Shklovsky a story is a straightforward narration
of a sequence of events which do not use the technique of defamiliarization and
therefore, cannot be considered as literary. He suggests that a story becomes literary
only when the technique of defamiliarization is applied to the sequence of events and
they are converted into something that cannot be easily recognized by the readers and,
therefore, they break the hold of dull habituation. This defamiliarized sequence of
narration is what Shklovsky identifies as a plot. So, it is by converting a story into a
plot that a narration according to Shklovsky gains the quality of literariness. And, here
I think a good example of this distinction between what is a story and what is a plot is
provided by Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness. This novel which was first
published in 1899, defamiliarizes the idea of colonialism and its associated narrative
of civilizing mission for the European audience. During the 19th and early 20th
century European colonialism of places like India and Africa was accompanied and
was justified by a story. And, the story was that these people, living in India and
Africa, were barbarians and, therefore, the Europeans went there and they colonized
these barbarians and they colonized them in order to civilize them – very sort of
sequential narration of what happened and what is going to happen. Now, Conrad’s
novel makes strange this familiar story of the civilizing mission through a plot that
traces the journey of it is protagonist Marlowe through the Congo valley. The easy
understanding of the narrative of colonialism as a civilizing mission is hampered, is
impeded by the plot which presents in painful details the kind of barbarity unleashed
by the so called bringing in of European civilization to places like Africa, Congo. So,
as you can see here formalism though it might appear to be apolitical, because it does
not directly engage with the historical context of a work or the political ideology of it
is authors can nevertheless function politically, by pointing out the ways in which
literature defamiliarizes certain ideas, certain concepts, and certain narratives that are
accepted within the society habitually and automatically. Just like, colonialism was
accepted habitually and automatically by the European most of the European audience
of the late 19th and early 20th century when Conrad wrote his novel. So, from a
Victor Shklovsky’s theories of defamiliarization,
Roman Jakobson
let us now move to the works of the other major Formalist Roman Jakobson.
Jakobson was born in 1896 and was one of the leading figures within the Moscow
circle of the Russian Formalists. During the suppression of the formalist school of
thought in Russia by the government, Jakobson shifted to Prague where again he
became one of the leading lights among a circle of intellectuals who formed what is
known as a Prague school. And, then again at the verge of the outbreak of the Second
World War, Jakobson who was a Jewish descendant escaped Europe to escape from
the rise of the Nazi government and he fled to America, where he first taught in the
new school, and then he went on to teach at the Harvard university. So, the
Anglophone academic sphere was exposed to the thoughts of the Russian Formalist
school not only via the translations of Tzvetan Todorov, but also via the presence of
Jakobson in America.
Now, Jakobson was a linguist and his contribution to the field of literary theory is
primarily through his efforts to identify what makes particular kinds of, language uses
more poetical than other.
To understand Jakobson’s theory of poetical language we need to start by studying
how he explores the notion of equivalence in language. So, consider for a moment
these two sentences. The first sentence is: Flowers bloom. And the second sentence is:
Bulbs glow. Now, the words in each of these sentences are connected with each other
in a relation of contiguity. That is, in the first sentence flowers and bloom are
associated with each other by being placed side by side and by being related in terms
of a sequence. So, let us call this relationship horizontal and this relationship of
course, also exists between the words bulbs and glow. Now, if you consider the two
sentences together, the first and the second, you will see that they can be very easily
mapped onto each other and you will find that there is a relationship of similarity or
analogy between them. Thus, the nouns flowers and bulbs are analogous to each other
just as the two verbs bloom and glow are analogous to each other. So, let us call this
analogous relationship vertically. Now, if we plot these two relationships in the form
of a graph it will look something like this. The y-axis is the plane along which the
vertical relationship of analogy functions, that is the relationship of a similarity –
similarity between the words flowers and bulbs and the words bloom and glow.
Jakobson calls this y-axis the axis of metaphoric relationship. On the other hand the x-
axis is the plane along with the horizontal relationship of contiguity functions, that is,
the relationship established through the sequence between the words flowers and
bloom and between the words bulbs and glow. Jakobson calls this x-axis the axis of
metonymic relationship. Now, according to Jackobson language functions poetically
when we transport the words related along the metaphoric or analogous axis on to the
contiguous or the metonymic axis. So, for instance, take the words flowers and bulbs,
they are related along the y-axis of analogy or metaphor. If I now transport the word
flower on to the x-axis of contiguity and metonymy and place it next to the word
bulbs to create a sentence like bulbs flower, then this according to Jakobson will be an
example of poetic language; and this poetic transformation is actually very easily
understood. So, for instance a sentence like I pressed the switch and the bulb flowered
over my head sounds much more poetic than a sentence like I pressed the switch and a
bulb glowed over my head. Now, here it is important to note that such poetic uses of
language which juxtaposes the metaphoric onto the metonymic plain can and indeed
does occur in our day to day speech as well. So, this is a function that is not unique to
poetry, but what makes the language of poetry distinct from our day to day language
of communication is that in the former, which is in the language of poetry, the poetic
function of language is used much more extensively. And to use Shklovsky’s concept
here, it defamiliarizes our everyday use of words and phrases and makes us perceive
them as fresh by disturbing their usual order. With this we end our discussion of a
Russian Formalism. In our next two lectures, we will take up the work of a man, who
in spite of being associated with Russian Formalism created several theoretical
concepts that stand out for their uniqueness and not only for their uniqueness, but also
for their far reaching applicability and here I am talking about Mikhail Bakhtin. So,
we will take up Mikhail Bakhtin and his works in our next lectures. Thank you for
listening.

Dialogism

Welcome back, all of you, to another lecture on Literary Theory and today we are
going to talk about the works of Mikhail Bakhtin, who has been one of the most
influential figures, not only in the field of Western literary theory, but also in the field
of 20th century humanities in general. And this is in spite of the fact that Bakhtin was
able to publish only two book length works under his own name during his lifetime.
And we will come to this publishing works under his own name, this might sound a
bit odd, but when we go through our lecture today you will understand why I am
using this word. So, he was able to publish only two book length works under his
name during his lifetime. And the rest of his creative output is primarily available in
the form of long essays many of which were compiled and published only after his
death. So, why is Bakhtin so popular? One of the reasons why Bakhtin enjoys such a
great reputation within the field of literary studies is because of the striking
uniqueness of his work. Thus, though Bakhtin was associated with the intellectual
circles of a Russian Formalism and though he too like the Formalists was repressed by
the communist government of the day his theoretical works on literature cannot be
easily categorized under the rubric of Formalism. On the other hand, attempts to
categorize his theories as Post-structuralist are also I think equally misplaced. And
such attempts to categorize his works as part of the greater category of Post-
structuralism were actually made, because his works became widely known in the
Western world only during the 1980s and 1990s, when Post-structuralism as a
theoretical school was on the rise both in Europe as well as in America. But this
categorization is flawed and I do not think it can really be sustained, because
Bakhtin’s major works preceded by quite a few decades, the rise of Post-structuralism
and were not in any way influenced by any of the major theorists who ushered in the
Post-structuralist wave during the second half of the 20th century. And, therefore, this
resistance to easy categorization makes it imperative to study Bakhtin and his
theoretical works separately, as a separate category all together. Thus, in this course
we will be dedicating two lectures exclusively on Bakhtin; we will be dedicating two
lectures to elaborate on the contribution of Bakhtin from within the field of literary
theory. Now, in this as well as in the following lecture, I will be using the word
“dialogism” and I will be using it as a blanket term to discuss some of the key
theoretical concepts that Bakhtin introduced. Concepts like polyphony, concepts like
heteroglossia, like carnivalesque, and chronotronpe. So, these are some very unique
concepts that Bakhtin came up with. But here, I would also like to introduce a caveat,
because I know that some of these concepts that I just mentioned are distinct as
theoretical ideas. And therefore, they deserve to be studied individually and on their
own right. But I also believe that in spite of this distinctness there is an underlying
coherence connecting all of these concepts. And in any case I will be using the term
dialogism not to bulldoze the distinctness of these different concepts, but rather as a
sort of rough and ready category to signify the theoretical works of Bakhtin in its
entirety. But, before I move on to discuss Bakhtin’s theoretical concepts let us go
through some of the historical context that framed this work, and also, we will
acquaint ourselves with a bit of his biography. Now to narrate the life of Bakhtin is
also to narrate the various stories of his being discovered and rediscovered by the
academic circles. The first time Bakhtin was quote “discovered” was actually in
1960’s. When he had already lived for six decades and had finished some of his most
important theoretical works. In this case he was discovered by a group of young
scholars, who had come across his works in the Maxim Gorky Institute of Moscow,
and who then went on to rescue Bakhtin from obscurity and bring him to limelight.
He was also discovered by the Western academic world at large during the same time
when his book Rabelais and His World was published in English translation in 1968.
But, it is important to note here that for long, this was the only text, Rabelais and the
World was the only text, of Bakhtin through which the Western academia knew him.
His popularity surged further only during the 1980s and during the 1990s when his
other works were also made available in translation. And through both these
discoveries, first by the group of students in Moscow and then by the Western
academia at large, Bakhtin emerged onto the world stage not only as a scholar, but
also as a kind of a semi mythical heroic figure, who had been both a victim as well as
a survivor of political persecution. And even more remarkably as someone who had
continued to produce wonderfully thoughtful pieces during this period of hardship.
Now, the problem of this emergence as a heroic figure is that the biography of
Bakhtin that we have with us is almost a kind of mythologized history in which one is
never quite sure about the boundary line separating fact from fiction. But
nevertheless, these are some of the broad outlines of his biography. So, Bakhtin was
born in 1895 in a Russian town called Orel, but mostly grew up in cities like Vilnius
and Odessa. Now, the reason I mentioned these places is because of the impact they
had on Bakhtin in terms of languages. Bakhtin from his early days could speak not
only Russian which was his mother tongue, but also a German which he picked up
from his governess. And this acquaintance with multiple languages was only
enhanced with his move to Vilnius, where though the official language was Russian,
the locals usually spoke in Polish or Lithuanian. And also in Odessa where young
Bakhtin spent some part of his youth he encountered multiple languages, because
Odessa was a port city, is still a port city, where the inhabitants came from different
cultural communities and they spoke varied languages. Now, Michael Holquist, who
is a Bakhtin scholar in his book titled Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World identifies
this exposure to different social milieus, where various languages were equally
accepted and were equally current as one of the key influences that later inspired
Bakhtin theory of many languages. Now there is a technical term for this I am
deliberately not using it, because otherwise you might get confused. We will go into
this many language-ness, or what I am calling many language-ness right now, during
the course of this lecture and the next lecture. Now, as far as Bakhtin education is
concerned, he seems to have mostly followed on the footsteps of his elder brother
Nikolai, but there is also this opinion that in reality Bakhtin received very limited
formal education beyond the school level and actually passed off his brothers more
successful academic career as his own later on in his life. Indeed, one Bakhtin scholar
is of the view that because Bakhtin formal higher education was next to nonexistent,
his approach to academic research remained somewhat cavalier, and he had little
scruple while lifting entire sections from the book of a German philosopher named
Ernst Cassirer, and using them in his doctoral thesis on Rabelais. But in the decade
following the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Bakhtin was able to gather around
himself, and, irrespective of how well educated he was able to gather around himself a
diverse group of intellectuals, which included people like Valentin Voloshinov and
Pavel Medvedev. Again, I refer to these names, as these names are important, because
during the 1920s a number of works were published under the names of Valentin
Voloshinov, Medvedev, and other acquaintances of Bakhtin which have been claimed
by later scholars as being written by Bakhtin himself. And the examples of such
works of disputed authorship would include a study on Freudianism and another on
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language which were published under the name of
Voloshinov, and another work titled The Formal Method in Literary Study which was
published under the name of Medvedev. So, some scholars quite a number of scholars
actually claim that these works were actually written by Bakhtin. But irrespective of
whether they were entirely written by Bakhtin himself or not, these works bear
testimony to the diverse topics of research and discussion that characterizes a circle of
friends that Bakhtin had gathered around himself during this time. And during the
1920s Bakhtin also published a work under his own name which was a study of the
Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. And the work was titled Problems of
Dostoevsky’s Art and this work is widely regarded as one of the seminal contributions
of Bakhtin to the field of literary theory and this is a work which he later expanded
and published under a slightly different title and the title is Problems of
Dostoyevsky’s Poetics so not Dostoyevsky’s Art but, Dostoyevsky’s Poetics. We will
discuss this work in further details when we start elaborating Bakhtin’s theoretical
concepts later during our lecture. But for now, let us move on to the discussion of his
life the year 1929 was the year when this Dostoyevsky book was published, but that
was really a calamitous year for Bakhtin. Because, that was also the year when
Bakhtin was arrested and he was sent to exile to a distant part of Kazakhstan, modern
day Kazakhstan, which was at that point of time part of the Soviet Union. But
nevertheless, this period of exile proved very fruitful intellectually for Bakhtin,
because this was a time when he worked on some of the very important monographs
important studies on novel which later became very famous and which later were
translated, and collected in the book The Dialogic Imagination. In the late 1930s and
early 1940s, Bakhtin completed two other works. The first was a study on
Bildungsroman, or novel of growing up, novel of education, but this work today only
exists as a fragment, because the manuscript that Bakhtin had sent to the German
publisher was destroyed during the bombing of the Second World War and the copy
that Bakhtin had with himself was apparently used up by him to roll cigarettes in the
absence of cigarette paper. So, that document is largely lost. The second book that he
produced during this period was actually his thesis on Rabelais which he submitted in
1941 to the Maxim Gorky Institute of World literature in Moscow, and he submitted
that for a doctoral degree, but it was only admitted by the institute years later and after
much controversy. And this is in fact, the work that was later published under the title
Rabelais and his World, and became again one of Bakhtin seminal contributions to the
field of literary theory. Bakthin’s fortune really began to turn in the 1960s when as
mentioned earlier he was “discovered” not only by a large number of readers within
Russia, but also abroad. Bakhtin whose health was ravaged by years of hardship and
who had also lost one of his legs to a decaying bone disease was now suddenly
transformed from being a German teacher in an obscure town of Russia, to being an
intellectual hero. And his last years were spent in Moscow in academic limelight
where he returned back to some of the philosophical interests that he had in his
younger days and during this period of time he worked on essays which he had
produced before his Dostoyevsky’s book. These were, however, not published during
his lifetime and it was only after his death in 1975 that these along with most of his
other important monographs on literary studies were compiled and published. And as
mentioned before, Bakhtin really became a prominent name almost a phenomenon in
the Western academia after 1980. So, though some of his works now date back almost
a century, their impact nevertheless retains a kind of freshness within the field of
Western literary theory. So, with this background in place, let us now move towards
his theoretical concepts and the first set of ideas that we are going to take up is the
notion of polyphony, and how this notion of polyphony is related to the concept of
dialogism. Now, if you open your dictionary and look for the term polyphony, you
will see that it is usually used to denote certain pieces of music, certain pieces of
music, in which different melodic lines are sung or played simultaneously. They are
played parallel to each other and this achieves a kind of harmony. So, this playing
simultaneously of different melodic lines to achieve a harmony is what is usually
known as a polyphony. Bakhtin in his study problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics
which was published as Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Art borrowed this term from the
world of music and used it to signify what he considered to be a unique feature that
characterized Dostoyevsky’s novels. In his author’s preface Bakhtin writes, and I
quote: (“We consider Dostoyevsky one of the greatest innovators in the realm of
artistic form. He created, in our opinion, a completely new type of artistic thinking,
which we have provisionally called polyphonic”.) Now, we will have to come back to
this idea that polyphony is something that was invented as a literary device by
Dostoyevsky, later on, because, we will see that in his later essays like Discourse in
the Novel, Bakhtin treats polyphony and the associated notion of dialogism as a much
more universal phenomenon than he is ready to admit in his Dostoyevsky book. But
for now, let us move down a few pages to read the lines in which Bakhtin explains
more elaborately, what he means by the use of polyphony in Dostoyevsky’s novels.
And this is a long quotation from his book Problems of the Dostoyevsky’s Poetics:
(“A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine
polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoyevsky’s
novels. What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single
objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of
consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combined but are not
merged in the unity of the event. Dostoyevsky’s major heroes are, by the very nature
of his creative design, not only objects of authorial discourse, but also subjects of their
own directly signifying discourse”.) Now, there are two things here that I would like
you to focus on. The first is how polyphony is being defined here. And if you notice
carefully you will see that it is here defined in terms of plurality, yes, but what is
important to note here is this plurality is referred to as plurality of “independent and
unmerged voices as well as consciousnesses”. So, here the qualifiers independent and
unmerged are as important as a notion of plurality and we will see why this is so in a
moment. But there is also a second thing that is important to note in the quoted
passage which is how polyphony is contrasted with the unity of a “single authorial
consciousness”. Now try to think of any novel that you might have read recently and
the chances are that you have encountered in that novel a number of characters. And
each of these characters speak their different lines this is definitely a kind of plurality
of voices, but according to Bakhtin this does not automatically mean that the novel
that you have read can be categorized as a polyphonic novel. In other words plurality
of voices does not automatically lead to genuine polyphony. And why is that so? Well
this is because according to Bakhtin many novels are written in a way that conveys
just the single consciousness the worldview of its author, and the numerous characters
that one might encounter in such a novel act merely, as so many mouthpieces of that
single authorial consciousness. So, there is plurality of speeches, but not plurality of
ways in which the world is being looked at and is being engaged with and this
uniformity is not only to be found in certain kinds of novels, but may also be
encountered in other literary genres. In a drama, for instance; and why I mention a
drama, because in a drama the illusion of plurality might be even more intense as we
physically encounter different characters coming up on the stage and speaking their
own different lines. But these too might not be truly polyphonic, because though the
author might not be visible on the stage, the lines that all the characters speak might
just be so many echoes of the single authorial consciousness. So, this underlying unity
and the sameness in a novel and by extension any other literary form is what Bakhtin
describes as monologism. This is an important term monologism which would
literally mean a single discourse or a single utterance. Now, in problems of
Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin argues that Dostoyevsky’s novels were able to break
free from this monologism and Bakhtin puts this very well in his own words and I am
quoting, “Dostoyevsky’s major heroes are by the very nature of his creative design,
not only objects of authorial discourse, but also subjects of their own directly
signifying discourse”. So, this is the last line of the previous quote and this means that
each of these characters that we encounter in a novel by Dostoyevsky has a unique
consciousness, he or she has a unique way of interpreting the world around him or
her, and that person also has a unique way of engaging with this world. And this
translates into what Bakhtin calls the plurality of independent and unmerged voices
which forms the essence of genuine polyphony. So, whereas the assertion of the
single authorial consciousness results in monologism, the presence of a genuine
polyphony creates what Bakhtin calls dialogism. He therefore, categorizes
Dostoevsky’s novels as not just polyphonic, but also dialogic in nature. Now here we
need to understand that a literary work like a novel or even a drama might have
dialogues without being dialogic in nature. That is to say even a monologic novel or a
monologic drama might have what is conventionally regarded as dialogues or lines
uttered by different characters. But if these lines are all pervaded by the single
consciousness of the author then the literary piece will not count as dialogic in
Bakhtin’s scheme of things. Bakhtin points this out, in fact, in no uncertain terms and
I quote: (“The polyphonic novel is dialogic through and through. Dialogic
relationships are a much broader phenomenon than mere rejoinders in a dialogue, laid
out compositionally in the text; they are an almost universal phenomenon permeating
all human speech and all relationships and manifestations of human life, everything
that has meaning and significance”.) Now, this quotation makes clear the difference
that Bakhtin observes between dialogues as mere rejoinders and true dialogic
relationship between independent and unmerged voices. But what is interesting here,
is Bakhtin’s assertion that dialogism is not something unique to certain kinds of
literature, but rather is and I quote, “an almost universal phenomenon, which
permeates all human speech and all relationships and manifestations of human life,
and which permeates everything that has meaning and significance”. But, though he
states this universality of dialogism in the Dostoyevsky book he does not really
develop it, or at least he does not really develop it till his later essay Discourse in the
Novel. So, let us now have a look at this essay. This particular piece, which was
written during his exile in Kazakhstan, elaborates on why dialogism is a universal
characteristic of human discourse. In this essay Bakhtin, argues that whenever we
direct our utterances towards an object, and this object might be a physical object, or
it might be an idea, or a concept, an abstract object. So, whenever our utterances are
directed towards any object, then our words enter into a dialogue with other utterances
and to quote Bakhtin: “Between the word and its object, between the word and the
speaking subject, there exists an elastic environment of other, alien words about the
same object”. Now though this might sound rather esoteric and rather difficult to
comprehend actually the idea behind it is really very simple. So, imagine discussing
with your sister the last movie that you watched, or arguing with your friends about
which restaurant serves the best kebabs, or conversing with your classmate about the
nature of romanticism in the poetry of John Keats. Now we will, in all of these
instances, you will notice that your utterances are directed towards different objects,
some of these objects are material, like for instance, material restaurants, and very
material kebabs, and others are abstract objects like for instance the nature of
romanticism in the poetry of Keats. Now, none of these utterances are spoken in a
vacuum. All of these objects have already been spoken about by others and also by
the people that you are at that point of time communicating with. And therefore, your
words are articulated within a space which is already marked by all these previous
utterances, or to use Bakhtin’s phrase “alien words” that have been spoken by others.
So, your utterance is always in a dialogue with these previous utterances and it is
precisely by being in a dialogue that any particular utterance gains any meaning. If for
instance I were to come up with utterance about something that nobody has ever heard
or nobody has ever spoken about then there is little chance of me making any sense.
Thus, in Bakhtin own words: (“Any concrete word finds the object towards which it is
directed always and already qualified, as it were, disputed, evaluated, enveloped by an
obscuring mist, or, on the contrary, by the light of other words already spoken about
it. […] The word directed towards its object enters this dialogically agitated and
tension filled environment of other words, evaluations and accents, weaves itself into
their complex inter-relations, merges with some, [and] recoils from or intersects with
others”.) Therefore, any concrete language use is automatically dialogic because
utterances can only be meaningful once it enters the tension filled environment of
other words, which are articulated by other people with consciousnesses that are
independent and unmerged from my own. This will mean that an example of a
concrete language use like a novel, for instance, cannot but be diological and
dialogism is therefore, not something that is merely confined to particular novels of
the Dostoyevsky’s. Of course, it is very possible that in certain texts like those written
by Dostoyevsky this dialogism is made more pronounced by stylistic innovations.
And in the novels of some other author monologic tendency might be observable
where there is an attempt by the author to assert a single viewpoint. But even in these
later kinds of texts it is possible to hear the echo of alien words, of other independent
consciousnesses which creates the field of signification and meaning making. So,
even if the authors tendency is monologic it is possible for a text to be read
dialogically, by going beyond authorial intention and by locating the traces of the
tension filled environment within which utterances ultimately gain meaning. We will
see how this possibility of reading the underlying conflicts, contradictions, and
plurality within any particular text plays an important role in other Bakthinian
concepts like heteroglossia or like carnivalesque. And we will take these concepts up
in our next lecture. Thank you.
Bakhtin 2
Hello and welcome back to another lecture on Literary Theory. Today, we are going
to continue with some of the other theoretical concepts that were introduced by
Mikhail Bakhtin and more specifically, we are going to focus on three topics. The first
being Heteroglossia, the second being Carnivalesque, and the third being Chronotope.
But, before we start discussing these new concepts, I would like to briefly look back
on the discussion of our previous lecture. And I would like to try and situate Bakhtin
and his work within the broader context of this course on Literary Theory. So, in my
previous lecture, I had insisted on Bakhtin’s uniqueness as a theorist, but here I would
like to suggest that in spite of this uniqueness, Bakhtin’s work can be placed and, in
fact, should be placed to borrow one of his own terms dialogically vis-à-vis some of
the established schools of literary theory of the 20th century. Thus, for instance,
Bakhtin’s focus on discourse and the way discourses are constructed and structured,
places his work squarely within the tradition of 20th century Western literary theory
that I have referred to as a linguistic turn, theories which follow the linguistic turn.
Now, we have already seen this Bakthinian preoccupation with language in our
previous discussion on polyphony and we will notice it even more strongly when we
take up for discussion the concept of heteroglossia today. But, connected with this
linguistic turn is another characteristic aspect, which is the relegation of the author to
the margins of literary criticism. And in this aspect too, we see Bakhtin’s work
sharing certain similarities with the 0New Criticism, with Russian Formalism, and
also with the later theoretical schools like Structuralism, for instance, or Post-
structuralism. Thus, in Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony, for instance, we have already
seen how he prioritizes the multiplicity of utterances, the multiplicity of voices. And,
there the authorial voice exists but only as one among the various other independent
and unmerged voices and consciousness which together constitute the tension filled
dialogic space of concrete language use. However, even while taking note of these
connections and these overlaps, we will need to be aware, we will sort of need to
remember that Bakhtin’s theory does have it is own peculiarities and singularities
which do not allow us to very easily categorize Bakhtinian work as either part of
Russian Formalism or as part of the later Post-structuralist movement, and this I have
already told you in my previous lecture, but this we need to remember. And as we
deal with more of his theoretical concepts today, this uniqueness of Bakhtin should
become even more apparent to us. So, the first theoretical concept that we would
focus on is heteroglossia and the texts that we would use to understand this concept is:
two of Bakhtin’s long essays that were later compiled in the English edition, title The
Dialogic Imagination. So, the names of these essays are “Discourse in the Novel”
which is an essay that I have already briefly touched upon in my previous lecture and
the other one is titled “From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse”. Now, as you
remember Bakthin through his concept of polyphony was already working on a theory
of multiplicity or plurality of discourses. But in his Dostoevsky book which was our
primary focus in our previous lecture, this exploration was framed as well as limited
by his readings of Dostoevsky novels; nevertheless even then, a careful reader of
Bakhtin’s study on Dostoevsky would be able to perceive, would be able to notice
that this polyphonic plurality is not merely a feature of the novel, of a particular novel
or novels of a particular author. But, rather it is a more widespread phenomenon that
is inherent to how language is used; concrete language uses. And heteroglossia is in a
way a study of this plurality that we had already encountered in the idea of
polyphony, but it is a study of this plurality that is taken up at the level of language
use in general and not just at the level of stylistic features observable in a particular
set of novels. However, before we make this transition from polyphony to
heteroglossia, we need to deal with another term which Bakhtin introduces in his
essays compiled in the Dialogic Imagination and the term is polyglossia. The word
polyglossia might sound completely unfamiliar especially to those who are not yet
acquainted with Bakhtin’s theories, but a related form of the same term is quite
extensively used in mundane English conversation, and I am quite sure you have
heard of that term, and the term is polyglot. So, the dictionary meaning of polyglot,
“is person who can read write or understand communicate several different
languages.” For instance, most of the Indians who are educated beyond their school
and college levels are usually polyglots, who are comfortable communicating in at
least two or three languages, if not more. The term polyglossia, as you might now be
able to guess refers to this many languaged-ness. But then, what does it mean? What
does this many languaged-ness mean in Bakhtin’s theory? Well, according to Bakhtin,
“the consciousness of polyglot shatters the myth of the isolation of national languages
and the literature produced in those languages.” So, in order to understand this, we
will first need to understand what a national language might mean. Now, within the
multilingual context of India, relating nation with one language might sound like a
rather alien idea. But the sense of nationalism as it started spreading in Europe from
after the French revolution was mainly pivoted on the concept of linguistics
similarity. So, the nationalist argument is that France is the country of the French
speakers, Germany is the country of German speakers, Spain is a country of speakers
of Spanish, Italy is a country of Italian speakers, and so on and so forth. Now, you
will also have to remember here that the boundaries of these European nations as
individual nation states only got fixed after the First World War. So, the idea of nation
state as a pervasive phenomenon is really something that is very recent in world
history but, nonetheless, the point is in Europe, there is till date a very strong
correlation between nation and language. So, for instance, the national language of
France would be French, the national language of Germany would be German and so
on and so forth. In contrast, if you look at the Indian context, you will see that we do
not have a single national language. So, unlike what many of us might think, Hindi is
not the national language of India and in fact, there is even a Gujarat high court
judgment on this matter, but of course, Bakhtin was writing within the European
context and within that context speaking about national languages and national
literatures produced in those languages made perfect sense. Now, since any form of
nationalism stresses on exclusivity, there is often a myth of uniqueness surrounding
national languages too. So, to sustain the exclusivity that is proffered by nationalism,
national languages are more often than not, looked in isolation and considered as
existing in a state of uncontaminated purity. But according to Bakthin, the
consciousness of polyglossia shatters this myth of the isolation of national languages
and it does so by pointing out it is dialogic relationship with other foreign languages.
Of course in certain societies, the consciousness of the presence of other foreign
languages might be limited,, and here, Bakhtin’s example is the society of classical
Greek antiquity, where the myth of an isolated Greek language and Greek literature
sustained a sense of Greek nationalism in spite of the fact that Greece was
administratively divided among various city states or polis, and actually, we have
already talked about this proto-nationalism in terms of a shared Greek culture-sphere
in our lectures on Plato and Aristotle. But in most cases, these myths of isolated
national languages cannot be sustained because of the presence of other foreign
languages and these other foreign languages their presence has to be accommodated.
In other words, it becomes imperative in certain situations to develop a consciousness
of polyglossia. Here Bakhtin’s example is that of imperial Rome, whose language
Latin does maintain the links between the entire sprawling empire could not,
nevertheless, exist within the cocoon of linguistic isolation because the imprint of the
preceding Greek culture was so heavy on the Roman Empire that it is language Latin
was always informed by the spectral presence of Greek of the Greek language and
was always situated in a dialogic relationship with that preceding language. For us,
this kind of polyglossia is even more easily understandable within our Indian context.
Thus, take for instance any of the vernacular Indian languages that we might speak;
we will soon realize that we do not use that language in isolation rather our language
use is constantly informed by the presence of other languages, be it the English
language which is our colonial inheritance or the other Indian languages that we
might know or we might hear regularly spoken around us. This sets up precisely the
kind of dialogic relationship that we had discussed in our previous lecture on
polyphony. Our utterances in any one language enters a tension filled space where it
interacts with and where it rebounds from other alien utterances in other foreign
languages. Thus for instance the English that I am speaking to you now is constantly
being inter illuminated in my mind with other languages like Bangla, for instance or
Hindi, Urdu; and the same thing happens when I speak let us say in Bangla. The
spectral presence of English and of Hindi is unmistakably present even then. So,
conceptually what does all of this boil down to? I think this is what it boils down to, at
the most fundamental level: Bakhtin through his ideas like polyphony, or polyglossia
was attacking and undermining certain very persistent and pervasive myths of unity
and of homogeneity. In the first case, it was a myth of a single homogeneous authorial
voice and authorial consciousness that he was attacking through the idea of polyphony
and in the second case that we have just now discussed, it was the myth of an isolated
and homogeneous linguistic nationalism that was being attacked by Bakhtin through
his concept of polyglossia. It is precisely in the place of this unity, this homogeneity,
this singleness, that Bakhtin was offering his idea of dialogism of a dialogic
relationship where a plurality of elements be their different voices, or different
languages, all of them interpenetrate and inter-illuminate each other. So, if we are
clear about this understanding of dialogism then the idea of heteroglossia which we
are going to take up right now will be quite easy to understand. Indeed one of the best
ways to understand the term heteroglossia is through polyglossia. So for instance,
what polyglossia does to a language externally, heteroglossia does to that language
internally. In other words, heteroglossia signifies how a language is dialogised from
within. Now, again like much of the things that we have encountered and will
encounter in this course on literary theory, these cryptic sentences sound more
complicated than they actually are. So, what does it mean to say that heteroglossia
dialogises a language from within? To simplify matters, let us try and think about our
language uses in day to day context. You will see that even when you are speaking the
same language, let’s say you speak Bangla, you are speaking it differently depending
upon the context but, also depending upon the audience, and also depending upon
whether you are connected to your listener over the phone, or over a device where you
can see his or her face while communicating and there are many such other factors
which control our language use and which diversify and differentiate our language
use. So, I am sure if we think about it, it will not take any of us much time to figure
out that we use language differently when we are talking say for instance to our
mother, than from when we are talking to our boss, or our best friend, or like now
when I am talking in front of a camera. This means that even when we are talking in
one particular language we took the instance of Bangla, but you can think of any other
language that you are familiar with, even if we are talking in that one language, our
language use is thoroughly stratified is thoroughly pluralized from within. In fact,
Bakhtin in his essay “Discourse in the Novel” provides a much more comprehensive
list of such internal stratification which goes beyond the examples that I have just
cited. Thus, Bakhtin talks about: “social dialects, language that is characteristic of
group behavior, [So, as I said we talk differently when we are amongst our group of
friends than when we are not] professional jargons, generic languages, languages of
generations and age groups, [Your grandmother, I am sure you have noticed, talks
differently, uses a language differently than you do] tendentious languages, languages
of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions, languages that serve the
specific sociopolitical purposes of the day, [every day we come across some slogan or
the other and language that serves the specific purposes not even of the day, but] even
of the hour [because] (each day [Bakhtin says] has its own slogan, its own vocabulary,
its own emphasis.” So, this internal stratification is what Bakhtin refers to as
heteroglossia. And since each of these stratified components interact with and inter-
illuminate each other, like different languages do in the case of polyglossia, we again
come across the notion of a dialogic relationship. Thus, whereas, polyglossia
dialogises a language from without, by bringing it in contact with other foreign
languages, heteroglossia dialogises a language from within, by establishing an
interplay between the various stratifications of that language’s use – which typically
pitches different characters from different social strata against each other, in different
conditions, and different contexts, would obviously be a literary form where the use
of dialogism of language would be the most markedly observable. And therefore, it is
no wonder that Bakhtin starts with the novels of Dostoevsky to gradually build first
his theory of polyphony and then, to build the more sophisticated concepts of
polyglossia and heteroglossia in his later essays. But even then, we have to remember
that the dialogism that is triggered by polyglossia or heteroglossia, is not any special
feature of a particular literary genre or the other. Rather they inform any and all
concrete uses of language. Thus, even if an author shows monologic tendencies, it is
still possible to locate in his work traces of dialogised polyglossia and dialogised
heteroglossia. Indeed, as we will see later, reading a text against its grain and locating
the traces of plurality of voices beyond the authorial consciousness is one of the
characteristic features of a literary theory like Postcolonialism. But for now, let us
move forward and take up for our discussion another typical Bakhtinian concept
which is the Carnivalesque. The word carnivalesque is derived from the more familiar
root word which is carnival and carnival signifies generally an occasion of festivity
and occasion of celebration. And the most iconic image that comes up in our mind
when we discuss carnival is the image of some kind of a spectacle involving parades
of riotous crowds, of unusually bright color, and dresses, and generally of scenes of
wild revelry and abandon. Bakhtin points out that such carnivals were an integral part
of the medieval European social life; riotous spectacles which even today from the
principal image of a carnival could be regularly seen in the market squares of all
medieval European towns and cities. Now, Bakhtin observes that these bawdy
celebrations which characterized the spirit of carnival, they were deeply subversive in
nature. So, the spectacles usually revolved around the willful suspension of the social
rules and hierarchies that were otherwise very strictly imposed. For instance, in a
carnival one could see a buffoon playing the role of a king, or for instance
ecclesiastical figures, very respected figures otherwise it could be seen being parodied
and being ridiculed in street acts during a carnival. So, in general carnival involved
and, in fact, it still involves to a certain extent a limited extent the turning upside
down of the social norms as they were otherwise known, like the placing of the
foolish over the wise for instance, the poor over the rich and so on. Bakhtin notes the
underlying spirit of these carnivals was to challenge and even degrade the hierarchical
regulations that guided the medieval societies and constructed the formal and official
truth about it and this is what Bakhtin writes in his book Rableis and his World, which
is the source text from which we can derive Bakhtin’s idea of the carnivalesque. I
quote from the book: (“Carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing
truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank,
privileges, norms and prohibitions.”) Now, such turning upside down of the social
hierarchies and norms through laughter dismantled, howsoever temporarily, the
official and formal discourses and truths of social existence and situated these official
versions, official discourses, official truths within a field of multiple other
possibilities, and this again brings us back to the notion of dialogism. Because this
tension filled space of contradictory subversive and alternate social possibilities bring
us back to that familiar concept of things being within a dialogic relationship inter-
illuminating each other. However, whereas, we have so far encountered the idea of
dialogism only in relation to language and it is literary expressions, Bakhtin’s writings
on the spirit of carnival shows that the site of dialogism is as much social as linguistic.
But then, how does this conception of the carnivalesque spirit inform our
understanding of Bakhtin’s literary theory? Well, according to Bakhtin, with the
advent of the Renaissance in Europe, carnivals were squeezed out of the public life by
the state authority, of course, to control their subversive possibilities. However,
Bakhtin argues that as the spirit of the carnivalesque was denied expression in the
form of street spectacles, it was gradually observed from that time onwards by
literature and literary genres like parody, for instance, or satire started performing the
same kind of subversion and degradation of the official truths and of the social
hierarchies that were earlier done through carnival performances. And as an example
of this absorption of the carnivalesque in literature, Bakhtin mentions the 16th century
French writer Francois Rabelais and he mentions his famous satirical prose piece
named the Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel. But, what is important for us to note
here is that according to Bakhtin, it is not this one work that is imbued with the spirit
of the carnivalesque though his book Rableis and his World is primarily focused on
this particular work and this particular author. What we need to note here is that the
whole genre of the novel can be read as a literary form that is open to the tendencies
of the carnivalesque. This is because unlike an epic, for instance, which is a product
of the hierarchical world of the pre-modern age and is therefore in complete sync with
the official truths and the formal discourses of that world, a novel is still
comparatively new it is still an emerging genre which can not only accommodate the
official discourses of the social hierarchy, but which can also accommodate at the
same time parodic discourses, ridiculing and challenging the official versions, the
official truths, official uses of language. And this dialogic placing together of different
discourses as we have already seen is one of the hallmarks of a major novelist like
Dostoevsky. So, we have come almost to an end of our discussion, but before we end
I would just like to briefly touch on the concept of chronotope which is again a very
typical Bakhtinian concept. The term chronotope actually builds upon two separate
Greek words; the first being “chronos” which means time and the other part is “topos”
which in Greek means space. So, the theory of chronotope is basically something that
explodes the dialogic relationship between space and time and it explores how these
space-time relations inform different kinds of literature. So, let me clarify this with an
example. Think of all the romances of kings and queens and princes and princesses
that you might have read as a child. Now, try and think about the wait time unfold in
these romances. Can you remember for instance romance in which the hero during the
course of his adventures grew old or became feeble or changed his personality? I
think not. Yet, such change is precisely what characterizes the everyday passage of
time in our life. So, in the romances, unlike in our lives, as these nights and even
seasons and years would pass while nothing would apparently change. No one in
these romances seemed to grow old or to age or even to change his or her attitude
towards life or towards the fellow human beings. In other words, the time of the
romance is what might be referred to as empty time and Bakhtin refers to this time as
adventure time. So, empty adventure time is a time of the romances. Now, think again
about the spaces or the location against which the adventures of the romances were
enacted. These spaces even if referred to, in any details, were actually mentioned in a
generic form and did not have any real impact on the story. So, for instance, think of
some of the Bollywood romances where neither the hero nor the heroine is usually
seen growing old and in these romances, the locales in which their romantic tale
unfolds is so irrelevant that the director is not even apologetic about shooting a
sequence in distant Croatia, for instance, or Hungary, or New Zealand, for a film that
is otherwise shot almost entirely in India.. So, the empty adventure time in a romance
is usually coupled with an empty space in which the adventure is enacted and this
coupling creates a unique chronotope that is unique to romances. But we need to
remember that this chronotope or this space time relationship that I have just
elaborated is not universal. So, for instance if you were to compare this kind of time-
space relationship with the kind of time-space relationship that is encountered in let us
say a bildungsroman, you will see that the chronotope that is used there is completely
different and it is completely different primarily because unlike in a romance, in a
bildungsroman, the entire story hinges on the idea that the protagonist actually grows
and the protagonist changes over a period of time. So, the chronotope used in a
romance cannot sustain the narrative of a bildungsroman, but unfortunately because of
time constraint, I am unable to explore in further details the various different kinds of
chronotope that Bakhtin writes about. But, I would definitely encourage you to study
them in his essay titled, “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”. That
essay is also part of the compilation the Dialogic Imagination and so, with this, we
end our discussion on Bakhtin and his theories of dialogism. In our next lecture, we
will again take up a new topic. Thank you.

Reader Response Theory

Hello friends and welcome back again to this series of lectures on Literary Theory.
Now so, far in this series we have organized our discussions of various theorists
chronologically. So, we have started with ancient Greek theorists like Plato and
Aristotle and then we have slowly worked our way through the literary theories of
18th and 19th century. However, in our study of 20th century literary theories we will
have to break away from this chronological progression. And we will have to do this
break, away from the chronological progression, for two reasons primarily; the first
reason is that in the 20th century we see a plethora of literary theories emerging from
within the academia and they emerge almost simultaneously and they run their course
parallel to each other. And in most cases these are overlapping theoretical trends with
the same academician or the same scholar representing more than one category of
literary theory. So, for instance, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak whose works we will
encounter later in this series is generally considered to be one of the most iconic
figures within the field of Postcolonial theory. But, at the same time Spivak is also
one of the leading figures within the fields of contemporary Feminist theory, as well
as contemporary Marxist literary theory. This then makes a neat chronological
categorization of literary theories and literary theorists more and more impossible as
we approach the 20th century. Neat categorizations are also made difficult by theorist
like a Roland Barthes for instance who starts off his career as a Structuralist critic and
then takes a Post-structuralist turn later on in his life. So, there is a lot of overlapping
and interconnectedness that we will have to deal with and given the circumstances a
chronological journey through the field of literary theory would be a difficult if not
and altogether impossible proposition. There is another point that I need to make here,
which is that a chronological progression is also need difficult. Because of the
connections that one school of literary theory might have with some earlier theoretical
position. Let us for example, take the case of the Reader Response theory that we are
going to focus on in this lecture as well as in the next one.
Now Reader Response as a literary theory gained prominence within western
academia only during the last quarter of the 20th century. But it is roots can be traced
back to the more general theoretical position established by the phenomenological
school of thoughts established during the first three decades of the 20th century. Now,
in order to understand reader response theory it is imperative that we also explore the
philosophy of phenomenology and indeed that is precisely what we are going to do in
today’s lecture. But this going back though it is important as an aid to our learning,
nevertheless, problematizes the chronological positioning of Reader Response theory
within this course. So, it is better to clarify at this point that the sequence in which the
various schools of 20th century literary theories are going to be taken up would be
mostly a random. I will of course, as always mention important dates of theoretical
works as well as of the theoreticians to help you map them within specific historical
contexts. But even then a certain degree of chronological arbitrariness in the
arrangement of lectures would be unavoidable. However, while pointing out the
absence of a chronological sequence I would here like to suggest another form of
categorization, which might help you navigate better through the thickly populated
field of 20th century literary theory. If you look at the field of literary theory
comprehensively as a whole you will perceive four different centers around which the
various theoretical schools revolve. These centers are firstly, the author, secondly, the
text, thirdly, the reader, and fourthly the context. So, in other words some theoretical
positions prioritize the role of the author and focuses the critical lens on that particular
author. And we have already encountered such author centric literary theory while
studying Romanticism for instance as well as the theory of creative genius. If you
remember, this theory of creative genius was something that we discussed when
talking about Pseudo Longinus and his theory on the sublime. In the 20th century this
particular focus on the author has become less prominent and it continues to remain
less prominent even in the 21st century. And indeed much of the 20th century literary
criticism emerges as a direct opposition to the author centric theories of the earlier
period. But, in spite of this, the focus on the author does not completely disappear
with the coming of the 20th century literary theory. And we shall see for instance a
significant role that author still plays in Psychoanalytic criticism, for instance, which
is a school of theory inspired by the work of Sigmund Freud. So now, after having
discussed author centric literary theories let us come to the second center which is the
text. And the kind of 20th century literary theory that we have discussed so far,
namely New Criticism, Russian Formalism, and even Bakhtinian dialogism, all of
these theories are primarily text-centric theoretical positions. So, their focus is on how
a particular text uses different language components, to fulfill various literary
functions. And we will continue to observe this focus on the text, or the language that
is used as the text, throughout our discussion on literary theories like Structuralism,
for instance, or even Post-structuralism. On the other hand, what we will be
discussing in this lecture and the next one will provide good examples of the reader-
centric literary theories. So, we have discussed author-centric theories, we have
already started discussing some examples of text-centric theories and today we will
take up a particular group of literary theory, which focuses on the reader. And then
after this, in the later part of this series when we start discussing Marxist literary
theory, for instance, or Feminist literary theory, or Postcolonial literary theory, we
will be exploring what can be identified as the context-centric schools of literary
theory; schools which are focused on how social, political, and economic contexts
guide the production as well as consumption of literature. Now, though we have
discussed these four centers around which the schools of literary theory they revolve,
we have to remember that these distinctions are not watertight compartments and
there is a significant degree of overlap. Thus, for instance, though I have categorized
Bakthinian dialogism as a primarily centered on the text and on the language used
within the text, you will remember from our discussion of heteroglossia, that Bakhtin
closely connected the study of language with the internal fragmentations that inform
any particular socio cultural milieu. Also you will remember how his idea of
carnivalesque for instance is deeply rooted within a specific historical context. So,
Bakhtin though primarily a text-centered critic, can also be analyzed as someone who
is deeply interested in context. On the other hand, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, for
instance, who is closely associated with the context-centric schools of theories like
Postcolonialism Marxism, Feminism, is nevertheless known for her emphasis on close
reading and very careful and close attention to language use within a text. And in this
she closely follows one of her major intellectual mentors Paul de Man, who was
himself a deconstructive critic, and as I have just mentioned, Post-structuralist schools
like deconstruction are primarily text-centric schools of theory. But nevertheless, I
think this categorization though it is not foolproof, would nevertheless provide a
rough schema that might help some of you to get a better grasp of the plethora that
constitutes 20th century literary theory.
Edmund Husserl Phenomenology
So, now, with this introduction in place let us move to today’s topic which is Reader
Response theory. And as I have already told you, this is a particular form of literary
theory which became popular in academic circles during the third quarter of the 20th
century. But since it has deep connections with the 20th century Phenomenological
school of thought, we will start our discussion from there and we will do this by
focusing on the work of the intellectual Edmund Husserl. Husserl, whose dates are
1859-1938, was born to a Jewish family in Moravia which was then a part of the
Austrian empire and which is now a part of the Czech Republic. Husserl by training
was a mathematician and also an astronomer. But, much like his contemporary and
fellow Moravian, Sigmund Freud, Husserl is today known for opening up a distinct
field of inquiry. So, whereas, Freud is regarded as the father of the discipline of
psychoanalysis, Husserl is credited for laying the foundations of the philosophical
study of phenomenology. And it was in 1900 when Husserl was teaching at the
University of Gottingen in Germany, that he founded the Phenomenological
movement. And by the second decade of the 20th, century he was successful in
establishing the basic tenets of phenomenology as a separate field of study. And one
of the key texts of Husserl that we have from this particular period, which was
actually first delivered in the form of a lecture, is titled “Pure Phenomenology”. And
it has a subtitle which is “Its Method and its Field of Investigation”. And why I refer
to this text, is because this text provides us with an interesting entry point into
Husserl’s work from the perspective of a student of literature and literary theory. So,
in the middle of this short piece, Husserl states, and I quote: “No object of the
category work of art could occur in the objectivational world of any being who was
devoid of all aesthetic sensibility, who was so, to speak aesthetically blind.” In what
follows, my effort would be to elaborate on this sentence in a manner that will help to
clarify not only some of the basic tenets of Husserl’s phenomenological perspective,
but also how his phenomenology directs us to a reader-oriented theory of literature.
Now one of the important words that we need to elaborate from the quoted sentence is
a word “object” and it is derivative form “objectivational”. So, when we think of an
object, or speak of an object in our mundane conversation, we are usually speaking of
things that we believe are out there in the real world. Say, for instance, a pen or a
table for instance, or a toothpaste tube, these will all be considered as objects in our
day to day conversation, but seen from the phenomenological perspective the situation
will look slightly different. A phenomenologist will argue that we become aware of an
object only when it appears in our consciousness. That is to say, that when I refer to a
pen as an object, then what I am actually referring to is my consciousness of an object
and not to any real thing situated out there beyond the realms of my consciousness.
The phenomenologist here is actually playing with a distinction that is quite old
within the Western philosophical tradition, which is the distinction between reality
and how reality appears to us. And how we perceive reality and this distinction within
the tradition of Western philosophy is usually phrased as a distinction between
“noumenon” and “phenomenon”. So, what is the noumenon? Because phenomenon is
still a very commonly known term, but noumenon not so much. So, what is it? Well
noumenon is a thing that exists independently of human perceptions and human
senses. And phenomenon is the exact opposite; it is how this thing which exists
independently might appear to human perception in human senses.
Now, this distinction between noumenon and phenomenon can be traced back in
Western philosophical tradition, at least as far back as Plato. And if you remember our
lectures on Plato, you will know how we had discussed the concept of Platonic ideas
in them. So, these ideas according to Plato existed above and beyond the realm of
mundane human perception and were indeed the true form of everything.
Phenomenon was how this idea manifested in the world that was perceivable by the
human senses. So, in Plato’s scheme of things the idea of a bed will be noumenon
because, it as an idea, exists beyond the realm of human consciousness and how the
bed is perceived through human senses in its material manifestation would be
phenomenon. So, Platonic ideas are noumenon, their material manifestation for Plato
would be phenomenon, because that is how we perceive those ideal forms.
Immanuel Kant
Now, by the time we reach Immanuel Kant who is the famous 18th century German
philosopher, the distinction between noumenon and phenomenon gets changed
slightly and, in fact, it becomes more easy to grasp. So, with Kant phenomenon still
signifies a thing as it appears to the human consciousness when grasped by human
senses, but noumenon no longer signifies a Platonic idea, but rather it signifies more
simply what Kant calls the thing in itself, this is actually not very difficult to
understand. Take for example, a stone. Now following the reality appearance
distinction one can see that a stone has two aspects. The first aspect is its existence as
a thing in itself beyond the realm of human perception. And the second is its existence
as an appearance within human cognition. So, in its first aspect as a thing in itself it
will be noumenon, and in its second aspect as an appearance that is perceived by the
human cognitive process it is a phenomenon. Now, according to phenomenologist the
existence of an object, as a thing in itself is of little consequence, because in that form
it is not available to the human consciousness, it is not available to the human
cognitive processes. And since it is beyond human consciousness there is no way that
it can be consciously known or explored or even validated as something that really
exists or not.
Objects from a phenomenological perspective is, therefore, only the phenomenon and
not the noumenon. Why? Because the former can be known and therefore, it can be
explored and it can be validated. Whereas, the latter one, noumenon, one can never be
sure of what it is and whether it exists or not. So, if you go back to the sentence that, I
originally quoted from Husserl you will see that the phrase “objectivational world of
any being” means the world of objects as phenomena which is within the grasp of our
consciousness. However, before we move on with the quoted sentence, I want to
clarify something else regarding phenomenon. Now when I say that phenomenon is
how a thing appears to the consciousness, it is always assumed that phenomenon is a
reflection, it is a reflection of a noumenon that exists as a thing in itself. However, let
us say that I am hallucinating for instance and let us say that I see a dagger in front of
me just like Shakespeare’s Macbeth saw before him in act 2, scene 1 of the play. Now
that dagger which I see in my hallucination, will not correspond to a thing that exists
in the material world beyond my consciousness, of course, because I am
hallucinating, I am thinking of it in my own head. But from a phenomenological
perspective the hallucinatory dagger is very much an object because it is part of the
objectivational world of a being. To give you another example, if I think of a dragon
for instance, while writing a sequel to I do not know Harry Potter. And then,
irrespective of whether or not there is a noumenal dragon existing somewhere out
there, the dragon exists as a valid phenomenal object within my consciousness. So,
whether or not something is an object or not is not determined at least from the
phenomenological point of view by it is relation to the nominal world. But rather it is
determined by the notion of what the phenomenologist will say “intentionality”.
And now this word intentionality is very important for a proper understanding of
phenomenology and also literary theories based on the phenomenological philosophy.
So, let us try and have a more detailed look at this word. The word intentionality as
used within phenomenology does not really mean what we usually understand by the
word in our everyday conversation. So, for instance in our mundane conversation we
speak of someone having a good intention, someone having a bad intention, where the
word intention means something like the desire to achieve a particular purpose. Now,
for a phenomenologist like Husserl for instance intentionality has a different meaning,
because according to Husserl every thought that we can think of is a thought of
something. In other words our thoughts are always targeted towards some object or
the other. And here I use the word object in the more specific phenomenological sense
of the term. And this targetedness of thoughts to particular contents or particular
objects is what is identified as intentionality by the phenomenologists. So, in other
words, if my thoughts are intended towards any particular content or towards any
particular object, then irrespective of whether they exist out there as a reality is of no
consequence to a phenomenologist. If it exists in my consciousness, then the
phenomenologist will treat it as a valid object. So, here we come across a question.
Are these objects towards which our thoughts are guided by intentionality really
reflections of something else that exists beyond those intentional thoughts or are the
creations of our own consciousness? And here I am not talking about things like
dragons or hallucinatory daggers where one can say that no they do not exist; they
only exist in our mind. But what about more mundane things like pen or stone? What
we have is consciousness of these objects, but do they really exist as a thing out there?
So, in more radical terms can we be at all certain of the existence of a world of objects
beyond our consciousness? Can we really be certain of anything existing as a thing in
itself? Now, a phenomenological answer to this question will neither be a definite yes
or a definite no, rather the argument will be that since we cannot know of this world
because, we can only know through our sense perceptions our consciousness and we
cannot know if anything exists as a material reality beyond that consciousness. So, a
phenomenologist would argue that since we cannot move of this world beyond our
consciousness, we need to suspend our judgment about it. And this is what is referred
to as a “phenomenological epoché”. This suspension of judgment about a material
world or a world outside what we are able to perceive and what we are conscious of.
So, to repeat, a world beyond the realms of our consciousness is not the field of
investigation for a phenomenologist, rather this is how Husserl defines the
phenomenological field of investigation. And I will now read out from Husserl, and
though the language might sound slightly difficult, but I think after our discussion you
will be able to grasp this properly: “It would be the task of phenomenology, […], to
investigate how something perceived, something remembered, something phantasied,
something pictorially represented, something symbolized looks as such, i.e, to
investigate how it looks by the virtue of that bestowal of sense and of characteristics,
which is carried out intrinsically by the perceiving, the remembering the phantasizing
the pictorial representing, etcetera, itself.” In other words, phenomenology deals with
the act of perception and not with any material reality or even immaterial reality that
might exist beyond that realm of human perception.
phenomenological inquiry and literature
(phenomenology vs. new criticism and formalisim)
So, the question is how does this phenomenological inquiry into the way things are
perceived, influence the way we theorize about literature? Now if you notice carefully
you will observe that the phenomenological perspective is in sharp contrast to the
position adopted by the 20th century literary theories that we have discussed so far.
Thus be it New Criticism or be it Russian Formalism, we have seen a prioritizing of
literature as it exists as a text out there, in the form of black words on white page . In
the language of this present lecture, New Critics and Formalists consider literature
as a text which is a thing in itself. But as we have seen, a phenomenologist will
argue that the thing in itself, even if it exists, phenomenologists will neither deny
its existence nor accept its existence. That is the phenomenological epoché. But,
irrespective of whether it exists or not, the thing in itself cannot be a proper object of
inquiry, because it is beyond the realms of human perception. Therefore, if we treat
literature as a thing in itself, as a text, which is out there then that itself cannot be an
object of inquiry because, it is beyond the realms of human perception.
Thus from the phenomenological perspective a literature of any kind or even an art of
any kind could only be studied in the form of how it is perceived by the readers or by
the viewers or by the listeners and how they are then processed from within his
consciousness?. So, in other words a literary theorist cannot study a novel per se, but
can investigate only how a text becomes a novel through the bestowal of the reader’s
perception and through the bestowal of her ability to make sense of the text. A novel
or any form of literature opens itself up as a field of investigation only when it
emerges as a literary object within the objectivational world of any being, that is to
say when it is perceived and read by a person as a piece of prose fiction.
If a novel just exists out there and is never read or is never perceived and decoded as a
piece of literary work, then from the phenomenological perspective it falls beyond the
purview of literary theory and the best we can do is to suspend our judgment about it.
And what is true or for a novel is true for all literature and indeed all art forms in
general and this brings us back to the quoted sentence with which we had started. And
I will quote it again and now you will see you have a far more, better grasp of that
sentence than you had before. “No object of the category “work of art” could occur in
the objectivational world of any being who is devoid of all aesthetic sensibility, who
was, so to speak, aesthetically blind.” So, now, we can see that a literary theory that
emerges from this phenomenological tradition will foreground not the text, nor even
the author, but the reader, and will foreground how the reader respond to our text as
and when it appears to her consciousness. However, this study of the reader’s
response was not to emerge as a major literary theory till much later during the last
three decades of the 20th century. And we will take up and discuss the contours of
this literary theory which became popular as Reader Response theory in our next
lecture. Thank you.

Reader Response Theory 2

Roman Ingarden
Hello again and welcome back to another lecture on Literary Theory. Today, we are
going to take forward our discussion on Reader Response Theory. And we are going
to see how the phenomenological insights offered by Edmund Husserl, translates into
literary criticism in the later part of the 20th century. And we will start our exploration
with the works of Wolfgang Iser, but before we can start discussing Iser, we will have
to trace back the story to the works of a Polish theorist called Roman Ingarden. And
we will have to do this because Ingarden works act as a sort of connecting bridge
between the Phenomenological theory of Husserl and the Reader Response theory of
Iser. So, first the dates: Ingarden was born in 1893 and he died in 1970. And he was a
student a direct student, in fact of Edmund Husserl at the Gottingen University, where
Husserl first came up with phenomenology and developed it as an independent field
of inquiry. And Ingarden worked with Husserl’s phenomenology and he worked
towards building a framework of literary theory based on Husserl’s philosophical
insights. So, if we try and understand in the most concise manner the basic features of
this literary theory proposed by Ingarden, then we will arrive at three main points.
And these three main points that I am talking about each of them follow from the
other, so they are connected points basically. The first point that can be used to sum
up Ingarden’s theory is based on the phenomenological concept of intentionality. Now
as you will remember from our previous discussion on Husserl, intentionality in
phenomenology means the directedness or the targetedness of thought to one
particular object or another. Now, a piece of literature according to Ingarden is an
expression of such an intentional act, which documents the directedness of the
author’s thoughts towards specific objects. So, literature documents this intentionality
of the author. From this first point follows the second point, which is that these
intentional acts are reanimated by the reader when she reads the particular work of
literature. And in the process the reanimation allows her to direct her own thoughts
towards certain objects. So, the first step is the author recording her intentionality in
the form of a text, the second step is the reader reanimating that intentionality and
allowing her thoughts to be directed towards certain objects. But one of the things
that Ingarden points out is that there is no perfect one to one correspondence between
the author’s coding in the piece of literature, a certain set of intentional acts, and the
reader’s decoding of these intentional acts during the process of a reading. Ingarden
argues that literary texts have indeterminacies which require the reader to fill them up
with her own interpretations, or with what Ingarden calls active reading. So, this is a
third point that Ingarden makes and this active reading results in what he calls the
concretization of literature, concretization of a literary work. So, in Ingarden’s view
literature is not a static object that is out there, but rather it is a dynamic process that
emerges through a dialogue between the consciousness of the author and that of the
reader and these two consciousnesses are mediated by a text. And it is on this
particular understanding of how literature works that Wolfgang Iser goes on to
construct his version of Reader Response theory.
Iser (textual gaps)
So, now, we are going to discuss Iser. Iser is known as the founding father of what is
called the Konstanz school of criticism named after the German university, the
University of Konstanz. And his dates are 1926 to 2007 and among his publications
there are two very important ones. The first one is a book titled The Implied Reader
which was published in 1972 and the second one is titled The Act of Reading which
was published in 1976. Now, one of the key features of how Iser conceived the act of
reading literature was through the notion of what he called “ textual gaps”. And these
gaps, I have already referred to them actually when discussing Ingarden as textual
indeterminacies, but here let us try and understand because these gaps and
indeterminacies form such a crucial part of the theorization of both Ingarden as well
as Iser, who builds upon Ingarden theoretical insights. Let us try and understand these
gaps in more details. Well, these gaps as I have already told you are textual
indeterminacies which produce, which sort of disrupt a sense of coherent progression
within a text, right. And this disruption of the coherent progression of the text while
you are reading it can be produced for various reasons. In today’s lecture we will
consider three very typical reasons, why textual gaps or textual indeterminacies might
be experienced by the reader, which might disrupt her understanding of the text, or
her understanding of the flow of the text. So, the first reason why a textual gap may
be produced is because there is disconnection between the various textual segments.
To understand this let us take for instance a poem by Coleridge called “Kubla Khan”.
Now, as Coleridge himself mentions, the first two sections of the poem was conceived
by him in an opium induced dream-state, but the last section was written after the
state of reverie was broken by the arrival of a visitor. And the sections of the poem
“Kubla Khan” very distinctly carry the mock of this break in the mental state of the
poet, which the reader needs to negotiate through her reading. But even if we do not
take an extreme example like “Kubla Khan”, where the break is very clear and even
the author points out that break, we nevertheless encounter in any literary text, gaps or
breaks in the textual segments in the form of stanzas. For instance, one stanza giving
way to another stanza and there is a break in between, we have paragraphs for
instance which are separated by a break, we have chapters which are again separated
by a break. So, they are separate textual segments and they produce gaps within the
text and the passage between each of these schematic sections, between stanzas,
paragraphs, chapters present indeterminacies in the narrative coherence which
requires the reader to do what Iser calls ideation and what Ingarden calls active
reading. Take for instance John Keats, his poem “To Autumn”, a very famous poem.
Each of the stanzas in the poem though connected by the autumnal theme, are
nevertheless distinct from one another. For instance, if you ask this question, what is
the connection between the autumnal scene of plenty as described in the first stanza
… and the figure in the second stanza about whom the poem says “on a half reaped
furrow sound asleep, while thy hook/ Spares the next swath and all its twined
flowers”? We often infer that this figure in the second stanza, is the season of autumn
incarnate, but the figure can as easily be interpreted as the representative of the
approaching winter which will take away the plentitude of autumn. And indeed this
latter interpretation gains even more heft, if we are conscious of the traditional poetic
association between winter and death, and if we also note that the sleeping figure of
the second stanza is carrying a mowing hook or a scythe, and a scythe in Western
imagery is strongly connected with the figure of death. So, the argument that I am
trying to make here is that because the stanzas are not connected by any explicit
commentary, in moving from one to the other we encounter interpretive uncertainties,
we encounter textual gaps. And these gaps are then filled up by us, the readers, with
our own imagination, thereby, producing literary experiences that are unique to one
particular reader and that differs from a reader to another. Now let us come to the
second reason, why a literary text might have gaps or indeterminacies; and I will call
this reason the disconnection between narrative perspective. Take a Dostoevsky’s
novel for instance, now as you will know from our discussion on Bakhtin. Bakhtin has
described these novels by Dostoevsky as characteristically polyphonic, which means
that rather than having a unified authorial perspective, it has a number of different and
often contradictory perspectives articulated by different characters. Thus, the fictional
world that we are exposed to is not unified and neither is it continuous. We as readers
need to piece together these unmerged perspectives as so many different scraps of
paper and we need to piece them together to create a kind of collage to arrive at a
comprehensive understanding. And since that collage is indelibly stamped by our own
interpretative acts as readers, the literary experiences will differ from one reader to
another. And a good example of these gaps arising from different perspectives within
a particular work, though it is not a piece of literature or novel, is a film in fact and
the title of the film is Rashomon. It is a famous film directed by Akira Kurosawa,
where the same story is told from radically different perspectives and that forces the
reader or in this case the viewer to idea it as Iser will call it. That is to put one’s own
imaginative input into that text so as to reach a sense of comprehensive
understanding. Now, the third reason why gaps, textual gaps, may be created has to do
with the concept of reader; I am not talking about a specific individual I am here
talking about the concept of the reader and how that concept is fragmented from
within. So, when I say that the concept of the reader is fragmented what I refer to is a
distinction between the implied reader and the actual reader. So, let us say that a
literary text is written by an author with the assumption that it will be read by a white
middle-class woman. In other words our text is written with the white middle class
woman as its implied reader. Now, it is possible that the actual reader of the text that
very text whose implied reader is a white middle class woman, the actual reader might
be different might be different socially, might be different culturally, might be
different historically. So, let us say if the implied reader of Jane Austen’s Pride and
Prejudice is a 19th century white British middle class heterosexual woman, its actual
reader might very well be a 21st century brown homosexual South Asian male and
this distinction too creates areas of indeterminacies in a particular text. This is because
cultural terms or social relations, which might not have required much explanation to
the implied reader might present themselves as opaque to the actual reader, thereby
forcing him or her to fill in these opaque blanks in the narratives with his or her own
interpretations. But now that we know that a text might have a number of gaps and
might have them for different reasons, the question is: how do they affect the reading
and appreciation of literature? Well, as you might have noticed during my discussion
on gaps and indeterminacies, I have repeatedly spoken about how they need to be
filled up by the reader through ideation, if you want to use the word used by Iser, also
active reading which is the word used by Ingarden. And as far as Ingarden or Iser are
concerned this process of filling up a particular text, is central to the very way we read
and understand literature or indeed any text for that matter. And according to them,
according to Iser and according to Ingarden, a reader in spite of encountering a
literary text that is essentially fragmented from within because of the number of gaps
and indeterminacies that are there, cannot reconcile herself to a fragmented reading
and to a fragmented understanding of the piece, because reading should necessarily
lead to the comprehension of a wholeness. That is one of their basic presumptions. So,
they are saying even though a text might have indeterminacies a reading cannot, sort
of, cope with indeterminacies, a reading needs to fill up those gaps and resolve those
indeterminacies to arrive at a whole, comprehensive understanding. So, let us go back
to the example of Keats’s “To Autumn”. As we have discussed there is a gap
separating the first and the second stanza, where the connection between the scene of
autumnal plentitude in the first stanza and the lonely figure in the second stanza is not
quite established by the text. Yet, as a reader we cannot just read them as two separate
and distinct fragments within the same text. The moment we pass from the first to the
second stanza, we try and establish a connection between the two to reach a sense of
wholeness; a comprehensive understanding of the poem as a unified work right. We
do not read Keats’s poem as a collection of three completely separate and completely
different stanzas. We try and combine them together to form a sense of wholeness and
as Iser notes in his book The Act of Reading and I quote, “consistency-building is the
indispensable basis for all acts of comprehension”. Now, this sense of a wholeness,
arrived at through active consistency-building is of course, a dynamic process. And
the reader needs to keep changing and adjusting it as she moves down the text. Thus,
for instance a reader moving from the second to the third stanza of “To Autumn” is
exposed to one more textual segment which she needs to incorporate in her evolving
sense of what the poem means as a whole. This, in effect, changes how the whole is
comprehended by the reader. In other words, through the reading process, one idea of
wholeness constantly gives way to another idea of wholeness and each of these
depends upon the way a particular reader ideates or she fills the gaps that she
encounters during the reading process. Now, here we encounter a problem; which is
that if a literary reading is so independent from other literary readings, which is to say
that if a literary reading is so much pivoted on how individual readers interpret the
gaps and tide over the indeterminacies through ideation, then how can we even
publicly refer to and discuss a particular literary piece? For instance, if my reading of
Hamlet is completely different from your reading of Hamlet, then how can we even
talk about this one text called Hamlet? Well Iser admits that this problem of
uncontrolled subjectivism does complicate the Reader Response theory, but we will
also have to remember that the ideation by individual readers does not happen in an
absolute vacuum. A significant part of the reading experience involves being guided
by the intentional acts of the author. So, there are certain limits of ideation during the
reading process, beyond which an interpretation might be regarded as a
misinterpretation. So, in other words irrespective of how you and I fill the gaps which
are present within Shakespeare’s Hamlet the text still provides sufficient common
ground for me to refer to it to refer to Hamlet and for you to understand which text I
am referring to.
Stanley Fish (reading and misreading)
Bloom “anxiety of influence”.
Now from Iser we would move to Stanley Fish, who is another major figure in this
critical tradition. But since I just mentioned the distinction between reading and
misreading, I would like to briefly touch on Harold Bloom’s theory of “anxiety of
influence”, which casts a very interesting light on the concept of misreading. Now,
according to Bloom, and by the way Bloom is a noted American literary critic, who
was born in 1930 and he is still with us. Bloom suggests that any poet or any literary
artist finds her motivation to create new literature primarily by reading the works of
earlier authors. However, according to Bloom the poet or the literary artist also wants
to assert the individuality and uniqueness of her own work. And this she can only do
by strongly denying the influence of the earlier author because otherwise it will seem
like a copy of an earlier work. . So, this oscillating response towards the previous
author by later authors is what Bloom terms as the “anxiety of influence”. So, how
does a poet or a novelist overcome this anxiety? According to Bloom, the poet
overcomes this anxiety of influence by distorting the work from which she has drawn
to such an extent that nobody is able to recognize the influence or shadow of that
previous work in her own poem or in her own novel. So, the trick lies in distorting the
source of influence. This process of trying to resist the influence through distortion is
what Bloom refers to as misreading. So, what Bloom is effectively doing here is
prioritizing misreading over reading. And Bloom argues that all readings, because
Bloom does not really believe in true readings as such, according to Bloom all
readings by subsequent poets of the works of previous poets or previous authors are
necessarily misreading. But some are “weak misreading”, where the degree to which
the parent poem has been distorted remains less and, therefore, the influence distinctly
identifiable, others are “strong misreading” where the influence of the parent poem
has been so successfully resisted that the later work appears as almost original.
So, Bloom’s theory of originality is very interestingly tied up with notions of
misreading. Now, my reference to Bloom in this lecture on Reader Response theory is
important on two accounts. First I wanted to discuss Bloom because Bloom represents
a section of Reader Response theorists which also include important personalities like
David Bleich, for instance, whom I would not have time to discuss, but they represent
a section within Reader Response theory who works with psychoanalytic insights. So,
for instance, underlying Blooms theory of anxiety of influence and misreading is a
Freudian notion of oedipal complex. And this will become even more clear when we
discuss psychoanalytic literary theory in our future lectures. But there is also a second
reason why I thought discussing Bloom would be apt here, which is that Bloom shows
that Reader Response theory need not only concern itself with how we read or
interpret texts, but we can also use it to gain insight into the creative process of
literature, or how a text is produced by the author.
Now we finally, come to Stanley Fish, who is as I told you one of the most celebrated,
but also one of the most controversial scholars working in the field of Reader
Reception theory. Fish was born in 1938 in Rhode Island in America and he is
currently a chair professor at the Yeshiva University in New York. Fish is primarily
known for two very important theoretical concepts. The first is known as “affective
stylistics” and the second is known as his concept of “interpretive communities”. So,
let us start with the first one. Affective stylistics, refers to how reading of a text
affects the readers and how these affects in turn shape the reading process itself. So,
to explore this idea further we will first have to understand that for Fish, as for other
reader response theorists Iser for instance, text is not a static entity located out there,
rather it is a dynamic process which unfolds over time as the reader proceeds through
a particular text. And this dynamism results from the fact that readers bring their own
imagination, they bring their own sentiments, and expectations to the reading. And
these keep changing as they progress through the text; as a result their idea about what
the text is also keeps changing during the course of their reading. So, as Fish notes the
text is structured by the readers response to it and this structuring process unfolds
temporally during the course of the readers reading. And Fish illustrates this
structuring process, gradual structuring process which builds up over time, by
referring to the following line written by Walter Pater: (“This at least of flame like our
life has that it is, but the concurrence renewed from moment to moment of forces
parting sooner or later on their ways.”) Now as you can see that this line does not
provide for a very easy reading and one of the reasons why it does not provide for an
easy reading is because its flow is continuously disrupted by the intrusion of various
segments. And this forces the reader to adjust her comprehension of the words
accordingly. So, for instance the phrase “concurrence of forces” is disrupted by the
intervention of the words “renewed from moment to moment”. And this forces the
reader to work these words into her interpretation of the phrase “concurrence of
forces”. And then again as the reader reads along, she has to modify her
understanding of the word concurrence as she encounters the antithetical word
“parting”. So, the idea that you gain by reading the word concurrence is balanced or
you might even say disrupted by the appearance of the word parting as you read along
the line. And again, the sense of the word parting and the finality that it signifies gets
modified and even suspended by the interplay of the following words “sooner or
later”. So, the moment you encounter the word parting you arrive at a sense of
finality, but when you move on you encounter the words sooner or later which again
delays the sense of parting or at least disrupts its finality. So, as you can see, with this
explanation, a reader’s interpretation of a text changes as she passes from one word to
another word from one sentence to another sentence. And this process through which
meaning builds up gradually in the mind of the reader is what is referred to by Fish as
affective stylistics. Here however, we encounter the same problem that we
encountered in Iser, which is that if a text is so dependent on a reader’s structuring of
it through his or her expectations and imaginative interpretations, then how can we
even refer to a text which can be understood by everyone? How can we refer to a text
that can be commonly identified by a reading public at large? In studying Ingarden
and Iser, we had found the answer to this question by referring back to the
intentionality of the author inscribed in the text which acts as a guiding principle for
the reader. In Fish too the answer is to be sought in the author’s intention in forming
the text, but this answer gains a further nuance through the introduction of the concept
of interpretive community. Now according to Fish, the competent reader does not
stray away from the intentions of the author even while structuring the text through
his own interpretation. And this is because the author and the intended reader of a text
belong to the same interpretive community, which means that they share the same
literary competence and they share the same cultural assumptions and expectations.
So, let us say that we are reading a play by Shakespeare, for instance, and we
encounter a character which speaks some sentences in an aside, right. Now while
reading the play we do not consider the character to be a mad person, who assumes
that the lines he has spoken in an aside will not be heard by other characters on the
stage even while the audience can hear them distinctly and we do not make this
assumption because we share the literary competence that the author expects us to
have, so as to understand the meaning that the author seeks to convey by noting that
these lines are spoken as an aside. So, we understand the dramatic convention that is
signaled by the introduction of the term aside. And the same is applicable when we
read other texts as well where we try and decode the author’s intention and we are
aided in this process by belonging to the same interpretive community. Now this
notion of interpretive community, therefore, makes the academia, and the literary
critics, as well as theoreticians very important, because they are the ones who are
identified as sharing the required competence to understand exactly what the author
intended to mean. Now this idea of an interpretive community addresses the issue of
unchecked subjectivism on the part of the reader, but it raises a different set of
problems. So, for instance what if a reader does not belong to the interpretive
community, or even more importantly, what if the reader is not in agreement with the
author? To take an example, I for instance, I am not a supporter of Fascism; neither do
I share the cultural assumptions of a Nazi sympathizer. So, what kind of a reader does
that make me of a text like Hitler’s Mein Kampf for instance? We will also see that
for some schools of criticism, this we will find out in our future lectures when we deal
with Postcolonialism for instance, where reading is a way of resisting the author’s
intention and not agreeing with it. So, how do these kinds of readings fit in with
Fish’s theories? We will get to revisit these issues in some of our future lectures. But
with this we come to an end of our discussion on Reader Response theory. And we
will carry forward our lecture series by starting to discuss Structuralism from the next
lecture onwards. Thank you for listening.

Structuralism Ferdinand de Saussure

Hello and welcome to another lecture on Literary Theory and the topic that we are
going to take up today is Structuralism. The first quarter of the 20th century is
exceptionally significant as far as this particular lecture series is concerned, because it
was during this period that a number of theoretical schools either emerged or their
philosophical basis was led down. We have already seen this before with New
Criticism, for instance, or Russian Formalism or even Reader Response theory which
we traced back to the writings of Edmund Husserl during the first quarter of the 20th
century. And we will again see this phenomenon today when we discuss Structuralism
and when we take up for discussion the works of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de
Saussure, whose work forms the basis of this Structuralist school of literary theory.
But before we start discussing Saussure, let us first consider the term structure from
which this particular theoretical category derives its name. Now, usually we start with
the dictionary definition and then proceed from there, but this time let us make an
exception by starting with an example rather than with a definition. So, from this
example we will gradually work towards an understanding of structure. So, one of the
most common forms of structure that we encounter every day visually are the various
buildings that we see around us. So, why is it that we would regard these buildings as
structures? And why at the same time, for instance, we will not consider as structure a
pile of bricks and rubble, randomly dumped next to a building? Well, in case of that
pile each of its components has a separate and independent existence that is above and
beyond its existence as part of that pile; which means that in haphazardly dumped pile
of bricks for instance, each brick has an independent existence that is complete in
itself beyond the pile. And therefore, a pile of bricks dumped haphazardly together
can at best be called an aggregate, but not a structure. On the other hand, a building is
regarded as a structure because each of its component parts are subservient to the
whole in that they do not have a genuinely independent existence outside the
wholeness provided by the building. Think of a window for instance or a door, which
basically frames blank spaces within a building, right. Now imagine if you were to
take them out of the building and place them in an open field, they would immediately
cease to make sense. So, doors and windows are meaningful only within the specific
context of a building. That is to say that they become relevant only in relation to the
other components of the buildings. So, for instance we identify a window as a
window, because we recognize that it is not the wall. So, it is this oppositional
relationship between the window and the wall around it that gives the window its
meaning as well as its relevance. So, here we have already encountered two very
important aspects of a structure. What are they? Well the first aspect is that in a
structure the constituent parts are always subservient to the whole. And the second
aspect is that each of the constituent parts gains meaning and relevance only through
its relation to other constituent parts of that same structure. This is to say that none of
the constituent parts make sense outside the structure at least in the same way that
they do within the structure. So, as I told you if you take a window out of a building,
and you put it in a field, it will immediately cease to make sense – at least make sense
as a window. Now these characteristic features inform not just architectural structures
like buildings, but also other kinds of structures. Take for example, a raga that is
integral to both north Indian as well as Carnatic classical music. Now each raga is a
structure on its own in which musical notes work as a component parts. Now not only
are these component parts subservient to the whole, but they also do not have any
meaningful existence outside the structure of the raga. Thus, if you take out any single
musical note, on its own, from a raga and try to play it or sing it in isolation, it will
sound simply like a monotonous noise which has nothing musical about it. This is
because each musical note gains its musicality as it were not by itself, but rather
through its relationship to other notes. And here I would like to point out another
important feature of a structure, which is that the relationships of the constituent parts
within a structure that gives them there relevance are completely arbitrary. This
means that the rules are unique to the structure, the rules that guide the relationship
between the component parts of a structure, are unique to that structure itself. And one
cannot seek either to justify or to invalidate these rules with reference to anything
outside the structure. To understand this let us go back to the example of raga that we
were just discussing. So, every raga has certain rules about how specific notes within
it can be arranged in a sequence. Now one cannot answer the question as to why
certain note sequences are allowed and certain note sequences are not allowed in a
particular raga, with reference to anything outside the structure of the raga right. For
instance, there is a very popular evening raga called “yaman”, where you the
sequence that is allowed is ni re ga, but not ni sa re ga. So, why one particular note
sequence is allowed and why another particular note sequence is not allowed within a
raga, cannot be either justified or invalidated by referring to anything outside the
structure of the raga. So, for instance, you cannot make arguments like some
sequences are allowed because they are more natural, and other sequences are allowed
because they are more unnatural; there is nothing more or less natural about the
sequence ni re ga, and nothing less natural, for instance, about the sequence ni sa re
ga. So, that does not explain why this particular note sequence is allowed and this
particular note sequence is not allowed. So, rules that operate within a structure has
nothing natural or unnatural about them. This will become even more clear when we
revisit these characteristic features of a structure with reference to language. That is
where we will be heading soon. But here I would like to reiterate the major points that
we have so far touched upon. So, a structure has at the very least these four important
features. What are they? The first feature is that it is made of constituent parts, which
are subservient to the structure as a whole. The second point is that the constituent
parts of a structure do not have any meaningful existence outside the structure at least
in the same way that they have within the structure. The third point is that the
constituent parts derive their relevance within the structure not because of any
inherent quality that they have, but because of the way they relate to each other – one
component part one constituent part of particular structure relate to another
constituent part of that same structure. And the fourth point is that structures are self-
regulated and relations between the constituent parts of a particular structure are
guided by rules that are arbitrary. Because they are unique to the structure itself, and
do not require any external validation.
Ferdinand de Saussure
So, with these 4 points in mind, let us now proceed to explore the works of Ferdinand
de Saussure which laid the groundwork for Structuralism as a theoretical school. So,
as I mentioned before Saussure was a Swiss linguist, and he is primarily known today
for the book Course in General Linguistics which is basically a collection of his
lecture notes originally published in French by his students and his students made
these notes between 1906 and 1911 and published the book under the French title
Cours de Linguistique Generale in 1915. And by then Saussure was already dead. So,
it was a posthumous publication. Now, the main contribution of Saussure was to
establish the fact that language operates as a structure; which means that language is
marked by the characteristic features of a structure that I have just enumerated. And
since language is the medium of literary expression, this theorization of language as a
structure had tremendous influence on twentieth century literary criticism. So, why
does Saussure refer to language as a structure? And even more importantly how does
this identification of language as a structure is something that is of influence to our
understanding of specific language uses. Well, one way of understanding language is
to look at it as an aggregate. Something like the pile of bricks that I have mentioned a
few minutes back. And this understanding is pivoted on the fact that language is
constituted of independently meaningful words that are put together for
communication. So, study of language you would basically mean a study of these
words as independent entities, and how they emerge and change during the course of
history. This historical study of language is what is referred to as a diachronic
approach. But what Saussure suggested in place of this diachronic approach was a
synchronic approach. And to understand this let us look at language more closely.
Now, as you will all agree, language in its essence is fundamentally a system of
signifying. Words which are the constituent parts of language are therefore, basically
signs which refer us to something or the other. For instance, words like dog or pen act
as signs which refer us to things like barking four-legged animal or a writing
instrument. So, if we look at these words or signs which constitute a language, we will
see that they have two different aspects. The first aspect is the sound of the word,
words like dog, or the sound of the word pen. Now this aspect of the sign the aspect of
the sign marked by the sound is referred to by Saussure as a signifier. But the sign
also has a second component apart from the sound marker. And this is the concept
that the signifier or the word sound refers us to. So, if the signifier is the word sound
dog, then it refers us to the concept of a four-legged barking animal. Alternatively, if
the signifier is the word sound pen, then it refers us to the concept of a writing
instrument right. So, this second aspect of the sign which is the concept that it refers
to is termed by Saussure as the signified. So, a sign has two overlapping aspects a
signifier and a signified and they can be graphically represented as follows. Now, at
this point, Saussure makes a very important and interesting argument, which on the
face of it might appear to be counter intuitive. Saussure argues that there is no natural
or inherent relationship between any particular signifier and its signified. So, take for
example, the word tree we have already discussed this example in our earlier lectures,
but here it is also very apt to bring back this example. So, if we consider the word
tree, word sound tree, as a sound image tree is a signifier and whenever we utter this
word sound tree, we are inevitably directed to a signified, which is something which
has a wooden trunk and which has wooden appendages, and they have green leaves
growing on them, something like that. According to Saussure there is no inherent
connection between the word sound tree and this concept of a thing made of wood
and leaves. The fact that there is no inherent relationship between the two, between
the signifier and the signified, is actually very easily gathered from the fact that the
same thing the same signified that we are refer to in English by the signifier tree is
referred to in other languages, other language structures by radically different
sounding signifiers. Like for instance in German, it will be referred to by the word
sound baum. And in Bangla, it would be referred by the word sound of the signifier
Gaach. If the signifier was something rooted in the signified, then in each of these
languages that I have just mentioned, a particular concept or a particular signified
should have had the same signifier to refer to it, or at the very least the signifiers
should have been similar to each other. If the signifier derived from the signified
because in all of these languages we are referring to the same signified, the signified
is not changing, what is radically altering is the signifier, the word sound. But since
these languages do not share similar sounding signifiers, the only conclusion that we
can draw is that the signifiers, the word sounds, they do not derive their existence, or
their ability to make sense from the signified. But then how is a signifier able to
signify if there is no umbilical cord connecting it to one particular signified? Well,
according to Saussure a signifier is able to signify not through its attachment to a
particular concept or a particular signified, but through its relationship with other
signifiers within a particular language system. In other words, language functions just
like a structure, where its constituent parts, word sounds in this case, derive meaning
not with reference to the world outside the structure, but solely with reference to their
relation to each other. So, just like in the example of an architectural structure, where
I said that a window gets its meaning through its oppositional relationship to the walls
around it, a word sound within a language structure gets its meaning through its
oppositional relationship with other words sounds surrounding it. So, that is to say the
word sound tree signifies what it does, because its different from other words sounds
like bird, for instance, or fruit, or dog, or pane, window, door, etcetera. So, the
meaning making ability of a signifier does not depend on its positively being related
to something or the other outside the particular language structure. But rather, it
depends on its negatively or oppositionally being related to other signifiers within that
language system, within that language structure. And each signifier occupies the
space that other signifiers do not. And each word sound, therefore, signifies what
other words sounds do not because they are in oppositional relationship. So, let us say
that the signifier red, according to Saussure’s theory does not signify any particular
colour. But rather, it signifies those colours which are not signified by other words
sounds within the particular language system like, for instance, green, yellow, white,
black. So, red occupies that space which is not occupied by other word sounds. Now,
let us say that in a particular language system the signifier magenta is not there. So, in
that language the word sound red will be used to signify both what we understand as
the colour red, when we speak in English, as well as, the colour magenta. But the
moment the word sound magenta is introduced into that language, the meaning of the
signifier red would become more specific and more narrow, as it will cease to signify
the colour that is now referred to by the new word sound magenta. Now, all of this
might sound a bit confusing, but I am sure if you spend some time thinking through
this concept you will understand what Saussure means when he says that signifiers
gain meaning through their oppositional relationship with other signifiers. And this is
a very important concept which we will use not only to understand Structuralism, but
also beyond that when we take a Post-structuralism. So, according to Saussure,
language like a structure is always complete, and self-contained at any given point in
time. And therefore, linguists this was his argument should study language in terms of
its internal relationship that exist at any given point in time, rather than merely in
terms of its history. And this is why Saussure approach to language is referred to as
synchronic, as focused on all the aspects of language at any given point of time, rather
than diachronic which is the historical approach. Now when we talk about the
relationship of difference or opposition that connect the word sounds as meaningful
entities within a language structure, then we need to remember that like any rule
guiding a structure this oppositional relationship is completely arbitrary. This means,
as I mentioned before, that the rules are unique to the structure itself and cannot be
either justified or invalidated with reference to anything outside that particular
structure. So, what exactly will count as phonetic difference, as sound difference,
separating one-word sound from another within a particular language, depends upon
the unique rules followed by that specific language structure. To explain this let us
take an example for instance. Consider these two sentences: The first sentence reads: I
thread the needle. And the second sentence as you can see in the slide, reads: I tread
the unknown road. Now, look at the italicized words in these sentences. The first one
is thread, and the second one is tread, and they are both oppositionally related in
English language because the English language speakers register a difference between
the sounds th and t. But, on the contrary, if we take a word like coat for instance, and
let us say we pronounce it in two different ways. In the first way, we pronounce it as
koat without aspirating the initial key sound. And in the second way, we pronounce
the word as k[h]oat by aspirating the initial key sound. Now, if you are
communicating in English, then the structure of that language will not allow you to
notice between, notice any difference actually between, these two sounds; any
meaningful difference. And both the pronunciations will still be registered as the same
signifier. So, even though you might be able to hear the difference technically, they
will not be registered by you as English language speakers to be meaningful
differences. Yet, for someone located outside the English language structure, let us
say a Hindi speaker, ka and kha are phonetically distinct and different. This goes on to
show that the rule of difference that regulates a particular language structure is
peculiar to itself and completely arbitrary. So, within the English language a hard t
and an aspirated soft th will count as different. Whereas an aspirated kha it will be
registered that sound as not different or no meaningful difference will be registered
between the kha sound and the unaspirated ka sound. And such kind of peculiar
arbitrariness can be noticed throughout any given language structure. So, though I
mentioned English you can find such arbitrary rule governing the oppositional
relationship if you look at any language. So, before we end our discussion on
Saussure I would like to discuss another important aspect of his work on language
which revolves around the distinction between langue and parole. And to understand
this distinction let us first ask ourselves this question. When we speak of language as
a structure what exactly do we mean? Do we mean the sentences which for instance I
am uttering here in front of you? If that is the case then the answer is slightly
problematic, because these sentences are the utterances of an individual. Yet, a
language system exists as a structure of communication between several individuals.
For instance, between me and you at this particular point in time; which means that
my individual utterances can only be part of a bigger structure, but can never be the
entire structure in itself because if my speech was the entire structure, then you will
not be able to understand its arbitrary rules of opposition as someone located outside
that structure. So, then what is that structure when we are talking about language as a
structure, and how do we know of its existence, if not through concrete acts of
language utterances, language uses? Saussure answers this by referring to a game of
chess. Now any particular game of chess involves a set of specific moves made by
individual players, right? Needless to say here that these sequences of moves differ
from one game to another but, nevertheless, there is a common stratum of rules and
conventions that guide all of these moves, all of the moves in any particular game of
chess. So, for instance in all individual games of chess, the bishop will move in one
particular way which is again very peculiar to the structure of the game of chess,
whereas, the knight will move in another very peculiar format. Now these deep sets of
rules are above and beyond individual games. And indeed all of the rules cannot even
be guessed by observing a single game of chess because all of them are not activated
in any single game of chess. Just like all of the language rules are not activated during
the utterance of any single sentence or even a whole speech. So, when we refer to the
game of chess, we refer to it with a kind of double consciousness, which takes in both
the deep lying and invisible set of rules and regulations that govern the game, and the
individual performance of that game at any given point in time. And when we speak
of language as a structure, we employ a similar kind of duality. Language tool like
chess has a deep lying and invisible layer of rules and regulations, which governs it
structurally and makes specific uses of language possible. This underlying set of rules
and conventions is what Saussure refers to as langue. Parole, on the other hand, is any
concrete language performance at any given point in time which parallels the
sequence of chess moves made by an individual player during a particular game. So,
the sentences that I am uttering now in front of you are examples of parole, whereas,
the set of regulations inherent to the structure of English language which is guiding
my utterances, form the langue. And this langue is not limited only to me as a
speaker, but is in fact, shared by others including you, who is listening to me, and you
who is able to understand me. And it is this shared quality of the langue that makes
individual paroles understandable, meaningful and helps us communicate using them.
So, with this we come to an end of our discussion on Ferdinand de Saussure and his
unique intervention in the study of language. But what was missing crucially missing
from this discussion was literary theory. And till now I have not explained how all of
this language theory can be made applicable to a study of literature. In our next
lecture, we will take up this question of applicability of Saussure and see how his
intervention in the field of language study has opened up a whole new field, a whole
new way of looking at literature. Thank you for listening.

Levi-Strauss

Welcome back all of you to another lecture on Literary Theory. Today we are going
to continue with our discussion on Structuralism. Now as you will remember, in a
previous lecture which was on Ferdinand de Saussure, the linguist, we had looked at
how his interpretation of how language works plays a fundamental role in formulating
the theory of structuralism; however, we had also noted in our previous meeting that,
Saussure’s work is almost entirely a commentary on how language works. And by
itself it does not become apparent how that work on language can be used to
understand and theorize literary narratives. So, for this we will have to look at the
work of theorists, who utilize Saussure’s structuralist argument to construct a
framework of literary theory. And in today’s lecture we are going to do just that by
focusing on the writings of a person called Claude Lévi-Strauss. Now here it is
important to note that Claude Lévi-Strauss, who was Belgium born, French
intellectual was actually not a literary critic. In fact, he was an anthropologist by
profession. He was born in 1908, and he died in 2009. So, he lived a long life, and
during this long life which, in fact, spanned over more than a century, he taught both
in France as well as in America. And indeed it was in America that Lévi-Strauss met
Roman Jakobson you will remember Roman Jakobson from our earlier lectures on
Formalism. So, it is in America that Lévi-Strauss met Roman Jakobson. And
Jakobson deeply influenced his way of thinking, and it was Jakobson’s influence
which made Lévi-Strauss turned towards Structuralism and allowed him to explore
structuralism as a tool for analyzing human society. And indeed both Jakobson and
Lévi-Strauss had fled the continental Europe at the wake of the Second World War.
So, they shared similar kind of history, and America proved for these intellectuals a
safe haven, just like it proved to so many persecuted intellectuals during the second
half of the twentieth century. Which is why, if you note, the America of the mid 20th
century proved to be a wonderful melting pot of ideas and an intellectual powerhouse.
So, a number of intellectuals that you will be encountering in this course actually
drifted to America from continental Europe during the middle of the 20th century.
Anyway, so with the end of the Second World War Lévi-Strauss was back in France
and he became a celebrity anthropologist in France, especially after his publication of
his memoir titled Tristes Tropiques, which documented among other things his travels
in the Amazonian rainforest and his ethnographic study of the native tribes in
Amazonian rainforest. So, that was a very important piece of work that he did and it
became known to the wider public through his memoir Tristes Tropiques though
academic work based on that research was already known within the limited circle of
anthropologist. Anyway, in spite of being an anthropologist, primarily an
anthropologist, Lévi-Strauss is a significant figure for us. He is important from our
perspective as students of literary theory because of two reasons. And the first reason
is that he expanded the insights of Ferdinand de Saussure on language, and gave it a
wider socio-cultural relevance. So, this is the first reason. And the second reason is
that he used Saussure’s insights to produce structuralist analysis of myths, and these
structuralist analyses of myths remain classic examples of how structuralist principles
can be applied to decode narrative structures, which as you will understand is deeply
significant for any student of literature. And indeed in today’s lecture, we are going to
discuss one such classic examples of his analysis of myth by taking up his study of the
Oedipus myth. So, one of the most interesting and far reaching arguments that Lévi-
Strauss forwarded was that the socio-cultural existence of human being is underlined
and supported by a deep seated grammar. And here Lévi-Strauss was borrowing from
Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole. So, as discussed in our previous
lecture Saussure had argued that our concrete language uses are underlined by a set of
rules and regulations, just like the sequence of moves in a particular game of chess; is
underlined by a set of rules that are above and beyond the individual moves made by a
particular player at any given point in time. So, Saussure identified the underlying set
of rules guiding a particular language structure as langue, and the concrete language
uses guided by that structure as parole. Now according to Lévi-Strauss, this langue
and parole distinction can be extended beyond language to encompass human socio-
cultural existence in general. And all major aspects of human socio-cultural life,
according to Lévi-Strauss are guided by underlying sets of regulations, which
structure human experience just like a langue within a language structures paroles. So,
Lévi-Strauss exemplifies this by showing how, for instance, the kinship structure that
locates us within our society are guided by a set of regulations that might be identified
as a kind of underlying social grammar. And this was a very important piece of
argument that Lévi-Strauss forwarded. But this kinship structure aside, Lévi-Strauss is
also known for his analysis of myths. And those analyses are really very important as
far as we are concerned as students of literature. Because according to Lévi-Strauss,
myths are the language which helps humans, or at least those that he identifies as
primitive men, to articulate various aspects of his existence, and the myths provide
him with this possibility of articulating the various aspects of his existence, and by
providing him with this possibility helps him negotiate his being in the world better.
In other words, myths are a kind of language use; myths are paroles, which are like
language underlined by a set of rules, a set of grammar, a kind of deep seated langue.
So, as I said in other words, the underlying grammar that informs the myths also
structures the worldview of human beings and the ways in which the human beings
conceptualized their position and their role within their surrounding environment.
And this is very beautifully put by the scholar Terence Hawkes, who while writing on
Saussure and his analysis of the use of myths by primitive men states, and I quote,
“Lévi-Strauss concern is ultimately with the extent to which the structures of myths
prove actually formative as well as reflective of men’s minds: […]. And so his aim,
he says, is not to show how men think in myths, but how myths think in men,
unbeknown to them.” By the way this book that I have just quoted from which is
Terence Hawkes is Structuralism and Semiotics is a wonderfully well written and
concise account of the structuralist theory. And I would highly recommend this book
to anyone of you who want to understand Structuralism in more details. So, coming
back to the topic of our discussion, the way myths structure the human worldview,
structure the human mind cannot be understood by merely listening to individual
narrations of particular myths, because they are what Saussure would call paroles. To
understand the structuring aspect of myths, we will need to go to the deeper level of
rules which govern these individual narratives, or in other words to the mythic langue
to use Saussure’s language. And Lévi-Strauss shows us the way to approach this level
of deep grammar by his analysis of the Oedipus myth in his essay “The Structural
Study of Myth”. It is a very important essay by Lévi-Strauss. So, to explore Lévi-
Strauss’s structural study we need to begin with a telling of the myth. And in this case
it will be my individual version among the many versions available. So, this telling of
the myth that I am going to perform right now would be a kind of a parole. So, but
like paroles, the distinction shared by these individual narrations among which my
narration will be one particular one are hardly significant here because, our effort is to
go down to the level of langue which is common to all these versions. But
nevertheless one particular version needs to be put on the table so that we are all
familiar with what we are talking about and those of you who are already familiar
with the Oedipus myth, kindly bear with me for a few minutes, as I present the
narrative. And I would do so not only because it will help us understand Lévi-
Strauss’s Structuralist intervention or interpretation of that myth, but would also help
us later when we study Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory because Sigmund
Freud also makes extensive use of this Oedipus myth to come up with this theory of
Oedipal complex.
Oedipus
So now the story; the myth starts with a person called Cadmus, whose sister Europa
was abducted by the god Zeus. Now distraught over the loss of his sister Europa, his
father actually instructed Cadmus and all his other siblings to go out in search of
Europa. So, the whole family therefore, scattered to different places and all of them
were looking for Europa, but none of the brothers including Cadmus could find
Europa. And incidentally when Cadmus during his own search for Europa reached a
place called Delphi, he was told by the Oracle there, [Delphi in ancient Greece was a
famous seat of an Oracle.] he was told by the Oracle in Delphi that the search for
Europa is futile, you stop looking for her, you will never find her, but instead what
you do is you found a new city, because that will be something fruitful. So, Cadmus
heeding to this advice sent his men to bring some pure water. So, that he could
perform a ritual of sacrificing a cow to goddess Athena and start building the new
city. Now his men went out in search of pure water, but they were however killed by a
dragon. And when his men did not return after a very long time Cadmus himself went
in search of them, and he subsequently encountered the dragon confronted it and
killed it. And following the suggestion of the goddess Athena, Cadmus then took out
the teeth of the dragon and planted them, sowed them on the ground. And as a
consequence of his planting of the dragon’s teeth in the ground a number of warriors
came up from the ground who were known as the Spartoi. And they started battling
with each other. And after much fighting only 5 of the Spartoi were left. And they
subjected themselves, they accepted allegiance to Cadmus. And Cadmus with their
help found the city of Thebes. So, this is the first part of the myth, but it then goes on.
Because it is in the family of Cadmus that Oedipus is born, the hero of our myth.
Oedipus’s grandfather, whose name was Labdacus was one of the grandsons of
Cadmus. And the name Labdacus signifies lame, one who has difficulty in walking.
And Labdacus’s son was named Laios, and the meaning of the name Laios, if you
translate it exactly, it means in Greek left-sided, right, and as we shall see these
meanings of the proper names will be very significant in Lévi-Straus’s analysis of the
myth. Now, Laios married a woman called Jocasta. And in due course Laios became
the king of Thebes. Now king Laios was, however, warned by an Oracle that his own
son would kill him, and to save himself from this fate he pinned together the feet of
his newborn son and asked the shepherd to kill the baby by exposing it to the elements
outside the city, by exposing it to rain and sun so, that the baby will die. Now, the
shepherd who took the baby from the king did not kill it, but rather he gave the baby
to a friend who adopted the child as his own son, and who gave him the name of
Oedipus and again this particular proper name has a very significant meaning
significant as far as Lévi-Straus’s analysis is concerned because Oedipus means
someone with a swollen foot. Anyway when Oedipus was a young man, he learned
from the Oracle of Delphi that he would kill his own father and he would marry his
own mother. Now of course, he was very shocked by this Oracle and horrified he fled
away from his home, from the home of his adoptive parents whom he believed to be
his biological father and mother, and he ran away to Thebes. Now, while on his way
he ran into a chariot which was being driven by Laios himself and, of course, Oedipus
did not know Laios and Laios did not know who Oedipus was. And they had an
altercation which led to Oedipus killing Laios. Now, after killing Laios when Oedipus
finally, arrived at Thebes he saw that a sphinx was killing the inhabitants of the city
by asking them different kinds of riddles, and when they failed to answer those riddles
the sphinx would kill them. Now, Oedipus answered the riddles and he got rid of the
sphinx, and became the savior of Thebes. And as a savior of Thebes he was made it is
king. And as the king of Thebes he subsequently married the existing queen who was
Jocasta, who you would remember was Oedipus’s own mother. Now of course,
Oedipus did not know any of this. But it was later revealed to him and this fact that he
had killed his own father and he had married his own mother led to his being expelled
from the city of Thebes. And his place on the throne was taken up by the two sons:
Eteocles and Polynices. And they were the son of Oedipus and Jocasta. Now, the two
brothers after Oedipus was removed from the throne, the 2 brothers fell apart and
during a war Eteocles killed Polynices. But after the death of Polynices, it was
decreed by the king of Thebes that Polynices’s body would not be buried. And anyone
who would bury him, who would perform the rituals and who would properly bury
Polynices, would himself or herself be buried alive. So, that was a royal decree;
however, despite this injunction Polynices’s sister, Antigone buried the body of his
brother. And then later committed suicide herself to escape the fact of being buried
alive.
Lévi-Strauss analysis
Now, the way Lévi-Strauss analyzes this mythic narrative or parole, is to first
segregate it to the level of mythemes, what he calls mythemes. So, what are
mythemes? Mythemes are the constituent units of a myth and as far as the mythic
structure is concerned, they are equivalents of the word sounds which when we were
studying a language structure, [we identified word sounds as the constituent unit], so
just like word sounds are constituent units of a language structure, mytheme is the
constituent unit of a myth. So, what Lévi-Strauss does is he first reduces the Oedipus
myth to the level of individual mythemes, which are it is constituent building blocks.
And he then arranges them in a unique pattern of rows and columns. And you can see
this unique pattern of rows and columns that Lévi-Strauss constructs out of the
mythemes of the Oedipus myth in the slide now. So, let us try and understand this
slide. First of all, as you can see all the units that are listed in this chart are actually
individual mythemes. So, for instance Cadmus seeking his sister Europa is one
mytheme. Cadmus killing the dragon is another mytheme. The Spartoi killing one
another is another mytheme and so on and so forth. So, each a unit that you see in
front of you represents one mytheme. Now Lévi-Strauss says that if you read the
mythemes horizontally by disregarding their division in columns, you will get the
narration of the myth, you will get something like what I just did, the parole the
narration of the myth; however, in order to understand the structuring of this myth
you will need to read it vertically, and pay attention to the columns, instead of reading
it horizontally. Indeed, if you do that you will see that the first two columns in the left
are in an oppositional relationship to each other. And similarly the last two columns in
the right are in an oppositional relationship with each other as well. We will come to
the specificities of these oppositional relationships in a moment. But what I would
like to point out here is that this is the typical way in which a Structuralist critic would
engage with a narrative. So, she would first segregate the narrative into it is
constituent blocks. And then she would try to figure out the oppositional relationships
that exist between them; to find out the grammar of relationship that structures these
constituent parts. So, typically a Structuralist criticism would produce such neat rows
of binary opposites for the analysis as you can see in this slide. But now let us come
back to Lévi-Strauss’ chart again. And if you focus on the two leftmost columns,
column 1 and column 2, you will see that they have something or the other to do with
family. But, whereas, in column 1 we see an over rating of family relations, in column
2, we see it is exact opposite, which is an under rating of family relations. But then
what do I mean by overeating and under rating? So, if you see the mythemes arranged
in column 1, you will see that all of them speak about excessively intimate blood
relationships. And this is for instance expressed in the excessive grief that Cadmus
and his family feels for Europa. It is expressed in the incestuous relationship between
Oedipus and his mother, which is again an excessively deep relationship, or for
instance it is expressed by Antigone’s decision to risk her own life to bury her brother.
Now this is what Lévi-Strauss calls the over rating of blood relations, which ties the
mythemes of column 1 into a single bundle, they make it a single category. Column 2
presents the binary opposite to this. So, the Spartoi killing each other, Oedipus killing
his father, Eteocles killing his brother are all expressions of what Lévi-Strauss calls
the underrating of blood relations. Now let us come to the binary opposition between
column 3 and column 4, which will require some explanation. Now, column 3 refers
to two monsters the first being the dragon and the other being of sphinx. Now both of
them are described by Lévi-Strauss as chthonian creatures, which means that they are
regarded as creatures, who are born out of the earth. Now, in the third column these
creatures are all killed, which signifies a denial of the chthonic existence. Column 4,
on the other hand, obeying the logic of Structuralism and its rule of binary opposition,
upholds the notion of chthonic origin and chthonic existence. Now, this upholding of
the chthonic origin is gathered from the fact that all the characters mentioned in the
4th column be it Labdacos, for instance, or Laios, or Oedipus, all of them have
defective feet or have some problem in walking. Now, this according to Lévi-Strauss
is the typical character that various myths across the world associates with creatures
who are born out of the earth – chthonic creatures. So, we have now in front of us two
sets of binary relations. The first relation represented by column 1 and column 2
presents the binary of overrating of blood relations versus underrating of blood
relations. And the second opposition is represented by column 3 and column 4, which
presents the denial of chthonic existence and the assertion of chthonic existence. And
if we place these 2 sets of oppositional relationships side by side, they would look
something like this as you can see on the slide. Where on the one side we have
overrating of blood relations and beneath it under rating of blood relations and then on
the other side we have denial of chthonic existence and below it assertion of the
chthonic existence. So, this then reduces the mythic narrative in a neat set of structural
opposition. But it does not produce any obvious explanation, as of yet, about how this
underlying mythic structure provides human beings with a tool to negotiate his or her
sense of being in the world or how does it is structure his or her worldview. To
connect this structural opposition underlying the Oedipus myth with a larger socio
cultural content, Lévi-Strauss argues that this underlying language of the Oedipus
myth actually provides a tool to the primitive human being through which he
articulates the conflicting notions of his origin
. So, according to Lévi-Strauss the society which produced this myth, and was in turn
structured by this myth was torn between two notions of human origin; how did
human being came into being? The first notion was that human beings were
autochthonous; which means that they had originally sprung out of the earth, they
were born out of the earth. The second notion of human origin was in fact, validated
by their quotidian existence, quotidian experience of life, which was that human
beings originated from sexual union between male and female within the social
structure of a family. So, this was validated by their quotidian experience. Now, the
deep structural grammar underlying the Oedipus myth does not actually help us to
solve this conflict between the two notions of human origin. What it does it, it gives
us a language through which to coherently articulate this opposition, and place them
side by side for a better understanding. So, in Lévi-Strauss own words, “[The] myth,
[and he is talking about the Oedipus myth here], has to do with the inability for a
culture which holds the belief that mankind is autochthonous, to find a satisfactory
transition between this theory and the knowledge that human beings are actually born
from the union of man and woman. Although the problem obviously cannot be
solved, the Oedipus myth provides a kind of logical tool which relates the original
problem – born from one or born from two? [That is the original problem] – to the
derivative problem: born from different [which means born out of the sexual union of
male and female who are different] or born from the same [which means born from
the same earth]?” So, if you follow this logic, then the first 2 columns of Lévi-Strauss
chart gets translated as follows: Since, column 1 speaks of overrating of blood
relations and the upholding of the family structure, it can be taken to signify an
assertion of the notion of human origin through sexual union. On the contrary, column
2, since it speaks of underrating of blood relations and the family structure, can be
taken to mean a denial of the notion of human origin through sexual union. Similarly,
we can also translate the remaining two columns. Column 3 which speaks of a denial
of existence of the chthonic creatures can be taken to signify a denial of the notion of
human being’s autonomous origin. Whereas column 4 which upholds the chthonic
existence can be taken to signify an assertion of human being’s autochthonous origin
thus, the two sets of opposition can be written as this: Where, on the one side, you
have assertion of birth through sexual union, and below it, the denial of birth through
sexual union. Both of them form binary unit. And this equals on the other side denial
of autochthonous origin of human being and the opposition to this is provided by
assertion of autochthonous origin. And look at the equal sign that I have put between
them, because the assertion of birth through sexual union equals on the other side
denial of autochthonous origin; whereas, if you look at the sections below you will
see that the denial of birth through sexual union equals the assertion of autochthonous
origin. So, for Lévi-Strauss this is ultimately what the Oedipus myth means at a
deeper level. This is the langue of the Oedipus myth, Oedipus narrative and
irrespective of any individual kind of paroles, it is the structural grammar that is
presented by this langue which guides the Oedipus narrative. So, whether you tell it,
whether I tell it, whether someone else tells it and there will be variations individual
variations of these paroles, but it will be this same langue that will guide all that will
structure all of these paroles. So, as you can see here the Structuralist analysis of
narratives depend on identifying the underlying structural principle, the structuring
principle rather, that informs any narrative, be it mythic narrative like the Oedipus
myth, or say for instance an 18th century British poem or a contemporary Indian
novel, this is the way we can approach structurally any narrative. And we will see
how this Structuralist theory of reading and understanding texts gets worked upon by
someone called Roland Barthes. And we will take up Roland Barthes in our next
lecture. Thank you.

Bridging Structuralism and Poststructuralism: Roland Barthes

Hello and welcome back to yet another lecture on Literary Theory. Today we will
move from Structuralism that we have been discussing in our previous lectures to
Post-structuralism and we will make this transition with the help of the writings of
Roland Barthes. And Roland Barthes is especially important as a figure of transition
because he stands like a connecting bridge, whose works allow us to move from the
structuralist insights provided by people like, Saussure, or Lévi-Strauss to Post-
structuralism, which both dismantles the edifices of Structuralism as well as builds
upon them. So, before therefore, we enter into a discussion of the theories proposed
by more strongly identified Post-structuralist figures like Jacques Derrida, for instance
or Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes will provide us with a kind of necessary prelude,
and as usually preludes are, this will be a comparatively short lecture which will be
compensated by a longer one on Derrida. So, Roland Barthes was born in 1915 in
northern France and he graduated from the University of Sorbonne in Paris where he
studied grammar and philology. Now, throughout his career he held a number of
teaching positions, both in France as well as abroad in places like Romania, for
instance, Egypt, and America. Today he is most widely known for his essay which
declared and some would say declared rather scandalously “The Death of the
Author”. And this particular essay was first published in an American journal called
Aspen in 1967 and was made available to the French public at large in a French
version which was published in 1968. So, as you know this dates 1968 is very
important as far as this lecture series is concerned and we have been encountering this
date for quite a number of times in our lecture series. And in that particular year in
1968, Barthes essays radical denunciation of the controlling figure of the author in a
text resonated perfectly well with the fiery student movements that were unfolding in
the streets of Paris and their resentment against authority as such any authority.
Indeed this particular essay evoked two very important responses from Michel
Foucault and Jacques Derrida, who represented in 1968 the face of new generation of
intellectuals in France. Thus, Foucault wrote his seminal piece “What is an Author” in
1969, which many believe was an attempt to critically engage with Barthes
pronouncement of the author’s death. On the other hand Derrida referred back to the
essay “The Death of the Author” when he was writing an homage to Barthes after his
death, which he titled “The Deaths of Roland Barthes”. But, as we will see, the essay
announcing the death of the author forms only a small part of the theoretical work
produced by Barthes. However, before we try to get somewhat more comprehensive
view of Barthes, I would like to refer to a highly publicized debate that took place
between Barthes and a Sorbonne professor by the name of Raymond Picard and I
want to refer to this debate because this gives us an idea about the radically new kind
of thing really that Barthes was doing, the radically new kind of criticism that he was
putting on the table. Now, in 1963 Barthes published a book length study which was
titled in French Sur Racine, which in English literally translates into On Racine. And,
it was a book that explored the 17th century playwright, the works of the 17th century
playwright Jean Racine who is widely regarded as one of the greatest figures of the
French literary tradition. Now, this study reflecting Barthes’ unique variety of
Structuralist criticism was received by the public at large and was recognized as a key
text of what was then looked upon as the changing face of literary criticism and was at
that point identified as new criticism. Now, here please do not confuse this particular
critical approach to literature that was represented by Barthes with the earlier school
of critical thoughts that we have studied as Anglo-American New Criticism because
Barthes criticism builds upon the work of Saussure and Levi Strauss in a way that the
work of critics like Eliot, for instance, or Richards never did. So, the criticism that is
represented by Eliot by Richards, for instance, that is what is now known as New
Criticism, Barthes today would be referred to either as a Structuralist or as a Post-
structuralist, but during the 1960s Structuralism was new, the kind of thing that
Barthes was doing with literary criticism was new and that is why it was referred to
locally as the new criticism. So, please do not confuse between the two. Now, coming
back to Barthes book on Racine, it created such a big uproar in the academic world
that Raymond Picard chose to write a pamphlet against it and he chose to attack that
book as a representative of a new kind of critical development which he considered to
be rather dubious. And therefore, the name that Picard chose for his 1964 pamphlet
was this, “New Criticism or New Fraud?” So, clearly he considered the criticism the
variety of literary criticism that Roland Barthes was doing as a kind of fraud. Barthes
in his turn retorted back by publishing in 1966 a book length defense of his own
position and he titled that defense “Criticism and Truth”. In which he argued, Barthes
argued, that the old criticism against which his new criticism was being compared and
which was represented by figures like Picard for instance was actually not criticism it
was simply a way of judging, passing judgment on a particular set of literary texts for
instance. Now, Barthes on the other hand considered the purpose of criticism to be
different from this old school of judging a literary work and he writes about this when
he states, and I quote: “Books of criticism are born, offering themselves to be read in
the same manner as the strictly literary work, although the status of their authors is
that of critic and not writer. If new criticism has any reality it is there: not in the unity
of its methods and even less in the snobbery which, it is so comfortably asserted,
supports it, but in the solitude of the act of criticism, which is now declared to be a
complete act of writing.” Now Barthes adds that in the change circumstances the
author and the critique are no longer regarded as and I quote, “the superb creator and
the humble servant”, but rather they both have as a common métier the same
language. In other words the critic’s work as well as the author’s work involves
engaging with language as a medium of expression and doing so, by and I quote
again, “perceiving, separating, dividing.” Now these words perceiving separating and
dividing should remind you of the Structuralist technique of approaching a narrative
that we have discussed in our previous lecture on Levi Strauss, but let us for a
moment go back to the long quote that I just read out and which you can now see in
this slide. In this quote note that Barthes talks about critics working as authors. Critics
are like authors in engaging with language and he also says that the works of criticism
are “complete acts of writings” which exist in, what he calls, “solitude” in isolation
and demands attention above and beyond the literary work they might be commenting
upon. So, the stress on language here shows that we are dealing with the same long
tradition and criticism that was initiated by the linguistic turn inaugurated at the
beginning of the 20th century. We have already talked about this linguistic turn. So,
this should be a familiar idea to you. But the stress on completeness and on solitude
speaks of something more. It tells us that by the 1960s especially in Paris, there was a
concerted effort by intellectuals like Barthes to cut free criticism from the role of
simply judging or explicating literary texts. Critics were no longer to be servants to
the authors, but they were to be authors themselves or the equivalent of authors. Now
since within the discipline of English literary studies we identify theory precisely with
these intellectual currents that emerged in France during the 1960s and that then went
on to create a wide network of legacy bearers, we often end up treating theory as
separate from literature or as a parallel tradition almost. And I have already expressed
my views about this, about treating theory as separate or as equivalent or as parallel to
literature, in my introductory lecture in this series. But here I just wanted to point out
that what might have been one of the sources of this thinking that theory is a field of
study that is independent of literature can be found in the writings of Roland Barthes.
But now let us come to the actual literary criticism done by Barthes which earned him
such resentment of people like Picard. As I have suggested before, his criticism,
Barthes criticism, was primarily built upon the Structuralist insights provided by
Saussure and Levi Strauss and as far as the Structuralist technique of reading a
narrative is concerned, Barthes did not make any major innovations. However the
important thing that Barthes did was that he revealed how the Structuralist reading
could have political implications and could be used to critique the existing power
structure. To understand this let us go back to one of the very important insights
provided by Saussure because it is on that insight that Barthes then builds his version
of criticism which has this political angle that I want to show you. So, the insight that
I am talking about is that signifiers and signifieds are connected only randomly. So, if
you go back to our Saussure lecture, you will see that we have talked about how
signifiers and signifieds, the word sound tree and the thing with a wooden trunk and
leafy appendages, are randomly connected together there is no inherent connection
between the two. And indeed the meaning making ability of a particular signifier or a
constituent unit within any structure is not gained, according to Saussure, by being
integrally connected to a content outside the structure. So, this is familiar grounds to
you. Rather Saussure argues that it gains meaning through the relationship of
difference that it shares with other constituent parts within the structure. Now for
Saussure this was true only of linguistic structures, but as Levi Strauss had shown the
Structuralist way of thinking about the meaning making process can be extended to
other things like, for instance, the kinship structure of a society or how mythic
narratives operate and we have seen that in our lecture on Levi Strauss and our
analysis of the oedipal myth. Now, the Structuralist mode of reading can be extended
even further actually to understand how meaning is generated in other more mundane
situations, like for instance driving down the road. While driving down or crossing for
instance, if we see that the traffic sign is red we stop our cars or at least we should
stop our cars, and we do that because we interpret the red sign, the red light that is
glowing in the crossing, to be a halt sign. On the other hand if we see the green light,
then we continue to drive because we read the green sign, the green light, as a signal
that the road is clear for movement. Now the reason why we interpret red as halt and
green as go is not because there is any natural or inherent relationship between these
color signals and the ideas of halting or going. Rather, green and red mean what they
do within the structure of the traffic sign through their mutual relationship of
difference and this will mean any sign system that surrounds us starting from the
rudimentary system of traffic signals to the more sophisticated sign system of a
literary language all relate to external world through convention. So, it is convention
to stop to read the red light as telling us to stop and it is convention to read the green
light as telling us to go and these two signals connect with the external world, these
two signifiers connect with the external world, merely through a habitual relationship
of certain ideas with them. But if you look at conventions then you will realize that
conventions are tentative. Since they are conventions that exist within a particular
social, cultural, and political milieu, yet, each particular socio political order makes it
appear that the conventions through which meanings of any sign system is interpreted
within it is universal, and eternal, and perfectly natural. Yet, this is clearly not so
because we can imagine very well an order, social order, where the meaning of the
red and the green signal might be switched. They will still share an oppositional
relationship between them, but we might start interpreting through convention red
signal as go and green signal as halt. Now this was precisely the insight that Barthes
brought to bear upon Structuralism. The structure of meaning making at any given
point in time tended to naturalize the conventions arising out of the world view of a
particular socio political dispensation. This is precisely what Barthes showed in his
book Mythologies which is a fascinating collection of Structuralist reading of things
ranging from wrestling matches to cinematic representations to show of striptease. In
this book Barthes shows how the meaning of things that surrounded people in the
France of 1950s were not natural or universal or eternal, but were rather meanings
generated out of the bourgeois conventions. Since, it was a bourgeoisie that
represented the major socio-political dispensation within a capitalist world. The way
in which Barthes uses his criticism to produce a commentary on the political status
quo already starts taking us out of the confines of structuralism. The way he points out
that signifiers connect to the outside world of signified through conventions which are
tentative and which are related to particular social political and economic milieus is
already something that goes beyond what pure Structuralism told us. Pure
Structuralism that we encountered in Saussure, for instance, and in Levi Strauss; in
Saussure, for instance, there is no political dimension and no political dimension is
also very clearly identifiable say, for instance, in Levi Strauss’ Structuralist analysis
of myths or kinship for that matter. And Barthes starts bringing us closer to what we
now refer to as Post-structuralism. So, here with Barthes we start our journey from
Structuralism and this additional political dimension already brings us out of
Structuralism and on to Post-structuralism, leads us on to Post-structuralism, and
indeed we will see in our future lectures how this exploration of the element of
political power goes on to become a powerful concern in the Post-structuralist
criticism of someone like Michel Foucault for instance. But Barthes writings not only
prefigured the Post-structuralist position of Foucault, but also prefigured some of the
thought processes that would underline the kind of Post-structuralist criticism that
would be inaugurated by someone like Jacques Derrida and this Derridean kind of
Post-structuralism is best anticipated by Barthes in his famous essay “The Death of
the Author”. So, the first question that we need to ask with regards to this essay is,
why does Barthes announce that the author is dead? Which, as I said, some would
regard to be a very scandalous announcement indeed! So, when we talk of an author
we usually think of a real living individual, who stands prior to a particular text and
who stands before a particular text originates. And he helps in creating that particular
text by pouring his own emotions, his own sensibilities, and his own ideas into it. That
is how we usually consider the relationship between a text and its author. So, in other
words the text is regarded as an expression of the author’s self and of his intention.
Therefore, the author is evoked as the ultimate arbiter of what a text actually means
because he is regarded as the generator and controller of meaning within the text that
he has written. Now according to Barthes the author is not a reality, rather it is a
bourgeois fiction and just like the other bourgeois fiction that he exposed in his book
Mythologies, the fiction of the author too presents itself as not only real, but also as
natural universal and eternal. So, for instance those of us who are conditioned by the
capitalist world order, all of us think of texts that surround us as created by one author
or the other and that appears to us as a most natural way of thinking about a text and
we believe that this is how people have been thinking about texts throughout the
history of the world. Now, the reason why Barthes believes that the presence of a real
life author behind the text as a final arbiter of meaning is an illusion is because like a
true Structuralist he considers meaning to be the product of the internal relationships
of difference that signifiers have with each other. In other words meaning cannot be
poured into a text which is ultimately a collection of signifiers from outside by an
author. There was the author necessarily stands outside the text or at least author as
we usually understand him, a real life individual. Now a text therefore, cannot be the
expression of someone’s personality why because that someone is always outside the
meaning making process of a language structure. Barthes by pointing this out declares
that the death of the author figure is actually not really the death, but actually the
recognition of the fact that author is a fiction. So, what Barthes is doing is he is really
announcing the death of what was always a fiction, a bourgeois fiction which was
only conceived or mistaken as reality. But does this mean that Barthes believes that
texts get produced by themselves without any human agency? Do they fall from sky
or can we say that they are generated by a machine randomly? No that would of
course, be a very ridiculous assumption and indeed Barthes does state that, texts are
produced by writers and by writers we mean individual human beings. But, what
Barthes emphasizes is that this writer that he is talking about cannot be mistaken for
an author. Why? Because a writer does not or rather cannot pour his own ideas and
sensibilities within a text. But can only act as a kind of dictionary a kind of repository
of a language that is always already present before that writer and it is from that
language that he cites to produce a text, it is from that dictionary that he cites to
produce a text. In Barthes own words, “Succeeding the Author, the writer no longer
contains within himself passions, humors, sentiments, impressions, but that enormous
dictionary, from which he derives a writing.” So, rather than defining a text as the
expression of the inner self of an author, Barthes in his essay defines it, and I quote as,
“a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources of culture”. And, this is
because the writer cannot, but use pieces of a language associated with a particular
culture through convention that had already been used and already been reused by
others. Writer or the process of writing, for instance, is therefore, not only original but
a series of citations which recycles the same signifiers that has already been used
before. So, with Barthes nullifying the presence of an author behind the text, we
arrive at the verge of Derridean Post-structuralism and it is this Derridean Post-
structuralism that we will take up in our next lecture. Thank you.

Poststructuralism:Jacques Derrida
Hello and welcome back to another lecture in this series on Literary Theory. Now as
you will remember in our previous lecture we were discussing the writings of Roland
Barthes and we were discussing Roland Barthes as a kind of figure who bridges
Structuralism with the Post-Structuralist ideas of people like Jacques Derrida and
Michel Foucault, who as I mentioned were among the brightest intellectuals
associated with the anti authoritarian movements of the 1960s. And in this lecture we
will take up for discussion the theoretical concepts proposed by Derrida before
moving on to Foucault in our next lecture. So, to begin with Derrida, he was born in
1930 and he died in 2004 and he was born in Algeria. But he did his higher studies in
Paris, now it is important that you note the place of birth here which is Algeria and
then again when we later discuss Louis Althusser, for instance another major French
intellectual, we will again see that Louis Althusser is born in Algeria, and Algeria as
you know was a French colony. So, when we do a Postcolonial theory, then you will
understand that there is a very interesting metropolis-periphery dynamics going on
here, where some of the major French intellectuals coming not from France itself, but
being born in Algeria the periphery of the French empire and then gradually moving
to Paris and becoming major figures of the French intellectual world, so that in itself
is very interesting. Anyway as I said Derrida was born in Algeria, but he came to
Paris where he did his higher studies and as a student there he had as his peers figures
like Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser. Also, Derrida who is today primarily
known for his concept of deconstruction, became a global phenomenon in 1966, the
year when he delivered a very important lecture in John Hopkins University in
America, titled “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of Humanities”, or human
sciences. Subsequently, his seminal text titled Of Grammatology was published in the
year 1967 and this cemented his reputation as one of the foremost thinkers of the 20th
century. Now, Derrida’s career is marked by a mind boggling eclecticism really,
because, we find Derrida writing extensively on the works of people as different as
Plato, Husserl, Heidegger, Marx, Saussure, Austen, Emmanuel Levinas, Roland
Barthes. Also, I mentioned one text that Derrida wrote on Barthes and this list of
people that Derrida engaged with, this list of intellectuals, can really go on and on it is
a very long list. But apart from this Derrida’s eclecticism and the variety in Derrida’s
work is also characterized by the profusion of very innovative ideas that he came up
with during his career, which involved ideas like deconstruction, for instance,
metaphysics of presence, différance, trace, pharmakon, phallogocentrism, and so on
and so forth. But though all of this is very exciting it is precisely this eclecticism and
this wide variety which poses a problem when we try and learn Derrida within the
short span of a single lecture and this problem is further compounded in a course on
literary theory because most of Derrida’s ideas are rooted within the context of
Western philosophy and therefore it is difficult to seamlessly modify and translate
these concepts and make them tools of literary theory. In any case, my effort to
discuss Derrida would not be an attempt to understand his ideas in any exhaustive or
very comprehensive manner in the context of Western philosophy which is its original
context.
Rather, my effort would be to explore how Derrida’s concepts transformed the field of
Structuralist literary theory with which we are now familiar and which continued to
exert influence till 1960s, if not even later. So, Derrida’s intervention completely
changed this field of Structuralist literary criticism and what we are going to do is we
are going to study this change. So, to start with, let us again look at the meaning
making process of a text. Now, as we just discussed the concept of an author standing
outside the text and yet guiding the meaning of the text, remains a widespread idea;
we discussed this when we were doing Structuralism and this also appears to be the
most commonsensical way of approaching a text, especially by a non-specialist who
looks at it from outside the discipline of literary theory in literary studies. Now,
Derrida describes such a concept of an external source of meaning making as a
transcendental signified. So, according to him such an idea of a transcendental
signified or external authority establishing the meaning of the text be it an author or
be it god himself, because god is also often attributed in various cases to be the real
author of certain texts. So, these transcendental signifieds create an illusion that
language structure has a center which fixes the meaning of all it is constituent parts.
Now if we follow Saussure’s argument as a Derrida does till a certain point, we will
know that meaning is generated from within the language structure or the langue that
underlines the specific paroles of a text. In other words meaning cannot be poured
into a text or fixed in a text by an outside entity like an author for instance . This leads
Derrida to conceive of language as a structure without any transcendent center and
according to Derrida this idea of a central less structure sets in motion and indefinite
play of meaning this is what Derrida describes through the term différance. Which he
created by fusing together the sense of two French words, one meaning to differ and
the other meaning to defer. Now since this might sound slightly complicated, we will
try and proceed very slowly here. So, to repeat myself according to Saussure, a
signifier gains it is meaning through it is relation of différance with other signifiers
say there is a signifier and within a language structure if we were to study it is
meaning applying Saussure’s theory, we will then have to explore it is oppositional
relationship with another signifier, let us say that this is signifier b, But what is
important to note here is the signifier b in itself is again not an entity with a fixed
meaning, it too derives it is meaning from the differance that it shares with let us say
signifier c which in turn is related in opposition to say signifier d, which again gives
way to signifier e, f, g and so on ad infinitum. Therefore, the meaning of a signifier
which is born out of differance is eternally deferred or eternally delayed within a
language structure and all we do is we keep moving across a chain of signifiers or
constituent elements of a language structure. So now, that this is clear and I hope that
this should be clear by now because, this is actually a reiteration of what we have
already done in our previous lectures on Structuralism. So, if this is clear I do not
think we will have any problem understanding Derrida’s explanation of how
différance works and I am quoting from Derrida here, the book that I am quoting from
is titled Positions. This is what Derrida writes: “The play of differances supposes in
effect synthesis and referrals which forbid at any moment or in any sense that a
simple element be present in and of itself referring only to itself, whether in the order
of spoken or written discourse no element can function as a sign without referring to
another element which itself is not simply present. This interweaving results in each
element being constituted on the basis of the trace within it of the other elements of
the chain or system, this interweaving this textile is the text produced only in the
transformation of another text. Nothing, neither among the elements nor within the
system is anywhere ever simply present or absent; there are only everywhere
differances and traces of traces.” So, this passage is basically again a reiteration of
the Structuralist notion, that the constituent part of a structure is not simply a self-
contained element within itself. But rather it derives it is identity from other elements
through a relationship of differance. But the notion of traces that Derrida introduces
here takes the argument beyond the ambit of Structuralism. So let us try and
understand what the concept of traces mean here. Now, in itself it is actually a very
simple notion, what Derrida is saying here is that because, each element gains its
identity with reference to other elements within a structure, it carries a spectral or a
ghost-like presence of all of those other elements which help define it is identity. This
ghost-like presence is what Derrida calls traces; so for instance since every signifier is
basically constituted of the differance it shares with other signifiers, it is informed
through and through by traces of these other signifiers, this is why Derrida says in that
quote there are only everywhere differances and traces of traces. So, how does all of
this make Derrida a Post-Structuralist, well in the Structuralist scheme of things
meaning was not eternally deferred because, signifiers were made sense of by
arranging them in binary opposites, like for instance, man woman, or a light dark, or
reason madness, and so on. The first term, if you notice carefully in each of these
binaries that I just mentioned, represent what Derrida calls presence and the second
term in each of these binaries represent a corruption or distortion or lack of this
presence. So, if light represents the presence, darkness simply represents it is lack, if
reason represents a presence, then madness represents it is corruption. If you think
back at our discussion of Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of the Oedipus myth then you will
remember that there too we had encountered two sets of binaries: one dealing with
sexual reproduction within the family and the other with autochthony and there in
each of the binaries the first term represented the assertion of a presence, whereas, the
second term represented its denial, or it is absence, or lack. Now, in this scheme of
things the terms representing presence are treated as self-contained elements, which
signifies an immutable identity. It is only the second term which represents an identity
made of negative traces of the first term and this prioritization of presence is what
Derrida calls the metaphysics of presence. Now what Derrida argues here is that
though Saussure came up with the radical idea, that meaning is not made of positive
identities, but only of differances and negative relations he did not carry it through.
Thus in the kind of Structuralism that we find inaugurated by Saussure, we will find
the notion of certain terms signifying different forms of presences are treated as
immutable and self-contained. For Derrida, on the other, hand there is no such
presence signified by any element within a structure or more specifically by a
signifier within a language system, this is because within a structure which is guided
strictly by the rule of differance there can be no positive presence. And as we have
already mentioned that any presence from outside the structure cannot influence the
meaning making process within it. Therefore, according to Derrida, all signifiers are
made of differances and on a deep inspection reveals that they are constituted not of
any positive presence, but only of shadowy traces of other signifiers. This notion of
every signifier dissolving into traces of it is differances with other signifiers, has had a
profound impact on how Derrida approaches the meaning making process of a text.
For Derrida the signifiers within a text, does not yield any sharp or specific meaning,
but rather leads the reader to what he calls an aporia. And aporia is a Greek term
which means impasse or a lack of resolution. So, a Derridean reading of a text
typically opens up an impasse in terms of meaning and within the context of literary
criticism this particular way of approaching a text is what is identified as
deconstruction. But you may think at this point that literary criticism should be all
about decoding meaning, and therefore, to adopt a reading strategy which you know
ends up in an impasse or meaninglessness makes absolutely no sense at all. My
answer to you at this point would be that the aporia that deconstruction opens up is
not exactly a dead zone of meaninglessness, on the contrary, the impasse leads us to a
deeper appreciation of the complex relationship that both underlines as well as
undermines the meaning making process. Let me try and explain this to you with the
help of an example which will also clarify the concept of deconstruction as a reading
strategy. Now, the example that I want to explore here is the man/woman binary, now
if we were to approach this binary from the Structuralist perspective then we will get
a binary that is sorted into an opposition between presence and absence. The man will
represent the presence and the woman will represent the absence or the site of lack,
more specifically, the mark of the presence that a man would be seen as bearing is his
protruding genital which is lacked by a woman. Now here, it is important to note, that
within the patriarchal society a man’s genital or phallus is of tremendous symbolic
significance and therefore as we shall see when we do psychoanalytic criticism the
structure of a patriarchal society can be described as a phallocentric structure. But,
coming back to the man/woman binary; the presence of the phallus makes man the
immutable term in the equation, in the binary, and this term acts as the origin that
generates the identity of the second term that is the woman. So, man defines woman
through negation, woman is a distorted man from this perspective, woman is a
distorted man or a non-man. In fact, this positing of man as the origin and then
deriving woman from this concept of man as it is negation is perfectly illustrated in
the biblical myth of Adam and Eve. Where Eve the first woman is both born out of
the first man Adam and is at the same time radically different from him. So, the term
woman is not self contained and neither is it an immutable signifier, but rather on
inspection it gives way to the trace of another signifier, which is the signifier man and
it is the signifier man which constructs the signifier woman differentially, which gives
the signifier woman its meaning. However in the process of sexual procreation man is
always invariably born of a woman and this allows us to think of the notion of origin
and presence within the man/woman equation differently; that is to say that one can
argue that the presence is actually marked by the woman’s womb which is also the
source of origin. In this argument the concept of the man therefore both originates
from woman and represents the lack of presence that the woman signifies. In other
words man signifies the non woman,
now what deconstruction tells us to do is not to reject one interpretation of the man
woman binary and pick the other, rather it tells us to place these two opposite ways in
which one can generate meaning from the man/woman equation one over the other
and this leads us to the following points. The first point is that since both the terms
man and woman can be constructed as terms denoting presence, we need to be
skeptical about the notion of this presence as immutable or as natural. Because there
is nothing natural about the notion of presence here, otherwise there could not have
been two contradictory ways of thinking about the presence. We therefore, need to
move away from interpreting the binary in terms of presence versus absence. The
second point that we have here is that in place of a presence versus absence binary,
what we encounter in the man woman equation is what Derrida would call différance,
which means each of the term is haunted by the spectral absence of the other term. So,
whenever we try to scrutinize either the term man or the term woman they dissolve
into traces of other terms which define them through differance. Now, this play, and
this is the third point, this play of differance results in a deferral of meaning, as
neither the term man nor the term woman possess a definitive identity. Rather we are
regularly and incessantly pointed towards the absent other, this is how we arrived at
the deconstructive impasse or aporia. So, now that we have become familiar with how
the process of deconstruction operates, let us read from Derrida a little and though he
is usually held to be a difficult philosopher. I think we have now reached a stage
where we will not have any problem in understanding at least the general drift of his
argument. So, in the book Positions from which I quoted earlier, Derrida explains that
the general strategy of deconstruction firstly involves a realization that when we are
confronted with the Structuralist binaries in the form of man/woman, or light/dark, or
reason/madness we are not dealing with peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis but rather
with a violent hierarchy, one of the two terms governs the other or has the upper hand,
to deconstruct the opposition first of all is to overturn the hierarchy at a given
moment. So, for instance if we look at the example of the man/woman binary that we
have been discussing, we will have to start by realizing that within a specific socio-
political context within which this binary operates, for instance, the context of
patriarchy. The two terms are not treated as equals; the binary involves what Derrida
calls a violent hierarchy, where man has an upper hand over woman. Deconstruction
would start with overturning this hierarchy. But how do we do that? Derrida writes
that and I quote, “we must proceed using a double gesture, according to a unity that is
both systemic and in and of itself divided, a double writing, that is, a writing that is in
and of itself multiple”. So, if we go back to our own effort at deconstructing the man
woman binary, we can identify this double gesture or double writing in the two
narratives that we had set forth. One centered on man as the origin bearing the mark
of presence in the form of the phallus and the other centered on woman as the origin
bearing the mark of presence in the form of the womb. These narratives have
overlapped to form a sort of doubly inscribed text, where the latter women-centric
layer of writing threatens to overturn or cancel out the meaning of the other layer of
writing which is centered on man. Now here Derrida raises an interesting point and I
quote from Derrida where he makes this point: “To overlook this phase of overturning
is to forget the conflictual and subordinating structure of opposition. Therefore, one
might proceed too quickly to a neutralization that in practice would leave the previous
field untouched leaving one no hold on the previous opposition, thereby preventing
any means of intervening in the field effectively.” When Derrida is saying this what
he is saying is that it might be possible to just move away from the hierarchical
boundary, by saying that both the terms are derivative of one another and are
therefore of equal valence. This will neutralize the hierarchy without our needing to
overturn the binary first, that is to say the neutralization of the hierarchical
man/woman binary may be achieved without creating a woman centric elaboration of
the binary first. But, according to Derrida, to omit the phase of overturning the binary
is to actually leave the hierarchical politics that informs that binary unrecognized; it is
only by creating a reverse hierarchy that one can effectively intervene into the power
equation underlining the structuring of say the man/woman binary. But this reversing
of the hierarchy as we will have to remember, is only a phase in the strategy of
deconstruction as Derrida declares in his book Margins of Philosophy and I quote:
“Deconstruction does not consist in passing from one concept to another, but in
overturning and displacing a conceptual order”. [“[o]verturning and displacing a
conceptual order”, this is very important.] This is to say that the strategy of
deconstruction is not just the shifting away from a man-centric binary to a woman-
centric binary, the task as mentioned earlier is to proceed through a double gesture
and a double writing, where the man-centered understanding of the binary is
juxtaposed or overlaid by the woman-centered understanding of the binary. This will
result in not just an overturning of the specific binary, but indeed an overturning or
displacement of the entire conceptual order which the binary upholds or within which
the binary operates. So, for instance, in case of our example which is the man/woman
binary, this will entail an overturning of the entire conceptual order of patriarchy.
Thus, when we apply that deconstructive strategy to the man/woman binary, we do
not simply arrive at a meaning that is different from the one that is conventional,
rather we arrive at an aporia which represents not exactly meaninglessness, but rather
the inability of the conceptual structure to operate and produce a definitive version of
meaning. But then the question is how is deconstruction relevant as a strategy of
reading literature? So, to explore the significance that deconstruction might have as a
reading strategy let us look at Shakespeare’s Macbeth and we will look at it through
this Derridean lens of deconstruction. Now, as most of you will know the theme of
gender identity is very strong in Macbeth and the twin protagonists of the play
Macbeth and lady Macbeth operate within a conceptual order, where the
understanding of the man/woman binary is heavily centered on the term man. Thus
right from the first act in the play we see Macbeth as well as Lady Macbeth trying to
align, their identities with notions of manliness. Thus Lady Macbeth, for instance,
urges her husband to kill the old king Duncan and adds and I quote from the play,
“when you durst do it then you are a man”. Macbeth in his turn asserts his masculinity
by accepting to wield the dagger that appears to him in a state of hallucination
hovering in front like a phallic symbol. This prioritizing of manliness establishes as
Derrida would say a violent hierarchy where the notion of womanhood exists as a
suppressed other. And this violence of suppression is evident, for instance, in the
speech by lady Macbeth, where she evokes the dark forces to undo her womanly
identity, and again I quote these are very famous words from the play uttered by lady
Macbeth, “Come you spirits,/ That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, […]/
Come to my woman’s breasts,/ And take my milk for gall”. A careful reading of the
play, however, shows that one can read into it an understanding of the gender theme
that radically reverses the hierarchy between the terms man and woman. So, for
instance one recurring concern in the play, is the idea of bearing child versus
childlessness. The power that the patriarchal order of Macbeth exercises through
phallic symbols of violence like daggers knives and swords is countered by the power
of the womb to bear children. Thus Macbeth’s masculine power is reduced to nothing
in absence of children, as he feels his whole life transformed into what he calls, “[A]
tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing”. Indeed Banquo, in
spite of meeting a gruesome death, finally wins over Macbeth because his legacy is
carried forward by his son, while Macbeth bears on his head the burden of a fruitless
crown, and again I quote from the play: . “Upon my head they placed a fruitless
crown,/ And put a barren scepter in my gripe,/ Thence to be wrench’d with an
unlineal hand,/ No son of mine succeeding”. In this particular reading of the play, the
womb is seen to triumph over the phallus thereby reversing the hierarchy in the
man/woman binary. But as Derrida has pointed out this reversing of the hierarchy is
only a phase, in the entire strategy of deconstruction; this reversal does not end the
deconstructive reading of Macbeth because to quote Derrida: “Deconstruction does
not consist in passing from one concept to another, but in overturning and displacing a
conceptual order”. Indeed in the play it is the witches, who comprehensively
dismantles the socio-political milieu of the patriarchal order and these are precisely
the characters, who are presented as the incarnations of the double gesture or the
double writing by which man/woman binary are deconstructed and the man-centric
narrative is overwritten by the woman-centric narrative, and these incarnate forms of
the deconstructive double gestures create an inability to interpret their gender identity
from within the conventional conceptual order of patriarchy. And this is borne out, for
instance, by Banquo’s confusion when he meets them and I quote from the play: “you
should be women,/ And yet your beards forbid me to interpret/ That you are so”. And
so here we encounter that final phase of deconstruction, a fruitful aporia, that helps us
to go beyond the conventionality of the meaning making process and see through their
claims of eternity and universality. However, what we will have to understand here is
that this aporia is not a reduction of meaning into nonsense; the deconstructive aporia
is a highly potent political tool which is used to dislodge and overturn existing
conceptual orders and their meaning making processes. Thus, for instance, it can be
used to dismantle conceptual regimes like patriarchy or racism, where the meaning
making process proceeds by creating violent hierarchies of man over woman or of
white over black. It is, therefore, no wonder that Postcolonial critics like Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak would make use of Derrida to think through colonialism and to
dismantle its myths of racial and gender hierarchies. So, as you can see, Post-
Structuralism is not a journey into nihilism. Both in Barthes and now also in Derrida
you have witnessed the political potential of Post-Structuralism, its potential to
intervene and to dismantle the legitimacy of violent and coercive concepts, coercive
conceptual regimes. This political nature of Post-Structuralism is however most
evident in the writings of Michel Foucault and it is to these writings that we will turn
in our next lecture. Thank you.

Post-structuralist Michel Foucault

Hello and welcome back to yet another lecture on Literary Theory. And today we
will be continuing with our discussion on Post-structuralism. And we will be doing so
by focusing on the writings of Michel Foucault. Now we have already seen how the
linguistic turn by the time it reaches Post-structuralist scholars, like Roland Barthes,
starts getting a political tone, a political nuance, and we also found this political
nuance informing Derrida’s strategy of deconstruction for instance. But the political
texture of language use was perhaps best explored by Michel Foucault. And it was
best exemplified by Michel Foucault’s analysis of discourse. It is this concept of
discourse that will form our central preoccupation in today’s lecture, but before we
move on to the concept of discourse and its relation to power politics let us familiarize
ourselves with some biographical details about Foucault. Foucault was born in 1926
in Poitiers, in France, mainland France and he was educated in such prestigious
institutes of higher education in Paris like the Normale Supérieure"École Normale
Supérieure and the University of Sorbonne. He held several diplomatic posts across
the world before returning to academics as a teacher and his longest association as a
professor was with the Collège de France where he taught History of Systems of
Thought. Now, Foucault was also sadly one of the earliest victims of AIDS in France
and died in 1984 at the age of fifty-seven. His book, the Folie et Déraison, whose title
has actually been translated variously in English as The History of Madness or as
Madness and Civilization, established Foucault’s reputation as one of the major
intellectuals in the early 1960s, and this reputation grew with almost every subsequent
publication like, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Discourse, The Archaeology of
Knowledge, Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality and, these are, the titles
that I just mentioned, these are just some of the more well-known works which were
published during his lifetime. Indeed a large collection of his lectures delivered in
Collège de France are still in the process of being compiled and published in the form
of a series, and therefore, for the academic world at large, Foucault’s writings still
remained living archive. Like his contemporary Jacques Derrida, Foucault is a
wonderfully eclectic scholar. If you read his writings, you will be amazed by the kind
of eclecticism, the kind of variety that you find there, and like Derrida he too put
forward a number of noble ideas which are now in use in various different academic
fields like, philosophy, literary studies, history of sciences, sociology, and so on and
so forth. But then, like in our lecture on Derrida, we would not try to arrive at a
comprehensive picture of all of these ideas. Because given the time restriction, the
result will only be a superficial understanding of Foucault. What we would do is we
would rather approach Foucault as a Post-structuralist; which means that we will
primarily focus on those aspects of Foucault, which directly relates to the discussion
on things like the author, text, and language which we had initiated with our lecture
on Ferdinand de Saussure. I think the best way to see how Foucault built on the
Structuralist/Post-structuralist tradition while simultaneously critiquing it is to start
with his 1969 essay, titled “What is an author?” Now, if you remember our lecture on
Barthes, you will know that Barthes had famously announced the death of the author
as a subject who stands outside the text and pours meaning into it. Because for
Barthes who was working along the lines of Structuralism, language that formed a
text was a self-contained structure whose meaning making process depended upon the
internal relations of its constituent parts. The author as far as Barthes is concerned is a
bourgeois fiction. And Derrida too, as we saw in our previous lecture, worked with
the assumption that there is no external author figure, who acts as a transcendental
signified, and who fixes the meaning within the language of a text while himself
remaining above and beyond the text. And indeed Derrida argued that the absence of
such an author figure of such a transcendental signified who can fix the meaning of
signifiers within a text actually results in an interminable interplay of meanings,
which he referred through the novel concept of différance. Now, Foucault, in his turn,
approaches the issue of author and authorship through a completely different lens,
through a completely different question that he poses. And the question is that even if
we agree that the author as a subject is merely a bourgeois fiction, then why is such a
fiction necessary? In other words, if the author is required as a concept within certain
specific socio-cultural and political milieus, then what guides that requirement, even
more simply put, why do we need the author? Foucault answers this question by first
noting the fact that the name of the author represents a special kind of a proper noun
which incorporates two different functions. The first function is of designation, and
the second function is of description. So, the function of designation, for instance, is
something that the author’s name shares with any other proper name. For instance, my
name is Sayan. And whenever that name is uttered, it amounts to a gesture; it amounts
to a pointing of finger towards me, the human subject right. Similarly, if I say William
Shakespeare, that name too will function as a gesture which points to a specific
human subject who existed as a real historical figure at a particular time and a
particular place; when people like Barthes and Derrida questioned the relationship
between the author and the text, what they were doing was that they were questioning
the existence, or I should say the relevance of this real historical figure, as far as the
meaning making process of the text is concerned. But even if we set this designative
function of the author’s name aside, we are faced as Foucault shows us with the idea
of author as a descriptive category. In other words, if we refer to the author William
Shakespeare for instance what we have in mind is not simply the identity of a person,
but also a description of a particular body of writing. This understanding of the author
William Shakespeare as a descriptive category, for instance, will change if we come
to know that the sonnets that goes under the authorship of Shakespeare, the cluster of
sonnets which are attributed to Shakespeare, are actually poems written by someone
else. And in that case even if the real historical person designated by the name of
William Shakespeare remains the same, our understanding of the author William
Shakespeare is bound to change. So, even if we do not concern ourselves with the
presence of a real historical person standing prior to the text and claiming to be it is
author, Foucault argues that we are nevertheless left with this idea of author as a
descriptive category, and I quote from Foucault: “Marking of the edges of the text,
revealing, or at least characterizing, its mood of being.” Now this descriptive aspect
of the author is, therefore, distinct from an independent of the idea of author as a
subject. And to make this distinction clear Foucault refers to this descriptive aspect of
authorship as the author function. Now note here that whereas, the author as a human
subject stands outside the language or discourse of his text, the author function is
integral to the textual discourse, and actually emerges from within it. To understand
this let us understand some of the features that Foucault ascribes to the author
function; when we approach the name of William Shakespeare as an author function
for instance, what it allows us to do is to identify a group of text as a single coherent
and connected category. And it does so in at least four different ways. For instance, if
we were to judge whether a particular piece of writing belongs to the category of
Shakespeare’s work or not, we try and see whether it is literary value matches with
the other works that are known or that are ascribed traditionally to Shakespeare. And
in this the assumption is that the name Shakespeare represents a constant level of
literary value. We also see if the particular piece of writing under consideration
coheres with the doctrines professed in the writings that are otherwise attributed to
Shakespeare or not. And in this we assume that the name of the author, in this case
Shakespeare, represents a field of conceptual or theoretical coherence. Thirdly, we
also note while judging whether a piece can be ascribed to Shakespeare or not,
whether it matches with the stylistic conventions that are otherwise followed in
Shakespearean works. And here our assumption is that the name of the author
signifies a stylistic unity. And finally, we also see if the piece that we are considering
falls within the time span in which other Shakespearean works were produced. And
here the assumption is that the name of the author signifies a particular time period,
which brackets a specific set of social, political, and economic events. And therefore,
the work needs to either reflect them or be informed by those events. So, as you can
see the author function provides a way of clubbing together a set of texts and as such
depends on the features of the discourse present within these texts. So now, that we
have identified Foucault’s author as author function rather than a human subject, let
us return to the original question: Why do we need the author? And here of course, by
author I mean author function. Foucault argues that we need the author because we as
a society fear the proliferation of meaning. His fear of proliferation of meaning can be
quite clearly seen, for instance, in the distinction that every society makes between
discourses or utterances that are allowed, and discourses that are regarded as
transgressive. According to Foucault, the author function is evoked to control the
transgressive discourses and the proliferation of dangerous meanings that might
disrupt the existing socio-political world order. And to understand this through an
example, let us take the story of Mansur Al-Hallaj. Now, Al-Hallaj was a Persian Sufi
saint of the late 9th and early 10th century, and he is best known for his utterance
“Ana al-haqq”. Now in Arabic, this phrase Ana al-haqq literally translates into I am
the truth. But the word “al haqq” in the Quran is used as one of the names of Allah.
So, the phrase Ana al-haqq can also be understood as meaning I am Allah. Now, this
second understanding of the phrase Ana al haqq can in turn be interpreted in two very
different ways. So, for instance, the first interpretation can be that the person uttering
the phrase Ana al haqq is claiming to be Allah himself. The other interpretation that
one might derive from this phrase is that the person uttering the phrase Ana al haqq is
speaking about renouncing his ego, and dissolving his individual identity into the
greater identity of Allah. So, as you can see here, the same piece of discourse has a
potential to create a profusion of meanings if a free play of the meaning making
process is allowed. Now, some of these meanings that this limitless play might
generate can be positively dangerous within specific socio-political milieus. Thus, for
instance the interpretation that one who utters the phrase Ana al haqq is actually
claiming himself to be the almighty Allah was absolutely scandalous when articulated
within the theocentric Abbasid caliphate of the tenth century when Al-Hallaj was
living. Now, according to Foucault the author function is needed to control this
dangerous potentiality inherent in the limitless profusion of meanings. Thus, the
author function can be evoked to cancel out certain possible meanings of an utterance
by stating, for instance, that such a meaning is not consistent with the doctrines
professed in other texts marked by the name of the same author. Alternatively, the
author can be held guilty of uttering a transgressive discourse and be punished for
that. So, for instance in the tenth century Abbasid caliphate, Mansur Al-Hallaj was
actually condemned as a zindiq or an apostate and was sentenced to a very painful and
gruesome death. Now this punishment meted out by the caliph did not simply kill off
the person designated by the proper name Mansur Al-Hallaj, but also suppressed the
entire category of discourse that was described by the author function indicated by the
name Mansur Al-Hallaj. This is because all the potentially subversive meanings of the
phrase Ana al haqq was erased by marking the author of that phrase as an apostate;
that is, a person who has abandoned religion and therefore, is not in a position to utter
any meaningful discourse on the subject of god. In other words, the execution of Al-
Hallaj was not simply the killing of a person, but also an attempt to stop the
proliferation and circulation of meanings made possible by the utterance Ana al haqq.
Now, I have presented here a very selective reading of Foucault’s essay “What is an
Author?”, and if you find some of the arguments that I have mentioned here to be
interesting, then I would definitely recommend that you go and read the full text of
the essay, it is really a very interesting piece. But even with the selective reading that
we have in front of us, I would like to point out to you, how Foucault intervenes into
the field of Structuralism Post-structuralism by introducing the aspect of political
power. So, in our lectures on Barthes and Derrida, we had seen how a language
structure can produce an infinity of meaning. But what Foucault tells us through his
elaboration on the need for the author function is that this infinity of meaning within
any particular social milieu is limited by a political power structure. As the story of
Mansur Al-Hallaj shows, there are ways in which certain discourses are regularly
suppressed or denied meaning within a particular society. Indeed, a Foucault provides
a wonderful exploration of how the meaning making process is controlled and limited
to allow only certain socially and politically sanctioned meanings to finally emerge.
In the remaining part of this lecture, we will focus on this particular act of Foucault’s
scholarship. Now, some of you might have noticed that in this lecture on Foucault, I
have been repeatedly using the word discourse, and as I mentioned in my introduction
discourse forms a very crucial part of Foucault’s writings. But discourse is also a very
commonly used word. Yet, when we encounter this word in the writings of Foucault,
we encounter it in a very specialized sense. So, in order to understand Foucault’s
theory about how the meaning making process underlying a discourse is limited and
controlled within specific socio-political milieus let us try first to understand the word
discourse in its most simplest and mundane form, and then we will gradually build up
from there. So, if you consult a dictionary, you will see that a dictionary defines
discourse as a set of meaningful statements; meaningful statements which might be
made orally but also which might appear in a written form and they can be
meaningful statements on any given topic. So, again the simplest definition of
discourse that you will find in a dictionary is that, a discourse is a set of meaningful
statements made orally or in writing on any particular given topic. And this means
that in the language of Structuralism with which we have now developed a familiarity,
discourse means something like a parole, that is, a concrete piece of language use
. Foucault claims that there are certain deep seated regulations, which structure and
limits the creation and circulation of discourses. And here I am not talking about the
structuring principle of langue, because even while following the structure in principle
of langue, we can theoretically say or write an infinite number of things. But what
Foucault says is that though this might be possible in theory, this infinity, in practice
the number of meaningful statements that we can make is actually strictly limited by
certain factors. And Foucault in his essay “The Order of Discourse” discusses three
such factors namely: taboo, madness and sanity, and institutional ratification. And we
will look at each of these factors one by one, and we will start with the notion of
taboo. Now, in any society at any given point of time, there are always prohibitions
surrounding certain topics. And these topics, these prohibited topics are regarded as
taboos. And any discussion on these topics are therefore, socially looked down upon.
And consequently there is an absence of discourse on certain topics within certain
social milieus. In the example of Al-Hallaj that we have just discussed, speaking
about oneself as god as a topic was considered to be taboo. In certain patriarchal
societies, for instance, talking about women’s sexual rights might also be considered
as a taboo. Similarly, in societies which prioritize heterosexuality, the topic of
homosexuality might be considered as taboo. And in each of these cases what the
taboo does is that it stops the proliferation of any meaningful discourse on that
particular topic. Now, such prohibited subjects might vary from one society to another
and from one time to another. But the fact remains and it remains constant that in any
given society, there will be always some subjects regarding which it will be
impossible to or at least very difficult to create a socially acceptable discourse, a set of
meaningful statements. Thus, though in theory the topics on which we can have a
discourse is infinite, in practice, we can talk or write about only certain things. And
certain things are best left aside; no meaningful discourse would be entertained by the
society on those specific topics. Now, apart from taboo the notion of madness and
sanity also acts as another factor limiting the possibility of discourse. For instance, if I
say the elephants are flying in the air, most probably I would be taken as a mad
person. And what this will do to my utterances is precisely what the categorization of
Mansur Al-Hallaj as an apostate did to his utterances on god: it will all be made
meaningless. Thus, if discourse is to be understood as composed of meaningful
statements, then it follows that someone who is deemed mad cannot generate
discourse. So, even though a mad person might be able to speak, might be able to
utter sounds, in a society which considers that person to be mad, his speech will not
be given the acceptance of a discourse. Now, the reason I mentioned that a mad mans
speech will not be accepted as discourse within a society that considers him to be mad
is because just like taboo the understanding of madness too is specific to certain social
milieus. So, in other words, different societies separated from one another specially or
temporarily, might construe the idea of madness differently. But irrespective of what a
particular society is understanding of madness is, the basic concept of madness
remains present in all society. So, all society will make a distinction between what is
madness and what is sane, what is guided by sanity. Which means that in any given
society and at any given point in time, there will always be a group of statements
which will be denied the status of discourse, because of it is association with madness.
So, apart from taboo and madness, Foucault also talks about another factor. Foucault
talks about institutional ratification that limits the proliferation of discourse. And if
we consider this, we will understand that our process of knowing about things and
talking or writing meaningfully about them are closely guided by various institutions
like our schools, colleges, the publishing industry, the news agencies, learned
societies, laboratories, etcetera. For instance, if I were to say today that the sun goes
around the earth, then such a statement would not be admitted as part of a meaningful
discourse because it won’t be ratified by these institutes which regulate knowledge
production and knowledge consumption in today’s world. Yet at one point in history,
this very statement that the sun revolves around the earth enjoyed institutional
validity. Thus, again like taboo and madness, institutional ratification is also place and
time specific. But again like what I said about the earlier two categories, institutional
ratification too would exist in some form or another in all societies. And in every
society, institutional ratification will try to control the generation and the circulation
of discourses that might be dangerous for the existing political power structure. So, as
you can see here with the discussion of these limiting factors, we gradually move
from the restricted domain of text to the domain of the socio-political context which
frames the text, and we had already started this movement from Barthes and Derrida.
But with Foucault we have reached a point that we cannot read a text on its own by
merely focusing on the meaning making processes that goes on within it, but we also
need to connect it with the context. And when we take up the discussion of Marxist
literary theory in our next lecture, this shift from text to context or rather this
relationship between the text and the context would become even more apparent.
Thank you for listening.

psychoanalytic literary theory

Sigmund Freud 1

Hello friends and welcome back to another lecture in this series on Literary Theory.
Now as I have already mentioned in some of my previous lectures, the beginning of
the 20th century was characterized by the opening up of a number of new fields of
inquiry and each of these new fields, then went on to generate distinct schools of
literary theory with their own distinct sets of critical vocabulary and their own distinct
sets of key ideas. And we have already seen this with Ferdinand de Saussure’s
synchronic linguistics as well as Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. Today we will
see how the works of Sigmund Freud, opened a distinct field of human inquiry and
how that then went on to create a very unique kind of approach to literature. This new
field of theoretical approach is what is referred to as psychoanalytic literary theory
and it has been one of the most dominant schools of literary theories throughout the
20th and 21st century. But like always, before we delve into the literary theory
founded on Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, we will start by familiarizing ourselves
with a few biographical details. Freud like Husserl was born in Moravia, in the region
of Moravia and the year in which Freud was born was 1856; however, very soon
Freud shifted to Vienna. In fact, he was only 3, when he shifted to Vienna, the
Austrian capital, and in this city that Freud continued to live and work till he was 82.
Now in 1873, Freud enrolled as a medical student in the University of Vienna and by
the late 1880s, he had already established himself as a consulting doctor for
psychological disorders. Now, we will have to remember here that when, Freud
started his career as a doctor, what we today consider to be psychological disorders
were primarily understood and treated as disorders of the nervous system. But Freud
started moving away from this purely physical understanding of the psychological
disorders quite early in his medical career. He believed that these disorders were
forms of mental illness, which required a special kind of medical approach that was
very distinct and different from how physical ailments were usually being treated by
the doctors. This departure from the mainstream medical approach of the day
ultimately, led Freud to the formulation of his theories of human mind and mental
disease that, we today study under the rubric of psychoanalysis. The first major step
that, Freud took in this direction in defining this new field of psychoanalysis was
publishing a book titled Studies in Hysteria and this book Freud wrote with another
Viennese physician, whose name was Josef Breuer. But of course, the most well
known manifestation of this new field of psychoanalysis came in 1899. This was in
fact, the year when Freud published his landmark book, which bore the German title
Die Traumdeutung and which was translated in English as The Interpretation of
Dreams. However it is interesting to note that, during the time of its publication the
reception of this book was rather muted and the reason for this is actually not very
different to guess. Firstly, the fundamental theory of psychoanalysis that, Freud lead
out in this book was such a radical departure from the existing ways, in which human
ailments were understood and were treated by contemporary doctors that it,
obviously, aroused a lot of skepticism a lot of doubt. And secondly, and perhaps more
importantly, the reason why The Interpretation of Dreams received a muted response,
during the time of it is publication was because, Freud insisted that it was the sexual
desires that guide our psychological life and also how mental diseases were formed,
were caused. Now, placing such tabooed subjects like sexual desire and incest, in fact,
at the heart of his theories was deeply troublesome for the conservative Viennese
society of the late 19th and early 20th century and this aspect of Freud’s writing might
still make psychoanalysis unacceptable to certain groups of people. However, the
acceptance of Freud and his theories saw a gradual rise over the years and by 1908,
when the first International Psychoanalytic Congress was held in Salzburg, Freud was
already recognized as a major scholarly figure. Now, Freud was a prolific writer and
throughout his fairly long life, he published a number of books, which are today
regarded as classics of Western scholarly tradition. These books include, apart from of
course, they books that I have already mentioned they include names like The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, The Ego and the
Id, Civilization and Its Discontents, Moses and Monotheism, etcetera. Freud’s
fortunes, however, turned for the worse, when the Nazis came to power and when
they annexed Austria and took it over as part of their own kingdom, right. Freud
himself was of course, an atheist, but since he was born to Jewish parents, the Nazis
came to regard his publications as expressions of what they believed to be the
decadent and immoral Jewish culture. His books were therefore, ceremonially burned
in 1933, along with those of several other major intellectuals including Karl Marx,
Freud himself was, however, able to escape Nazi Germany in 1938 and he sought
exile in London and that is where he stayed till his death in 1939. So now, from his
life let us move on to a study of his work.
Now, since a Freud inaugurated an entirely new field of inquiry and since this field of
inquiry has it s own unique concepts and distinct vocabulary, we will first try to
familiarize ourselves with the broad outlines of Freudian psychoanalysis and then we
will move on to a discussion of how psychoanalysis can provide us with a new
understanding of the literary process. And the place where I wanted to start is Freud’s
research on hysteria, which ultimately resulted in the publication of the book Studies
in Hysteria. Now, the term hysteria comes from the Greek root word “hysteron”
which literally means a womb. Now the reason that this disease which is identified as
hysteria, got a name that derived from the root word womb is because, it was
originally believed to be a disease that was caused by quote, unquote the wandering of
womb away from it is original place within a woman’s body. In the mid 1880s, when
a Freud started working on hysteria, the mainstream opinion about the disease had of
course, moved away from the theory of wandering wombs, but it was still believed
that the disease had something to do with the female reproductive organ and
consequently hysteria was believed to be an affliction that was suffered exclusively by
the females. This established theory was, however, already being challenged by a
French doctor by the name of Jean-Martin Charcot, who believed that hysteria, had
nothing to do with the reproductive organs. Rather, Charcot argued that hysteria was a
result of inherited brain damage and as such the disease could be found both in males
as well as in females. Now though Freud briefly worked with Charcot on hysteria, he
did not agree with Charcot’s attribution of hysteria to an impairment of the human
body. On the contrary, Freud believed that hysteria was a psychological disease and
the causes of hysteria cannot be really traced back to in his specific problem in the
patient’s body. Freud argued in his turn that the cure to hysteria can only be achieved,
if the doctor looked into the patient’s mind rather than studying his or her biological
body. In the book Studies in Hysteria that Freud coauthored with Breuer, he asserted
that hysteria was caused by the patient’s efforts to repress a traumatic memory. That
is to say it resulted from the patient’s efforts to forcefully refuse to acknowledge in a
conscious state of mind the memory of a past trauma. Now this analysis of the disease
led, Freud to work on a kind of cure that was very different from how hysteric
patients were being treated by doctors, who believed in the biological cause of the
disease. And this new cure involved allowing the patients to talk, to talk about their
own past and to talk about them freely, so that after a certain point the repressed
memory of their trauma is brought to the consciousness. What Freud and Breuer
argued was that remembering and confronting the memory of the traumatic past,
actually produced a release of emotions and it resulted in something like a cathartic
effect, which ultimately cured their hysteria. And the role of the doctor in this line of
treatment consisted in carefully listening to the narratives produced by the patients
and in helping them to interpret them; where the aim of the interpretation was to sift
through the narrative in such a way that the patient can identify the repressed
traumatic event which was at the root of their suffering. Now, here I want you to
notice one thing, Freud’s major shift in understanding and treating hysteria consisted
in his ability to convert the disease, to convert its cause, as well as its prospective cure
into the process of telling a story and interpreting a story. The historic patients were
the tellers of the story and Freud’s role as a doctor, was much like that of a literary
critic, who would analyze and interpret these stories and this focus on narratives and
interpretation of narratives would remain the central concern of Freud’s
psychoanalysis. And it therefore, gives us a clue as to why Freud became so,
influential in the field of literary studies. In any case moving on with our discussion
on hysteria Freud found that the repressed traumatic memory that was causing the
hysteria was very frequently being related by his patients to some incident of sexual
violence experienced in childhood. Now, here we need to understand something very
important, which is that the very fact that something can be so repressed in our mind,
that it goes beyond the grasp of our consciousness, means or at least meant for Freud
that our mind has a large area beyond what is available to our consciousness. And this
area which could only be indirectly approached was identified by Freud as the
unconscious. The rule of this unconscious in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory is
paramount and we will talk more about it, when we will later discuss in details, how
Freud mapped the human mind?
But for now let us come back to the repressed memory of childhood sexual trauma.
Freud discovered that there was a common pattern underlying the narratives of his
hysteric patients, the patients almost inevitably ended up talking about, how as
children they were seduced and sexually engaged by an older figure, who was in most
cases identified as the father himself. Now, this led Freud to what is now called the
seduction theory and in this seduction theory, the idea is that the child who was
seduced by the father figure, experiences a sense of trauma, but Freud argued that this
trauma was not experienced when the older father figure engaged sexually with the
child. This trauma was only later realized when the child was growing up and when
this memory of the sexual engagement started becoming more and more traumatic to
recall and because, it became more and more traumatic to recall because, of course,
the child then comes to realize that this is not socially acceptable, the growing child
learns to repress, it learns to push it away from the pale of consciousness to the area of
the unconscious. Now, this seduction theory is a neat enough theory, but Freud pretty
soon rejected the seduction theory and he came up with a new theory regarding the
cause of psychological disorder like hysteria. And this new theory would actually
effectively reverse the earlier understanding of the seduction drama. In this new
theory, Freud proposed that the sexual event in the childhood might not be a real
event at all, but it might just be what he called phantasy. Now this term phantasy is
very important to Freudian psychoanalysis in general as well as psychoanalytic
literary theory in particular. So, we will need to understand this. So, what is phantasy?
Well in psychoanalysis, phantasy means creating an imaginary scene that would allow
someone to fictively enact his or her own desire that is too problem to be admitted or
enacted in reality. And why this notion of phantasy is important in the study of
psychoanalytic literary theory? We will come to it, when we discuss Freud’s essay on
daydreaming later in one of our future lectures, but here we are faced with a question,
which is that how does this new theory, based on phantasy, address the cause of
hysteria and such other psychological diseases? Well, according to Freud, the scenes
of seduction by the father depicted by the patients were actually phantasies, which
enable the patients to enact in their imagination and in a distorted form their sexual
desire towards their parent figure. Now therefore, what was being repressed, was
actually not the trauma of being sexually defiled, but what was being repressed, was
the sexual desire of the child. Because the child while growing up comes to learn that
such a sexual desire directed at a parental figure is socially taboo and then the child
starts repressing it and pushing that desire into the unconscious. Now, it was this
stress on sexuality that made Freud’s psychoanalysis a difficult theory to be accepted
within the social mainstream. Indeed his collaborator Breuer parted ways with Freud
precisely, because he was not comfortable with Freud’s locating of the causes of all
psychoanalytic diseases within the sexual desires of his patients. Yet, rather than
abandoning this theory of psychoanalysis based on sexual desires, Freud actually
elaborated on it and made it the cornerstone of his 1899 publication the Interpretation
of Dreams. This book, it is a wonderful book, not only because of it is content, but
also because of it is style and it includes the narration and analysis of a number of
dreams, including many dreamt by Freud himself and it can be read at a number of
different levels. So, at one level it can be read as an elaboration of Freud’s theory of
psychoanalysis, but of course, the book has many other facets and therefore, they can
be read equally fruitfully as pieces of Freud’s autobiography, which the dreams which
come together to form this book; or even the book can be read as a history of
dreaming and a history of interpreting dreams. My favorite way to read the book of
course, is like a collection of mystery stories, where each dream like a scene of crime
in a detective novel presents us with a number of cryptic clues and Freud like a good
detective leads us through an analysis of these clues to a comprehensive
understanding of what they really represent and what is their underlying reality,
underlying truth. Now the question is, why did Freud decide to write a book on
dreams at all, after he had worked on hysteria? Well, as I mentioned just a few
moments earlier, the concept of an unconscious mind played a very important role in
Freud’s engagement with hysteria. If a certain memories were being repressed out of
the conscious mind then, they were definitely being stored somewhere, because
otherwise these memories would not be able to resurface at a later point in time as
they were doing, when his hysteric patients were talking about their past. Now, Freud
believed that these unacknowledged memories were being stored in the unconscious
area of the mind and that this unconscious formed a basic characteristic of all human
minds and not just the minds of his hysteric patients. Now, the problem with this
conceptualization of the unconscious is that since, it exists beyond the pale of our
consciousness, it is very difficult to know anything about it directly. Indeed, one
might even doubt it is a very existence. Freud, however, realized that the unconscious
can actually be approached through studying a person’s dreams, which usually plays
out in the gray zone between our consciousness and our unconscious mind. So, when
we go to sleep the boundaries of our consciousness are relaxed and a limbo between
the consciousness and the unconscious mind is exposed. Dreams are actually products
that get generated within this limbo, but what is interesting is that they are still very
frequently available to us even when we wake up and even when the boundaries of
our consciousness crystallize again. That is to say we can still remember some of our
dreams that we had dreamt in our sleep even after we have woken up. Freud
discovered that these remembered dreams can act as he called and I quote, “the royal
road to the unconscious” and in The Interpretation of Dreams, this royal road to the
unconscious leads the reader to the seat of uninhibited sexual desires, which
according to Freud animates all human mental life. But we will discuss Freud’s
understanding of sexual desires in our next lecture, right now, what I would like to do
is, I would like to focus on how Freud reads the narrativized dreams as manifestations
of the unconscious. Now, Freud argues that the dreams that, we dream do not
transparently mirror the unconscious, but rather reflects it in a distorted form, this
translation of the unconscious content into the dream is what Freud describes as
dream work. So, to begin with we will first try and understand this dream work and it
is with an analysis of this dream work that we will end our lecture today. So, again to
start with the dream work relates two different things, this is the first thing that we
need to understand. Dream work is a translation of one thing into another thing. So,
what are these two things within which this translation happens? Well first there is
something, which Freud refers to as the latent content and then there is something,
which Freud refers to as the manifest content. Dream work happens, when latent
content is translated into manifest content; but then what are these two contents?
Well, the latent content is the unconscious content that underlines a dream and
because it remains hidden Freud refers to it as the latent content, the hidden content.
The manifest content is what we register as the dream, which is a distorted version of
the unconscious latent content. Now here, we are going to keep aside for the time
being at least two very important questions; but I would like to state these questions
here, the first question is what exactly constitutes the unconscious latent content? And
the second question is why does the latent content have to be distorted and
transformed, so as to make way into our dreams? In other words, why cannot our
dreams reflect like a mirror, exactly what is there in the latent content? Now, both of
these questions are significant and we will take them up in our future lectures. But
right now let us see, what are the processes through which latent content gets
transformed into the manifest content? In other words, what is the mechanism of
dream work? Now this transformation, this mechanism of dream work primarily
involves two processes, one is condensation and the other is displacement. So, what is
condensation? Well one of the ways in which the dream work, distorts the latent
content is by clubbing together, by bringing together, a number of objects, people,
places and representing all of this variety through a single dream image. So, the
images that we see in our dreams are most often, they are like shorthand symbols,
which signify in a compressed form a variety of things. Let us say that, I have a
crucial exam and I go to sleep the night before that exam worrying not only about
how I will perform in it but also about, what will happen if it rains and if I fail to
reach the exam hall in time? Now, let us assume that in my dream, I see myself
wearing a black hat with a large flattened top. Now this black hat is, obviously,
representative of a black umbrella held over ones head and it clearly connects with my
fear of it raining in the morning and the possibility of my failing to reach the exam
hall in time. But this hat that, I see in my dream also reminds me of the peculiar kind
of academic headgear, that one usually wears during a graduation ceremonies, which
also has a flattened top. Now, since this academic headgear signifies academic
success, you wear it to your graduation ceremony, it can be seen as relating to my
worry about how well, I will be able to perform in my exam? Whether I will be
successful or not? So, as you can see in this example, the hat that I see in my dream
fuses within itself, at least two different and unconnected objects; it is this process of
fusing together different things in the form of a single image, that Freud refers to as
condensation. So, the hat that I see myself wearing in my dream is a condensed image
of various different things like the umbrella for instance or the academic headgear.
Now, this process of condensation results in dream images being overdetermined, this
is also a very important word and this actually should be a familiar term to you,
because we have already discussed this term in the context of Althusser’s theory. And
from that discussion, we know that overdetermination happens, when a single thing is
related to multiple causes. Now, since a condensed dream image has a number of
constituent elements, which fuses to form it, just like the image of the black hat was
formed by fusing together the images of an umbrella and of an academic headgear,
Freud refers to the manifest contents of our dreams as overdetermined, and this should
also show you that there is the one to one correspondence between what appears in
the manifest content and what is there in the latent content. So now, let us come to the
other thing that goes on in the dream work, which is displacement. Freud argues that
certain aspects of the latent content, often gets represented in the manifest content
through images, which are not connected to it in any integral manner. In fact, the
connection is so flimsy between the manifest representation and the latent thing that is
being represented that, when this connection is revealed Freud says that and I quote,
“it gives the impression of being a bad joke or of an arbitrary and forced explanation
dragged in by the hair of its head.” Indeed the very purpose of displacement seems to
be the obscuring of the latent content, through a moving or a shifting away from it and
in our next lecture, we will come to the point as to why this shift, why this move away
from the latent content, happens in our manifest content? But right now let us discuss
an example of displacement, which Freud gives when he refers to a patient, who has
this strange dream of strangling a white puppy. Now, when it was, this particular
dream, was finally connected to the latent content by Freud, it was discovered that the
white puppy, the dog actually stood for the patients sister-in-law. This lady, the sister-
in-law, who was intensely disliked by the patient, had an excessively pale complexion
and in one argument that she had with the patient, she was abused by the patient as a
dog who bites. So, in the manifest content of the dream the murderous rage that the
patient felt towards the sister-in-law, gets displacement in the form of an image of the
patient strangling a white puppy. So, with this explanation of the dream work, we end
our lecture today. In the next lecture we will take up for discussion Freud’s
understanding of sexuality as well as his unique map of the human mind. Thank you
for listening.

Sigmund Freud 2

Hello and welcome back again to this series on Literary Theory. From our previous
lecture you know that we are trying to familiarize ourselves with the key concepts of
Freudian psychoanalysis and our attempt is to study how psychoanalysis can help us
gain a new perspective on literature, how to approach literature how literature is
created etcetera. Now, in our preceding lecture we have seen how Freud establishes
the notion of unconscious as the site of repressed sexual desires and he does that first,
through his study of hysteric patients and then through his study of dream work. We
have also seen how in both his study of hysteria and his study of dreams, Freud focus
has been on narratives and on the problematic of interpreting narratives. This as I
have already pointed out to you, establishes an obvious connection between Freud’s
theory of psychoanalysis and the field of literary studies. Today we are going to
explore some more fundamental ideas underlying Freudian psychoanalysis and we are
especially going to talk about Freud’s understanding of human sexual desires, which
according to him plays a guiding role in shaping our mental life, and later as we will
also see, it also plays a guiding role in shaping literary creativity as far as Freud is
concerned. In today’s lecture we will also explore the map of the human mind that
Freud came up with in order to provide a schema for his psychoanalytic theory. But
before we delve into these topics we will start today’s discussion by focusing on what
is known as parapraxes or more commonly as Freudian slip. Now, as I have already
mentioned in my previous lecture, the unconscious and its workings became central
elements in Freud’s study of the human mind right from the days, when he started his
research on hysteria. And whereas his book Studies on Hysteria referred to the
unconscious only vis-à-vis the mental world of psychological patients, in The
Interpretation of Dreams Freud was using this concept of unconscious and repression
of sexual desires in a much broader way. He was establishing them as universal
phenomenon. Thus, if dreams are accepted to be manifestations of an unconscious
latent content, then it is to be accepted that all of us have an unconscious because all
of us dream. In the next major work that Freud published after his the Interpretation of
Dreams, Freud asserts that the unconscious informs our lives in an even more
ubiquitous manner than was earlier suggested. The argument here is that it was not
only the psychological diseases or our dreams that are connected with the
unconscious, but even our more mundane forgetfulness or everyday errors that we
make while speaking and all of these also have their roots in the drama that is playing
out in our unconscious mind. The book in which Freud delineated elaborated this
thesis is therefore, very aptly titled The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. The
keyword that Freud introduced in this new book to discuss the ubiquity of our
unconscious was parapraxes. So, what is parapraxes? Well, you must have noticed
that in our day today conversations, we often forget names, it often happens that we
cannot recall words; words, names which are otherwise very well known to us, or
sometimes we make errors in pronunciations known pronunciations, or for instance
we often end up substituting the wrong word for a right one. Freud names these slips,
these errors, as parapraxes and he argues that these errors are actually manifestations
of the repressed emotions and memories that are shunted out from our conscious mind
and that are relegated to our unconscious. So, just like the hysteric symptoms or the
dreams which are distorted manifestations of an unconscious content, the everyday
parapraxes too, the everyday Freudian slips too are distorted manifestations of a
hidden unconscious content. Now let us try and understand this by looking at an
example provided by Freud which will help us in at least two distinct ways. Firstly, of
course it will help us to understand the phenomenon of parapraxes better. But
secondly, and perhaps more importantly for our purpose, it will help us to get a feel of
what a psychoanalytic approach to literature might look like. This is because in this
example of parapraxes that we are going to discuss, we start with a narrative or a story
which is then followed by Freud’s analyzing the text of the story, so as to reveal it is
deeper intricacies and its connections with the unconscious and this inner wave forms
the bedrock of psychoanalytic literary criticism, where the critic engages with a
literary text to uncover the drama of repressed and unconscious desires and fears,
seething underneath the surface. So, first let us start with the story, the incident of
parapraxes that Freud tells us, has to do with the forgetting of a foreign word. Once on
a train journey Freud struck up a conversation with a young man who like Freud was
of Jewish ancestry. Now, this young man believed that the fact that he was a Jew in
the contemporary society put him at a market disadvantage and as Freud writes he,
and I quote: “Bemoaned the fact that his generation, as he expressed it, was destined
to grow crippled, that it was prevented from developing its talents and from gratifying
its desires.” And to underline this lament the young man brought in the reference of
another lament, the lament of dido as narrated by Virgil in his epic Aeneid. Now, in
Virgil’s epic, Dido is a queen who falls in love with the protagonist Aeneas and her
love is initially reciprocated by Aeneas and they even start living like a couple. But
this was resented by one king Iarbas, who had earlier tried to unsuccessfully woo
Dido. Iarbas’ father was the god Jupiter and Iarbas appealed to his father that Dido
and Aeneas be separated. Jupiter in order to keep his son’s request, ordered Aeneas to
leave the land in which he was living with dido and Aeneas being a loyal person,
loyal to god, obeyed Jupiter. Now, Aeneas’ leaving dido of course infuriated her quite
understandably and Dido threw herself in a funeral pyre while cursing Aeneas with
the Latin line that you can. Now see on the slide in English this line would translate
into the sentence. . “Let someone arise as an avenger from my bones”. The young
man of Jewish origin whom Freud met in the train wanted to end his lament his
personal lament by quoting this particular line from Virgil. But, the problem was that
he could not recall the word that you see underlined in the slide and the word is
“aliquis” and this word of course was later provided to him by Freud. Now, this
forgetting of the Latin word is interpreted by Freud as an instance of parapraxes. The
way Freud connects this parapraxes, this particular instance of parapraxes, with the
repressed unconscious of the young man is through a method called “free
association”. Now, free association was a method that Freud had initially developed
during his research on hysteria, but then he continued using this method throughout
his career as a psychoanalyst and this is in fact a very important aspect of Freud’s
approach to the mental life. So, what is a free association? Well, it is a method in
which one is encouraged to see unhesitatingly all that comes to the mind without
trying to control either the stream of thoughts or trying to create a logically coherent
discourse. When Freud asked his fellow traveler to do a free association and tell him
whatever comes to his mind when he thinks of the word aliquis, the young man first
came up with a string of words which were “reliques, liquidation, liquidity, fluid”.
Now, this reveals that these other words the words that I have just mentioned, though
initially absent from the discourse, these are words that do not appear in the Latin
original. So, they were absent from the discourse, but nevertheless they had cast a
shadow on the word aliquis, which the young man had wanted to utter, but could not.
Now for those of you who are familiar with Derrida, and you will be familiar with
Derrida if you have been following this lecture series, then you will notice that relics,
liquidation, liquefy, these words, fluid, they resemble a chain of signifiers over which
the meaning of the word aliquis is both differed and deferred. The traces of these
other words haunt the word aliquis, right. This should be very clear if you know your
Derrida and it is these traces that Freud explores to bring out the connection between
the forgetting of the Latin word and the young man’s unconscious. Now, apart from
the chain of words that I just mentioned, the young man also came up during the
course of his free association with the names of a number of Christian saints,
including most notably that of Saint Januaries. In fact, he even narrated to Freud a
ritual associated with this saint, the young man told Freud that a phile of blood was
kept in a church in Naples as the relic of saint Januaris, which means that it was
believed that the blood contained in that file is the blood of the saint and this file of
blood this relique was associated with an annual ritual. What was the ritual? Well
every year at certain specified dates a miracle would happen and the miracle was that
the clotted blood of the saint would start to liquefy again, would start converting into
a fluid. The young man also told that if this liquefaction of the blood does not happen,
then it gives rise to great consternation and worry among the believers. Finally, the
young man also mentioned to Freud that during his free association he was also
reminded of a woman that he knew. Indeed, he was actually dreading that he might
receive a message from that woman which can be really very worrisome to him.
Freud connected all these thoughts ideas and words that the free association had
thrown up and that has haunted the young man’s remembering of the word aliquis and
he related all of this to one particular thing, which was the young man’s worry about
the woman of his acquaintance becoming pregnant. So, as I told you in my previous
lecture, psychoanalysis proceeds something like detective work, where you have a
number of scattered clues and then they are related to one event which is repressed in
the unconscious. In this case the repressed memory that Freud refers to is the fear of
the woman becoming pregnant. Now, the fear that the young man had repressed
actually from his conscious mind is that the woman that he knew might have missed
her regular menstrual cycle, which would be a sure sign of her being pregnant by him.
This fear had got attached with the word a aliquis because, the young man separated
the Latin word into “a” and “liquis”, and then associated that with fluid and with the
process of liquefaction, and in his chain of association this was further connected with
the ritual of liquefaction of saint Januaris’s blood, which in itself is evocative of a
woman’s menstrual cycle. Now, if you recall the story of Dido that I have told you
will realize how the young man’s fear could have been unconsciously triggered
because, in the Dido story, Aeneas went away from dido like an unfaithful lover much
like the young man was going away from the woman of his acquaintance. The word
aliquis appears in the speech of dido which she uses to curse Aeneas. For the young
man, the fear of this curse gets transmuted into the fear of an embarrassing incident of
pregnancy. Now since, the young man was trying to repress this fear it becomes
difficult for him to remember the word aliquis, which had got entangled in his
unconscious mind with the feared pregnancy. This is what according to Freud led to
this particular instance of parapraxes resulting in the young man’s inability to
remember a very known word. Now, this discussion of parapraxes brings us to one of
the fundamental points of Freudian psychoanalytic literary theory; which is that any
discourse, or to use Saussaure’s term, any parole, be it the speech of lament produced
by Freud’s young acquaintance on the train, or a more patiently crafted piece of
literature, is underlined by the unconscious desires and fears of the speaker or the
author. The aim of psychoanalytic literary theory which takes its cue from Freud is to
dwell upon this connection between the text and the author’s unconscious. So, as I
had pointed out in some of my previous lectures that though the general thrust of 20th
century literary theory has been to move away from the figure of the author,
psychoanalytic theory has kept alive our interest in the author’s mind and in its deep
intricacies. This connection between literature and the author’s unconscious would, of
course, become even more evident in our next lecture, when we take up for discussion
Freud’s essay on creative writers and daydreaming, but for now let us move on to the
understanding of sexual desires which is at the very core of Freud’s psychoanalytic
theory.
Now, one of the most controversial claims made by Freud was that sexuality is not
something that developed in human beings with the onset of puberty. Rather,
according to Freud, sexual desire was something that characterizes every human being
even while he or she is just a baby. This basic instinctual sex drive which informs our
existence right from our childhood is what Freud identifies as libido. Freud argues
that as a child each of us direct this libido towards our mother, who being our first
care giver and provider of food is also the closest person that we know. The focus of
this libido is initially on the activity of breastfeeding and as Freud points out, a baby
comes to feed on the breasts of its mother not merely to draw nourishment, but also to
experience pleasure which goes beyond the mere requirement of food; and this is
what Freud writes: (“The baby’s obstinate persistence in sucking gives evidence at an
early stage of a need for satisfaction which though it originates from and is instigated
by the taking of nourishment, nevertheless strives to obtain pleasure independently of
nourishment and for that reason may and should be termed sexual.”) Now, within the
family structure a baby soon realizes that the mother is not exclusively occupied with
it. The father is also someone who demands and receives the attention and care from
the mother. This leads the baby to conceive its father as an opponent who is vying
with him for the love and attention of the mother figure; and this results in what Freud
famously identifies as the Oedipus complex. Now here the reference is of course to
the Greek myth of Oedipus which we have already discussed in details in our lecture
on Lévi-Strauss, and if you recall that lecture, you will know that Oedipus was a
figure who killed his own father Leos and married his own mother Jocasta. Now
according to Freud, a baby while growing up resembles something like this mythic
figure Oedipus who wants to “kill its father” or at the very least, remove the father
from the scene, so that it can receive the undisputed undisrupted love and care of its
mother. Now with the introduction of the father in the scene, the baby’s desire for its
mother also gets underlined by a sense of fear. It realizes that the father is a much
stronger person and can potentially cause harm, for the baby who by this time has
discovered its penis as one of the primary locus of sexual pleasure, this fear of being
harmed by the father takes a very specific shape. It translates into the fear of being
castrated by the father. This fear of castration or castration complex, as Freud calls it,
is according to Freud one of the fundamental aspects of our psychoanalytic life. Now,
as the baby grows up and gets acquainted with the social expectations and
prohibitions, it realizes that harboring murderous intentions towards one’s own father
is socially tabooed. The baby therefore represses this desire into the unconscious and
rather than treating the father as a competitor comes to regard him as a role model.
The baby comes to believe that if it can become like the father, it will be able to win
complete love and affection of one someone like its mother. Now the reason I said
someone like its mother and not the mother herself is because, the baby also realizes
that sexually desiring one’s own mother is again socially tabooed and therefore that
too needs to be repressed in the unconscious. The best one can consciously wish for is
a lady who will be the substitute of the original mother figure. So, as you can see here,
the growing a process according to Freud results in the repression of a number of
desires and fears which then inform our unconscious and which manifest themselves
in distorted forms through symptoms of psychological diseases or through our dreams
or through our everyday parapraxes.
Now here we need to note two things, the first is that the explanation of how Freud
conceptualized sexual desire vis-à-vis the growing up of a child, already gives us
answers to two questions that we had raised in our previous lecture. The first question,
if you remember, was what constitutes the unconscious – latent content that ultimately
gets revealed in the form of the manifest content of the dreams? Well, now, we know
that the latent content is constituted by the repressed libidinal desires and fears that I
have just outlined. The second question was why was this latent content distorted by
the dream work? Well as we can understand now, the latent content of the
unconscious is too disturbing to be admitted by the conscious mind of a grown up
human being. In our dreaming state the mechanism of censorship through which we
prevent the repressed contents of our unconscious from making way into our
conscious mind relaxes a little, which is why we get a glimpse of the unconscious
desires and fears through our dreams. But we will have to remember that even in the
dreaming state the mechanism of censorship is not completely switched off, therefore
the unconscious content cannot be transparently reflected in our dreams, it still
remains too troublesome for that. Consequently, the reflection is muddied and
distorted through the process of dream work which we have already discussed in our
previous lecture. The second thing that I wanted you to notice here is that Freud while
explaining the sexual desire of a child takes as his example a male child. The
masculine sexuality is the norm as far as Freud’s psychoanalysis is concerned. Freud
does work on female sexuality, but he clearly treats it as a distorted version of the
normative male sexuality; we do not have enough time at our disposal to go into the
details of Freud’s explanation of female sexuality. But if you read it you will very
well understand why it remains a fiercely disputed theory especially, contested by the
feminists.
Let us now take up Freud’s mapping of the human mind which will be the final topic
of our discussion today. Throughout his career, Freud kept revising the structure
underlying the human mental activities. So, if we read the complete works of Freud it
is unlikely that we will arrive at a definitive version of Freud’s map of human mind.
But more or less the basic contour of this mind map created by Freud is well
established. Our mental activities according to Freud when taken together, has three
broad aspects. They are the id, the ego and the super-ego. Now, here it is important to
note that these three names that I just mentioned are three aspects of the mental
dynamics and they are not physical parts of our brain. In other words, id, ego and
super-ego do not have specific physical locations within the anatomy of our brain. So,
now that we know what they are not, let us try and understand what they really are
and let us start with id. According to Freud, id is constituted of all our instinctual
desires that I have identified a few moments earlier as libido. The main guiding
principle of id is a what Freud calls the pleasure principle, in other words the
instinctual drives informing the id always seeks pleasure and it comes across as
something like a petulant and demanding child who keeps repeating the phrase: I want
this, I want that, etcetera, and indeed this metaphor is not very superfluous, because if
we look at it from the Freudian perspective, then we will see that the unchecked
manifestation of the desires informing the id is what characterizes our state of
childhood. At that early stage we do not need to control or repress the id because we
are at the center of our parents’, especially our mother’s, attention and all our
demands for pleasure are almost immediately satisfied. It is only when we grow up
and learn to negotiate the world as independent social beings that we realize that all
our desires cannot be instantaneously met and indeed some desires like the killing of
our fathers or the marrying of our own mothers cannot be met at all. At that stage we
come to develop what Freud calls the ego, which tries to negotiate between the
constant demands of the id and the social realities, so it tries to find a middle ground.
This is how Freud explains the relationship between the id and the ego and I quote:
“Thus in its relation to the id, ego is like a man on horseback, who has to hold in
check the superior strength of the horse; with this difference, that the rider tries to do
so with his own strength while the ego uses borrowed forces. The analogy may be
carried a little further. Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged
to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of
transforming that id’s will into action as if it were its own.” The final aspect that
informs the human mental process is, as I mentioned, super-ego and super-ego in its
turn is constituted by an awareness of all the restrictions, prohibitions taboos and
interdictions that the society imposes upon us and upon our desires. This is actually
the borrowed forces that Freud mentions in the lines that I have just quoted. Now,
remember here that according to Freudian psychoanalysis, while growing up we first
learn to restrict and repress our desires out of a fear of our father. Consequently, at a
later stage when we have a strongly developed super-ego we often associate it with
the dictum of the father and since god is often assumed to be our universal father
super-ego is often perceived as the moral restrictions lead down by god himself. So,
with this elaboration of the Freudian map of our mind, we come to the end of our
lecture today. In our next lecture we will take up for discussion Freud’s analysis of
literary creativity. Thank you.
Sigmund Freud 3

Hello and welcome back to yet another lecture on this series on Literary Theory.
During the course of our previous two lectures we have familiarized ourselves with
most of the key ideas informing Freudian psychoanalysis. In today’s lecture we will
discuss how these key ideas can be brought together to produce a general
understanding of literary creativity. Now, in our previous lecture we have mentioned
that psychoanalytic literary criticism primarily proceeds through the critic engaging
with a piece of literature, in order to uncover the drama of repressed desires and fears
seething underneath the surface. Now, instances of such an approach to literature can
be found in Freud’s own writings. So, for example, if we read Freud’s 1907
publication titled “Delusion and Dream in Jensen’s Gradiva”, we find an analysis of
Wilhelm Jensen’s novel Gradiva from a psychoanalytic perspective. Freud shows
through his reading of the novel, how the hero suffers from psychological
complications which arise out of his repressions, and how those psychological
complications gradually gets cured as the novel progresses. Apart from this
psychoanalytic profiling of fictional characters appearing in novels and plays,
psychoanalytic theory can also be used to profile authors or creative artists. One of the
finest examples of this approach where a piece of artistic creation is used to delve
deep into the recesses of the creator’s mind is Freud’s 1910 psycho-biography titled
“Leonardo de Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood”. In this particular piece of work,
Freud relates how Leonardo de Vinci’s repressed childhood sexual fantasies animate
his creative work in later life. And though Freud accesses the unconscious of the
creator Leonardo de Vinci via an analysis of one of his paintings and not any piece of
literature per se, but we can use the same method that we find in this particular essay
and apply them to literature to understand the author’s repression and how those
repressions and repressed desires create a particular literary piece. In this lecture,
however, we will not take up for discussion Freud’s psychoanalytic readings of
specific literary characters or creative artists, rather we will focus on Freud’s views on
literary creativity in general and see how we can connect them with the intricacies of
human psychology.
One of the best pieces through which we can study Freud’s interpretation of literary
creativity in general is his essay “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming”. Now, this
was first delivered in 1907 as an informal lecture at the house of the bookseller and
also a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Hugo Heller. And this particular
lecture was later published under the title that I just mentioned “Creative Writers and
Day-Dreaming” in 1908. Now, this essay broadly divides itself into two parts; the first
part works out the relationship between child’s play, fantasy, and day-dreaming and
the second part connects this relationship, or this network of relationships, with the
process of literary creativity. And in our lecture today we will follow the pattern laid
down by the essay because that will help us understand the chains of equivalent
relationships through which the argument progresses. Now, to begin with Freud draws
our attention to the aura of uniqueness that usually surrounds the creativity of a writer.
Some of us can author wonderful stories, wonderful poems, or other literary pieces
while others, like me for instance, we can’t do that. So, within almost every society
creative writers are regarded as special beings, they can do something special which
others can’t. And as Freud writes, “we layman […] always [remain] intensely curious
to know […] from what sources that strange being, the creative writer draws his
material, and how he manages to make such an impression on us with it and to arouse
in us emotions of which, perhaps, we had not even thought ourselves capable.” Now,
please note here that in this particular quotation which I just read out, Freud focuses
on two aspects of the creative writer. The first aspect is the way in which the creative
writer creates his literary product by drawing upon certain kinds of materials. And the
second is the way in which that literary product influences the readers by arousing in
them strong emotional responses. We will have to come back to each of these aspects
later on, but for now let us follow how the essay develops. Freud in order to study this
unique phenomenon of literary creativity tries to equate it with a more mundane and
more universally occurring psychological phenomenon, so that it becomes relatable to
everyone. He finds this universal phenomenon in the play of children, and he
discovers in the psychological dynamics underlying the mind of a child at play, the
equivalence of an author’s creative energy. Let me quote here from the essay:
(“Should we not look for the first traces of imaginative activity as early as in
childhood the child’s best-loved and most intense occupation is with his play or
games. Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that
he creates a world of his own, or, rather re-arranges the things of his world in a new
way which pleases him?”) For the child at play, this imaginative recreation of a world
of its own is not a jest. As Freud observes, the child is, in fact, quite serious when it is
playing with the things around him and he treats the world created by him through his
imagination with utmost earnestness. A child’s play is therefore, not to be contrasted
with its other activities performed in seriousness. Rather in Freud’s words, “The
opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real.” Now, this distinction that
Freud draws between child’s play and reality brings us to the already familiar terrain
of wish fulfillment. As we have noted in our previous discussions on hysteria, for
instance, or on dreams, or on parapraxes, one of the crucial aspects of Freudian
psychoanalysis is a study of how those wishes are engaged with and at least partially
satisfied which cannot be enacted or even admitted in reality. These wish fulfillments,
therefore, always proceed by creating a cleavage with reality and opening up a zone
of fantasy. Now, if you have followed the previous lectures carefully, you will know
that fantasy is defined from within the field of Freudian psychoanalytic studies as the
creation of an imaginary scene. It is an imaginary scene which allows one to live out
the repressed wishes that cannot be fulfilled in reality, because our mind is too
inhibited to even acknowledge them in public. Freud explains that a child’s play is an
early form of fantasy or rather I should say it the other way around. Freud says that
fantasy is the adult substitution for the child’s play. Now, this needs some
explanation, so we will proceed slowly step by step. A child, as we will know from
our own experience of having watched them, usually wants to be like the adults that
he sees around himself. Now, the way in which the child fulfills this wish is through
creating an imaginary scene in the form of play in which the child enacts out his
desire of being an adult. If for instance a child has seen his father driving a car then in
his play he might create an imaginary scene in which he assumes the role of a driver,
and he will keep zooming around the room sitting on a chair and pretending that that
chair is his car. Now, this fictional situation that the child plays out produces for him a
high yield of pleasure which is otherwise denied in reality. Now, Freud argues that as
the child grows up such mechanism of wish fulfillment through playing games are no
longer available to him, yet, the pleasure that the playful creation of an imaginative
scene of wish fulfillment offered someone as a child cannot be very easily forfeited by
him as an adult. So, rather than completely giving up playing, what the adult does is
he transforms it into an activity of creating fantasies. Let me read some lines from the
essay to make this point clear: (“As people grow up, […], they cease to play, and they
seem to give up the yield of pleasure which they gained from playing. But whoever
understands the human mind knows that hardly anything is harder for a man than to
give up a pleasure which he has once experienced. Actually, we can never give up
anything; we only exchange one thing for another. What appears to be a renunciation
is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate. In the same way, the growing child
when he stops playing, gives up nothing but the link with real objects, instead of
playing, he now phantasies. He builds castles in the air and creates what are called
day-dreams.”) So, here we encounter the word “day-dreams”, which will be one of
our key terms in understanding literary creativity through the lens of Freudian
psychoanalysis. But before we can take up the concept of day-dream for further
discussion, let us dwell a little longer on the transformation that happens between the
child’s play and the adult’s fantasy. Freud observes that one of the key distinctions
separating child’s play from fantasy is that the imagined objects and situations that
constitute the former, that is a child’s play, are often linked with tangible and visible
things in the real world. Thus, for instance, the child trying to fulfill his wish to be a
driver like his father might make use of a real chair and pretend that that chair is his
car. In case of fantasy, however, no such linkages with real tangible objects can be
observed. Indeed, the adult very carefully protects his fantasies from any external
manifestations, so much so, that if asked an adult would even deny the existence of
his fantasies. This is however sharply different from how a child plays because a child
may not have any desire to exhibit his play in front of the adults but then again he
does not make any special effort to hide his play from anyone. A child at play is in
other words indifferent to whether someone else is observing him at that particular
point of time or not. This contrast between the child’s indifference to observer’s
spying on his play and the adults desperate attempt to keep his fantasies a secret is,
however, not very difficult to understand. The wishes that the child enacts in his
imaginary world while playing are not particularly repressed wishes because the
entire mechanism of repression and repressing desires only gradually develops as one
grows up. However, for an adult the mechanism of repression is already well
established and consequently the imaginary engagement with wishes that cannot be
fulfilled in reality becomes an embarrassing fact. These imaginary engagements or
fantasies are pleasurable for an adult but they represent a form of guilty pleasure
which the adult needs to keep hidden. Thus, as Freud notes the form of fantasy which
he identifies as day-dream is rarely admitted by anyone in spite of it being almost a
universal phenomenon. And this gives us a clue as to what kind of wishes and desires
constitute our day-dreams. But before we can move on to these wishes and desires, let
us focus on the term day-dream for a moment, and let us focus on its relationship with
the other kind of dream, with night dream for want of a better word, that we
experience while asleep. Well as we have already discussed, dreams which arise from
within the limbo between consciousness and unconsciousness manifests our libidinal
desires and they allow us to engage with these libidinal desires. Now, since these are
desires which an adult person has come to regard as shameful, they appear in the
dream only after being sufficiently distorted by the mechanism of dream-work. We
have already discussed this. Now, the fantasies of a day-dream are also similar
engagements with “shameful desires”, with the only difference being that in day-
dreams these desires are engaged in the woken state itself. The stigmas associated
with these desires, nevertheless, remain very strong even in a day-dreaming adult and
consequently it becomes very difficult to make a person who day-dreams confess his
fantasies. Indeed, as Freud notes, it is often easier to make a person confess his
misdeeds than confess the fantasies that plays out in his day-dream. Now, let us come
to the contents of the fantasies that constitute our day-dreams. So, we already have a
number of clues as to what the content might be of our day-dreams, but let us look at
it more elaborately. Well Freud states that the nature of day-dreams differ from person
to person and it depends for instance on the person’s sex, on the person’s character,
circumstances, and a number of other things. But irrespective of these individual
variations, day-dreams, according to Freud, primarily fulfill two different kinds of
wishes. The first Freud calls ambitious wish and the second he calls erotic wish.
Now, ambitious wish relates to a person’s desire to be regarded as socially elevated
and powerful, whereas, erotic wishes relate to a person’s repressed sexual desires.
According to Freud, in the day-dreams of young men the ambitious wishes mostly
surface, whereas, a young lady’s day-dream is more likely to be dominated by erotic
wishes. And this distinction also makes clear the motives of concealing ones day-
dreams, because as Freud explains a young lady is allowed only a minimum of erotic
desires by the patriarchal bourgeois society. Therefore, any excess of erotic desire has
to be repressed by her and engaged with only in the private imaginative space offered
by day-dreams. And this is very important to remember that repression has a social
angle to it. For instance, when Freud is talking about the repression of erotic desires in
young women he is talking from within the context of a patriarchal bourgeois society.
So, does that mean that if the society changes, if the societal norms change, the
contents of the day-dreams will also change? If, for instance, a young lady is no
longer supposed to repress so deeply her erotic wishes, will that create different kinds
of day-dreaming in her? Well, this is a question that I will leave hanging in the air for
you to consider. But let us move on with the essay and Freud contrasts the day-dreams
of a young lady with the day-dreams of a young man. And he says that in case of a
young man what he needs to do is he needs to and I quote, “suppress the excess of self
regard which he brings with him from the spoilt days of his childhood, so that he may
find his place in a society which is full of other individuals making equally strong
demands.” But having made this distinction, Freud also goes on to point out that the
distinction does not mean an absolute opposition, or any kind of a rigid
compartmentalization. And this is because often the day-dreams overlap both the
wishes; overlap ambitious wish with erotic wish. Thus, for instance, a young man,
who in his day-dreams fantasize about performing some heroic exploits is actually
trying to fulfill an ambitious wish, but in that same day-dream the young man might
also imagine himself to be performing these exploits to win the affection of his
ladylove which then connects with his erotic wish. And, therefore, as we can see in
the same day-dream both of these wishes can be juxtaposed. Now, we need to note
one thing here, which is that though day-dreams might have at their core either
ambitious wish or erotic wish or a mixture of the two, the mise-en-scene, which
means the setting of the day-dream of each individual person differs and it changes
from one day-dream to another. This is because and I am quoting from the essay here:
Day-dreams “fit themselves in to the subject’s shifting impressions of life, change
with every change in his situation, and receive from every fresh active impression
what might be called a ‘date-mark’’’. To explain this, Freud gives the example of a
possible day-dream that a poor orphan might indulge in on his way to meet a
prospective employer. Now, in his day-dream this poor orphan boy might imagine
himself as meeting the employer, then getting the job from him, and then the boy
might also imagine himself performing brilliantly, and wonderfully succeeding in the
job that he has got, and then winning the trust of the employer, and finally, getting
accepted within his family. In his day-dream the brilliant carrier might culminate in
the boy’s marrying the charming young daughter of the employer and then, finally,
inheriting the business after the death of the employer. Now, note here that the setting
of the day-dream is almost entirely influenced by the poor orphan’s present situation.
He is on his way to meet a prospective employer and, therefore, his day-dream is
about getting the job and about doing exceptionally well in that particular job. But
what happens when we look beneath the surface of the story that plays out in this
particular day-dream and that is, of course, shaped by the unique situation of the
moment. Well, we find the same cluster of ambitious wish and erotic wish that
provide the universal content for all day-dreams. Thus the exceptional career that the
poor orphan imagines, fulfills his desire for social elevation, whereas, the part about
his getting married with the charming young daughter of the employer, fulfills is
erotic wish. So, a day-dream, just like a usual dream, a night dream, or like
parapraxes, presents us with a narrative. And if we analyze that in additive, if we look
deep into that narrative, we can interpret it from the psychoanalytic perspective and
that will reveal to us the presence of some very deep seated desires. Now, while
elaborating on the example of this possible day-dream of a poor orphan, Freud draws
our attention to the sequence of time that underlines the fantasy. In Freud’s words,
“The relation of a fantasy to time is in general very important. We may see that it
hovers, as it were, between three times - the three moments of time which our ideation
involves. Mental work is linked to some current impression, some provoking occasion
in the present which has been able to arouse one of the subject’s major wishes. From
here it harks back to a memory of an earlier experience (usually an infantile one) in
which this wish was fulfilled; and it now creates a situation relating to the future
which represents a fulfillment of the wish.” This comment becomes easier to
understand if we go back to the example of the day-dream of the poor orphan. Now,
that particular day-dream is, of course, integrally connected to the orphan’s present
situation. As I explained just a few moments ago, the orphan’s day-dream is about a
job because he is at present on his way to a prospective employer. But this event that
informs the present of the orphan boy, triggers a day-dream precisely because it
strongly harks back to a memory of an earlier experience. And in case of the poor
orphan it might be the memory of his family and the affection that he used to receive
while his parents were still living. The reason the present event triggers this past
memory is because the future holds a prospect of his regaining his position within an
affectionate family, in this case, the family of his prospective employer. So, what the
day-dream does, for the orphan boy, is to allow him in his imagination of the future a
chance to regain what he has lost in the past. In other words the day-dream strings
together the three times of the past, the present, and the future. But the obvious
question is that what has all of this got to do with our understanding of literature or
literary creativity? Well, Freud argues that just like the fantasies or the day-dreams are
transformed forms of child’s play, popular novels, romances, and short stories are
transformed forms of day-dream. So, here we reach at the culminating point of the
chains of equivalent relationships that Freud has been creating throughout his essay.
So, from child’s play we come to day-dream and from day-dream we now come to
creative writing. Now, here it is important to note that Freud begins his discussion of
literature and literary creativity in the second part of the essay by making a
distinction. He says that his focus in this particular essay will be on popular novels,
romances, and stories, which are entirely products of their author’s imagination. And
he will not focus on literature produced either by critically acclaimed writers, or on
ancient epics, and dramas, which use readymade materials to build their story. So,
does that mean psychoanalytic literary theory can only be applied to certain kinds of
literature and not to certain other kinds of literature? Well, this is a question that I will
leave open for you to decide, but while considering this question do not go by only
what Freud has written in this essay. You also need to consider the kind of literary
work which Freud himself engages elsewhere. And I think you will find him engaging
not only with a lot of critically acclaimed literary pieces, he engaged with
Shakespeare for instance, but also with ancient literature; think about his use of the
Oedipus myth. But anyway moving on with Freud’s essay, the argument that is being
made here by Freud is that popular fiction produced by authors are similar to day-
dreams produced by each one of us. Thus just like a day-dreamer the creative writer
too gets inspired by a strong experience in the present which triggers in his mind
some earlier childhood memory. This childhood memory appears in the present as a
desire or a wish, which then finds fulfillment in the creative work. In other words, just
like a day-dream, a creative work too is underlined by its author’s desire for wish
fulfillment, and again just like a day-dream, the creative work to strings together the
past, the present and the future. Moreover, popular creative writings like novels,
romances, and short stories also resemble day-dreams in having ambitious and erotic
wish at their core. Thus, for instance, the hero of a popular romance or a novel seldom
comes to any harm or seldom dies even if he is found to be injured or in deep trouble
at the end of a chapter, he is seen recovering or making an escape soon enough mostly
even in the next chapter. Now, this is a manifestation of the ambitious wish in which
the subject always imagines himself as supremely powerful and as absolutely
invincible. Think here, for instance, of all the run of the mill Bollywood scripts where
even if the hero is beaten black and blue, even if he falls from a high rise, even if he is
caught in a car crash, he comes out of it unscratched, almost like a divine figure. The
erotic wish also plays an important part in popular creative writing and if you come to
think of it also in popular Bollywood scripts as well, in these stories we see the hero
being imbued with such charm that it becomes irresistible for all the young beautiful
women around him, and they can’t stop falling in love with him, and this clearly
connects to the subject’s repressed sexual fantasies. But having pointed out these
similarities between day-dreaming and creative writing, Freud brings up for
discussion at the very end of his piece a crucial difference between the two. Now, he
points out that our day-dream is a fantasy of an individual and is associated with the
fulfillment of his personal desires. And Freud also notes that if we were to tell our
day-dreams to others, our narration would most probably repel them or at the very
least leave them cold. This is a not very difficult to understand in fact, because
imagine one of your friends telling you of his day-dream in which he performs great
heroic acts and in which he saves the world from destruction and in which he ends up
marrying a young beautiful woman. Now, this day-dream though it yields a high
degree of pleasure to your friend would leave you uninspired because, it does not
fulfill any of your desires or wishes, that is to say your friend’s day-dream does not
make you feel heroic. Yet, a popular novel or a romance or a short story in spite of
being akin to the day-dream of its author, seems to yield pleasure to the reader as
well. Now, how does this happen? Well, Freud argues that a creative writer allows
others to participate in his day-dreams and to reap pleasure from them by two
different ways. The first way is that the creative writer uses his ability to write and to
structure his narrative beautifully, and this formal beauty of the creative writing
attracts the reader and for it calls this the “incentive bonus” or the “fore-pleasure”.
This fore-pleasure experienced through the literary form, leads the reader to
experience a still greater pleasure from the content of the creative writing. A reader
can experience this pleasure from the content because the creative writer is able to,
and I am quoting, “soften the character of his egoistic day-dream by altering and
disguising it.” In other words, the creative writer narrates his own day-dream in such a
way that it loses its private or personal character and it allows the reader to participate
in that day-dream. The personal fantasy of the author is, in fact, sufficiently altered
and disguised for us readers to be able to project our own images on to the hero of the
fiction, and thereby fulfill our ambitious and erotic desires through him. And since
through literature we can indulge in these wishes, ambitious wishes and erotic wishes,
more openly than through our day-dreaming, you remember that we need to very
closely guard our day-dreams as a top secret. But when we read literature we can
indulge in these wishes more openly and therefore, Freud sees that we feel liberated
from the tensions of our minds. That is to say that the feeling of shame that is attached
to day-dreaming is gone when we engage with literature. Yet in both cases, in the case
of day-dreaming and in the case of literature the goal remains the same, as far as
Freud is concerned, which is the fulfillment of our repressed desires. So, as you can
see here Freudian psychoanalysis can help us create not only an author-centered
literary theory, but also a reader-centered literary theory. And indeed, as Freud tells us
in his essay approaching literature through the lens of psychoanalysis and through
psychological phenomenon like day-dreaming, brings us to the threshold of new
interesting and complicated enquires. We will continue with these new and
complicated enquires in our next lecture, when we take up for discussion the work of
the psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Thank you.

Jacques Lacan
Hello, all of you and welcome back to this lecture on Literary Theory. For the past
few lectures we have been discussing how psychoanalysis can provide a novel way of
approaching literature, and our focus so far has been on the work of Sigmund Freud
and of Carl Gustav Jung. Now we have noticed certain significant differences in the
works of Freud and Jung, but we have also observed significant commonality. And
the commonality is that the object of psychological study, be it symptoms of hysteria
or dreams, or parapraxes, or fantasies, all of them are first presented in the form of a
narrative. The psychoanalyst treats these narratives as something like a veil and once
this veil is lifted, the narrative reveals the workings of the unconscious. Now, in case
of Freud it is just the personal unconscious. And in case of Jung, of course, there is
also the added layer of collective unconscious. But in both the cases, the strategy of
Freud as well as Jung remains the same – language leading us to desires, wishes,
fears, and memories repressed or imprinted in our subconscious.
Today we are going to discuss a psychoanalyst who radically revised this strategy by
arguing famously that, “the unconscious is structured like a language”. In other
words, our language users do not reveal our unconscious rather, language is our
unconscious. The psychoanalyst that I am referring to here is Jacques Lacan and like
always before we start exploring his works, we will briefly dwell upon some
biographical details and we will do that because that will help us contextualize our
discussion better. Now Lacan, his dates are 1901 to 1981, and he first achieved
recognition with the publication of his doctoral thesis On Paranoid Psychosis and this
he published in 1932. In 1936 Lacan came up with his first major idea that would
eventually go on to form one of the key pillars of his version of psychoanalysis. And
this was the idea of the mirror stage which Lacan presented for the first time in the
14th conference of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Now, while
presenting this paper Lacan was stopped midway by the President of the Association
who was chairing the panel. And the president of that association at that point of time
was Ernest Jones, who was a close associate of Freud and who was also Freud’s
biographer. And Lacan was stopped from presenting his full paper and his paper also
did not receive any mention in the conference publication that later came out. Now,
this event has been interpreted in two different lights; one interpretation is that in the
conference each speaker was allotted 10 minutes for their papers. And therefore,
Ernest Jones was not trying to especially gag the content of Lacan’s paper by stopping
him midway, but he was just performing his role as the chairperson of the panel by
telling the speaker that your time is up, so you should stop now. And, moreover, the
conference publication did not carry Lacan’s paper simply because Lacan did not
submit the paper for publication. Some, however, do not believe in this rather
mundane interpretation and they read into this event of the 14th Congress of
International Psychoanalytic Association – Lacan’s first major rift with the
mainstream institutions of psychoanalysis; this interpretation is given further
credibility by referring to Lacan’s later conflicts with the International Psychoanalytic
Association, which as an organization refused to recognize Lacan as a practicing
psychoanalyst. This was because Freud had introduced a standard practice of
analyzing the patients for sessions that lasted for 50 minutes. Lacan converted these
standard 50 minute sessions into sessions of variable lengths. And what this meant
was that Lacan would spend different amounts of time with his different patients and
the amount of time that he is going to spend with a particular patient was not
predetermined. So, the time that Lacan would spend with a patient might vary from
just a few minutes or even a few seconds on the one hand, to several hours on the
other. Now, such experimentation with the length of sessions proved to be too
scandalous for the psychoanalytic orthodoxy represented by the International
Psychoanalytic Society or IPA. And thus in 1963 Lacan’s name was struck off as a
member of IPA and its affiliate societies. Now all of this might suggest that Lacan
was consciously rebelling against the legacy of Freudian psychoanalysis not only by
deviating from his fixed length sessions, but also by burning his bridges with the IPA
which was an organization that was set up by Freud himself. Indeed, this impression
of Lacan departing from Freud gets even stronger if an uninitiated reader reads a few
pages of Freud’s writings and then compares them to Lacan’s. The lucid narrative
style of Freud is in sharp contrast with Lacan’s writings, which often appear to be
deliberately obscurantist and filled with mathematical equations and cryptic diagrams
that thoroughly disrupt any semblance of narrative flow. Yet, despite of these surface
differences Lacan always claimed himself to be a Freudian. In fact, his argument was
that psychoanalytic orthodoxy of his time was not Freudian enough which is why he
asked his audience to look at his works as an effort to return to Freud and to his true
teachings. This attachment of Lacan to Freud can, in fact, be well observed from the
fact that when IPA and its affiliates struck of Lacan’s name from their membership
list he went on to establish his own psychoanalytic organization which he named
École Freudienne de Paris; which literally translates as the Freudian School of Paris.
This institution founded in 1964 gained prominence during the next few decades and
it established what may be called a Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis. Interestingly,
however, in 1980 just a year before Lacan died, he dissolved this school that he had
founded and he famously told his followers and I quote here: “It is up to you to be
Lacanians if you wish. I am a Freudian”, but in spite of these repeated assertions of
being a Freudian one cannot help, but consider Lacan as a wonderfully original
thinker; who even while revisiting such typically Freudian concepts like the Oedipal
complex for instance drastically changes our more mundane understanding of that
phenomenon. Indeed it was this charismatic originality that made Lacan into a cult
figure in the post Second World War decades within the intellectual circles of Paris.
And at the heart of this cult status was the seminar series which Lacan started
delivering in 1953 and with which he continued till 1980. So, Lacan delivered a
number of seminars during his entire lifetime and this lecture series this seminar
series was attended by various French intellectuals of the day including figures like
Michel Foucault, we are already familiar with Foucault, but also others like Giles
Deleuze, for instance, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva. And one interesting piece of
information about this seminar series was that between 1964 and 1969 these seminars
were delivered in Paris’s École normale supérieure, or ENS. Now those of you who
have carefully followed my previous lectures would know that ENS was the
intellectual hotbed during the 1960s. A number of scholars associated with the events
of 1968 were indeed affiliated to ENS at some point in their life. And indeed when
Lacan was delivering his lectures in ENS in which he was reinterpreting Freud at the
same time and at the same venue Louis Althussar was working on his reinterpretation
of Marx’s Capital and producing seminal text like Reading Capital or For Marx. And
both these contemporaries in their powerful reinterpretation of Marx and Freud were
being heavily influenced by the wave of Structuralism which at that point of time was
sweeping through France because of the influence that Claude Lévi-Strauss’s
publications had at that point in time. So, an important thing to note here is that
though standard textbooks of literary theory would usually present figures like a Lévi-
Strauss, Althusser, and Lacan under three different chapters dealing with say
Structuralism, Marxism, and Psychoanalysis, yet, we discover very intimate linkages
between the works of these intellectuals. And therefore, one innovative way of
approaching literary theory might be to group literary theorists according to their
locational proximity in terms of space and time rather than according to their
acclaimed ideological affiliation. So, this is a thought and you might want to turn this
in your head a little. But right now we are going to move from this biographical
sketch of Lacan to study some of his main ideas. Now, one interesting thing about
Lacan is that his thoughts were chiefly conveyed to his audience through lectures,
through seminars rather than through book publications. Indeed apart from his
doctoral thesis Lacan only published one book in his lifetime which was titled Écrits
which literally means writings. And, this was collection of all of the major essays that
Lacan had written till 1966. It also contained the essay on the mirror stage, but not the
one that he presented in the IPA conference in the 1930; it was a later version. It was
a version that Lacan had worked on and had presented in late 1940. The notes of his
seminars, as I mentioned he kept on delivering seminars from the 1950s till 1980, they
now represent the chief part of Lacan’s oeuvre and they are right now in the process
of being published. So, some of it is already out there, but some of it is still to come
out in the form of books
. So, like some of the other theorists that we have encountered in this course, the
Lacanian canon too is very much in the making. However, the basic framework of
Laconian psychoanalytic theory is pretty well established. According to Lacan, our
psychological life is guided by three different orders or registers which he referred to
as 1. the Imaginary, 2. the Symbolic, and 3. the Real. These three orders form a kind
of interlocking matrix, which Lacan depicted through the image of the Borromean
rings, which you can see on the slide. Now, this complex structure that you can see is
referred to as Borromean rings because this structure famously formed part of the coat
of arms of the Italian aristocratic family of the Borromean. Now, what is noticeable
about this structure is how the rings are intertwined and they are intertwined in such a
way that if any one of these three rings break, then the entire structure falls apart.
From the perspective of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and
the Real are intertwined like the three Borromean rings and our psychological
phenomena play out in the spaces created between these intersecting orders.
But what constitutes the Imaginary, or the Symbolic, or the Real? Let me take them
up one by one starting with the Imaginary order. Now the first thing that we need to
clarify before going into any detailed exploration of the Imaginary is that the name of
this order is not rooted in the usual English meaning of the term Imaginary, which
usually means unreal or fictitious. The term Imaginary rather derives from the word
“image”; and this order has at its centre the process of the development of the ego
with reference to the image of one’s body as a coherent whole. As far as Lacan is
concerned the most crucial aspect of this process of ego development, that is to say
the development of the sense of one’s own identity, is what is referred to as the mirror
stage. Now this mirror stage is something that happens in the life of a child when it is
between 6 and 18 months and it happens when the child starts recognizing the image
of its own body on a mirror as its own self. To understand the major implications of
this recognition of one’s own bodily image as one’s own self we will have to start
from the phase that precedes the mirror stage. Now in this preceding stage, the child
does not have any coherent sense of its own body, nor any sharp sense of distinction
between its own self and the external world. This is why Lacan wittily refers to a
child located in this phase as an hommelette. Now, this word is what is called a
portmanteau configuration which yolks together two different words, two different
French words and the meanings of these two different French words. So, the first
word that we have to note here is a word homme, right? [Note the spelling it has, an h
which is silent] Now, in French the word homme means man. The second word is
omelette which is also commonly used in English, and as we know, it refers to a
preparation of beaten eggs that is spread out on a frying pan and then allowed to
gradually solidify over heat. Now a very young child is not yet a man, or an homme,
but an omelette in the same way that a small book is a booklet, or a small pig is a
piglet. At another level, this very young child in the phase that precedes the mirror
stage does not have a very well defined notion of its bodily identity and is thus
something akin to an omelette of beaten eggs, where the liquid mixture keeps
spreading over the frying pan without any definite shape. Thus the portmanteau word
hommelette, with an h, is used by Lacan as a pun operating on both these levels.
Now, when between the age of 6 and 18 months the child learns to recognize its
bodily image in the mirror or in any other shiny surface, then two very important
things happen. The first thing is that the baby gets to recognize its body as a
comprehensive entity and a well defined shape that is distinct from shapes of other
things or other persons around it. The second thing that happens is that the baby gains
a semblance of mastery over the image of its own self. Now this is because the baby
realizes that it can manipulate the image on the mirror by shifting its own arms , its
legs, its head, etcetera. Now, both of these ideas of a distinctly shaped body and a
sense of mastery over it that the baby acquires vis-à-vis its mirror image is actually in
contrast to the lack of motor skills and sense of bodily fragmentation that the baby
otherwise experiences. Therefore, the mirror image becomes a sight of pleasure, a
sight which gives it a sense of completeness and of being in control, a sense which it
otherwise lacks. This leads the baby to identify with the image on the mirror. So, in
other words, as far as the baby is concerned, it’s the image on the mirror that comes to
stand for who he or she is. From the Lacanian perspective, the ego or what is also
referred to him by the word Ideal-I is, therefore, identified as this self image acquired
during the mirror stage. Consequently, according to Lacan, the ego has two
characteristic features; one is misrecognition and the other is alienation.
So, why is ego associated with misrecognition by Lacan? Well, the mirror image
which becomes the basis of ego or the Ideal-I is at the final instance only an illusion.
It gets prioritized in the psychological world of the baby because it gives the baby a
sense of wholeness and mastery. But then again this wholeness and mastery is
actually an illusion because it is missing from the actual experiential world of the
baby. The identification of the baby with the image thus happens at the cost of putting
aside the actual experiential sense of being which is why Lacan classifies it as a
deliberate misrecognition. The reason why ego is associated with alienation is
something which must have already become clear from our discussion, because the
ego is based on an image which is an external projection that is located outside the
subject. Now this is what Lacan means when he says that the ego which is sort of the
image of the self is alien to one’s own self. And here we need to take into account two
very important things; the first is that Lacan here is making a distinction between
what he calls the subject and the ego. Why? Because the ego is an alien idea or an
external image that the subject latches on to and invests with a sense of identity, it is
outside the subject. And second is that the use of the term alienation that is present
here, that we encountered in Lacan, is very different from the earlier use of the term
that we have encountered in this lecture series. We have encountered the term
alienation if you remember when we were dealing with Marxism especially when we
were talking about Brecht’s epic theater. So, I want you to study them separately and
not to confuse them. They are very different though the term is the same – the term of
alienation.
So, this is what I had to say about the Imaginary order, now let us move on to the
Symbolic order. Lacan’s work on this Symbolic order was very heavily influenced by
the Structuralist insights of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Since this is the case we will
therefore, start our discussion on the Symbolic order by revisiting some of the ideas of
Lévi-Strauss. Now, if you remember our earlier lecture on Claude Lévi-Strauss you
will know that there we had discussed his Structuralist approach to myths in details.
But we had also mentioned in that lecture that Lévi-Strauss uses the Structuralist lens
to also approach kinship relationships and in that lecture I had not elaborated on the
kinship structure, but that is where we need to focus today in order to understand the
roots of Lacan’s Symbolic order. For Claude Lévi-Strauss in his study of the human
kinship noted that kinship relations are underlined by a sort of grammatical structure,
which was above and beyond the actual human beings who performed the kinship
rules. To understand this let us take an example. Let us say that there is a real
historical woman called let us say Parvati and, let us say, that this lady gets married to
a real man, a real historical man, whose name is Anand. Now, this marriage of two
real and unique individuals will immediately situate them in a network of kinship
relations, of various kinds of in-laws for instance, which is independent of the
individuals per say. That is to say if Parvati were to marry someone called Mukul,
instead of someone called Anand, that marriage in its turn will open up the same kind
of kinship network as the other. So, here the identity of Parvati operates at two
distinct levels. One at the level of signifier, and the other at the level of signified. The
signifier here is the role of the wife and the signified here is the actual person who is
Parvati. Now from our study of Structuralism we know that the meaning of the
signifier is independent of the signified. Indeed the signifier gains its meaning through
its relations with other signifiers. Similarly, the role of the wife gains meaning only
inside the context of the network of other kinship relations within which it is situated.
In the language of Structuralism the grammar of kinship relations which determine the
meaning and significance of particular kinship roles within any society resembles the
level of “langue”. The marriage of Parvati and Anand or Parvati and Mukul, for that
matter, operates as individual instances of parole which mobilizes the langue of
kinship grammar. Now, though I have been somewhat cryptic here I am sure those of
you who have followed my lectures on Structuralism and Post-structuralism carefully,
you would have no difficulty in understanding my explanation here. So, the main
inference that we can draw from this study of Lévi-Strauss on kinship structure is that
at one level, human beings operate in society just as signifiers operate within
language. This is what is referred to as the Symbolic order where there are no
essential identities, but simply marks or symbols which generate meaning through
their interrelations. Now, what is important to note here is that this Symbolic order of
kinship structure within which humans operate precedes their individual existence.
Thus, for instance, the identity of wife within the kinship structure, precedes the
existence of the real life figure Parvati. And the event of her getting married becomes
significant only because of this preceding langue of kinship grammar. This is similar
to how the underlying structure of langue, for instance, pre-exists individual instances
of parole. Now, Lacan both adopted this concept from Lévi-Strauss as well as
expanded upon it. According to Lacan, it was not only the kinship relations that
represented the Symbolic order, but all other aspects of human social and
psychological life as well. This was because human existence is inextricably
associated with the Symbolic order of language which precedes our individual
existence and, in fact, which is going to continue beyond the end of our individual
existence. So, in other words we become fully human only when we are subjected to
the Symbolic order of language.

‫تخدمها‬ee‫تي نس‬ee‫ا ال‬ee‫ االن‬... ‫في اللحظة التي يدخل فيها الطفل الى عالم اللغة و يدرك ماهية االنا يصبح انسان مستقل‬
‫ل‬ee‫ل مث‬ee‫ تعم‬... ‫رآة‬ee‫ورة في الم‬ee‫ مثل انعكاس الص‬... ‫في التعبير عن نفسنا هي صورة وهمية غير حقيقة عن النفس‬
signifier ‫ اي ان االنا هي تعبير ثابت غير مرتبط بمعنى محدد و انما يأخذ معناه‬.. ‫ في حالة البنيوية‬signified
‫من عالقته بالدوال االخرى حولة‬
‫انا اكون انا الني لست ابي‬
‫انا اكون انا الني لست اي شيء او شخص اخر بالنسبة لي‬
‫ مفهوم خاص بكل شخص و هو ال يدخل العالم الفعلي و انما مفهوم تخيلي عن الذات ( غريبة‬... ‫االنا غير حقيقي‬
)‫بالنسبة لنا مثل صورة المرآة‬
)‫ صورة المرآه‬-( ‫ التخيلي‬-2 ) ‫ اللغة ( تعبير االنا‬-1 ‫اصبح لدينا نوعين من الصورة الغريبة‬
 1- other ( ‫هناك توافق شديد بينها و بين الذات باالضافة الى انها تبداء معي و تنتهي معي ززز )المرآه‬
‫االخر االصغر‬
2- Other ( ‫اسماها الكان االخر االكبر النها تسبقني و تستمر بعدي ) اللغة‬

Thus, language is the medium or template on which we articulate our identity. And
this “I” which we utter from within the language to identify ourselves operate just like
the mirror image. It is external to us, this articulation of I, but it is the mark on which
we project our sense of selfhood. Thus, both the mirror image and the language from
within which we enunciate the I, that identifies us, are alien or other to us.
Now to distinguish between these two others Lacan refers to language as the big
Other with a capital O. And, the reason he does that is because with the mirror image
there is a very tight fit between the image and the subject’s identity. So, my mirror
image, for instance, begins and ends with me. And this is why Lacan calls it the small
“other”. Language, on the other hand, is another “Other” which precedes me and
which will continue after me. Therefore, language cannot be completely assimilated
within my individual identity and this is why it is referred to by Lacan as the big
Other, right. So, this is the distinction between the big Other and the small other; the
small other is the mirror image and the big Other is the language.
Now, when Lacan asserts that our human identity is articulated from within the
Symbolic order of language, he is not just speaking of the conscious part of our
identity, but also the unconscious part. This is because Lacan believes that all our
wishes, our desires, our fears, even when they are repressed are actually structured by
the force field of language.
In other words, our desires, wishes, fears are all generated from within the Symbolic
order of language irrespective of whether they get repressed or not; which is why
Lacan argues that not only our conscious self identity, but also our unconscious is
structured like a language.
Now, this idea, which as I told you in my introduction to this lecture, is a very
important idea that is associated with Lacan and from the perspective of literary
studies this idea changes a lot of things. But before that you might ask this question as
to how this idea of desires and fears, how do they generate within the Symbolic order?
What is the meaning of that? Well in order to understand that we will have to go into
a discussion of how Lacan reinterprets Freud’s idea of Oedipal complex. But
unfortunately we do not have that amount of time in our hands, so this will remain a
gap in our lecture. But if you are interested to know more about it, I can refer you
Sean Homer’s book on Jacques Lacan in the Routledge Critical Thinker Series and
that book really provides a very lucid elaboration of this Lacanian reinterpretation of
Oedipal complex. And if you are interested to know more about how desires and
wishes can get generated within the Symbolic order, then I suggest you go and read
that. Now, as I said that it is important to note here that this idea of the unconscious
being, structured like a language, radically revises the relationship between literature
or any other concrete language use for that matter with the unconscious. With Freud
or even with Jung instances of language uses were probed to reach at the unconscious
that lived beyond the linguistic structure. But, with Lacan we reach at an
understanding of the unconscious which is linguistic in nature, which is itself like
language.
‫ الالوعي هو منطقة خارج البناء اللغوي و ال يمكن التعبير عنها النها خارج البناء اللغوي او خارج االدراك‬: ‫فرويد‬

‫ الالوعي هي مثل اللغة و لها بنية لغوية‬: ‫الكان‬

‫وجهة نظر الكان هي وجة نظر بنيوية بحته حيث ان كل شيء يتم طيه داخل هيكل اللغة وال يوجد اي شيء متعالي او خارج ذلك الهيكل‬

.
This is a typically Structuralist move where everything gets folded within the
language structure and there is no transcendental signified outside the structure. With
Freud and Jung the unconscious stood beyond the structure of language, imparting
layers of meaning to it while itself remaining above and beyond that meaning mating
process. With Lacan, however, the unconscious itself gets folded within the
structuring process of language.
And so just to give you an example the two processes of condensation and
displacement that we have already discussed and which I have pointed out plays a
very important role in the Freudian concept of dream work, is interpreted by Lacan in
terms of language use; for instance, he relates the idea of condensation with the
linguistic trope of metaphor and he relates the idea of displacement with the linguistic
trope of metonymy. So, it is interesting to delve into this Lacanian interpretation of
the unconscious as language, operating as language. I can only be this brief in this
lecture I cannot elaborate it beyond this point, but it is something that you might want
to probe for yourself. So, the tissue of language which constitutes literature becomes
here with Lacan the same tissue that constitutes the unconscious of the author as well
as the reader. So, here again we come back to the core idea of Structuralist literary
criticism; that there is nothing beyond language and its structuring principles in the
form of a transcendental signified. So, with this we would end our discussion of
Lacan but before I end let me briefly dwell upon the order of the Real and here when I
say briefly I really mean it because, this is a concept that Lacan himself kept rather
vague. Now the reason why Lacan kept himself vague when talking about the real is
because, the real is that which continuously escapes the articulation of the Symbolic
order, or language. So, let me on this statement. Though Lacan asserts that the whole
of our psychological life is structured by the Symbolic order of language, he also
admits the presence of a reality that is beyond the Symbolic order. This is the reality,
which constantly, which consistently escapes articulation through language and this is
what constitutes for Lacan the order of Real with a capital R. An example of our
encounter with the Real would be, for instance, our encountering a near fatal accident
or a life threatening situation. Now in that encounter, we are left speechless, it causes
a trauma that is beyond the articulation and that stuns us into absolute silence. Sooner
or later we overcome this stunned state and we get back to the Symbolic order of
language and articulation, but the moment of shock when we are left stunned and
speechless that is the moment which Lacan would point out as our encounter with the
Real; with something that is beyond articulation. So, with this we complete our
discussion on Lacan and we also complete our discussion on the topic of
psychoanalysis and literature. In the next lecture we will take up Feminism and how
that relates to the field of literary studies. Thank you.
Feminism 1 : Wollstonecraft
Hello and welcome back to a new lecture in this series on Literary Theory. In our last
lecture we have completed discussing psychoanalysis and, today we are going to
move on to the topic of feminism and how feminism relates to the field of literary
studies. Now, feminism appears to be a much maligned term and someone like
Margaret Walters, for instance, in her book Feminism: A Very Short Introduction,
devotes the whole of the first chapter, to trace the long history of opposition to the
term feminism. And what is interesting is that, this opposition does not merely come
from people, who are opposed to the idea of equality of women but also from people
like Virginia Woolf, whose works are regarded as central to contemporary feminist
theory. We will talk more about Virginia Woolf’s opposition to the term feminism
later on, when we discuss her in more details. But what I want to focus on right now is
that, there is a problem involved in dealing with a theoretical term that is so, regularly
vilified. And, the problem is that in such cases, we end up with a purely negative
theoretical category – sort of a blank, a perversion, a lack, which becomes difficult to
study in itself. So, one of the first things that, we need to do here I think is to try and
fix some sort of a positive understanding, positive definition of feminism as a
theoretical category, which can act as the basis for our exploration. I think a good
definition of feminism is provided by Chris Weedon, at the very beginning of her
book titled, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. Where Weedon writes,
and I quote: “Feminism is a politics. It is a politics directed at changing existing
power relations between women and men in society. These power relations structure
all areas of life, the family, education and welfare, the worlds of work and politics,
culture and leisure. They determine who does what and for whom what we are and
what we become.” Now, this definition is particularly good, because by explaining
feminism in terms of resistance to patriarchy, it reveals feminism in its full scope. So,
just as patriarchy is ubiquitous and just as it structures all areas of life, feminist
resistance to it is also equally ubiquitous. But for a lecture series like ours, this very
ubiquity of feminism poses a problem. If feminism pervades every aspect of our life,
or can potentially pervade every aspect of our life that is structured by patriarchy, then
how do we even start studying it? How do we find the beginning of feminism? How
do we trace its history? What social cultural and political or economic context do we
locate feminism within? Since, these questions cannot be satisfactorily answered with
the help of Weedon’s definition, I propose moving on to a narrower definition of the
term, which we can find in Oxford English Dictionary. In Oxford English Dictionary
after defining feminism as a movement associated with the advocacy of equality of
the sexes and the establishment of political, social, and economic rights of the female
sex, the note then goes on to add section, a kind of a footnote, which is very important
for our purpose and this footnote or this annotation reads as follows: “The issue of
rights for women first became prominent during the French and American revolutions
in the late 18th century, with regard especially to property rights, the marriage
relationship and the right to vote. In Britain it was not until the emergence of the
suffrage movement in the late 19th century that there was a significant political
change. A “second wave of feminism” arose in the 1960s, concerned especially with
economic and social discrimination, with an emphasis on unity and sisterhood. A
more diverse “third wave” is sometimes considered to have arisen in the 1980s and
1990s, as a reaction against the perceived lack of focus on class and race issues in
earlier movements. Now, this particular definition and the note accompanying it,
though it lacks the kind of comprehensiveness offered by Weedon’s definition, makes
up for it in terms of practical usefulness by providing us with some definite spatial
and temporal coordinates from within which to study feminism; so, according to this
definition, feminism, as it is popularly understood, is a cluster of movements for
women’s rights that can be traced back to the late 18th century. These movements
played out in the context of the post-Enlightenment West had largely remained
confined to Western Europe and America at least till the 1980s and 1990s. Since, then
according to this definition and the note attached to it, feminist movements have
become more inclusive of race and class and have consequently spilled beyond the
bourgeois white woman centric discourse. Now, there are of course, some very
obvious problems with this particular definition. For instance, it may be quite
justifiably argued that this definition is too West centric in its orientation and does not
take into account the long history of movement for women’s rights that took place
within other socio-cultural contexts. For example, this definition does not allow us to
take into account the anti-patriarchal activism of individuals like Savitribai Phule, for
instance, or Begum Rokeya, or Tarabai Shinde, or Pandita Ramabai. But, then this is a
gap that haunts not just this definition in particular, but indeed how feminism is
popularly understood and popularly discussed. The mainstream discourse of feminism
considers the post-Enlightenment West to be the major wellspring of feminism and in
this lecture series, we will use this mainstream understanding of feminism. But, at the
same time even while working within this particular West centric definition of
feminism, we should be definitely conscious about it is limitations, which is why I
pointed this out to you. And in fact, if you find interested in feminism, I would
definitely encourage you to go beyond the confines of post-Enlightenment Western
feminism. And, to do a more exhaustive research on the different ways in which
women’s rights has been advocated in different cultures and in different historical
periods. So, with these introductory comments about defining feminism, let us now
move on to the study of some of its major aspects. Now, one of the ways of studying
feminism has been by looking at the different waves of feminist movement, but since
we have been approaching theoretical categories in this lecture series by focusing on
individuals and their works, we will continue with that convention even here. So,
when we will talk about the waves, we will talk about them in our discussion of some
figure or the other. So, in this lecture series, I will try and introduce feminism to you
of course, in the more spatially and temporally limited sense of the term, through the
works of three different intellectuals. We will deal with the works of Mary
Wollstonecraft, then Virginia Woolf, and then we will move on to Simone de
Beauvoir.
So, let us start with Mary Wollstonecraft today, we will be dealing with
Wollstonecraft in this lecture and then in our next lecture, we will move on to
Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir. Now, Wollstonecraft, her dates are 1759 to
1797, and she was born in a middle class English family, which had fallen on bad
days. In many ways her upbringing was representative of the upbringing of any girl
within lower middle class families of 18th century England. So, since her family had
fallen to poverty, only one among the seven Wollstonecraft siblings, were chosen to
receive formal education. And, given the patriarchal norms of the day, it is
unsurprising to note that neither Mary nor any of her sisters qualified for formal
education, rather, it was her brother Edward, who was chosen for that privilege and
who was deemed to be the most suitable for formal education simply because he was
a boy. Now, here let me briefly stop and clarify the term patriarchy; I have used it
again just now. I am sure, it is a very well understood term in general, but
nevertheless ,it is always good to have a definition at hand and this is a definition,
which I have borrowed from the same book of Chris Weedon from which I had
quoted a few moments ago. . So, as per Weedon, “[T]he term, [patriarchy or]
patriarchal refers to power relations in which women’s interests are subordinated to
the interests of men. These power relations take many forms, from the sexual division
of labor and the social organization of procreation to the internalized norms of
femininity by which we live. […]. In patriarchal discourse, the nature and social rule
of women are defined in relation to a norm, which is male.” Now, I will not try to
elaborate on this definition because, it is assertions are lucid enough and are known
enough to be understood clearly. So, let us move on with Wollstonecraft’s life.
Though, Wollstonecraft did not receive any formal education, she was taught to read
and write and she used that to become an autodidact or a self-taught person from quite
early on in her life. In contemporary England, the occupations that were available to a
gentlewoman like Wollstonecraft were severely limited and they constituted primarily
of a either being a governess, or a companion to a lady, or being a teacher to young
children. Mary Wollstonecraft tried out most of these professions during her lifetime,
but she really came on her own, when her publisher, friend, and patron Joseph
Johnson offered her the role of a contributor in his Analytical Review. One of the
chief disappointments of Wollstonecraft’s life was her relationship with American
merchant named Gilbert Imlay with whom, she was passionately in love and with
whom she had a child named Fanny, outside the wedlock. After her separation with
Imlay, Wollstonecraft married the English journalist and radical philosopher, William
Goldwin and on August 1797, she gave birth to a daughter who would be known in
history as Mary Shelley, the author of the famous novel Frankenstein. Mary
Wollstonecraft would, however, die shortly after giving birth to her daughter and this
would bring to an end one of the most exemplary lives led by a woman in the 18th
century. During her comparatively brief lifespan, Mary Wollstonecraft was able to
produce a significant amount of a writings, which included some fiction, but also
more importantly socio-political treaties, which would question some of the
fundamental aspects of her contemporary society. The best known among these,
treatise is a piece titled A Vindication of the Rights of Woman which was published
in 1792. And, this piece is widely regarded as one of the earliest tracts of modern
feminism with its main thrust being on the idea that, women should be put forward as
rational subjects, women should be understood as rational subjects. Now, we will
have to come back to this idea of women as rational subjects later on, but before I do
that I would like to briefly dwell on the qualifier earliest that, I have used to describe
Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; I said it is one of the earliest
tracts of modern feminism. Now, if we are looking for treatise extolling the role of
women in society within the context of the western world, then the year 1792 when
we saw the publication of A Vindication, is actually rather a late date. And, for
instance, we already find a full-fledged polemic written in English and discussing the
superiority of women over men, as early as 1589, and this was a tract that was written
by one Jane Anger, and it was published under the title Protection for Women. And, it
makes this very interesting argument about Eve, the biblical figure Eve, being better
than Adam because Eve was made not from the dust of the ground as was Adam, but
rather she was made from the flesh and bones of Adam. So, she was better and purer
than Adam. Now, as is evident from this particular argument mobilized by Jane Anger
to elevate the status of women, such early feminist texts that preceded
Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication, we are all using various interpretations of the Bible
to make their point. And, the Bible, in turn, provided these early advocates of
women’s rights, or women’s superiority within a society with a number of significant
woman figures, whom they could evoke to make their argument starting from Mary,
the mother of Jesus, to Mary Magdalene, who repented for her sins to Jesus. The use
of these Christian figures and the Bible to promote the status of women within society
is also understandable, because these tracts are being written, within the context of a
geocentric society, where all major social and political arguments are god driven, but
the spirit of Enlightenment that swept through Europe, during the 18th century
brought about a paradigm shift – divinity was replaced by rationality as the key
argument underlying human social and political life and this ideological refreezing of
man’s position within the socio-political matrix was most decisively acted out on the
world stage in the form of two revolutions: The first was the American revolution,
that took place between 1765 and 1783 and the second was the French revolution,
which started as we all know in 1789 with the storming of Bastille and then in the
1790’s it went on to unseat the Bourbon monarchy. Now, both these revolutions
produce two very significant documents: the first, being United States Declaration of
Independence and the second, being Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the
Citizen and both of these documents undermined, the earlier belief in a divinely
ordained hierarchical society and established a new idea of man’s place in the society
based on principles of rationality. Thus for instance, The Declaration of Independence
asserts, and I quote, “[W]e hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that
among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Now, note here that,
though the divine creator is evoked, the basic rights of man are regarded as self-
evident truths, this means that they are truths, that are understandable by the
application of a common sense, rationality, and does not require any reference to the
divine for justification. Mary Wollstonecraft with her treatise On the Vindication of
Women’s Rights tries to intervene, in this changed scenario and she tries to
foreground women not with reference to theology or to Bible as was the norm before
her, but with reference to rationality. She tries to place woman on the same platform
of rationality that the contemporary discourse of human rights and political
citizenship was placing man on. So, in other words, Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication
can be seen as an attempt to extend the discourse of rights, which was otherwise
centered on man, on to the figure of the woman as well. And this was a novel effort,
which in a way started what we understand as the modern feminist discourse. And this
is why I have referred to Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication as one of the earliest tracts
of modern feminism. Now, coming to the actual arguments contained in a vindication,
Wollstonecraft asserts, that women by the virtue of being humans are as rational as
men. And, therefore, as much a claimant to natural rights as men, if this status as
rational subjects are at all denied or questioned, then they are denied by men, who do
so, without consulting the women. This in itself is a sign not only of injustice, but also
of tyrannical irrationality; so, in Wollstonecraft’s own words, “[W]hen men fight for
their freedom, fight to be allowed to judge for themselves concerning their own
happiness, isn’t it inconsistent and unjust to hold women down? […] Who made man
the exclusive judge of that if woman shares with him the gift of reason?” Now, here
Wollstonecraft does something very interesting, she does away with the question,
whether women are rational or not? And in it is place, she asks another question,
which is who says women are irrational? And then she goes on to show that, any
statement regarding women’s irrationality is itself made from a position that is
inconsistent, that is unjust, and that is not rational enough. Wollstonecraft, however,
argues that most women do appear to be ignorant, lazy, and irresponsible within
society, but she argues that this is not, because of any inherent lack of rationality in
them, rather it is because they are denied proper education by their fathers. And,
because any exercise of their reasoning faculty is looked down upon by a society at
large, which regards such exercise of the reasoning faculty as unfeminine.
Wollstonecraft’s suggestion is therefore, to completely overhaul the education system
for women that would allow them to emerge as fully rational beings, who are at par
with the men. But she is also aware that it requires more than the change of heart of
individual patriarchs within the family about the education of their daughters to
establish women as rational beings. This is because, Wollstonecraft argues that, both
men and women were ultimately, and I quote, “educated in a great degree, by the
opinions and manners of the society”. And, the notion of femininity, Wollstonecraft
finds it too deeply rooted within the patriarchal society to allow women to emerge on
the socio-political arena as rational citizens. She therefore, advocates that society
itself should be radically transformed so as to “bring about a revolution in female
manners”. In the next lectures, we will see how this early pronouncements of
women’s rights is rephrased, and rearticulated, and indeed, rethought by later
feminists of the 20th century feminists like Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir.
Thank you for listening.
Feminism and Literature II: Woolf & de Beauvoir
Hello and welcome again to this lecture series on Literary Theory. As you know we
are in the middle of the section discussing feminism and its relation to literary studies.
And in our previous lecture we have tried to fix a tentative definition of the term
feminism, and we have then discussed the life and works of one of the major early
modern feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. In today’s lecture we will discuss two more
important theories of the feminist tradition: Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir,
and we will start with Virginia Woolf. Her dates are 1882 to 1941, and Woolf was
born in London, in a family which had with strong literary and artistic connections.
So, her father Leslie Stephen was a literary critic, journalist, and well known editor
during his time. And Woolf’s mother’s Aunt Julia Margaret Cameron was one of the
greatest portrait photographers of the 19th century. Woolf grew up in a family which
included a large number of siblings, not only the children of her parents, but her half-
brothers and half-sisters, as well, who are children of Leslie Stephen and his wife
from their early marriages. And it is now known that unfortunately as a child, Woolf
was sexually abused by some of her half-brothers and a number of Woolf’s
biographers have connected this sexual abuse in her early years with her later mental
health issues. However, the dark shadow of sexual abuse aside, Woolf’s childhood
was spent in an intellectually invigorating atmosphere. As a young woman, Woolf
was an integral part of what is referred to as the Bloomsbury group or the Bloomsbury
set which was a circle of friends and associates, and included people like the
economist John Maynard Keynes, the literary critic Desmond MacCarthy, the novelist
E. M. Forster, and the biographer Lytton Strachey. Woolf’s future husband the author
and publisher Leonard Woolf was also part of this bohemian circle, and they together
during a first half of the 20th century represented the British intellectual avant-garde.
Today Woolf is primarily remembered as a novelist who works like Mrs. Dalloway
and To the Lighthouse, transformed the shape of modern British fiction. But apart
from these novels Woolf also wrote a number of very important non-fictions which
are central to the feminist tradition of the 20th century; they are at the core of the
feminist movement that defined the 20th century. In our lecture today, we are going to
focus on one of these non-fictions titled, A Room of One’s Own, which was initially
delivered as two separate lectures in the University of Cambridge and then well it a
woman together expanded and published in the year 1929. But before moving on to
explore this particular work, I would like to briefly talk about Woolf’s resistance to
the term feminism. In her book-length essay, "Three Guineas” which is also another
very important on fictional work that Woolf wrote, she argues that feminism is a
disparaging term that was forced upon individuals in the history who tried to speak on
the behalf of women’s rights. And also it is very interesting to note that in “Three
Guineas”, Woolf considers feminism to be a dated term which needs to be
“destroyed” because as she explains, it was “a vicious and corrupt word that has done
much harm in its day.” In any case, irrespective of Woolf’s resentment towards the
word feminism, her works can be read and indeed has been read as among the most
impassioned pleas for women’s right, which, as per the definition that we are using in
our lectures, makes her a feminist per-excellence. So, now let us come to the text A
Room of One’s Own. We had ended our previous lecture, you’ll remember, on Mary
Wollstonecraft by discussing how she envisaged the problems, as well as, the
possibilities of women emerging on the socio-political stage as rational agents, who
were at par with men. In a Woolf’s text the focus is much narrower and it deals with
the question “How can women write fiction?” Yet this very specific question leads
Woolf to explore the norms and limitations of the patriarchal society at large, which
gives her work a scope that is almost as broad as Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of
the Rights of Women. Woolf’s thesis is that and I quote “[A] woman must have
money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” This statement which occurs
at the very beginning of Woolf’s text though simple in its phrasing actually hides a
rather revolutionary argument. In our discussion of Wollstonecraft’s life, we had seen
how a very limited number of jobs where open to respectable women in the 18th
century British society. And about the century and half, when Virginia Woolf was
writing A Room of One’s Own not much had changed. Women could still not be
gainfully employed which forced them forever to be at the mercy of men as far as
financial sustenance was concerned. Woolf argues that having an income of 500
pounds a year would completely change this scenario for women. It would free them
from the humiliation of having to do those inane jobs which allow them to earn but
only a pittance and this will result in a sea change in the way women carry themselves
within the society. So, where as now they have to work, “they have to do things which
one did not wish to do, and to do it like a slave flattering and fawning with an access
to 500 pounds a year, there will be a complete change in temper”: To quote Woolf’s
own words, “No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food,
house and clothing are mine forever. Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease,
but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not
flatter any man; he has nothing to give me. So, imperceptibly I found myself adopting
a new attitude towards the other half of the human race.” Having A Room of One’s
Own, just like having money of her own, brings for the women a sense of freedom.
This is because it helps her retire, even if temporarily from the routine of domestic
chores. In other words A Room of One’s Own helps a woman to create a world of her
own, and to escape the role of being merely an angel of the house that is determined
for her by the patriarchy. So, in this text the question that Woolf takes up as to why
there is so little great literature, “great literature”, written by women compared to that
written by men is actually similar to the question of why women or less rational than
men that was taken up by Wollstonecraft. And like Wollstonecraft, Woolf too argues
that those, such differences might be true on the surface, they are caused not by any
inherent shortcomings on the part of the women. Rather they are the result of the lack
of equal treatment and the lack of opportunity that a woman experiences within the
patriarchal society.
And to exemplify this point Woolf presence brilliant portrayal of a fictional character
named Judith, who she imagines to be the sister of the most celebrated English author
of all times William Shakespeare. Now, to make this imaginative portrayal of Judith
effective, Woolf first presents a brief sketch of William Shakespeare’s life. Woolf
narrates how the famous playwright being born as a male child in a well to do family
was given formal education, which meant that he went to a school, he learnt Latin, he
learnt classical literature, he also learnt elements of grammar and logic. And clearly
such a formal training contributed heavily towards his subsequent development as a
playwright. As a young boy, William Shakespeare also had the necessary liberty to
develop wild habits like poaching rabbits and shooting dear. And he also had the
gumption to marry a girl of his own choice, and marry at a time which suited him.
Later, when William Shakespeare ended up in London he wanted to join the theater,
and he was able to fulfill this wish by initially holding horses at the stage door and
then getting admission inside the theatre where he got a job. And since then there was
no looking back for him. In Woolf’s words, “He became a successful actor, and lived
at the hub of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practicing his art
on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace
of the queen.” This life of the celebrated William Shakespeare is used by Woolf to act
as a foil to her depiction of the imaginary history of Judith. Judith is introduced as
Shakespeare’s “wonderfully gifted sister.” And this phrase wonderfully gifted sister is
important because the point that Woolf is trying to drive home here is that even if a
woman is inherently as talented as man within the patriarchal society she cannot be as
successful as a man. Now, being a girl child, Judith would not have been sent to any
school which meant that she would not have had any knowledge of grammar, let
alone any exposure to classical literature. And even if she was adventurous as her
brother, she would have been asked to stay at home, and per chance if out of curiosity
she would pick one of her brother’s books and start reading it, Woolf says, and I
quote, “her parents [would come] in and t[ell] her to mend the stalking or mind the
store and not moon about with books and peoples”. Now, though when compared to
the upbringing of William Shakespeare this might look like cruelty, Woolf is careful
to point out that her parents would treat Judith like this, not because they felt any
sense of hatred towards her. On the contrary, Woolf argues that they might even have
been excessively concerned, excessively loving towards their daughter. The treatment
that Judith receives as a child would rather be determined by the fact that she is a girl,
who is destined to be a woman and who like all respectable women of her time would
be expected to perform domestic chores, rather than concern herself with books and
papers. So, the way her parents would treat her was a reflection of the social norms
rather than any personal hatred that they have towards their daughter. Now, Woolf
says that eventually Judith’s parents decide to get her married and when she protests
she says that she does not want to get married, her father first beats her up and then
begs her with tears that she should not hurt him, not shame him, in this matter of her
marriage. Here again note that a within the framework of patriarchal society such an
attitude towards Judith does not reflect hatred on the father’s part, but rather love and
excessive concern for the daughter’s future. Judith who loves her father as much as he
loves her is therefore, caught in a dilemma. Yet she decides to allow her innate talent
to flourish and rather than marry and settle down as a wife she decides to run away to
London. So, in London just like her brother, Judith also visits theatre and she also
asks for a job there, but being a women she is denied entry, she is denied a job. And
this is because we will have to remember that in Shakespearean England, all actors,
including those who played women’s parts were male. So, Judith is laughed at and
humiliated, and not only does she not get a job, being a woman she is also unable to
do simple things like, for instance, go to a tavern alone, and ask for dinner or to roam
around in the street in the middle of the night. Now, in this state of destitution,
homeless, without access to proper food, a theatre person takes pity on Judith but he
ends up sexually exploiting her, and leaving her when she becomes pregnant. Woolf
says that this imaginary figure of Judith kills herself on a winter night, and her body is
now buried at a crossroad in London and buses now pass over it. Yet nobody knows
about Judith, who was this wonderfully gifted sister of William Shakespeare.
Now, at one level this story is very disturbing because it is a tale of how a woman
might literally be driven to kill herself by the expectations and parochialism of a
patriarchal society. But at another level the story sets the agenda for feminist literary
theory, because just like Woolf brings a focus on to the invisible Judith that nobody
knows of, nobody has heard of, and a person who is as talented as her brother William
Shakespeare. So, the entire point of the story is not that Judith is a fictional character,
the point of the story is even if Judith was real you would most probably not have
known her as a playwright. So, what Woolf does is she brings the focus onto this
invisible spaces of female writers, and a large part of feminist literary criticism would
also concern itself with foregrounding the unknown, half forgotten, or marginalized
women authors who have not been able to make it to the great canons of literature,
simply because they are women. We will talk about this later, in further details, when
we discuss gynocriticism in our next lecture.
let us move on to another major feminist theorist of the 20th century Simone de
Beauvoir. de Beauvoir’s dates are 1908 to 1986, and she is easily one of the most
talented and multifaceted personalities of the 20th century Western intellectual
history. She was a novelist, she was a philosopher, a political activist, the travel writer
and of course, the key figure who inaugurated what is known as a second wave of
feminism. But for along a she had been known primarily as the partner, simply as a
partner of the French intellectual Jean Paul Sartre. This was of course, partly due to
the fact that Beauvoir was a woman and as we have seen in course of these lectures,
women are usually placed second in importance to men within patriarchal society. But
this repetition of being just a shadow of search was also partly something of her own
making because de Beauvoir herself categorized her own works as little more that
elaboration of Sartre’s philosophy. However, later generation of feminist have tried to
decouple de Beauvoir as an intellectual from Sartre, and they have to a large extent
succeeded in establishing her reputation as a major intellectual figure of the 20th
century by her own rights. Now, de Beauvoir, unlike Woolf, did receive a formal
education and was in fact, the 9th woman to receive a degree from Sorbonne and the
first woman to qualify the prestigious competitive examination of “agrégation” in
philosophy. And Sartre incidentally stood first in that examination, and Simone de
Beauvoir stood second, and this being second, the notion of standing second to a men
would play a major role in how Beauvoir would theorize about the condition of
women we will see that. Between 1929 and 1943 de Beauvoir worked as a school
teacher after which she economically sustained herself through her writings. Though
de Beauvoir is primarily known outside France today as a philosopher, her first major
publication was a novel titled, She Came to Stay, which was published in 1943 and in
fact, it was as a novelist that she would receive one of the major awards of France, the
literary prize Prix Goncourt, which was given for her 1954 fiction The Mandarins.
But undoubtedly de Beauvoir’s most influential work was Le Deuxième Sexe or The
Second Sex which was published in 1949 and which acted as a trigger that unleashed
the second wave of feminist movement. In the remaining time today our focus would,
therefore, be on this work and we will try and understand some of the arguments that
de Beauvoir makes in The Second Sex. Now, this book The Second Sex, is a text
which has multiple layers and therefore, it is difficult to summarise or paraphrase it,
but the main argument in that book is that women within the patriarchal society is
looked upon as an ‘other’ of the man. That is to say, whereas, men are regarded as the
norm, women are regarded as some sort of a corrupt deviation from that norm,
making them as a title claims – the second sex. Now, this argument in itself is nothing
new. We have, in fact, already encountered this argument as far back as the late 18th
century in the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of
Women. What is unique, however, is the comprehensive way in which de Beauvoir
elaborates this central feminist argument which references philosophy, references
history, science, literature, as well as, the concrete day to day lived experiences of
women. de Beauvoir starts her thesis by looking at the various explanations which are
usually provided to justify women’s position as the deviant other to the normal men
and she first attacks the claim that women are “naturally” different from men. Thus,
as we know, it is often argued that nature made man and woman as distinct and
separate entities, and this is, this argument, is often used to justify their sexual as well
as their gender which are supposedly inferior to that of men. Now, de Beauvoir argues
that there is nothing inherently natural in the sexual and gender distinction, because
she says that there are one-celled organisms in nature, there are hermaphrodite species
which procreate without any need for this sexual distinction. So, to label the othering
of women as natural and as based on their sexual distinction is as unsustainabl,
because if it was natural then it would be a universally occurring phenomenon.
She then goes on to attack the discourse of Freudian psychoanalysis which too
provides an apparently natural reason for women’s inferiority. So, as we know from
our earlier discussion, for Freud the male child was taken as the norm and Freud’s
theory of the normal psychosexual development of the human being as articulated
through the idea of the oedipal complex was predicated on the presence of the male
penis. And since a girl child does not have a penis, Freud regarded the woman’s body
as a site of lack and he argued that their psychosexual development preceded via a
much more convoluted and therefore, “unnatural” route. De Beauvoir challenged this
Freudian lens of looking at women as simply damaged men and question the
psychoanalytic theory which defines identity almost entirely in terms of unconscious
drives and impulses, and largely neglects the role of individual choice, for instance,
and even more importantly the role of social values and norms in shaping one’s
gender identity, and this is something that de Beauvoir is going to focus on.
Now, de Beauvoir also attacks the Marxist, or rather more specifically, the theory
proposed by Engels that women are treated as inferior because of the division of
labour, which identifies men as breadwinners. Now, de Beauvoir would be affiliated
to the Marxist philosophy in general, but here she picks up a difference with Engels
and she argues that this theory does not explain how such a division of labour at all
came into place, and it is this that she then sets on, sets out to explain in her text. So,
de Beauvoir argues that women’s othering happened in the primitive human society
because she was identified with the process of reproduction and procreation. Now,
since this is at the core of de Beauvoir argument we will go over it slowly. According
to de Beauvoir, sexual reproduction though important is looked upon as a repetition of
the same, which is ubiquitous in the whole of the animal world. All animals procreate
and they repeat their sameness through that procreation. For de Beauvoir, human
being as race from the very beginning valued progress over repetition. So, in other
words, humans valued productive action which would help them surpass their own
conditions of existence over reproduction which would merely help them sustain as
race through the repetition of the same. This resulted in the original devaluation of
women within the society, because women were caught up in the cycles of
reproduction and child bearing, and in contrast men could afford to be more
adventurous, more outgoing, and they became inventors who in order to increase their
tribe’s resources to sustain life produced various things. So, in de Beauvoir’s own
words, “[b]ecause housework alone is compatible with the duties of motherhood, [the
woman] is condemned to domestic labour, which locks her into repetition and
immanence; day after day it repeats itself in identical form from century to century; it
produces nothing new. Man’s case is radically different. […] to appropriate the
world’s treasures, he annexes the world itself. Through such actions through such
actions he tests his own power; he posits ends and projects paths to them: he realizes
himself as existent. To maintain himself, he creates; he spills over the present and
opens up the future.” De Beauvoir argues that it is because man is able to open up the
future through his invention, through his productive activities that he establishes
himself as the normative human being. The woman on the other hand had to keep
away from this adventurous life but by de Beauvoir calls “the absurd fertility” and,
therefore, she becomes the second sex. And this subservient status which is
established in the primitive human tribe is then further continued and even confirmed
as human society moves towards the concept of private property and in that scenario
women are reduced to the status of being property owned by one man or the other.
De Beauvoir points out that the status of women as the other is constantly and
consistently maintained within the society through constant mythologizing. Now, this
means that either in the form of religious course or in the form of literature, we are
constantly fed with images of women either as goddesses or as dangerous sexual
temptresses. And in both the cases the images of women are constructed as being
images that are beyond the normal human being and in both the cases the images are
actually projections of men’s own fears and desires and wishes. Which means that,
even when she is being held as a goddess a woman is being defined by men, by their
wishes, and their desires, their fears. And if you want to understand how frustrating
this situation can be for a woman, I would suggest you watch Satyajit Ray’s 1950 film
Debi, literally the goddess which depicts the horrific process of deification of a
woman by a patriarch. Anyway coming back to de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, she
supplements these abstract theoretical arguments about the status of the women as the
other by providing a narration about the concrete life experiences of women within
the patriarchal society and by showing how these life experiences are affected by the
consistent process of devaluation of women within the society. And de Beauvoir
argues that this process actually starts from the very childhood when the members of
the family in particular and the society in general, they try to groom the girl child as a
woman, and teach her to be “feminine”. This process of becoming feminine involves
training the girl in domestic chores which fixes for her a particular kind of roll within
the society. It also involves alienating the girls from their own growing bodies by
associating the notion of shame with female sexual desire and with puberty. A dosage
of literature like Cinderella or The Sleeping Beauty teaches the girl to be submissive
in love, and to believe that their redemption lies in the arrival of some prince
charming. And when the promised man arrives to “redeem” the women, through
marriage it proves to be an ambiguous affair for her. Because at one level it does give
the women financial stability, but at another level it also traps her in an unequal
relation where she is expected to be guided by her husband, to serve her husband, and
to connect with the wider world through him. De Beauvoir points out that this lack of
personal freedom within marriage has in turn dangerous consequences for the
women’s identity as a mother, because she then projects her marital frustrations onto
her relations with her own children. And also, de Beauvoir points out that a women’s
desire to gain agency which is usually frustrated within the marital relationship,
within the relationship that she has with her husband, manifests itself through an
excessive attempt to control her children, which again in itself is rather unhealthy. But
then what does de Beauvoir suggest? How should a woman escape this trap of
inferiority, this trap of being relegated to the second sex? De Beauvoir points out, that
women during her time has definitely for more rights and privileges than what they
had earlier. But she also argues that even if one takes all of these rights together, they
cannot really emancipate a woman until and unless she also has economic autonomy.
So, in other words though we see women gaining a lot of civic liberties in today’s
world, the key factor to watch out for, according to de Beauvoir, is women’s
participation in the productive workforce as fully paid workers. And here we see that
in most countries the ratio of working men to working women is abysmally low, and
even when we see women being incorporated within the workforce, we know that
their status as second sex is still maintained there, they are for instance paid less, often
they are paid less to perform the same work as their male colleagues. De Beauvoir’s
solution therefore, is that women should escape from the trap of their “absurd
fertility” and move from merely performing reproductive functions in the society to
performing more and more productive rules. Yet de Beauvoir also acknowledges that
this is a difficult move, because it is regarded in the patriarchal society as
undermining a woman’s “femininity” which usually defines her within the society.
However, de Beauvoir stresses that this is a move that is important and that must be
accomplished in order for the men and the women to meet as equals for the reign of
freedom to triumph in society, these are her words. And for the two sexes to meet not
as battling counterparts, but rather as peers who come together to “unequivocally a
form there brotherhood”. So, with this we end our lecture today. We will carry
forward our discussion on feminism and literary studies in the next lecture. Thank
you.
Feminism and Literature III: Gynocriticism, Ecriture Feminine, Judith Butler
Hello and welcome back to our lecture series on Literary Theory. As you know for the
past few lectures we have been discussing feminism and its impact on literary studies.
We have traced our way down from the late 18th century writings of Mary
Wollstonecraft, through the early 20th century works of Virginia Woolf, to the
landmark 1949 publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. Now, it is
important to remember here that this history of feminism that we have traced through
the life and works of Wollstonecraft, Woolf, and de Beauvoir was accompanied by
sustained political campaigns to win more rights for women in society. Indeed, by the
time de Beauvoir’s book was published, feminist movements across the Western
world had wrested for women the very important political right to vote. The
developing economic scenario in the decades immediately following the Second
World War further aided the cause of women’s liberation in the Western world, and it
did so in two distinct ways. So, on the one hand, there was now a growing consumer
base purchasing things like refrigerator, vacuum cleaner, washing machine and these
household technologies freed up a significant amount of labour time required by
women, who were expected within the patriarchal society to perform domestic chores.
This was happening on one hand. On the other hand, complementing this freeing up
of labour time was the development of the service sector which employed women in
ever greater numbers. So, in a lot of ways the condition of women within the Western
society had developed much between the time of Mary Wollstonecraft and the
decades following the Second World War. And all of these changes are regarded as
part of the first wave of feminism. de Beauvoir’s work The Second Sex acknowledges
these positive changes, but de Beauvoir also considers this to be only a partial
revolution. Because when she was writing, women still remained unequal to men
within the patriarchal society. The second wave of feminism that gained momentum
during the 1960s, and that took its inspiration from texts like the Beauvoir’s The
Second Sex or Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which was published in 1963,
sought to address these inequalities, and it sought to address these inequalities by
foregrounding issues of reproductive rights, issues of conditions faced by women in
work place that made it difficult for them to work, more difficult than their male
counterparts, and they also raised the issue of domestic violence. So, these were
various issues that were brought forward by the second wave of feminism which
emerged during the 1960s.
In today’s lecture, however, we are not going to focus so much on the political and
social impact that the post-Second World War feminism had; rather, our focus today
would be on the changes in the field of literary studies affected by this new wave of
feminism, this new feminist momentum. And towards that end, I would be discussing
two very important concepts. One is gynocriticism and the other is écriture feminine.
And after elaborating these two concepts which represent some of the major reasons
which feminist thoughts have influenced literary studies, we will then move on to
explore the works of Judith Butler and see how the work of Judith Butler complicates
some of the very basic notions of gender identity, which forms the basis not only of
the patriarchal society, but which was also at the core of the various feminist
movements.
But let us start with gynocriticism. As we know, one of the fundamental
preoccupations of feminist theorists whom we have studied so far was the
discriminatory representation of women in literature produced by men. This we have
noticed most particularly while discussing The Second Sex, where de Beauvoir speaks
about how celebrated male authors, like D H Lawrence, Paul Claudel, or André
Breton, mythologizes women in their works and reinforced the status of the woman as
the Other. The main thrust of this kind of literary criticism was to explore and expose
the workings of patriarchal conventions and discriminatory bias that informs texts
written by males. But there is also another side to feminist literary criticism which we
observed while discussing Virginia Woolf. That side deals with the desire to
formulate a history and a canon of texts written by female authors. With the story of
Judith Shakespeare, we have seen how the very possibility of women writers, women
authors are systematically denied within patriarchal society. And even if women
authors are able to write by overcoming difficulties of neither having a room of their
own or usually a disposable income of 500 pounds that Woolf talks about, they
remain forgotten. They remain marginalized and outside the pale of literary canons.
And in fact, it is this systematic exclusion of women writers from the canon that
makes all “great literature” appear to be written by men.
By the 1970s feminist literary critics were trying to address this particular gap, and
they were trying to do so by focusing on what is referred to as “gynotexts” or
women’s texts. This term gynotext and the associated concept of gynocriticism was
first proposed by Elaine Showalter a professor of English at the University of
Princeton. So, what is gynocriticism? Well, first and foremost gynocriticism is a mode
of criticism which seeks to build a framework of literary analysis that is pivoted on
female identity. This would mean, at the most basic level, foregrounding texts written
by female authors which are usually kept out of the category of great literature, which
is usually not studied as part of the canon. Gynocritics would use these texts written
by female authors to identify subjects that most prominently concern the female
authors, subjects like domesticity, child rearing, etcetera . And apart from this, the
gynocritics would focus on specific language uses that might be peculiar to the female
authors and that might be seen as distinguishing them from their male counterparts.
Through exploring all of this, the gynocritic would try to lay bare in the words of
Elaine Showalter, and I am quoting her, “the psychodynamics of female creativity; the
trajectory of the individual or collective female career; and the evolution or laws of a
female literary tradition”. Gynocritics during the late 20th century produced a number
of texts including Patricia Meyer Spacks’s The Female Imagination which was
published in 1975, Ellen Meyer’s, which was very important text, Literary Women,
published in 1976. The Female Imagination was published in 1975, this one is
published in 1976, and then we have Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of their Own
published in 1977. But the most iconic text of gynocriticism was Sandra Gilbert and
Susan Guber’s 1979 publication, The Mad Woman in the Attic. The “Mad Woman”
in the title is a reference to the Jamaican character of Bertha Mason, who appears in
Charlotte Brontë’s very famous novel Jane Eyre. In the novel, Mason is kept locked
away by her husband Edward Rochester in an attic room in his country house in
England, and she is locked away because her husband claims that she is mad. The
central argument that Gilbert and Gubar puts forward by referring to this figure of
Bertha Mason is that within the patriarchal society where writing literature is seen as a
masculine activity, female writers suffer from a very strong sense of anxiety. This
anxiety of somehow transgressing the domain of femininity and trespassing into a
male domain gets reflected in the fiction of 19th century female authors, who were
writing in English through the dual depiction of women as angels of the house and
women as mad frenzied and uncontrollable. In Brontë’s novel this duality of female
identity is represented, on the one side, by Jane Eyre who represents the angelic side
of femininity and, on the other side, by Bertha Mason who is the mad woman in the
attic. According to Gilbert and Gubar the angelic figure that we find in these texts are
attempts made by the woman author to depict female figures in accordance to the
expectations of the patriarchy, whereas, the figures of the mad woman like Bertha
Mason, for instance, they represent the anxiety of women writers stemming from their
transgressive roles as authors.
Now, one of the major criticism that is usually levied against gynocritics is that they
essentialize gender identity. So, what does that mean? Well it means that according to
the gynocritics certain perspectives, certain literary subjects, certain ways of styling
the language are unique to women. In other words, if you are a female author
gynocritics would expect your literary work to be of a certain kind that would be
imprinted with the essence of your womanly identity, which would distinguish it from
texts written by male authors.
This charge of essentialism is also levied against the concept of écriture feminine,
which was proposed by the French feminist critique Hélène Cixous. And she
proposed this concept in her very famous essay titled “The Laugh of Medusa” which
was published in 1975. Now, this French term écriture feminine translates literally
into feminine writing or woman’s writing. And the idea of écriture feminine stresses
that language within a patriarchal society is phallocentric or centered around the
phallus. This assertion of language being phallocentric traces back to a Lacanian
theory about language about the symbolic order and about oedipal complex. And the
Lacanian theory in itself is rather complex and, therefore, we will not be going into
that. But if we try to understand it in simple terms, what Cixous is saying is that
language uses as a norm foregrounds the male. Slightly overused, but good example
of this through which we can try and understand the concept of foregrounding of the
male is the use of the word man in English language; where the word man is used to
stand in for the general category of human being. In other words, man in English
language, as it is usually written and spoken, represents the human norm, right. So,
there is a sliding of the notion of man masculinity etcetera, and what is normal as
human being, one slides over the other, one becomes the other. Now, Cixous points
out that a woman when writing in a language, which normally prioritizes the male and
the masculine have to constantly struggle to manipulate and even break down the
language in order to make it a suitable vehicle for her own thoughts and experiences.
Écriture feminine is, therefore, marked by according to Cixous, syntactical chaos,
disruptive gaps, unusual images, puns; and all of this are basically attempts to break
the sense of “normality” of how language is otherwise used within patriarchy.
Now, here again, you can see that there is a degree of gender essentialism that is
involved; the very fact of being a female author gets connected here with forms of
language use that would be imprinted by a womanly essence. Now to understand why
such essentializing of the woman identity might be problematic, let us turn to the
work of Judith Butler, who argues that gender identity is not an inherent essence that
we possess, but rather a performative construct. According to Butler, we do not
simply belong to a gender, but rather we do our gender. Now, I do understand that
these sentences are somewhat cryptic, but before I elaborate on them, let me first
introduce you to Judith Butler. Butler was born in 1956 in Cleveland Ohio; she was
born in a Jewish family. And she received her Bachelor’s, Master’s as well as her
Doctoral degree from the Yale University. And right now she is a chair professor in
the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California Berkeley.
Apart from her academic work, Judith Butler is also known for her activism for the
lesbian and gay rights, and also for her anti-Zionist stand. She has authored a number
of very important books, among which the most celebrated is her 1990 publication
titled Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. And it is on this
book that we are going to focus today and, as you will see during our discussion, that
with Butler we actually start moving beyond the boundaries of feminism, the kind of
feminism that we have discussed so far. So now let us come back to the statement that
gender is performative, gender is a performative construct, we do gender, we do not
belong to one gender category or the other. So, there is a distinction that is being
drawn between doing gender associated with the notion of performativity and just
being one particular gender or the other. And this is, in fact, the main thesis of Gender
Trouble – that we do gender. So, what does Butler mean when she says gender is
performative, gender is something that we do? Well, before we start discussing the
concept of performativity, let us start with the more common sense understanding of
gender. And by common sense I mean the mundane, the quotidian. Most of us live
within what can be called heteronormative patriarchal societies. And by this I mean
we live within patriarchal societies that consider heterosexuality to be the norm. Now,
within such a social framework the understanding of gender is usually seen to be
integrally connected with two other terms. One is the body and the other is sexuality.
So, the assumption is something like this. If I have a female body, then it is expected
that I would be naturally sexually attracted towards men, and would naturally
represent feminine traits – like being gentle, being caring, being soft spoken, etcetera.
If I have a male body, then it is expected that I would naturally be sexually attracted
towards women, and naturally show masculine traits – like courage, strength, physical
strength , assertiveness, etcetera. In all of these assumptions the stress is on the word
naturally, which signifies both a sense of obviousness in the connection established
between body, sexuality, and gender. And also it is naturalness; what Butler does in
Gender Trouble is that she undermines this notion of a natural cause and effect chain,
connecting body sexuality and gender, and argues that each of these terms body
sexuality gender are socially constructed. So, how does body, sexuality, and gender
get socially constructed? And how do body and sexuality affect the notion of gender?
Well, to get an answer to this question, we will have to understand the interesting way
in which Butler appropriates Sigmund Freud’s theory of melancholia, and makes it
the core idea of our gender theory. In his 1917 essay titled “Mourning and
Melancholia”, Freud discusses two different ways in which we react to any major
sense of loss. Let us assume that I have lost a person who was very dear to me. Now,
according to Freud, such a loss usually leads to a phase of mourning in which I will
deeply miss the person that I have lost, and I react to it in various ways including
psychologically denying the absence of the lost person. So, if someone is dead I
simply deny the fact that that person is no longer there. And often one can also
desperately try to get back in touch with that person, that lost person, and feel their
presence around oneself. So, we may even see that person, for instance, in our
dreams. That is one of the ways in which we try and get back in touch with that
person. And this is the usual form of mourning and some of the usual reactions. But
Freud says that this mourning gradually gets healed. And slowly, but surely we come
back to the reality, and we accept the fact that that person is no more. However, Freud
mentions that at times the reaction to loss might take a more pathological form which
he refers to as melancholia, and which he distinguishes from the usual mourning.
Now in melancholia the sense of loss is so profound that we feel we have not only lost
a person who was close to us, but indeed we have lost a part of our own self. In
Freud’s own words and I quote, “[I]n mourning it is the world which has become poor
and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.” One peculiarity of the psychological
response that melancholia elicits is what Freud calls identification with the lost object.
So, in other words, the melancholic person tries to make up for the loss that that
person has suffered by himself or herself assuming characteristic traits of the lost
person. So, melancholic identification involves a process of becoming like the object
of loss to compensate that loss.
This theory of melancholic identification is appropriated by Butler to come up with a
new understanding of a child’s sexual development which deviates from the
mainstream Freudian explanation. I should not say deviate; I should say which
reinterprets the Freudian concept of a child’s sexual development. Again, this might
appear to be slightly tricky to understand, this theory that Butler comes up with. So, I
will go over it slowly and step by step. Now, from our previous discussions on
psychoanalysis, you would remember that for Freud a child which in Freud’s writing
is primarily a male child is normally heterosexual. This is because his sexual urges are
developed through his engagement with his mother who is his primary caregiver and
also the main object of his desire. It is only when the oedipal complex sets in and the
taboo against incest is realized and internalized by the child that he starts shifting his
desire from his mother to other females, who appear as substitutes for the original
object of sexual desire. The process in which a girl child’s sexual desire emerges and
manifests as it is described by Freud is much more complex. So, the female child
according to Freud like the male child initially desires the mother, but soon passes on
that desire to the father. But realizing that such incestuous desire is taboo, she then
transfers it to other men who become for her the substitute for the father as the object
of sexual desire.
Now, according to Butler, this taboo of incest which forces both the male and the
female child to project their heterosexual desires beyond their parents actually
represent a later part of the child’s sexual development. As per Butler, this taboo of
incest is preceded for both the male and the female child by what she calls the taboo
of homosexuality. Butler claims that the earlier form of sexual desire, rather I should
say the earliest form of sexual desire, in both the male child and the female child is
homosexual desire. So, in other words for the girl child, the earliest object of sexual
desire is the mother and for the boy child it is the father. This is presented by Butler as
an innate human disposition. Now this original form of sexuality within a
heteronormative society is prohibited through what Butler calls the taboo of
homosexuality. It is only in response to this taboo of homosexuality that the little boy
and the little girl slips their object of sexual desire, which they now direct at parents
belonging to the opposite sex. So, they initially start with desiring parents belonging
to their own sex, and then after they encounter the taboo of homosexuality, they flip
their desire and project their desire onto their parents belonging to the opposite sex.
So, for the boy, the object of desire becomes the mother and for the girl it becomes
the father. But this too is a problematic phase of sexual development, because it soon
meets with another social prohibition which is the taboo against incest. This then
results in the growing adolescent projecting his or her sexual desires beyond the
confines of the family, and the usual thing that happens in the Freudian narrative of
how a child’s sexuality is developed. Now, this is a radical revision of Freud’s theory,
because here homosexual desires are established as more fundamental than
heterosexual desires. And in doing so, it undermines in a major way the central
assumption of a heteronormative society; which regards heterosexuality to be the
norm. But then what does melancholic identification has to do with all of this? Well,
Butler points out that the taboo of homosexuality which forces the child to shift its
desire from the same sex parent results in a deep sense of loss, which evokes reactions
similar to melancholia. So, to make up for this loss each child identifies with the
parent of the same sex even while projecting a sexual desire onto the parent of the
opposite sex. Thus, a boy child copes with the loss of the father as a primary object of
desire by trying to emulate his characteristic features and becoming more and more
like him. Something very similar also happens with the girl child, who also in her
attempt to cope with the loss of the mother as a primary object of desire tries to
become more and more like her; this is melancholic identification and this process of
identification with the same sex parents through incorporation of their characteristic
traits results in the girl child becoming “feminine”, and the boy child becoming
“masculine” which forms their gender identity. And indeed this gender identity
formed through melancholic identification with the same sex parent extends to what
Butler refers to as the stylization of the body. In other words, one of the many ways in
which a girl child tries to become like her mother and the boy child tries to become
like his father is by fashioning his or her body, stylizing his or her body. And by
fashioning or stylizing the body what I mean here is marking the body, piercing the
body, dressing the body, molding the body through certain postures, how you sit, how
you stand, how you walk, how you lie down. Which means that, within a society a
female body appears to be very different from a male body not so much because it is
naturally so, but rather because it is fashioned or stylized to be so. And the way we
fashion our body and our gender is informed by the way we are guided by the society
to repress our homosexual desires. Now, there are two very important things that I
want you to note here about Butler’s revision of Freud’s theory of sexual
development. The first thing, which I have already mentioned a few moments ago, is
that it ceases to regard homosexuality as a perversion of our “normal” heterosexuality.
In fact, homosexuality is established as more fundamental, as preceding,
heterosexuality. And the second important point that I want you to note here is that,
our gender which according to Butler incorporates not only our femininity or our
masculinity, but also our sexuality and our stylized bodies is socially constructed,
rather than being natural. So, in other words gender along with the two other related
terms body and sexuality are understood by Butler as responses to the ways in which
social prohibition shapes our identities. And this constructed nature of gender identity
now leads us to the important notion of performativity. Now, as I have mentioned that
according to Butler, gender has to do with fashioning, stylizing, enacting, and things
like that. And this means that our gender depends on our molding ourselves in
accordance to the social taboos and prohibitions and actively incorporating different
characteristic traits from our same sex parents to form our identity. So, gender is a
process of doing or becoming rather than simply being. A girl child gradually
becomes like her mother by doing what she does and by incorporating her
characteristic traits. The same is also true for the boy child, who gradually tries and
becomes a man just like his father. It is this process of doing or becoming through
incorporating the characteristic traits of the same sex parent that Butler calls gender
performativity. But why does Butler use this slightly unusual term performativity?
And why does she not use the more mundane term performance, is performance
different from performativity? Well, according to Butler they are different.
Performance as far as Butler is concerned is the enactment of a certain role by a
subject who precedes that role and who is otherwise independent of it. So, what do I
mean by this? Let us try and understand this with the help of an example. Example of
a film, the example that I have in mind is Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Godfather
Part1. Now, in that movie the actor Marlon Brando enacts the role of an Italian
American mafia boss. Now Marlon Brando, the actor, precedes this role as a subject,
and we can easily draw a distinction between this Marlon Brando as a subject and the
role of Vito Corleone that he plays in the movie. This is what Butler would identify as
a performance. Gender performativity, on the other hand, is different from such kind
of a performance because there is no separate subject before or behind the gender
role. When we enact our gender identities, we do not do that with a sense of our
identity as a subject that is distinct and separate from this gender role that we are
enacting. Indeed, we are socially obliged to appear as gendered individuals right from
the moment of our birth. So, announcements like “It is a girl” or “It is a boy” right
after a child is born already interpellates us, already calls upon us to occupy a
particular gender identity. So, there is no subject standing beyond or behind the
enactment of gender role as our sense of identity is always already informed by the
process of enacting gender. So, this is very important, let me repeat it. There is no
subject standing beyond or behind the enactment of our gender rules, why, because
our sense of identity is always from the very beginning already informed by the
process of enacting gender. Social expectations are already projected on us; which
expects us to belong to one particular gender, or other, which expects us to act out to
perform gender in particular ways. Butler identifies this peculiar form of enactment
where there is no distinct sense of subjectivity beyond the process of enactment as
performativity. Now, I do agree that this is a slightly difficult concept, but I think if
you go over the section of the lecture for maybe a couple of times, you will be able to
understand it quite clearly. I would like to end this lecture today by briefly referring to
the phenomenon of cross-dressing. Now if following Butler, we agree that gender is
constructed and not natural, then it might be possible to construct gender differently.
In other words, it would be possible to play around with the characteristic traits that
we incorporate to present ourselves as either men or women. Now, it is important to
note here that going beyond gender altogether is impossible as far as Butler’s
theoretical framework is concerned, because we are incorporated within the gendered
social framework from the very moment of our birth. And therefore, we do not have
access to a non-gendered subjectivity that can just stop being a man or a woman. The
most we can do is to perform gender differently. And one of the starkly visible ways
in which we can perform our gender differently is by working on the ways in which
we stylize our body, including the way we dress. This brings us to the notion of cross-
dressing, where a man might dress up in clothes that are usually associated with the
feminine gender, within a particular socio-cultural milieu, or a woman might dress up
in what is usually regarded as a man’s attire. Such cross-dressings can potentially
serve two very important functions. The first is that it can reveal gender identity as an
artifice, as a mode of self-fashioning; which can be done differently. So, it is not
natural, it is not essential. The second thing that this cross-dressing can bring to the
foreground is that it can help articulate one’s resistance against the social norms and
prohibitions that shape our gender identity. A good example of this is a self-portrait
made by the remarkable Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Now, though Kahlo is today
known as one of the greatest painters of our time, during her own lifetime she was
often portrayed primarily as the wife of the well-known muralist Diego Rivera.
Indeed, a 1933 newspaper article seeking to introduce to it is reader Kahlo as a
talented painter could not think of a better heading than this one: “Wife of the Master
Mural Painter Gleefully Doubles in Works of Art”. Now, the reason why Kahlo could
only be portrayed as a “dabbler” in art even as her husband is described as a master
mural painter is, because of the ways in which conventional gender stereotypes work
within patriarchal society; stereotypes in which the man is always the master and the
woman is at best a dilettante. Now, Frida Kahlo has a painting. This is painting that is
usually known as self-portrait with cropped hair, and this is a painting that she
completed in 1940. And this painting presents a strong resistance against this
stereotyped gender identity, and it does that through using cross-dressing. So, in this
self-portrait produced shortly after her divorce with her husband Diego Rivera, we
can see Kahlo stylizing her body in ways that deeply problematized the usual notions
of femininity within the patriarchal society. So, in this painting, you can see Kahlo
sitting with a scissor in her hand, which she has apparently used to crop her hair short,
much like a man, and her long “feminine traces” are scattered all around her. The line
of music that you can see on the top part of the painting is part of a Mexican folk
song, which if you translate it in English it reads something like this: “Look, if I loved
you it was because of your hair. Now that you are bald, I do not love you anymore.”
So, the cropping of her hair comes across as a rebellion against the patriarchal gender
norm where women are both identified and loved as women for the long hairs, for
ways in which they stylized their body, and hair is a very important part. But what is
more important for our purpose is the way in which Kahlo dresses herself in this
painting. Usually her self-portraits present her in traditional Mexican dresses. But
here we see her wearing an oversized suit, baggy pants, and a crimson shirt; all of
which represents the way her husband Diego Rivera used to dress. So, here Kahlo not
only dresses like a man, but more specifically she dresses like her ex-husband. And at
one level this signifies an attempt to assert her own identity, her own agency by going
beyond the limiting category of a woman who lives in the shadow of her husband and
only dabbles in art. But on another level, it also represents what we have discussed as
melancholic identification, where the object of loss which in this case is Diego Rivera
is incorporated as part of Kahlo’s own gender identity. In this portrait we therefore,
see Kahlo literally becoming the man Diego Rivera. With this I end today’s lecture, as
well as a section on feminism and literature. In the next lecture we will take up
Modernism and Postmodernism. Thank you for listening.