Literary Theories: A Case Study in Critical Performance - Review

Style, Fall, 1998 by James R. Kincaid

Julian Wolfreys and William Baker, eds. New York: New York University Press. xi 259pp.

If this ain't the berries! as an uncle of mine (memorable only for that botched idiom) used to say. Here's a book explaining and performing literary theory for undergraduates that is not only dutiful (which we would expect) and lucid (which it had better be) but brilliant (yes) and great fun (I swear). Wolfreys and Baker have devised an ingenious and challenging way to stage this anything-but-sure-fire-hit, and they have assembled a seven-person ensemble of scholars (the editor Wolfreys also appearing in the role of the butler) to provide an experience in lit-theory-for-beginners that is, by far, the best available. No other guide, survey, anthology, study manual, or crib comes close to the poise, wit, slyness, and effectiveness of Literary Theories. No other work makes so fully available to students and the rest of us the idea of a theoretical position as an awareness of what the hell it is you are doing and, even better, what you might be doing instead. It is a generous and assured book that honors both its readers and its subject with affability as well as respect.

Literary Theories is the only book of its kind to get its audience right. It has an uncanny sense of how it is being read, and a wonderful flexibility in adapting to its most interesting readers. It is a challenging and entirely uncondescending book, figuring that anybody prepared to tackle good theory deserves good words and shows about theory. It knows who these people are, these undergraduates taking "Intro to Theory 201" or "The English Major: A Gateway." Any theory book for such an audience should assume as its rhetorical challenge something like this: providing a detailed explanation of S/M theory and practice to the Christian Coalition. Your audience wants to hear but doesn't; it is secretly eager but openly, dramatically hostile. The audience, that is, should be regarded as profoundly ignorant but with an appetite it is not necessary to arouse (no need to peddle the product). In addition - and here the parallel to Ralph Reed breaks down - the student audience can be projected as bright but easily bored. Each of the contributors to Literary Theories seems not only to accept these conditions but to revel in them.

This book gets its foot in the door irresistibly by telling us, right off the bat, that it has no idea what "theory" is and will make no attempt to consolidate the various presentations made in it. In fact, the editors see theories as a set of intriguing possibilities, not mutually exclusive but certainly not capable of simply being pluralized or homogenized. Theories, in other words, give us different ways to perform, different ways to act in reference to literary experience. To demonstrate this, Wolfreys and Baker offer a short story as a kind of rough set of notes toward a choreography and then fling seven dancers at us: structuralist, poststructuralist, psychoanalytic, feminist, Marxist, new historicist, and deconstructive.

The short story is also given, published for the first time ever. Richard Jeffries's "Snowed Up" seems to have been written in 1876; at least it was rejected then in the only extant reference to the story. That is surprising, as "Snowed Up" is a layered and immediately absorbing tale about a London blizzard that isolates the city, cuts off food supplies, and provides material for a young woman's diary, concerned equally with suitors, battles with papa (over the suitors), money, food, the looting lower orders, rats, and snow. The story is strange and open, chosen not simply to tease young readers into theoretical activity but to show how much fun that activity is. "Snowed Up" offers a playing field for seven different games, each of them persuasive and none of them exclusive. One of the unusual aspects of this collection is its resolutely undogmatic and good-natured air, its refusal to make truth claims and score mean-spirited points. All these games have their rewards: you get what you pay for, and it is worth it in each case.

Taking them one by one: Julian Cowleys's essay on structuralism reminds us how delightful it can be and what a shame it is that current fashion requires that we be stupid about it. Cowley analyzes the story in terms of its way of communicating and the various and complex (contradictory) ways we readers communicate with it. At the same time, he artfully works in, without any hint of jargon, Saussure, Barthes, Genette, Propp, and other biggies. Structuralism is shown to be a dynamic system, opening possibilities rather than selling templates.

Mark Currie's poststructuralist analysis is not only readable and unpedantic but as astute and clear-headed as any such essay I have read. His awareness that texts do not constrain readers, much less do things to themselves, should be shouted from the housetops. Texts, he bluntly and medicinally says, do not deconstruct themselves; such subversions as are generated in deconstruction are not in the text but "represent the interests of a poststructuralist approach to narratology" (74), an approach which aims not to suppress but to make possible gaps, openings, and problems.