So we were reading Christopher Paul Curtis's Bud, Not Buddy, and the question of evaluation came up. Henry James once spoke of an author's donee. That is, an author's given subject and approach. The reader either accepts these or does not, but the reader who does not might as well shut up since whatever the reader says is not going to change the author's donee. Closer to my own history, I was a student of Northrop Frye, and Frye always insisted that value judgments were a dime a dozen, and consequently not worth much. To say that one person's opinion is somehow better than another person's may or may not make sense, but to base a study of literature entirely on such evaluative pronouncements is to accept that reading and criticism are elitist activities. I prefer to think of reading as a democratic activity, an activity in which everyone can participate. The catch is that understanding literature is not something one has naturally; to understand literature means approaching literature the way a scientist approaches the natural world. We read literature through a particular medium, that medium being criticism. (A scientist approaches the natural world through the medium of botany or zoology or chemistry or whatever.) We study the criticism of literature, rather than literature unmediated. Unmediated literature, like unmediated nature, is akin to Lacan's Real: amorphous, chaotic, fearsome, messy, even monstrous. The reader who has studied criticism and studied criticism with a degree of thoroughness will carry a certain authority. This authority does not mean that this person's opinion rules, but rather that this person's understanding of the grammar of literature will garner respect, but not necessarily agreement.
But back to evaluation. So I deride Curtis's novel for not being gritty and realistic and true to history, whereas another reader praises the book for dealing sensitively with African American experience and presenting a positive image of African Americans. Which one of us is correct? And if one of us is black and the other one white, how does this relate to which one of us is correct? Ultimately, an informed reader will know whether this book is good or not so good and won't have to bother telling others. The key here is "informed." What is an informed reader? An informed reader is a reader who knows the many and varied conventions of literature, and who is also informed on matters relating to the book that she or he is reading. When is a reader informed? To put this another way, I might ask, how many 12 to 14 year-old readers are informed? Will the youthful reader of Bud, Not Buddy know about the Great Depression? Will this reader know about the history of race relations in the United States (Jim Crow, for example)? Will this reader know about the connection between a certain kind of music and Black history? Will this reader know what jazz is? Will this reader know that for many decades in America there were segregated professional baseball leagues? And the crucial question: does it matter if a youthful reader does not know these things? Can the book stand on its own as a structure of words?
Visual Culture
We were also studying a couple of graphic novels and a student noted that we are now a visual culture rather than a culture that privileged the printed word. The catch here is that plays, television, graphic novels, all those things the student mentioned have their basis in the written word. Take graphic novels, for instance. Many of these are collaborative. The best known example is probably Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. We know that Alan Moore provides his collaborators (Gibbons in this instance) with detailed written descriptions of pages and panels. In other words, the artist works from a written script. The centrality of the written word may be less apparent in single-authored graphic works such as Stitches, but even here we do have words, not only in speech balloons but also in paratextual matter, like the back matter in this book. This is not to say that completely wordless books do not exist (for adults, I mean). For example, Lyn Ward was publishing wordless books for adults over 70 years ago. My point is not that we are not largely a visual culture now (we are), but that our visuality rests securely on the written word, and the printed word has always rested securely on the oral word. Whereas, for example, the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment took place precisely because of the centrality of the written word, the twenty-first century marks a shift from Enlightenment's privileging of the written word to a privileging of the visual sign. The difference between the visual sign today and the visual sign in the day of cave paintings and Egyptian hieroglyphics is that the visual sign today exists precisely because of the written word. In other words, sign systems interconnect. Take music, for example. Music traditionally had its own sign system (musical notes and stuff I know nothing about), but now we understand that music intersects with non musical signs such as painting (the afternoon of a faun), poetry (and hence the written word), the graphic arts (see Watchmen again), and even politics (check out Charles Mingus's Fables of Faubus).
And so, we may be a visual culture these days, but our visuality exists because we have the written word. In short, the teaching of writing remains important.
Perhaps the centrality of the visual marks a departure from Enlightenment principles and this departure allows for the emergence of the non rational as somehow acceptable. Why, for example, do many Americans appear to approve of Sarah Palin as a possible presidential candidate? She has great difficulty with the written (and spoken) word, but she looks okay. And she knows how to use television to improve her stock. In other words, as the visual gains prominence, so too does the illogical make its way against the logical. I might say the same thing of the stunning phenomenon of voters willingly voting for candidates who stand for policies detrimental to voters' best interests.
