104. The Stuff about the Stuff about the Stuff

 

Did your English teacher ever tell you what hermeneutics was? Mine did. "Hermeneutics," he said, "is the stuff about the stuff about the stuff." The stuff was the literature we studied every day. The stuff about the stuff was the criticism we studied once in a while. The stuff about the stuff about the stuff was the theory of criticism (dictionary: "the science and methodology of interpretation") we never got around to studying. Poems and stories took up too much time.

I see the move from poems to the theory of the criticism of poems as a move from this world, the world I lived in, to the academic world, a world then beyond me. My professor took us to it reluctantly, I now believe, because he was also a novelist, and probably wanted us to be good readers of the kind of thing he put a great deal of effort into — though he did write criticism, and put a lot of effort into that too. I see him working, professionally, in the academic world but living, imaginatively, in this world. The stuff he dealt with as a novelist, the Ur-Stuff, was life.

And that's what I had to deal with too when I read his novels. I understood them by filling his words with the meaning my experience with life had given me. When a character didn't want his neighbors to think he was "getting uppity," and so concealed the fact that he was "going to the toilet in the house," I well understood because I had lived in a town where you couldn't "get uppity." When I failed to understand his words the reason was usually lack of experience. When a character said, "Goodbye, Lois, and I forgive you for everything I did to you," I had to wait until I had known some men who mistreated women, and even then fell short.

In any case I was close to life, a lot closer than I was when I started doing graduate work, and discovered, in the abstract distance, all that the word "hermeneutics" referred to.  Reference was not a problem for those I had left behind, the ones close to life in the novelist's class.  There the word referred simply to the higher stuffiness.

Then came the really high hermeneutics in Literary Theory. "That stuff you're so interested in, that stuff all this other stuff is about? There isn't any. There are only representations of stuff, interpretations of stuff."  That's what it told us.

Talk about a kick in the kidneys. "There is nothing outside the text." Zero, zilch. "Words appeal not to facts but to other words." Two boots from Jacques Derrida. Half the people in the English department were doubled over with pain.

Ah, but nobody in a Physics Department was. Over there they ignored Derrida or made fun of him. Like making him the pilot of an airplane approaching an airport. "I've got some stuff in front of me," he tells the tower. "That stuff is a thunderstorm," says the controller. "Steer left." Does Derrida believe there is something outside the controller's text, something "fact" is the right word for? If he doesn't he's not long for this world.

     

Well that's not the world he and his followers live in, according to Harold Bloom. They live in the academic world, where they have to get ahead. Literary Theory, as seen in Cultural Studies at least, is just "a vehicle of careerism."

Sure, when you get serious you'll find that there's a lot more to it than that. But you can't do that, you can't go into this problem, without venturing into an even higher hermeneutics. Who has any energy left?