The Hermit Poet

After a week and a half of reading postmodern decontructivist and postcolonial literary criticism I am now completely convinced that postmodern literary critics must fall into one of two camps:

1) Willfully ignorant – eg. They deliberately ignore the fact that maintaining a postmodern deconstructivist stance means that their entire discouse is meaningless by the very nature of that stance. This makes them in some sense hypocritical — they really can’t believe this in its entirety if they still engage in the act of producing new criticism. Unless, of course, that act is mere “play” — merely the act of creating nonsensical texts for other willfully and/or truly ignorant readers.

Why bother writing criticism is the language and concepts are acknowledged as being completely arbitrary? If, as the postmodern stance maintains, there are only signifiers and no signifieds — how in the world do they intend to make sense? Or do they? Are they simply reveling in the production of nonsensical texts? Is the production of literary criticism the new “erotic” text — the act of creating it and re-creating it in reading a form of pleasure for a very select few initiates.

2) Truly ignorant – They really don’t understand what they are saying — which may actually be a self-fullfilling actualization of the postmodern stance.

In either case, why move towards obsfucation? Why muddy the waters further? I have seen so many terms which, rather than elucidate, eradicate meaning. The very blandness of the terms point to their arbitrary nature. The concepts behind them might be useful in understanding the various ways we as readers encounter the text, but if they are buried in obtuse definitions, who can actually understand them?

It seems as well that even other literary critics have difficulty understanding or apprehending the intended meanings behind these terms. On several occasions I have found the originator of a term harshly condemning the misuse and/or misappropriation of the term. And, as misapplications of that term increase, the term itself becomes less and less useful.

Even coining terms to develop a “common” language among critics is a little more than a modernist pipe dream. Isn’t the effort to unify the fragmented discourse a modernist impulse as opposed to a postmodernist one?

As a producer of texts (ie. a poet), I view the project of modern and postmodern literary critics as largely a failure. If, at its root, good criticism should facilitate a better understanding and/or appreciation of a text, how does the critic’s act of obscuring the machinery of his approach through complicated and ill-defined terms serve the producer of the text or the general readers of the text. Criticism as it stands today, largely privileges other critics — it seems a rather rooted in old school nepotism and cronyism.

Counterpoint – It might be argued that the creation of a new lexicon / jargon of technical terms is necessary to facilitate conversation. This might be true in the case of the sciences where there is a concrete and clearly understood signified. In literary and social theory this fails. So long as critics will argue on one hand of the arbitrary assignment of signifiers to often non-existent signifieds, and on the other hand demand that their discourse utilize a specific trade jargon, that there will always be a sense that they want both to have their cake and to eat it too.