When I was a boy riding the bus to our diocesan high school, an older kid sometimes sat in the seat next to me. He was an intelligent fellow who has since become a lawyer of considerable reputation. We might be sitting there quietly, when all at once, in a deadpan voice, he would turn to me and ask me why a certain state of affairs was, so — why, for example, do we deliver our electricity by wires above ground rather than burying them?
That was my cue. “I don’t know,” I said. “Why do we have our wires above ground?”
“It’s all a communist plot,” he said. He went on to describe, always in that deadpan voice, some absurd concatenation of motives and means that would make a communist plot out of it. (READ MORE by Anthony Esolen: Freedom as License Is Slavery in Disguise)
Why do we use seven digits in our local telephone numbers? Why are our stop signs octagonal? Why do we brush our teeth with fluorides? It’s all a communist plot.
He was in jest, of course. But our theorists in the humanities are not. Why is there only one woman among the top 100 chess players in the world? Why is Shakespeare regarded as the greatest poet who ever lived? Why is reason supposed to impose an order on our passions? It’s all a patriarchal plot. And so forth, for other political desiderata.
Theory — which comes from the Greek theorein, meaning to look at, to consider closely — should help to open our eyes to the complexity, integrity, wild variety, or beauty of what we are considering, quite independent of any feelings we may have about it or any use to which we might put it. It is not something we impose upon the object, but what the object reveals to us regardless of what we would like it to be. The true theorist must be patient and humble; like Kepler, who wanted the orbits of the planets to observe ratios derivable from the Platonic solids, who discovered instead that they were elliptical; and who wanted the orbits to preserve a constant speed, but who concluded from their elliptical orbits that they were always accelerating or decelerating, or passing in a twice-yearly instant from one state to the other. (READ MORE from Anthony Esolen: Ignorance to the Fourth Degree)
If you are dealing with something as varied and wild as human history in all its glory and shame, or human nature, or either one of those as reflected in the arts, especially literature, any theory worthy of its name must make the theorist more sensitive to meaning, not less; more able to thrill in sympathy with a human thought that is not his own; more like a child who imagines he can open a door and enter another world, a world that possesses its own order and wholeness, not like his world, and still somehow understandable; the foreign place that can yet become a home.
What we get instead are pseudo-theories, such as the Soviets had, that “solve” literature by dissolving it, seeing in Dostoyevsky, for instance, only a half-hearted champion of the poor, corrupted as he was by his reactionary embrace of the Orthodox faith. Soviet theorists look like acute and subtle geniuses when compared with our usually ill-read sorts, who apply, like the stamp on the printing machine my mother-in-law once worked in one of the world’s biggest candy factories, their theory to every single pre-formed bit of literary sweets, so that they all come out the same way, saying the same thing, world without end, Amen.
Such stuff attracts second-rate minds, often those actuated by ressentiment, the hatred of someone else’s greatness, a hatred accompanied by an inversion of values, so that you take your hatred to be a virtue, just as you take your theory to be intellectually superior to the work of art you have stamped it upon. After an initial adolescent thrill, the application of reductive and politically motivated pseudo-theories is a dull affair, and if you do love the material you want to learn about, you must reject them, just as if you want eventually to fall in love with a girl of real flesh and blood, your mirror is not the place to find her. Now then, if students are given to suppose that this is what reading literature or studying history or looking at paintings is all about, the best of them, or those with the coldest eyes for scouting out foolishness, will simply shrug and walk away, if they ever get into the matter in the first place.
Thus we get caught in a stupidly destructive spiral. The theorists apply their Little Orphan Annie Decoder Ring to Milton, and Milton comes out as the Ring has predetermined, though our Annie is peculiarly flippant and ill-mannered, shrill, and sometimes obscene. They say that this is what reading Milton is for — if we read Milton at all rather than some current author, the gist of whose politics can be gotten for free from a million people on the internet. People take them at their word, and say, reasonably enough, that if that’s what it is, it’s not worth the expense. The very mind of Milton and his brilliant art go the way of all flesh, where such minds and such art are not supposed to go. Budgets for the humanities are slashed, and Shakespeare and Milton are replaced by second-rate authors whom the professors who have scorned greatness find easiest for their sensitive nerves. And the deterioration goes on. (READ MORE: Happy Birthday, Rhapsody in Blue)
This is already bad enough, a colossal betrayal of our literary heritage. But I do not blame it on theory, not exactly. For some potent literary theory is just what we need now to counter the crass and simplistic materialism that is the default philosophy of our elites, and it is just what we are unlikely to get because those whose minds might be capable of conceiving it have learned from the “theorists” that all things are reducible, in a programmatic way, to politics; so they turn to theorizing but without the bracing, maturing, and mind-deepening experiences that literature could provide for them.
Let me venture here a suggestion as to what might have been possible. I am taking my cue from Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos. Percy is a theorist of signs, and it is precisely as a sign-maker that man, as he sees him, is irreducible to mere matter and the forces that act upon it. For the sign, he says, is that third thing along with man and the world about him, itself entering the world, and by its very presence providing that world with a new dimension — as you might think of raising a world of cubes and spheres from a flat world of squares and circles.
Other creatures make signals: a blue jay outside my window has just given his crow signal, which he does sometimes as a benefit to the smaller birds whose nests he often robs. But it is not a sign, properly speaking. The jay does not raise it to the status of independent existence. He does not, as the poet does, play with it, turn it ’round, contradict it, apply it to new things, connect it with other signs in an ordered and beautiful way, or use it as a means to uncover new truths about himself and the world. So far as we know, in all the universe outside of man there is not a single sign, unless, as Augustine suggested, thinking of Scripture, the universe itself is a vast array of ordered signs, the allegory of the creator God, whereby a creature is more itself, possesses a fuller measure of its own peculiar being, the more of a sign it is, the more significant it is. So man is among all creatures the great sign-bearer of God, made in his image after his likeness, and man alone among all creatures is a maker of signs.
What manner of existence does the sign possess? Genuine literary theory should ask that question without reducing the sign to a mere social convention or a mere political impulse. How does Hamlet, the prince of Denmark, exist? What does it say about the mind of man, that he can speak intelligibly about the character of Hamlet, of an imaginary being, an organism of signs, so that one critic’s understanding of the Dane may be truer than another’s? Are we to reduce Hamlet to ink blots on paper, or the flashing of neurons in a brain? What sense can that possibly make?
That is just to approach Hamlet from the question of what manner of thing he is; what he, that organism of signs, created by a sign-maker and sign-bearer called Shakespeare, has to say about our passions, our doubts, our crossed purposes, our ability to ferret out the truth, and our proneness to self-deception, is, of course, the real attraction he holds out for us, and shall, so long as men can read and eyes can see.
