Welcome to Part III of my continuing attempt to understand Steven Knapp’s Literary Interest and come to terms with its implications. (In what follows it’s possible that I demonstrate a constitutional inability to do either. Feel free to say so without worrying about my feelings. You could stuff my pride in a thimble and still have plenty of room for a thumb, i.e. I would rather be right eventually than wrong in perpetuity.)
Commenting on my second (still muddled) attempt to pin down Knapp’s argument, Adam Stephanides argues
The primary question Knapp is asking in this chapter is whether it is possible for a work of literature to necessarily mean something other than what the author intended it to mean, using Paradise Lost as a test case. As would be expected from the co-author of “Against Theory,” Knapp’s answer is “no."
I read that section under the same assumption and came to the same conclusion (though I neglected to mention it in that post). My entire discussion assumed that the point toward which Knapp marched would marshal against all arguments resembling “the Romantic Argument,” i.e. ones in which the critic rescues the coherence of the intended world at the expense of the author’s intentions. On The Valve, HZ forwards a different but not necessarily contradictory interpretation:
So, Knapp wants to know: What is the payoff of treating literary works as if they had a a “special kind of representational structure, each of whose elements acquires, by virtue of its connection with other elements, a network of associations inseparable from the representation itself.” What are we interested in when we are interested in THAT?
HZ’s account diminishes the importance of the prescriptive angle Adam and I believe to be entailed by his local statements. Granted, assessing these statements outside the global context of Literary Interest encouraged the speculation that led to my misrepresentating Knapp’s larger claims. (The first person who acknowledges the resemblence of my misinterpretation to the type of misinterpretation Knapp calls “the Romantic Argument” wins August’s Meta-Award for Meta-Awareness.) While HZ almost convinces me that Knapp’s interest in “literary interest” is disinterested, my experience reading Walter Benn Michaels suggests otherwise. (Not that I think there’s a one-to-one correspondence between the two. However, given the vehemence with which they argued in “Against Theory” and their response to responses to it, not to mention “Against Theory 2: Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, I find it difficult to believe that their initial positions and mode of argumentation could be that different.) I cannot accept the proposition that Knapp validates the argument that “literary interest” is the better or possibly even only way readers approach literature. That there are valid and invalid interpretive strategies must be the point of Literary Interest. Right? Right? Otherwise the entire book would be nothing more than a sophisticated account of the solipsism any engagement with literature entails:
Literary interest offers an unusually precise and concentrated analogue of what it is like to be an agent in general. For part of what being an agent is (always) like, apparently, is being caught up in an irreducible oscillation between typicality and particularity: between (on one side) the forms of action that an agent must understand in order to make sense of herself as the possible performer of certain actions, and (on the other side) the concrete history without which the agent could not distinguish herself from those who might, otherwise, just as well replace her. And this, once again, resembles the structure of mutual implication that characterizes the relation between the typicality of literary object-types and the particularity of the complex scenarios in which the literary work inserts them. (139)
The reason that our interest in literature takes the historical form Knapp calls “literary interest” is that the encounter with literature replicates the dynamics of human agency. We relate to the text in the same manner we relate to our selves. Since literature isn’t valuable so much as interesting, the only defense available to Knapp would be to tie its value to its interest. (If gardening could be proven to entail the same interesting relation to human agency, this argument suggests, then gardening would be as valuable as literature.) His defense of the literary amounts then to a defense of all engagements like the literary, in which the oscillation between type and particularity mirror (or poorly parrot) the oscillation endemic to the experience of human agency. Stephen King’s latest tome may be unliterary because its characters are too typical, never approaching the particular, never starting the swinging characteristic of literature. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, however, easily qualifies as literary. (Not a bad thing, mind you, only a conventionally unliterary one.) I (admittedly) fudge Knapp’s argument here, attributing to the object the experience it excites in the reader (or viewer), but I fudge because I believe I can:
Knapp’s argument demands that the reader have a knowledge of types. How else would a reader know whether what they encounter in Situation A is a particular instantiation of a more general type? Were one to compile a complete catalog of types, distinguishing works which inspire literary interest from ones which don’t becomes a simple matter of correspondence. Then the Canon--or, more precisely, some canon--slips in the back door. Given the works of literature whose engagement served as the foundation of his argument, this canon would largely resemble the Canon, only with the addition of the Whedonverse. (I must admit that I fancy this notion both generally and to the degree it would depoliticize the continuing Canon Wars.) All of which brings me to this:
What does this mean for people who interpret literature for a living?
I won’t answer yet because I don’t feel I can answer yet. Suggestions will be welcomed and appreciated.
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