12/31/00
December 31, 2000
(If you're not connected with an English dept., skip this one.)
Too many literary theoreticians are like alchemists in reverse. Unsatisfied with gold as it is, they feel the need of a science to analyze it. Literature on its own has too much emotional quality, mystery, allure that they wish to explain away, reduce to a more base essence, reduce to simpler elements: some lead here, a bit of zinc there. A little Freud here, a bit of post-colonial claptrap there.
Literature, in this view, could be compared to religion. What science has done to the church (or seemed to, anyway), explaining its mysteries and relegating it to irrelevance, it would seem also to have done to literature. The theorists, like their historical counterparts the alchemists, appear to be involved in a worthwhile and respectable endeavor. But it will prove preposterous.
Better to assay gold, I say.