{"id":32,"date":"2018-04-23T12:53:29","date_gmt":"2018-04-23T16:53:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/?p=32"},"modified":"2018-04-24T13:32:39","modified_gmt":"2018-04-24T17:32:39","slug":"absolute-relativism-birth-of-the-reader-in-%e2%80%a2-robert-delfeld","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/uncategorized\/absolute-relativism-birth-of-the-reader-in-%e2%80%a2-robert-delfeld\/","title":{"rendered":"Absolute Relativism: Dangers of Interpretive Liberty"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"THERE are a lot of opinions, these days, about opinions<\/strong> \u2013 about their validity, more specifically. Some opine, of course, that their opinions aren\u2019t really opinions after all \u2013 that they\u2019re actually something approaching absolute truth \u2013 gospel, if you think in those terms. We have learned, all of us, to be wary of these tyrants \u2013 so much so that many have sprinted in the opposite direction, arriving at the opinion that all of them \u2013 all opinions, that is \u2013 are equally worthy of merit.<\/p>\n

The theoretical roots of this anti-authoritarian dash, at least partially, lie buried in the garden of post-structural literary theory, a fancy name that\u2019s less important than that of Roland Barthes, one of its chief gardeners, who famously argued, in literary terms, for the kind of democratization foundational to our run from absolutism.<\/p>\n

Celebrations, especially of liberty, have little patience for the cautious, but I\u2019ll raise the question anyway: have we run so hastily \u2013 so blindly \u2013 that we\u2019ve actually just come full circle? Let me explain.<\/p>\n

To be very clear, Roland Barthes was not eulogizing: he was crying out for literary blood. \u201cWe know that to give writing its future,\u201d he famously proclaimed, \u201cthe birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author\u201d (Barthes). In other words: when interpreting a work of literature, we must give exclusive rights to readers\u2019 subjective judgments, discarding especially \u2013 in a violent way \u2013 authorial intentions: that same self-serving despotism constructed by opportunists and politicians (even authors themselves) for their own ends. Only the blood of authorial tyrants, so to speak, can properly refresh the tree of literary liberty.<\/p>\n

Such a thoroughly democratic suggestion seems \u2013 now as then \u2013 occasion for rejoicing. We might, to take just one example, celebrate \u2013 as Barthean freedom\u2019s finest fruits \u2013 the mid-century counterculture\u2019s re-appropriation of J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s books as a collective, subversive transcendence of that author\u2019s self-admittedly racist intentions. But some \u2013 more cautious celebrants, perhaps \u2013 might insist upon raising the hypothetical: what if it had happened the other way around?<\/p>\n

Speaking more generally: are there situations in which the freedom attending authorial sacrifices upon readers\u2019 altars comes at too high a price? Strictly speaking, after all, the Barthean ethic necessarily grants universal legitimacy to as many interpretations as there are readers, including those some might best characterize as, to put it mildly, less than benign. The cautious, however, are wrong \u2013 wrong to present the case as a hypothetical, that is. It\u2019s a story we\u2019ve already seen before.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"

Frontispiece of More’s Utopia, depicting the island commonwealth.<\/p><\/div>\n

IN at least two senses, Thomas More is dead.<\/strong> Biologically speaking, he\u2019s been dead for a long time: since 1535, in fact. But he has, in some way, lived on through Utopia<\/em>, his most famous work; it adroitly treads the line between literature and political philosophy, offering a fictionalized account, via frame narrative, of an ideal island commonwealth in the (then-new) New World. Raphael Hythloday, traveler-turned-narrator, describes the socio-cultural, political, and economic practices of the Utopian people to \u201cMore,\u201d written into the story as a fictional character. Utopia\u2019s most notable feature is that all private property has been abolished \u2013 its citizens live communally within a moneyless economy.<\/p>\n

But beginning with the front cover, it\u2019s a tale marked by contradiction: the word utopia <\/em>is a contrived Greek compound, translating roughly to \u201cno-place,\u201d but could be read alternatively as a pun on the Greek eutopia<\/em>, meaning \u201cfortunate place.\u201d In many ways, it seems to hold up to the latter interpretation \u2013 its citizens\u2019 basic needs are universally met and labor is light and evenly distributed, leaving plenty of time for social, artistic, intellectual and leisure pursuits. At the same time, legal rigidity comes with those benefits \u2013 even leisure is regulated by fixed hours, traveling requires permission from the government, and despite broad religious freedom, atheism is outlawed. To ensure their continued safety and security, the Utopians employ mercenaries to conduct pre-emptive strikes against potential threats \u2013 acquiring slaves and becoming a quasi-colonial power in the process.<\/p>\n

Beyond seeming moral contradictions inherent in the commonwealth\u2019s construction, the prose is punctuated by wry ironies. Originally published in Latin, \u201cMore\u201d would\u2019ve appeared as \u201cMorus\u201d \u2013 from which we get our word \u201cmoron.\u201d Raphael, the narrator\u2019s first name, refers to the biblical archangel who announced Christ\u2019s birth as the coming of a new age, but his last name, Hythloday, means \u201cnonsense peddler.\u201d But the greatest puzzle comes at book\u2019s end. Hythloday affirms his admiration of the Utopian system; a reflective \u201cMore,\u201d despite doubts about the feasibility of a moneyless economy, states: \u201cI freely confess that in the Utopian commonwealth there are very many features that I would like, rather than expect, to see\u201d (More, 113).<\/p>\n

READERS, upon finishing the slim volume<\/strong>, might find themselves searching, flipping furiously back through the pages, for an author to kill \u2013 More\u2019s tangled ironies and contradictions create a vacuum of meaning tantamount to authorial suicide; in his relation to his own work, the authorial More is functionally dead<\/em>, little more than a name on the spine. Utopia<\/em> and its contents are up for grabs: to be, respectively, interpreted subjectively and marshaled freely by any and all.<\/p>\n

Even academics, those most ostensibly dispassionate interpreters, continue to have serious and wide-ranging disagreements about More\u2019s book; its contents are so contradictory that even scholarly attempts to \u2018resurrect\u2019 the author\u2019s intentions by historical means have yielded little consensus, if not generated further controversy. Perhaps W.S. Allen has put it best: that More \u2013 if he can be assigned intent \u2013 leaves readers \u201cwith an ambivalent and puzzled view\u201d (118) about the merits of Utopian life. But that hasn\u2019t stopped others from trying to narrow it down. Quentin Skinner recounts that one theory, initially propounded by R.W. Chambers in 1935, claims that More \u201caimed to picture the best state that reason can hope to establish in the absence of revelation\u201d (Sir Thomas More\u2019s Utopia,<\/em> 123). Skinner names another school, of which Brendan Bradshaw is a recent defender, that holds that More meant any praise of the Utopian commonwealth ironically \u2013 that he held \u201cserious reservations about the ideal system\u201d (Ibid., 124).<\/p>\n

But an opposing 1888 reading by Karl Kautsky perhaps merits the most serious interest, which \u201c[sees] More as a the tragic figure of a socialist born out of his time\u201d (Foundations of Modern Political Thought<\/em>, 257) Skinner notes that Kautsky\u2019s interpretation \u201cappears to have been Marx\u2019s view\u201d (Ibid., 257) and indeed, John Guy notes that Marx and Englels, in The German Ideology, <\/em>\u201cranked More alongside the Levellers, the Owenites and the Chartists as a forerunner of socialism\u201d and that Williams Morris \u201cannounced that Utopia <\/em>was \u2018a necessary part of a Socialist\u2019s library\u2019 \u201d (95). Here we are reminded that debate over Utopia<\/em> is not one restricted exclusively to ivory towers; ideas formed there descend, manifesting themselves in reality, and etching themselves \u2013 in this case, quite literally \u2013 upon the monuments of history. Eighteen names were inscribed upon the Alexander Garden Obelisk of Moscow, repurposed by Lenin following the Russian Revolution, to honor Soviet influencers: Marx and Engels headed the list; ninth from the top is \u2018T. More\u2019 (Ibid., 96).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

To avoid digging graves in the permafrost, frozen inmate corpses were disposed of in the Arctic Ocean. (from “Drawings from the Gulag” by Danzig Baldaev, a former Soviet prison guard)<\/p><\/div>\n

To Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a survivor of the brutal Soviet Gulag work camps<\/strong> developed initially under Stalin, More\u2019s presence on the Alexander Garden obelisk seemed grimly ironic. After being awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, Solzhenitsyn\u2019s 1973 Gulag Archipelago<\/em> insisted that More had foreseen both slavery and forced labor as necessary prerequisites to support a system like the one the Soviets had implemented (Bloom & Hobby, 174). But in the end, it didn\u2019t matter whether Utopia<\/em> had been read \u2018properly\u2019 or not \u2013 during the Stalinist period, an estimated two to three million lives were claimed, on top of millions of others under the Soviet regime, in those camps alone (Snyder).<\/p>\n

It would be a dramatic overstatement, no question, to draw an absolute red line from Thomas More to Marx to Stalin\u2019s atrocities. This isn\u2019t to say, either, that Stalin\u2019s execution of Marxist thought is its authoritative, or exclusive, manifestation.\u00a0But this lesson from history should alert us to three axioms for our own time.<\/strong><\/p>\n

FIRST, writers \u2013 having written \u2013 inevitably lose control of their work, but especially so when \u2013 like More \u2013 ambiguities fractionate into a panoply of conflicting interpretations.<\/p>\n

SECOND, literary debates are deadly serious. Powerful ideas are distilled from, among other sources, the interpretation of literary works \u2013 ideas with inbuilt potential to germinate, physically, in reality.<\/p>\n

THIRD, and most importantly: anyone unabashedly enthusiastic about Barthes\u2019 birth of the reader should pay careful attention to those first two axioms. The problem with sanctioning the validity of every literary interpretation is that you must sanction all of them<\/em>, even those you yourself find repugnant. It\u2019s only a half step from literary interpretations to opinions of any kind: anyone committed to absolute relativism in opposition to absolutist despotism, in the end, has done nothing but make tyrants of us all.<\/p>\n

In a world where the legitimacy of truth resides equally, at all times, in each individual, we cannot judge nor be judged. Such mandates can be dangerous things; they possess a kind of latent malleability that can, to the enterprising mind, be bent into tools \u2013 weapons \u2013 for settling personal scores, or worse. Much worse.<\/p>\n

Those less than convinced should, perhaps, heed Solzhenitsyn\u2019s warning: \u201cYou may suddenly understand it all someday \u2013 but only when you yourselves<\/em> hear \u2018hands behind your backs there!\u2019 and step ashore our Archipelago\u201d (Gulag Archipelago<\/em>, 518). We don\u2019t want to imagine what happens next.<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/p>\n

Allen, W. S. (1976). \u201cThe Tone of More\u2019s Farewell to Utopia\u2009: A Reply to J. H. Hexter\u201d.\u00a0Moreana<\/em>, 13 (Number 51)(3), 108-118.<\/p>\n

Barthes, R. \u201cThe Death of the Author\u201d. Retrieved from http:\/\/www.ubuweb.com\/papers\/<\/p>\n

Bloom, H., & Hobby, B. (2010).\u00a0Enslavement and Emancipation<\/em>. New York, NY: Blooms Literary Criticism.<\/p>\n

Guy, J. (2000).\u00a0Thomas More<\/em>. London: Arnold.<\/p>\n

More, T. (2003).\u00a0Utopia<\/em> (G. M. Logan, Ed.; R. M. Adams, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.<\/p>\n

Skinner, Q. \u201cSir Thomas More’s Utopia and the Language of Renaissance Humanism.\u201d\u00a0The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe<\/em>, edited by Anthony Pagden, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987, pp. 123\u2013158. Ideas in Context.<\/p>\n

Skinner, Q. (1978).\u00a0The Foundations of Modern Political Thought<\/em>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.<\/p>\n

Snyder, T. (2011, March 10). \u201cHitler vs. Stalin: Who Killed More?\u201d Retrieved from http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/2011\/03\/10\/hitler-vs-stalin-who-killed-more\/<\/p>\n

Solzhenit\ufe20s\ufe21yn, A. I. (1974).\u00a0The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation<\/em> (H. Willetts, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THERE are a lot of opinions, these days, about opinions \u2013 about their validity, more specifically. Some opine, of course, that their opinions aren\u2019t really opinions after all \u2013 that they\u2019re actually something approaching absolute truth \u2013 gospel, if you … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1933,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1933"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions\/82"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl-209\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}