An Answer: How Should Ordinary Readers Regard Literary Theory?

In an age without a world, spreading love without meaning.

I’m very interested in this question, so my answer will be rather long.

First, the person asking the question understands “literary theory” as something that can interpret literary works “correctly” and “systematically.” There is an obvious problem with this. Literary theory’s explosive growth was, to a large extent, founded precisely on distrust of “correct, systematic” interpretation. Jonathan Culler defines “literary theory” this way: “The main effect of theory is the disputing of ‘common sense’ … For example, theory questions” the following:¹

1. the conception that the meaning of an utterance or text is what the speaker “had in mind”;
2. the idea that writing is an expression whose truth lies elsewhere, in an experience or a state of affairs which it expresses;
3. the notion that reality is what “exists” at a given moment.

Put simply, the very word “real” is constructed within a particular context; it is not fixed for all time. Literary theory rejects anything self-evident. Eagleton says that if we give anything self-evident even a little thought, we will discover that it serves the interests of particular classes and communities. Interpreting literary works “correctly and systematically” is clearly still a “classical” way of thinking about literature. Roland Barthes says that classical literature is “an art of expression, not of invention.”² Such expression rests precisely on trust in the idea of a “system.” For Sartre, this means that readers do not exist at all. Modern literary works reject this system; modern poetry destroys the relations within language. Sartre says that modern poetry is anti-language. Modern poets are pretty much all unhinged, too. They dance every day, as Nietzsche says—and they’re clubbing on the graves of classical poets. Artaud howls: “I write only to say that I cannot write anything.”

It was against this background that literary theory developed. Literary theory is bound up with the crisis of literature, and the crisis of literature is bound up with literature’s essence. Taking up Macherey’s symptomatic reading, Eagleton says: “The critic’s task is not to treat the text as an organic whole, but to find the breaks within it.” Trust in breaks is one of literary theory’s most fundamental stances. For this is a fundamental stance of modern literature itself.

Literary theory is certainly not merely external to literature. There are at least three possible relations between them:

1. Literary theory guides literary writing.
2. Literary theory interprets literature.
3. Literary theory is itself literature.

1. The first is easy to understand. Take modern Chinese literature: the theories of writers such as Yu Hua and Yan Lianke are crucial to their own work. I won’t dwell on this, because there are already so, so, so, so many books in which writers discuss how to write.

2. The second is even more a matter of common sense, and needs even less explanation. It’s literary theory, after all—naturally it interprets literature.

3. The third looks rather strange. Is this possible? Literary theory just becomes literature? In “The Critic’s Technique in Thirteen Theses,” Benjamin says: “The critic must speak the language of artists.” And he himself is clearly just such a person. “A man who dies at thirty-five is, at every moment of his life, a man who will die at thirty-five.” This is how Benjamin speaks of death.³ Death is a point at which meaning collapses, so poets keep lingering there. Blanchot is one such poet. As a literary critic, he often writes criticism that is more interesting than literature itself. Like Benjamin, he keeps his gaze fixed on death, thinking about the many relationships between humanity, himself, and death. One section of The Space of Literature is called “Can I Die?” Don’t laugh: for Blanchot, this really is a question worth thinking about. You need only look at a few of his section headings to see how “poetic” the man is: “Art, Suicide,” “The Exploration and Purification of Absence,” “The Infinite, That Horrifying Word.”⁴

Finally, let’s turn to the relationship between ordinary readers and literary theory. “Ordinary readers” is actually a very interesting term. Not only are “ordinary readers” not at odds with literary theory—the very term is constructed by literary theory. Sartre stresses that the earliest writers wrote only for a small group of people; they knew perfectly well what sort of people would read their books. Voltaire lamented that his audience was no longer a “classical” one made up of “judges, monarchs, or preachers,” but merely “a number of young men and young women.”⁵ When I say that “ordinary readers” are constructed by theory, I do not mean that without theory these readers would not exist. For classical literature was an all-encompassing category. Only when it split from within—that is, only when classical literature became a subspecies of literature rather than literature itself—could ordinary readers emerge. For classical literature did not care about ordinary readers; or, because of how knowledge was distributed at the time, readers simply could not read classical literature. It was not just a matter of language and rhetoric, but also of politics and power. When a new generation of writers began using slang, dialect, and plain everyday language, depicting scenes found everywhere in daily life, and abandoning endless moral preaching; when printing expanded enormously—only then did ordinary readers begin to exist. These new writers who dared to challenge classical literature were fighting with their own theories. They treated readers as their brothers (Baudelaire). They looked toward the future and called upon future readers (Baudelaire again). The writer’s future is the reader of the future. The writer of the future is the reader’s future.

Many “classical” writers, meanwhile, might have fainted on the spot from the shock of seeing “inferior people” reading their work. Take the twelfth-century clerics who wrote for other clerics. This statement by Saint Anselm very likely represents how many of them regarded “ordinary readers”: “Putting a book in the hands of the ignorant is as dangerous as putting a sharp sword in the hands of a child.” Or take the writers of seventeenth-century France. They were kept at the king’s expense, and their readers were a tiny elite. Sartre says that there were simply no “potential readers” in this period. Authors and readers held the same views on every question. In Rancière’s terms, they had only consensus, no dissensus; for dissensus to emerge, consensus must be broken and a redistribution must take place. From this perspective, any literary writing that helps “ordinary readers” emerge is already the writing of literary theory. Because theory is a form of thinking, and blindly accepting ideology is not. Baudelaire compared himself to a prostitute, saying: “To become a writer, I sell my thoughts.” Baudelaire negates the entire world to affirm his work, while Mallarmé’s work is negation itself: it negates its own possibility of becoming a work. Thus Sartre says that literature’s essence moves continually toward negation, until it becomes “a multicolored and glittering process of annihilation.”⁶ This, too, is precisely the broad definition of literary theory Culler gave above. Literature and literary theory are connected in the strict sense.

To sum up once more: the concept of ordinary readers did not fall from the sky. It is intimately connected with the development of literary theory = writing. It is worth noting that literary theory now pays increasing attention to the existence of readers: the “implied reader,” the “cultivated reader,” the “critical reader,” the “ideal reader,” “communities of readers,” and so on. Late-twentieth-century literary theory turned from text to reader, from the in-itself to the for-itself. Just as readers cannot do without literary theory (literally), literary theory cannot do without readers.