Explicate yourself - Bill Kirton
I used to lecture
and give tutorials on French literature, so I know how to do what they call
‘explication de texte’. Explicating isn’t the same as explaining. Recently, the rather loose connotation of the word 'explain' caused some fuss when an exam question asked schoolkids
to 'Explain, briefly, why some people are prejudiced against Jews'. The fuss was understandable because the instruction could be taken to invite some sort of justification of anti-Semitism. IN a literary context, ‘explication’ in French and English has no such ambivalence. It goes further and deeper than ‘explanation’. It's also fun. You see things that weren’t obvious at first – links,
connections, rhythms, meanings. But …
… it’s not so
easy to do it when you’re giving talks about your own writing. Because if you
start claiming things about your intentions, the ‘meanings’ of your symbols,
images, etc., the significance of particular themes, or any of the normal stuff
that crops up when people discuss books, you can’t help but sound pretentious. And, of course, the cry will go up 'Well, if you need to "explain" it to us, you haven't made a very good job of writing it in the first place'.
I take my writing seriously. I want it to entertain, amuse if possible but also to say something – usually about how human beings treat one another. I marvel at the resilience of some, admire the cheerfulness of others in dire circumstances, deplore the apparent determination of those idiots who patronise others from some baseless sense of their own superiority. And I do this not just by describing them and their actions and circumstances, but by using other subtextual tricks and juxtapositions to try a bit of subliminal persuasion on the reader. But there, you see? Already, that’s making me sound like a candidate for pseuds’ corner.
I take my writing seriously. I want it to entertain, amuse if possible but also to say something – usually about how human beings treat one another. I marvel at the resilience of some, admire the cheerfulness of others in dire circumstances, deplore the apparent determination of those idiots who patronise others from some baseless sense of their own superiority. And I do this not just by describing them and their actions and circumstances, but by using other subtextual tricks and juxtapositions to try a bit of subliminal persuasion on the reader. But there, you see? Already, that’s making me sound like a candidate for pseuds’ corner.
So what do you
do? Let the writing speak for itself? Yes, of course, but that works best when
the reader’s tucked away somewhere with just the book and his/her own
imagination. Your ‘critic’s voice’ highlighting what you presume to be its structures or subtleties would only be an intrusion. And anyway, if
you’re just plucking short extracts from a 350 page novel to study, you need to
give each some context. So you find a lot of your explication time is taken up
with something like:
‘Well, in the sixty pages leading up to this paragraph, Felicity realises she’s pregnant by the traffic warden so her sentence is commuted to eighteen months, her six children are put into care in Leamington Spa and the cosmetic surgery is postponed until the surgeon is released from quarantine. Meanwhile, the genetically modified chimpanzees have been recaptured but the green one is found to have a wasting disease and so the vet, Felicity's husband, has to retrace its steps in order to find the source. And now, on page sixty-one, we find Felicity in her cell just after the one-eyed warder has kissed her and gone home to his vegan wife.’
OK, that’s stupid, but it’s much more interesting for an audience than pointing out how I’ve expanded the imagery, fused abstract and concrete, reinforced a particular theme, inverted ethical conventions or something equally off-putting. Apart from anything else, whoever heard a reader saying ‘Oh goody, he’s inverted the ethical conventions. I can’t wait to see what he does with the Hegelian dialectic’?
‘Well, in the sixty pages leading up to this paragraph, Felicity realises she’s pregnant by the traffic warden so her sentence is commuted to eighteen months, her six children are put into care in Leamington Spa and the cosmetic surgery is postponed until the surgeon is released from quarantine. Meanwhile, the genetically modified chimpanzees have been recaptured but the green one is found to have a wasting disease and so the vet, Felicity's husband, has to retrace its steps in order to find the source. And now, on page sixty-one, we find Felicity in her cell just after the one-eyed warder has kissed her and gone home to his vegan wife.’
OK, that’s stupid, but it’s much more interesting for an audience than pointing out how I’ve expanded the imagery, fused abstract and concrete, reinforced a particular theme, inverted ethical conventions or something equally off-putting. Apart from anything else, whoever heard a reader saying ‘Oh goody, he’s inverted the ethical conventions. I can’t wait to see what he does with the Hegelian dialectic’?
I’m not questioning the reader’s sensitivity to things other than ‘the story’ or his/her ability to operate at several levels of comprehension and appreciation; I’m just saying that I find it difficult to do that when it’s my own books under discussion. On the other hand, it's a crucial part of the reviewing and editing process. As well as the essential hunt for typos, punctuation errors and grammatical infelicities, that's when we should also be doing some explicating - testing whether the links, images, symbols, structures really are doing what we want them to do.
Writing's about more than words. Yes, they're the essential building blocks, each catches (or tries to catch) a specific meaning - 'elbow', 'rain', 'stroke', 'sigh' - but the shapes you build with them, the rhythms that emerge from their combinations, the echoes they can throw back and forth in the narrative all impinge on those meanings, expand or undermine them and fuse to create something that only exists in that particular combination.
And if, for one moment, you imagined that was me talking about my work, you'd probably make a mental note to make a wide detour of any books with my name on the cover.
And if, for one moment, you imagined that was me talking about my work, you'd probably make a mental note to make a wide detour of any books with my name on the cover.
Comments
Are structures, subtextual tricks, subtleties, imagery and the rest features willed by the writer or expressions of this subliminal deep structure? I don't know. When it comes to other works, I can suggest what I think. But of my own? I wouldn't dare, not in public anyway.. But now I'm rereading books of mine that I'm getting ready to republish, I'm intrigued by what I see. In some cases I haven't looked at them for years and almost find it difficult to believe I actually wrote them. I'm constantly thinking 'I must have been clever in those days', which is a pretty salutary realisation to make. But it means I can be objective, as if somebody else had written them, and I could, if called upon (thank God I won't be), do some interesting E de Ts, pointing out features I never thought were there and, unfortunately, other features I wish weren't. But I do find rhythms, echoes, links and symbols, some of which actually work. Some I remember aiming for. Others I certainly didn't, or don't remember doing, but they are there anyway. Interesting; it's a great opportunity to understand what we've been up to all these years. And what, as you ask of your imaginary auditor, do we do with the great 'Hegelian Dialectic? Nothing. It's there already, in every piece of writing, music and in fact all art which we can say has satisfying form of which, when we've finished reading or listening or seeing, we can confidently say, 'It's finished. There can be no more.'
Ans as for 'a mental note' - I'll make no such thing. No wide detour for me.
As a writer I suppose the ideal is when a reader asks 'Why?' and teh writer has a chance to explain (or even explicate). As a reader I really don't like too much stuff at the end of a story - non-fiction yes but with novels and poems and plays I really like to be left to myself to ponder a while. Then, if there's a little signpost to say 'if you have questions, dear reader, this is wher you can ask' - well that might be best of both worlds.
I went round the back of the blog with a spanner, and I've fixed it - Blogger had changed the system a little, and my usual moves hadn't saved the link. But it works now!
Apologies to Bill and Lee - Sue Price.
"Ha, ha," he [Roth] says. "Now you're talking! I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk, if you shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot. A 100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk. You should let people fight with the books on their own and rediscover what they are and what they are not. Anything other than this talk. Fairytale talk. As soon as you generalise, you are in a completely different universe than that of literature, and there's no bridge between the two."
Is he completely serious? Who knows. But he's Roth, and he's great. About as great as it gets (sigh of envy).
Link to interview:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/dec/14/fiction.philiproth
And I know what he means, certainly about a first draft...as Catherine says...and Hemingway said...the subconscious/unconscious won't give up its riches under scrutiny. For some writers at any rate...I know not all fit this "type"!.
But equally I enjoyed reading that eloquent piece on explication, thank-you Bill!
(And may I steal away your unforgettable, green, wasted chimpanzee for a project of my own, if you are done with he/she/it?)
Perhaps what Roth was sick of was BAD explication...or the toxic professional literary schools of explication in the US which most American authors had to spend decades in to make a living while also writing, so they came to hate it...similar to Kundera's contempt for a world of "dissertation mountains"...
And I'm just beginning to feel this need that Catherine, and Cally, and Dan, have been feeling for a while I think...to get focus away from sales and marketing for a while, and onto quality of content...and in those discussions all those explication skills might be just what is needed to evolve the epublishing along its next notch.
Epublishing should be a bulwark against the general dumbing down that has been tried on us all...even though my beloved teacher since age 11, Ray Bradbury, didnae really see the use in these ereader thingies...but then as the author of FAHRENHEIT 451 with its literary firemen, we can appreciate his sensitivity to anything called a "kindle" being used to get rid of paper books, and let him off I think...I didn't understand the value of ereaders myself until last year:
"There is no future for e-books, because they are not books. E-books smell like burned fuel."
The late Ray Bradbury, Los Angeles (May 2008).
I like Dennis’s point about being experienced enough to see the structures in one’s own books but not necessarily meaning them to be there. That’s a familiar experience, especially if, as Catherine says, you’ve written plays and had to cope with the quite legitimate demands of actors and directors about textual matters.
I hope I didn’t give the impression that I was advocating providing explications for readers. That would be the kiss of death. As Anne says, it’s fine when they actually ask for it and, in fact, it’s quite fun to explore things you might have meant with different audiences. I’ve found that having to answer questions about something I’ve written makes me understand it better myself. Roz’s comment suggests that it’s important to recognize that, as long as they’re properly supported, readers’ interpretations of your work are as legitimate as yours. Who knows what subconscious pressures are pushing us to put specific words into the mouths of our characters? It’s like the old Victor Hugo lines I keep on trotting out. He wrote in a poem that, when he was backstage and the curtain went up on one of his plays, it felt as if his soul was lifting its skirt in front of hundreds of ‘burning eyes’.
I’d also differentiate between different sorts of Dan's ‘structuralist interrogations’. There are those which stem from a real desire to investigate textual layers and effects and expose the various sub-textual wonders. And then there are those perpetrated by the sort of academics who, even when talking of words, seem to do their utmost to crucify them. I have several favourite examples but the following will do nicely. It was written by a professor of rhetoric and comparative literature and published in a learned journal.
‘The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.’
That may be a brilliant analysis of whatever it’s analyzing but I don’t understand a word of it. Maybe it’s what Roth had in mind when he excoriated ‘insufferable literary talk’.
And, John, the monkey’s all yours.