Coriolanus, literary theory, bad fiction, literary utility, Grimms, shelves, Public humanities, dead novels, fictional therapy, Where is our Milton of the space age?, Austen's sisters, AI art

The irregular review of reviews, vol. XII

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Coriolanus

I am delighted to have written about Coriolanus for the journal Liberties, edited by

Celeste Marcus

. The essay discusses how everyone in the play has a hand in the bloody tragedy.

one of the lessons of Coriolanus is that our own passions, our own feelings, are part of the way the polity works. We cannot only blame our leaders, just as our leaders cannot excuse themselves with speeches about how they are not the authors of themselves. The determinism of Coriolanus’ tragedy runs deep — it comes out of his childhood and is rooted in the behavior of the populace.

I also discuss the play’s debate between authoritarianism and populism, including a discussion of Shakespeare as a grain hoarder.

Hazlitt thought that Coriolanus was a play in favor of authority because it gave all the most memorable lines to the tyrant himself — all of Shakespeare’s poetic power was invested in his cruelest character. And there’s some truth to this: Shakespeare is not kind to the mob. In Plutarch’s account of these events, the people are described as battle-scarred, but Shakespeare tells us they were of no use in battle. Indeed, the play focuses on the idea that Coriolanus has brought far more wealth to Rome through battle than the people have through labour. Indeed, one interesting question is why Shakespeare shows so little sympathy to the people in Coriolanus when their complaint is that the state has hoarded grain from them.

One answer is that Shakespeare was a grain hoarder himself.

Do read the whole thing.

How bad is literary theory?

I get it. I hated critical theory when I first encountered it because it was so boring and badly written. It uses impenetrable, clinical, technocratic jargon that takes forever to decode and understand. I figured that theorists used this jargon to conceal the fact that they weren’t saying anything at all. They were bullshit artists. As a first-generation student who was insecure and self-conscious about my own intellectual capacities, it felt satisfying to dismiss these pretentious snobs. The reason I couldn’t understand them wasn’t because I wasn’t smart or well-read enough. There was something wrong with them.

A persuasive argument in favour of reading literary theory, with some good discussion about the breadth of the term. I am “against” Literary Theory, but not literary theories. Literary Theory is Foucault and Derrida and post-structuralism and New Historicism and Terry Eagleton and all that jazz. Whereas literary theories are merely that: theories based on literature, such as were produced by Northrop Frye. The latter is good honest criticism, while the former is often self-referential and unliterary. I generalise and many good Theorists work alongside many uninspiring “traditionalists”. But we need to generalise to make some headway with this vexed topic.

The problems of New Historicism, for example, are that it took the Theory of Foucault as a starting point, rather than literature, and worked up an inconsistent set of ideas that were not very much about literature. D.G. Myers wrote,

We can yield the point that Elizabethan culture was patriarchal, or that those who serve ruling minorities desire secretly to see them toppled, and still go on to deny that A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Dürer’s sketch contain these meanings. If it is not self-contradictory for us to do this—if we can simultaneously grant an assumption and reject its interpretive significance—it follows that any interpretation grounded upon an unproven assumption about a work’s historical context is trifling, if not untenable. Only if a reader of a New Historicist argument is prepared to accept its a priori assumptions can its conclusions be accepted as true to history.

So much Literary Theory is like this: grounded on a set of ideas that all have to be assumed, but still highly declarative about what literature is and is not (usually, in the case of New Historicists, a means of discovering an ideology and little else). And the ideologies being discovered at work in the texts are always modern leftist bien pensant thinking. Once you declare that texts can hold many interpretative meanings, there’s very little internal contradiction involved in this, but it forgets common sense. There is always an appeal open from criticism to nature, as Samuel Johnson said. Or there ought to be.

If you want the rest of my thoughts about this vexed debate, along with the rest of the links, take advantage of the special offer and get 25% off.