I wasted many pairs of pants, sitting long hours in classrooms. Wooden chairs are designed uncomfortable to keep you awake during class, but the abuse they go through during a normal school year makes them rough and angry. Then, they retaliate on your pants. They use the bottoms and let loose nails piece your butt and leave you vulnerable to tetanus. All those years in school made me paranoid about chairs. I have a whole conspiracy theory about them. But it's not the only thing I've done during this twenty years of my life. I have learned a thing or two about critical thinking along the way.
My favorite subject of debate in University was reception theory. It's something I always perceived as the backbone for cultural studies, so by consequent, the backbone for comparative literature. This guy named Hans-Robert Jauss came with the idea in the sixties that a "text" (a book, a movie, whatever is written), isn't just accepted for what it is by a reader. It isn't "just a story", but instead in goes through the reader's whole cultural and ethnic background in order to find meaning. It makes sense. In a class, we studied Who Slashed Celanire's Throat? by Maryse Condé and saw that there are many ways to read the novel. There is an obvious gothic element to it, the magic, the tortured scenery, but there is also an argument about the treatment of women and another about black identity. Depending on who you are, you will find a different meaning to a novel and this is quintessential for writers posterity). Franz Kafka is another example. He's remembered as a master of tortured and paranoid literature, but writer/critic Alberto Manguel quoted from a Kafka biography (not sure in what book, I think it was A History Of Reading) , which said that the legendary writer thought himself as a comedian. That he made his friend laugh to tears while reading The Trial. Reception theory empowers the reader.
Since I've always had one foot on both playgrounds, I have always questioned the limits of that theory, which drove my critic teachers insane. Sometimes I would just love to stir shit up and to question a writer/director that a teacher presented us, only because he dug his work. I'm not sure if it was for Animation or Contemporary Cinema class, but one teacher made us sit through a short film called Mothlight, by Stanley Brakhage. It's four minutes long, but it managed to be the four longest minutes of my life. The "movie" consists in moth wings, insects and grass stuck to a roll of film. I'm not even kidding. Every eight seconds, I would look at my watch and wonder when this monstrosity would ever end. No sound, no distinctive image, no cinema. After four excruciating minutes, the teacher told us that Brakhage was such a passionate experimental artist that he died from inhaling the acid fumes from his laboratory. Noble, yes, but provocative enough to make me want to seek retribution. So I raised my hand and asked:
"Is it possible that Brakhage was completely high while doing Mothlight?"
"What?"
"Yeah. It's obviously not a movie. It's just random organic material patched on film for shits & giggles. You said yourself the man loves his fumes. Maybe this takes a whole other meaning when you're high".
"I don't think you understand what Brakhage tried to do here. It's an experiment on texture and organic film making. If you can't appreciate the beauty of it, your place is obviously not in this class".
That guy saw way too much in Brakhage's film. That I'm convinced of. It's not because you're an artist that you can't do something for shit & giggles. But, hey, the reader is right. The work is not complete without interpretation. I agree that a book is meant to be read and a film is meant to be seen. But this is where the academy fails. One writes from an inner need (I'm quoting here, but I unfortunately don't remember from who). Art makes you transcend loneliness and makes you feel like to belong to a certain group. May it be an underground punk movement, or humanity as a whole, if you write fiction to express how smart you are, you're only going to attract people who want to outsmart you. Joyce's scholars have been biting their own tails for almost a hundred years, but still, they take themselves with the same serious than cancer researchers do.
So I think it's a good warning that Academia has given us, book bloggers (or in my case, let's say cultural reviewer). As the interest of reading book reviews lies in different personal perspectives, let's never forget that we also have readers. It's a continuous chain that will create more readers, more reviewers and potentially more literature students. If we truly love literature, we have the duty to guide our readers towards the books we love for the right reasons. For the quality of the prose, but also for the ideas and the thematics it carries. Words like "boring" and "interesting" are vernacular of our own institution and therefore, should carry the weight that it proposes. There are reasons that push you to read further beyond the "I identified with the main character" and there is a whole readership, wanting to read why you did. No writer has transcended time with the style of his prose alone and in this era of democratization of thoughts that is the information age, we owe our favorite writers to carry their ideas forward. Let's not turn the blogosphere into a distant cousin of the Academy.
My favorite subject of debate in University was reception theory. It's something I always perceived as the backbone for cultural studies, so by consequent, the backbone for comparative literature. This guy named Hans-Robert Jauss came with the idea in the sixties that a "text" (a book, a movie, whatever is written), isn't just accepted for what it is by a reader. It isn't "just a story", but instead in goes through the reader's whole cultural and ethnic background in order to find meaning. It makes sense. In a class, we studied Who Slashed Celanire's Throat? by Maryse Condé and saw that there are many ways to read the novel. There is an obvious gothic element to it, the magic, the tortured scenery, but there is also an argument about the treatment of women and another about black identity. Depending on who you are, you will find a different meaning to a novel and this is quintessential for writers posterity). Franz Kafka is another example. He's remembered as a master of tortured and paranoid literature, but writer/critic Alberto Manguel quoted from a Kafka biography (not sure in what book, I think it was A History Of Reading) , which said that the legendary writer thought himself as a comedian. That he made his friend laugh to tears while reading The Trial. Reception theory empowers the reader.
Since I've always had one foot on both playgrounds, I have always questioned the limits of that theory, which drove my critic teachers insane. Sometimes I would just love to stir shit up and to question a writer/director that a teacher presented us, only because he dug his work. I'm not sure if it was for Animation or Contemporary Cinema class, but one teacher made us sit through a short film called Mothlight, by Stanley Brakhage. It's four minutes long, but it managed to be the four longest minutes of my life. The "movie" consists in moth wings, insects and grass stuck to a roll of film. I'm not even kidding. Every eight seconds, I would look at my watch and wonder when this monstrosity would ever end. No sound, no distinctive image, no cinema. After four excruciating minutes, the teacher told us that Brakhage was such a passionate experimental artist that he died from inhaling the acid fumes from his laboratory. Noble, yes, but provocative enough to make me want to seek retribution. So I raised my hand and asked:
"Is it possible that Brakhage was completely high while doing Mothlight?"
"What?"
"Yeah. It's obviously not a movie. It's just random organic material patched on film for shits & giggles. You said yourself the man loves his fumes. Maybe this takes a whole other meaning when you're high".
"I don't think you understand what Brakhage tried to do here. It's an experiment on texture and organic film making. If you can't appreciate the beauty of it, your place is obviously not in this class".
That guy saw way too much in Brakhage's film. That I'm convinced of. It's not because you're an artist that you can't do something for shit & giggles. But, hey, the reader is right. The work is not complete without interpretation. I agree that a book is meant to be read and a film is meant to be seen. But this is where the academy fails. One writes from an inner need (I'm quoting here, but I unfortunately don't remember from who). Art makes you transcend loneliness and makes you feel like to belong to a certain group. May it be an underground punk movement, or humanity as a whole, if you write fiction to express how smart you are, you're only going to attract people who want to outsmart you. Joyce's scholars have been biting their own tails for almost a hundred years, but still, they take themselves with the same serious than cancer researchers do.
So I think it's a good warning that Academia has given us, book bloggers (or in my case, let's say cultural reviewer). As the interest of reading book reviews lies in different personal perspectives, let's never forget that we also have readers. It's a continuous chain that will create more readers, more reviewers and potentially more literature students. If we truly love literature, we have the duty to guide our readers towards the books we love for the right reasons. For the quality of the prose, but also for the ideas and the thematics it carries. Words like "boring" and "interesting" are vernacular of our own institution and therefore, should carry the weight that it proposes. There are reasons that push you to read further beyond the "I identified with the main character" and there is a whole readership, wanting to read why you did. No writer has transcended time with the style of his prose alone and in this era of democratization of thoughts that is the information age, we owe our favorite writers to carry their ideas forward. Let's not turn the blogosphere into a distant cousin of the Academy.
