Walter Benjamin and Tim Burton

"In telling the story of my father's life, it's impossible to separate fact from fiction, the man from the myth. The best I can do is to tell it the way he told me. It doesn't always make sense and most of it never happened... but that's what kind of story this is."
-Big Fish

Watch "Big Fish" finale

When I think of storytellers, I think of both my grandfather and Albert Finney's character from Tim Burton's 2003 film "Big Fish." "Big Fish" is a tale of a father/son relationship in which the son must come to grips with the scattered pieces of his dying father's life. A perpetual storyteller, Edward Bloom (Albert Finney) raises his son Will (Billy Crudup) upon stories- marvelous, fantastical stories that are based in truth but leave Will feeling as if he only knows a fictionalized version of his father. Ultimately, Will comes to uncover the complex man behind the larger than life stories, and father and son reconcile their relationship in a heartwarming final scene where both engage in the act of storytelling. I believe that Burton really gets at the essence of storytellers and what their stories mean in "Big Fish," and the movie echoes some of the themes that Walter Benjamin develops in his essay "The Storyteller."

In the outset of his essay, Benjamin describes how there have historically been two types of storytellers: the "resident tiller of the soil" and the "trading seaman." In other words, storytellers who draw on the lore of the past and their own rootedness in a place or storytellers who draw on the lore of faraway places and their own travels. Edward Bloom is most definitely of the later variety, for the movie chronicles his travels out of small town Alabama into the wider world. Benjamin characterizes the storyteller as one who promotes the communicability of experience, counseling his or her listeners with the great well of wisdom arising from oral tradition. Storytelling, according to Benjamin, is at its' heart, a communal endeavor, while the novel, as a form, embodies isolation:

"The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others. To write a novel means to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life. In the midst of life's fullness, and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of the living."

Burton does a good job of capturing the community that shapes Edward Bloom's stories and the communicability of experience that characterizes his life. The colorful characters that enter Bloom's life at different stages provide the wisdom and "counsel" that Benjamin attributes to the storyteller, and the viewer very much gets the sense that Bloom has led an existence that is far from alienated. Despite the separation between Bloom and his son, it is evident that his stories are born out of human connection rather than out of isolated, industrial capitalist experience- the experience that gives birth to the novel.

The most clear parallel that I can draw between Benjamin's description of the storyteller and Burton's portrayal of Edward Bloom is the idea that stories are not expendable. Unlike information, which proves relevant only in a transitory instant, stories go on gathering new meaning with age. Benjamin writes that a story "preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time." In a similar way, the stories that compose Edward Bloom's life develop renewed value for his son as an adult. As a child, Will loved the stories that his father spun, cherishing them for their magical characters and impossible outcomes. Yet, as he grew older, he began to despise the fictionalization of life that his father made his craft. He wanted real information, a way of relating to his father in an authentic way based upon truth. As Will finally comes to embrace his father's makeup as a natural born storyteller, he can see the old stories from a new perspective-- see them for their deeper meaning that negates the need for factual information. Somehow the fabrications hold more insight into his father's life than the simple truth.

Personal Economy and the Ability to Perceive

I really resonated with Barbara Herrnstein Smith's opinions about interdependency and the radical contingencies of value. I had the feeling as I was reading her essay that it was dense with important material and that many different sections could be the subject of an interesting discussion. (However, according to Smith's own words, I must be careful when discerning why I found such value in her work. Due to the countless factors that influence one's ever-changing personal economy, I could attribute my appreciation for her essay to my appreciation for a clear and concise article in the Norton Anthology after having read so many that I did not fully grasp, to my desire as I reread her article to find thought-provoking material to blog about, to my preconceived notion that as a modern American author I would more easily understand what she had to say than I could understand the older, foreign authors that we have read, to my remembrance that the article had made solid sense the first time I read it, etc, etc. These factors unquestionably influenced my thought process as I read, and if I were to read Herrnstein Smith's article again in another six months, my personal economy would be drastically different).

That being said, I would like to reflect on a small point that Herrnstein-Smith made that I felt was particularly insightful:

"Moreover, the subject's experiences of an entity are not discrete, or strictly speaking, successive, because recollection and anticipation always overlay perception, and the units of what we call 'experience' themselves vary and overlap."

The idea that recollection and anticipation cover up or conceal our ability to perceive struck me as true. When we enter into experiences, be they reading a novel or simply meeting an old friend for a cup of coffee, do our expectations make a stronger impact upon our perception than what actually takes place while reading or conversing? Are we so consumed with past and future impressions and ideas intersecting that we cannot accurately read what is happening in the present moment? How often do I read a piece of literature with a notion in my head of what I should be looking for as I experience the text? How often are these notions colored by my recollections of past experiences and by my anticipation of what the text will be? Are our experiences ever really isolated in the present when they are supposed to be taking place, or are they, as Herrnstein-Smith suggests, representative of boundless intersection and overlap?

I have wondered before about my own perceptive abilities. I am asked all of the time to perceive, to opine about my impressions of what has taken place just a minute before or within the last year of my life. So often I assume that I am capable of perceiving and of perceiving accurately, yet, is this really true? As experiences blur and build upon one another, I am forced to process quickly, and I sometimes wonder if I have drawn the right conclusions about what has happened even within my own small life.

What matters who's speaking?

Of the three scenarios which we considered in class while discussing Foucault's essay, "What is an Author?", I was most drawn to scenario two, which involved the celebration and subsequent denunciation of a book which attempted to chronicle a Native American boy's experience with cultural assimilation. I think this scenario proved most thought-provoking for me because it was not just hypothetical but actually based off of a real-life situation involving author Asa Earl Carter (writing under the pseudonym of Forrest Carter) and his book The Education of Little Tree. Though the book was initially trumpeted as representative of Native American themes of simple living, tradition, and love of nature and though the book was thought to help revitalize Native American literature, when it became known that Carter had been a white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan member, controversy colored the book's reputation. There were several issues at the heart of the controversy: the fact that what was a fictional work had been presented as a factual memoir, the gap between the descriptions of Cherokee culture promoted in the book and actual Cherokee traditions and language recorded by experts, and the disconnect between the uplifting messages of the book and the author's racism early in life.

While Foucault would analyze this situation and find it fascinating how we expect consistency and coherence in the collection of an author's work, and while it is ironic that the same work can be both glorified and repudiated depending upon our perception of the author, I cannot help but believe that particularly in this case it does matter who is speaking and the meaning of the work is affected by the author's intention. How could even the most staunch Formalist or Structuralist who advocates for the death of the author honestly hold to their belief that any knowledge of the author is extraneous to the meaning of the work given this scenario? I would not be content doing a formalist critique of the unity between the book's form and content when I knew in the back of my mind that this author who wrote about the Native American experience had, in fact, as a white man, promoted racist attitudes thorough out his lifetime. There is no question in my mind that The Education of Little Tree must be reread and reexamined for the possible existence of white supremacist tones. When a work is believed to be representative of a people, then the author makes all of the difference. I'm sure that the argument exists that no literary work can truly be representative of the lived experience of many individuals, but when these individuals claim the work as representative, then this is a different story. I believe that the meaning of The Education of Little Tree must lie partially outside of the text. Foucault would also make note of how we expect an author to be authentic, trustworthy, transparent, and representative and how so often our concept of an author functions in this way. While this may be merely a cultural construct and an illegitimate expectation to put on authorship, I believe that it is permissible to ask about the author's intentionality and transparency when the integrity of a group of people that has been historically oppressed is at stake.

These questions regarding the role of the author in the realm of literary theory have clearly been relevant for Oprah Winfrey as she has both composed and edited her famous book list. Although she promoted The Education of Little Tree on her television show in 1994, calling it "very spiritual," she removed the book from the list of recommended reading on her website in 2007 due to the controversy surrounding the author. In another infamous case regarding the question of whether an author is allowed to present a fictionalized memoir as factual, Winfrey lambasted author James Frey of A Million Little Pieces for lying and exaggerating about many parts of his supposedly real memoir, which Winfrey had promoted in her book club. Check out video coverage here:

Oprah Winfrey and James Frey

The Function of Authorship

"The function of the author is to characterize the existence, circulation, and operation of certain discourses within society."
- Michael Foucault

Given Foucault's many different and important ideas about how "authorship" functions according to cultural criteria and how author's names are not proper names, I thought it might be interesting to investigate how Foucault's name functions in the field of literary theory. With the death of the author and Foucault himself as a victim, how does his name become an "object of appropriation?" Does his name suggest a certain level of quality? Are some of the texts he has written excluded from the body of work he is said to have "authored" because they do not demonstrate a "conceptual or theoretical coherence?" Or because they are stylistically different? Do readers seek to classify his "author-function" by examining the plurality of egos in his work (works narrated in the first person)? Are his writings more highly valued than others because they bear his name? Does his name hold productive power because of the knowledge he represents as an "intellectual gatekeeper?"

By merely browsing through Foucault's English-language Wikipedia page, we can draw some conclusions about the author-function of his name. Immediately I notice that on the right hand side of the web page, there are two lists: one of names of people that influenced Foucault, another of names of people that he influenced. His influences include Nietzsche, Marx, Borges, Kant, and others, but of course, these influences only include other notable intellectuals (nowhere on the list is his father, Paul Foucault). Foucault may interpret this data as indicative of the way in which the author functions always as a member of a larger group or school of thought. Authors must be linked to other authors and thinkers and thus their names function in order to represent larger ideas and periods of time. The name of the author has nothing to do with the individual person behind that same name. This is further evidenced by how the Wikipedia article classifies him by "school/tradition" and by "main interests": "Continental Philosophy, Structuralism, Post-structuralism," and "history of ideas, epistemology, ethics-political, philosophy," respectively. The author is now a product of consumption, manipulated by labels to function within specific cultures and societies. It is also interesting to note that the opening paragraph in Foucault's biography in the Norton Anthology states:

"Michael Foucault is arguably the most influential European writer and thinker of the second half of the twentieth century. His unclassifiable work (is it history? philosophy? cultural theory?) is controversial and has attracted much criticism, but the questions he raised, the topics he addressed, and the positions he took have become central features of today's intellectual landscape."

Clearly, Foucault's name is functioning here as one which bears much power due to the loftiness of his designation as "most influential European writer." The use of his name bears authority, the type of authority that would not be so readily attributed to a lesser-known or less highly regarded author. The way his name functions in relation to literature is much different than the way Stephen King's name functions in relation to literature. Additionally, though the Norton Anthology designates some of his work as "unclassifiable" (suggesting that the way that authorship functions in our society necessitates the classification of an author's work), it is interesting to note that these "unclassifiable" pieces are still considered part of the main body of his intellectual work. Foucault the person has no say in the way that his name functions or the way in which his work is characterized.

The Death of the...Person?

This semester in Spanish Linguistics class, we learned an important distinction between the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity and the vision of cognitive linguistics: while the Sapir-Whorf theory holds that language determines our way of seeing the world, cognitive linguists believe that our way of seeing the world determines the language that we use. To me, this distinction seems difficult to determine, almost in the same way as the old adage: "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" Do we first have cognition, or a way of seeing and understanding the world, or do we first have language which then shapes the way that we see and understand the world? Roland Barthes in his essay, "The Death of the Author" seems to firmly plant himself in the Sapir-Whorf camp, suggesting that language is our point of origin. Not only does language determine our perception of the world, in Barthes' opinion, language precedes the author. Barthes desperately attempts to recreate the way in which we talk about the author; it is not that he strips the author of all importance by boldly pronouncing his death, but rather that he refuses to continue subordinating both the text and the reader to the author. Instead of limiting the meaning of a work to the life, passions, tastes, and vices of the person who produced it, Barthes believes we must conceptualize the author as merely a location or "instance writing," a thing which "creates" language only in that it utters the words in the here and now.

I find it difficult to embrace Barthes' radical ideas about the death of the author given my situated-ness in a cultural context which, due to its capitalist ideology, has glorified the author as an individual who "reigns in the histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews [and] magazines." My instinctive response is, "If we don't have the author, than what works exist to be read? If we don't have the author, who through his or her creativity and perseverance has put forth a work to be analyzed and understood, than what are we left with but a colorful, mismatched swirl of cultural elements, forces, and influences that shape our unique time and place?" At the same time as I feel put immediately on the defensive by Barthes' assertions, I can appreciate his arguments. Is it not true that authors are "eternal copyists" who can only mix writings from their already-formed dictionaries? Is it not true that every person is immeasurably shaped by a variety of factors- parents, friends, relatives, peers, society, class, race, nationality, language, religion, media, geography, education, etc, etc? How capable is anyone of "expressing himself", and as Barthes suggests, is he or she not essentially expressing the infinite well of influences which his or her life has unquestionably drawn from? Is then the author no more than a channel, a means through which pre-formed ideas can be re-paired and compared?

As I was reading Barthes, I found myself questioning whether or not Barthes believes the author to be capable of self-awareness. Since the whole focus of his essay is upon the author's death, or the non-consideration of the author in literary theory, this question may be beside the point, but I think the question of whether or not any one of us can be fully cognizant of the cultural forces that shape our identities is interesting. Is it possible that an author could pinpoint the influences that form how he or she thinks and writes? If this were possible, than could an author reach that elusive mark of true originality? Is it possible for us to distinguish what we believe from where those beliefs originated, not unconsciously claiming them as our own? Do we not already do this to some extent, attributing ideas that we have to things that we've read or thinks that we've seen on TV? Or are we more absorbers than creditors? I think that Barthes might suggest that no person or author is capable of complete self-awareness which could produce authenticity, and I tend to agree with him. I have come to realize that I am incapable of ever fully disengaging from the aspects that I dislike about the culture in which I was raised. They shape me on a subconscious level, and thus, as Barthes says, the process of knowing who I am is more of a disentangling for influences than a deciphering for meaning.

Todorov and The Typology of Plots

Tzvetan Todorov states in his essay "Structural Analysis of Narrative" that structural analysis "seeks no longer to articulate a paraphrase, a rational resume of the concrete work, but to propose a theory of the structure and operation of the literary discourse, to present a spectrum of literary possibilities, in such manner that the existing works of literature appear as particular instances that have been realized." Structuralists, according to Todorov, search out in a near-scientific manner those elements that compose the underlying systems upon which the body of literature operates. Rather than narrowing their critical focus to the thing in and of itself as the Formalists demand, the Structuralists are not so much interested in specific works of literature but in the larger schema into which these works fit. Todorov illustrates Structuralist critique through his assertions about the plot structure of Boccaccio's Decameron. After summarizing the plot sequence of four tales within the Decameron, Todorov constructs an outline of the basic plot that he believes repeats itself in each story: "X violates a law-- Y must punish X-- X tries to avoid being punished--either A) Y violates a law or B) Y believes that X is not violating the law-- consequently, Y does not punish X." Having established this schema, Todorov continues with a more detailed structural analysis of what meaning could be understood from this structure. Ultimately, he makes clear that, "Our goal is not a knowledge of the Decameron (although such analysis will also serve that purpose), but rather an understanding of literature, or, in this specific instance, of plot."

In Todorov's structural analysis of the Decameron, he boils down the essential plot structure from his initial, specific outline of characters "X" and "Y" navigating the violation of laws and the (non) consequences of those actions to what he calls "the shift from one equilibrium to another." Defining an equilibrium as "the existence of a stable but not static relation between the members of a society," Todorov classifies the basic plot structure of the Decameron as two equilibriums separated by a period of imbalance, "which is composed of a process of degeneration and a process of improvement." Cannot all plots be simplified to a shift in equilibriums? As the embodiment of a change in character's lives? Essentially that "stuff happens" and things change? I remember a friend once telling me that she had learned that there were only two basic plot structures behind every story: 1) Someone leaves town and everything changes. 2) A new person comes to town and everything changes. (Some might even argue that the two are one in the same) At the time, I thought that many of the books and movies that I was familiar with could be reduced to that schema. Let's examine this further with a look at some of the top 10 movies that Messiah students list as their favorites on facebook.com (I can only include the ones I have seen, of course):

2). Anchorman- Christina Applegate's character joins Will Ferrell's news team and everything changes.
3) Remember the Titans- Denzel Washington's character is the new coach in town who changes the spirit and attitude of the town's beloved football team.
7) Hitch- I'm not sure that either of the main characters definitively enter or leave town, but both Will Smith and Eva Mendes' characters are changed by the presence of a "new" type of person-- for Smith, it is a woman who he cannot charm with his typical tricks, for Mendes, a man who proves halfway decent.
10) Beauty and the Beast- Belle and her father move to a French Provincial village, and Belle is perceived by all to be a strange, eccentric beauty. When she leaves town to search for her father who has become lost while travelling, she encounters the Beast and everything does indeed change for them both.

I'm not sure if trying to categorize recent films under this "someone comes, someone goes" schema can be considered structural analysis in the same vein that Todorov promotes, but it is interesting to conceive of the idea of a universal plot structure. Here are some links that provide further insight into the matter and perhaps affirm the verse in Ecclesiastes which says, "There is nothing new under the sun":

The Movie Site
Four Common Plot Structure
1, 3, 7, 20, 36?

Cleanth Brooks is a Convincing Formalist

I found Cleanth Brooks to be a breath of fresh air after having read some of the other formalist critics. I enjoy his style of argumentation because, rather than deny the obvious objections that people might have to the ideals of formalist criticism, he raises these concerns himself and provides a convincing defense of formalism. Just as I felt myself objecting to what he had written, Brooks seemed to always say something like, "But some readers might object to this because..." He points out that non-formalist critics might be scandalized by what seems to be a "bloodless and hollow" severance from the author and the reader but affirms the formalist belief that consideration of the author or the reader's response does not allow for true criticism. Additionally, his writing style is very clear and concrete, and I did not find myself struggling to understand as I so often did while reading Wimsatt and Beardsley. I have wondered in previous posts about the formalists' opinion of whether or not literature should serve as a tool in helping us to understand the human condition, and Brooks seems to directly address this issue:

"It is unfortunate if this playing down of such responses seems to deny humanity to either writer or reader. The critic may enjoy certain works very much and may be indeed intensely moved by them. I am, and I have no embarrassment admitting to the fact; but a detailed description of my emotional state on reading certain works has little to do with indicating to an interested reader what the work is and how parts of it are related."

The responses that Brooks references are critical responses that would take into account an author's "sincerity" (or the intensity of his feeling as he or she composed a work) and also the intensity of a reader's reaction when reading a work. Once again, the Formalists acknowledge the validity of an author's experience or a reader's emotional response but deny their objectivity in determining the meaning of a work. Judging by Brooks' writing, it seems that he might suggest that literature does promote understanding of the human condition but that this understanding is perhaps beyond or beneath the realm of formal criticism.

I found Brooks' assertions about the necessity of formalist criticism above any other school of criticism to be interesting. He writes that all critics are "forced to adopt" formalist criticism and consider only the work itself given the "desperate" alternatives:

"Either we say that one person's reading is as good as another's and equate those readings on a basis of absolute equality and thus deny the possibility of any standard reading. Or else we take a lowest common denominator of the various readings that have been made; that is, we frankly move from literary criticism into socio-psychology. To propose taking a consensus of the opinions of "qualified" readers is simply to split the ideal reader into a group of ideal readers."

Are these really the only alternatives? Must criticism only consider the work alone lest it become totally subjective, stripping the text of any objective meaning to be derived? Is any one reader's take on the meaning of a poem equivalent to any other reader's take, barring the existence of an "ideal reader?" In our class discussion of some of these questions in relationship to how we read the bible as a work of literature, I think that instinctively many of us wanted to believe that both an informed and uninformed reader could come to the bible and derive significant meaning. This instinctual response represents our collective world view as members of an egalitarian, postmodern society. Yet, maybe we must seek out some sort of "ideal" reader or student of the text in our pursuit of either biblical or more general literary criticism. Or perhaps we must categorize the types of meaning that can be derived from criticism: objective, subjective, personal, societal, historical, psychological, sociological, etc. Perhaps the Formalists do make a good argument that the best sort of criticism focuses upon a text's unity between its form and content and that this type of criticism must remove itself from the subjective concerns of an author's intention or biography and a reader's response. Perhaps.