CJP : Racism in Literature
Such a problem seems to be an ironic reversal of the much-mocked Leavisite critical stance. Dr Leavis held that literature has the power to reform the innately flawed human personality – it should, if we allow it to, make us ‘better people’. For Achebe, conversely, the literary work (‘Heart of Darkness’) is itself deficient and, by implication, perhaps has the power to corrupt – to make us ‘worse people’. This latter corollary appears to me exceptionally unlikely: the thought of white supremacists carrying a baseball bat in one hand and Conrad in the other seems absurd.
Unfortunately the previous paragraph somewhat unjustly treats Achebe’s criticisms in the same manner that Leavis’s usually are, ignoring the role of the most significant person involved in literary production – the reader; it is he who creates meaning. Without the reader the novel, poem or play is reduced to mere ink symbols on some sheets of paper. Hence, if a reader possesses a particular ideology his interpretation of the work will be always-already distorted: an especially ingenious reader could find support for the oppression of a race on a bus timetable (or an inattentive one might accuse me of facetiousness), so any work that is as elusive as Conrad’s could easily be misappropriated. Fortunately in this instance it was by someone unequivocally opposed to racism. Furthermore, supposed authorial intentions cannot make a literary work racist, sexist, anti-Semitic or anything else because any such intentions are unattainable: they require words to express, and those words similarly require further words fully to comprehend their meaning, and this process continues ceaselessly. The writer’s intentions are forever just out of reach. Those conceived by the reader, however, are not (at least to the reader himself).
Thus, I do not believe that a literary work can be considered inherently racist, since it is the reader who constructs this, or any other –ism, within the novel, poem or play merely by interpreting it. So, ‘Heart of Darkness’ is not racist simply because it cannot be; it is only in reading that it becomes anything. And if this is true, then the artistic qualities of the work remain unadulterated.
[Please excuse the lack of political saliency of this essay; my outmoded political views, if expressed, would only embarrass the enlightened purveyors of this blog]
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6 Comments:
Your arguments remind me very much of the opening chapters that I managed to read of Plato's "The Republic" - those of one reason leading into another and into another until an end can be reached that seems like a final logical conclusion but at the same time also seems a wrong conclusion (such as no literature can be considered racist) - however I fear that I am missing the point in much of the reasoning; will have to read Plato all the way through before further commenting!
With regard to meaning, would you accept that if a sufficient number of readers interpreted (or "created") a certain meaning, then this would become the conventional wisdom, and in consequence become a part of the novel? In this sense the novel would not (as you argue) have meaning in itself, but the overwhelming weight of popular literary criticism would strongly imply and encourage a particular interpretation that ultimately the end result is the same. For instance, everyone has interpreted Animal Farm to be an anti-communist allegory, to the extent that this particular reading is so ingrained in the novel's constitution that meaning becomes pracitcally indistinguishable from language.
So is the author powerless to shape his or her own work? If the author was himself racist and wrote intentionally racist literature would the literature be racist or would the author have failed because he controls only the words in the text, not their meaning?
Don’t the words on the page impose some sort of constraint on how the text can reasonably be interpreted? To take SPL’s example, Animal Farm can be read as an anti-Communist allegory but not as a set of instructions for assembling an MFI wardrobe. The latter was, I am pretty convinced, not Orwell’s “intention”; the former was (from the text itself and from other things we know about Orwell) very likely at least part of his “intention”. The words on the page can be interpreted in various ways, no doubt; but they do not mean anything I want them to; some readings of a text are simply perverse.
the question I was raising however, was that if an author intended to write racist literature would that literature be racist despite your conclusion that you "do not believe thata literary work can be considered inherently racist" or would you argue that the text is not racist itsef and requires someone to interpret it to be racist?
Liberal-interventionist, literature can be considered racist (or anti-Semitic, sexist, etc.) – I consider a stanza of the poem ‘Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar’ by T. S. Eliot anti-Semitic: ‘The rats are underneath the piles. / The Jew is underneath the lot.’ [the decay of Venice]. This, however, is my interpretation; if you thought otherwise, that would be perfectly acceptable – the words themselves are not inherently anti-Semitic.
SPL, the interpretation, no matter how generally accepted, ought never to become coexistent with the text itself; it would lead to the stagnation of literary criticism. However, it must be admitted that convention can be both pervasive and potent in literary studies: no one is going to claim that ‘King Lear’ is actually a burlesque comedy. A possible concern that hasn’t been mentioned in any of the comments is: how do we manage to function cohesively when what we write or say is always polysemous? Convention and generally accepted usage are, I suppose, necessary in ordinary situations; the assumption, unless given reason to believe otherwise, that the most literal interpretation of a statement is the ‘correct’ one prevails.
Ben, the author does shape his or her own work. The author has never done this alone – copyists, proofreaders, editors, Ezra Pound if you’re T. S. Eliot, all contribute to the shaping of the final work. However, once it has been shaped it stands immovable; what this particular shaping means, signifies or implies is down to the reader. Regarding your other point, perhaps the author, if his work were interpreted contrary to his intentions, might consider himself to have failed – he might even borrow a bit of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and exclaim: ‘That is not it at all, / That is not what I meant, at all’.
Without a reader, the words used have no significance. The work must be interpreted as racist. To demonstrate, consider the phrase ‘I hope it’s sunny tomorrow’. In writing that last (random) remark about the weather I momentarily assumed the persona of a racist and intended to write a racist remark. Clearly intentions are not enough (even if they could be conveyed to you, which, as elucidated in the essay, they cannot), simply because the author may be especially inept. Additionally, the author probably can never be aware of all his intentions: some drifting around in his unconscious mind might unknowingly slip through in the process of literary composition.
Politaholic, the constraint is not imposed by the words but by one’s fellow literary critics; the interpretation must be convincing enough to persuade them that your interpretation is a ‘valid’ one. If ‘Animal Farm’ cannot be read as ‘a set of instructions for assembling an MFI wardrobe’ it is because of the mental limits of the inventiveness of critics and their ability to persuade their peers of the acceptability of their interpretation, not because the words resist such a construal. [My own attempt is as follows: “all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others’ is perhaps, given that in Etonian slang ‘animal’ refers to a type of screwdriver, a veiled attack on people using tools of an inferior quality (such as B&Q’s own brand rather than ‘Black and Decker’) to construct their flat-pack wardrobes. Orwell was unable to make a direct attack due to fears of being sued for libellous comments by such companies, hence the eloquent paradox’] (Rubbish, I know) Why shouldn’t the words mean anything you want them to? Or, rather, other than for reasons of simple convenience and convention, why should a combination of certain words mean specifically one thing or several things rather than a multitude of other things? Why have you interpreted my essay in a particular way? Why didn’t you believe that I was being ironic, albeit badly, throughout, and that I actually think that literature can be intrinsically racist?
[‘animal’ is probably not Etonian slang for a type of screwdriver, sorry! I just invented that]
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