Thoughts on Theory

Once, a friend asked me about literary theory. He explained he’d taken a literary theory class and he still wasn't sure what theory was or why it was called “theory.” He explained his confusion stemmed from the fact the class used a single text, The Great Gatsby, and applied every theoretical approach they discussed to it. He approached the class with a scientific perspective, expecting it to be a matter of testing theories and hypotheses on a literary text, and that proving one would invalidate the others.

Well, literary theory doesn't work like that. I explained that literary theory is more about the approach a reader takes when studying a text.

A reader can take, for example, a feminist approach to one text, and they will focus on the portrayal of gender and gender relationships. Another reader may take a structuralist approach to the same text and they will walk away with a reading that focuses on how the story is set up. And someone doing a Reader-Response reading will focus on how the text impacts the reader.

A literary theory isn't so much a hypothetical statement as it is a school of thought that addresses issues that emerge in literature and how those issues are read and understood; and literary theorists are constantly responding to, complicating, criticizing, validating, and even disproving (or attempting to) the work of other literary theorists. So what is the point? The goal of all of this is to learn how literature tells us something more than just, well, what the literature itself is: about how we live our lives, engage in culture and society, and with each other, etc.

Allow me to share a classic example of a prevalent issue in literary theory: authorial intention.

Authorial intention basically asks two questions: First, whether or not it is possible to know what the author intended by what they wrote. Answering this question generally deals with what is known about the author, their life, their goals, their personal philosophies, and how that biographical and historical information intersects with the text so we as readers can find the author's purpose in their writing.

Seems simple enough, right? Then there's the second question: whether or not the author themselves were aware of what their intentions were, i.e. to what extent were they subconsciously motivated, or attributing too much intention to what could be coincidences. I've told people this before and people, generally the more hard-science minded, scoff at this idea, retorting with “How can you not know what you intended?” But it has been a serious issue in literary theory, and stems from other philosophical ideas about our own ability to self-perceive and self-conceive, to understand just what's going on in our own heads.

And there are literary theorists who argue that authorial intention is a moot point: that it isn't an issue worth addressing or it is impossible to answer, while others still try to decipher the author's intention from the texts they study. What complicates this is there isn't necessarily anything right or wrong about any of these perspectives. It isn't necessarily a matter of right or wrong, but much more a matter of how. How do you read and understand a piece of literature? How do you interpret it? What details and kinds of information do you consider appropriate?

Regardless of the approach, literary theory aims to discover how a piece of writing is more than just words on a page. Literary theorists look to literature to discover what literature says about society, culture, the human condition, philosophy, psychology, history, and even how literature comments on literature itself. Literary analysis, in any form, should go beyond what the piece of literature itself says.

Studying literature is a journey, and the theoretical approach you take is merely the path you take. Not every path will take you to the same place, but you will likely come close to and even cross a few other paths on your way there.

“Nightfall” and the Experimental Nature of Science Fiction

Take our solar system, and change one thing. Only one. In the entire expanse of the solar system, one change might not make that much of a difference.

How about the number of suns that shed light on Earth? How might that affect the flora and fauna? Or even culture, philosophy, society, and human nature?

Isaac Asimov's short story “Nightfall,” written in 1941, focuses on a group of scientists, mostly astronomers, and a newspaper reporter from a fictional world called Lagash. The world is not unlike Earth: it has science, religion, culture, art, architecture, universities, newspapers, etc. There is, however, one significant difference: it has six suns. The result of this constellation means Lagash does not have a night, or rather, they have a night once every two thousand years when a perfectly placed solar eclipse pitches the world in darkness.

This sounds like it might be some kind of survivalist story: what do you do when the sun goes down? And I would not be surprised to learn some script writer has tried to turn it into that. However, the story ends just as the last visible sun vanishes from view. The fates of the characters are not specified, though the outlook is certainly grim.

What makes Asimov's story interesting, and an important piece of science fiction, is not the survivalist “do-or-die” that would follow night, but a survey of how this kind of world would compare with Earth. As stated above, there are many similarities, but the differences Asimov postulates are what make it significant. A few examples include:

• Because of the suns, astronomers had to determine mathematically there is a moon.
• No artificial lighting. In fact, when they produce torches, in anticipation of the darkness, they say graduate students developed them.
• They hypothesize a one-sun system could exist, but also that orbiting planets could not foster life because it would be steeped in darkness half the time.

Most interestingly are the soft science-fiction elements:

• People go crazy or extremely claustrophobic when put in darkness.
• Religious explanations of previous nights.
• Using religious doctrines to validate scientific hypotheses.

I like to think of “Nightfall” as a science experiment that simply changes one thing and then logically extrapolates how that one change would affect everything else; particularly the people who are affected by that change.

“Nightfall” has no starships, no light sabers, no ray guns. There is certainly science but it's basic science; explanations, formulas, and telescopes, current technology for when the story was written, 1941. Until contact is made with a world like Lagash or our current sun is joined by five others, this isn't a situation we'll encounter any time soon. So it isn't science fiction in the sense of Star Trek or Firefly, namely, predictions as to how the distant future will be. Instead, “Nightfall” is a science fiction closer to Marvel or DC comics, asking, “What would it be like if our situation, our world, right now, was slightly different.” Authors of science fiction, therefore, take these diverse elements and, like a math or chemistry equation, play with the variables, and use their understanding of scientific principles to extrapolate how that would account for a different world.

Both types of science fiction, though, try to understand the relationship between humanity and science. We tend to think of science fiction in technological terms – those light sabers and starships I mentioned earlier – but those are simply extensions of science. After all, we call it science fiction and not technology fiction.

The emphasis, though, isn't on the science. Asmiov could have tried out the math himself to postulate the existence of such a world and hypothesized, in detail, the flora, fauna, and culture of that world, but there's something powerful you get from fiction that you don't get from scholarly work. This story, after all, deals with a question: what do you do when the sun goes down? Asimov's science fiction isn't just trying to explore complex scientific ideas and theories, but, in a softer science sort of way, to explore the relationship that humanity has with science.

Where do your sympathies lie? Part 4: A Symbolic Death

As the fourth, and last, post dealing with sympathies, audience, and Anton Chekov's play The Cherry Orchard, I thought it would be appropriate to discuss the end of the play, wherein an image and a sound are powerfully juxtaposed. The image is of Firs (the old valet) dying, and the sound is the cherry trees being cut down. It seems simple enough, and yet this juxtaposition carries significant symbolic weight.

Firs has been a mainstay at Ranevsky's estate, and even fondly remembers the time before the emancipation of the serfs. After all, he had it pretty good as a valet, one of the head servants, and probably saw his fellow servants go their separate ways once they were emancipated and the estate grew too poor to keep them on. He rose to the highest position he could as a servant, misses the others after they have left, and his closing words, the words that close the play, are “I'm good for nothing.“

As for the felling of cherry trees, Lopahin has made no secret of his desire to do so. He had encouraged Ranevsky to save her land by felling the orchard and building estates. He had used his business savvy to know what would be the best thing to do financially, and will now do the same, making his investment work for himself. But he does so quickly, felling the trees even before the family has left so Ranevsky watches her beloved orchard fall as she leaves her family’s estate.

Ending a narrative is a daunting task: everything has to be carefully resolved, and a Russian play with its full cast is no exception. By this time the other characters have already left and Firs is alone. So the question is, why end the play on this note, with the sound of the ax and the death of an old valet?

The characters represent more than just themselves. Just as Lopahin represents the nouveau riche and Ranevsky the noblesse oblige, Firs represents an old generation, so rooted in its ways that even when emancipation came, he did not accept it and continues to live the same life he always had. Firs, by virtue of his position, his age, and his attitude about serfdom, represents an older way of life, even though he has few lines and little attention. He brings with him a lot of social and cultural baggage and he, ironically, is willing to carry it while the audience must decide how to sympathize with him and what he represents. Even as he dies, he complains that Gaev, Ranevsky's brother, probably left in an inadequate coat. Firs, as a former serf who stayed with the family and became the valet, is a strong representation of that time and that mentality. He's like the cherry trees: an old establishment representing a bygone era. Ranevsky assumed that since they always had been there, they always would be.

So what about when the character dies? All of that dies with him. When a character represents something, like a historical period, a certain mindset or occupation or lifestyle, dies, it means that, unless there's another character that also represents it, everything they symbolize dies as well.

And if they're killed? Firs' death is interesting because it has the sound of the cherry trees being chopped down. Firs stands old and symbolic, alongside the cherry trees, and the two are only further linked symbolically through the juxtapositions of their deaths. Lopahin is responsible for the cherry orchard's removal, just as how Ranevsky is responsible for having lost her money and the estate. Lopahin does not take the ax to Firs, but by felling the orchard, Lopahin symbolically brings about the death of an era, initiating a new world governed by hard work and business rather than estates and inheritances. It's a world that has no place for the old serf Firs. And so, there's nothing left for him.

We don't just sympathize with people. We sympathize with what they represent, and how we demonstrate that sympathy shows how we sympathize with their representations. To pity Firs' death is to pity an old lifestyle. Similarly, to lionize Lopahin would be to lionize all he represents. Characters and people cannot be separated from what they do and what they represent.

Where do your sympathies lie? Part 3: Reconsiderations and Cultural Distance

In a more modern world, particularly in America where I teach, it is easy to sympathize with Lopahin, unless a director manes him out to be a villain. Nevertheless, a close reading suggests he is more an entrepreneuring opportunist; a more capitalist character them a villainous one, frustrated by the inaction of his aristocratic friends.

Many of my students initially sympathize with Lopahin. In some ways, he embodies the American Dream. He started with nothing and rose through his own efforts, Lopahin brings with him middle class values and lower class dreams.

But he brings much more than the promise of economic possibilities. He brings the history of serfdom. It is at this point I ask my students about their own backgrounds, the lives of their parents and grandparents. I have yet to get a student openly claim to be as closely descended of slaves as Lopahin. None have claimed an ancestry or childhood like Lopahin's.

I ask my students to consider their lives. They have possessions, their parents are educated homeowners, and effective if there is debt - even if their family lost or losses everything - they will not be like Lopahin. Serfs. Slaves. As much a fixture of the landscape as the cherry trees and the bookcase Ranevsky fawns over while ignoring her aged servant, Firs. The very fact my students are students suggests they are better off than Lopahin's parents ever dreamed of. It’s actually rather hard for modern students to sympathize with Lopahin, even if they initially side with him.

That leaves Ranesky. My students generally dismiss Ranevsky as flighty and foolish, either frustrated or humored by her actions and demeanor. But think about her background. She was raised in a comfortable home by her parents, didn’t have to wonder what she would eat. She had leisure time. She had spending money. She could do something because she wanted to. She had parties, food, friends, fun, and family.

My students may not know the luxuries of turn-of-the-century Russian aristocrats, but I’d wager my students live lives much closer to those of Ranevsky than they do to Lopahin.

This makes sympathizing with the characters very tricky. It’s easy to write off Ranevsky as obnoxious and say that Lopahin was just being a good businessman, but there’s so much more social and cultural baggage we can understand on an intellectual level, but never on an emotional level.

When I was a child and I first learned about the concept of primogeniture, I asked my father if my oldest brother would get the house we all grew up in some day (the fact the house was once my grandfather’s certainly contributed). My father, however, said whoever pays for the house gets it. This is not something Ranevsky would have worried about; it had been her parents house and their parents house. The closest connection we can draw would be genetics; Ranesvky inherited the house and the fortune in a similar way to how I inherited my father’s stature and facial structure. It was just taken for granted because that’s the way it worked, and Lopahin’s ancestors were part of the house.

Identifying your sympathies is much harder than it seems. It can be easy to forget that we deal with different cultures and time periods in literature. Russia, serfdom, and aristocracy are concepts so foreign to modern day American students. Even the closest analog, Victorian Britain, never underwent such serious socio-cultural transformations as contemporary Russia did. This means that understanding literature means thinking long and hard about its cultural heritage and recognizing its differences from our own. It is a powerful learning opportunity to move from the historical facts to seeing the world in ways that others did, through their literature.

Where do your sympathies lie? Part 2: Performativity and Protagonists

At the risk of oversimplification, tragedy occurs when the disrupted status quo, at the start of the narrative, cannot be regained and the characters end in a worse situation than they began. The opposite is comedy, where there is a disrupted status quo, but the status quo is either regained or a better situation replaces the old.

In short, either things end poorly or things end well.

Lopahin and Ranevsky follow different dramatic trajectories. Lopahin's is comedic. He may not get married or start a family, but he begins the play as a successful merchant and ends as a property owner, with a sizable estate his ancestors had been legally tied to as serfs, and he can use to increase his wealth.

Ranevsky's is tragic. She begins the play returning from France where she has squandered her wealth on a lover. She's in debt, but either refuses or is unable to acknowledge it. She longs to see her ancestral home and pines for tradition and is glad to have her home. She ends, however, ousted from her ancestral home to pay her debts. Her home, her heritage, her tradition, all lost.

And then there's the fact we're dealing with a play. Unlike poems and stories, plays are a public affair, with actors, a live audiences, and carefully designed sets and stages. A play is a communal experience in a large room filled with people. Even film was like this until the advent of television, VHS, and home entertainment.

People who have time and money attend the theater. Even today if you're going to see a professional play, you're going to spend upwards of a hundred dollars. Compare this to a feudal society where being a serf (like Lopahin's ancestors) belonged to the land and no land belonged to them. The lower classes never had the means to go see a play. It wouldn't be until serfdom was illegal and social mobility possible that someone other than the upper class, like the landowning gentry Ranevsky, could go attend the theater. While I can't confirm it, I like to think the audience of this pre-revolutionary play were mixed. Some traditional gentry on their way out, and some up and coming middle class. Those who had lived their lives with the theater and others whose parents had never had the chance to sit and watch actors and actresses play their parts.

Which characters, then, would this diverse audience have sympathized with? The distinction is hopefully an easy one to make:

The rising middle class would have sympathized with Lopahin, feeling for his rise from poverty, ingenuity, and his success in securing an estate. For them, the play is a comedy as they would have empathized with his personal struggles and successes, seeing a version of themselves and their own aspirations embodied in him.

The old aristocracy would have sympathized with Ranvesky. They would have seen the noblesse oblige embodied by Ranevsky in her parties and charities, and feeling for her as they see her succumb to the loss of her estate, which they would have all considered a tragic loss.

Whether or not Chekov intended it, and whether or not directors structure it accordingly, The Cherry Orchard can be a divisive play as it sends its characters in different trajectories. The play shows the delicate balance between comedy and tragedy with the play looking one way and then another as Ranevsky and Lopahin engage with one another, their situations, and the rest of the cast. It has the potential to remind us that happy endings are not so clean cut as we like them to be, and that our happy ending may be someone's sad ending.

But there’s another side to this issue. The play and its themes are deeply rooted in a different time and place from modern audiences. As a teacher, it is interesting not just to discuss where the sympathies of contemporaries would have been, but also to deconstruct our own reactions to this play charged with social commentary.

Where do your sympathies lie? Part 1: Tragedy and Comedy in Chekov's The Cherry Orchard

Anton Chekov, Russian author and playwright, worked at a time of social change in Russia. Karl Marx was dead, his philosophies taking root, and signs of the Bolshevik revolution were starting to appear. Serfdom had been outlawed, and a middle class was rising. His play The Cherry Orchard finds itself at a cultural crossroads, a time when the old was on its way out, being replaced by new ideas still finding their footing.

During this time Chekov wanted to write a comedy. His director made it a tragedy.

A century later, it still proves an interesting read. It shows the breakdown of an old social hierarchy through a Russian aristocratic family that loses their land to the son of former serfs turned successful merchant. It literally depicts the tearing down of the old and replacing it with the new. This social change makes the comedy-tragedy distinction a very interesting one, especially with a cast of characters who, true to the expectations of Russian literature, don’t rely on a single protagonist. The question is then a matter of where one's sympathies lie: which character do you associate with?

The play becomes a subtle social battlefield. Madame Ranevsky versus Yermolay Alexeyevitch.

Madame Ranevsky represents the old aristocracy. She is a landowner and it is her beloved cherry orchard that gives the play its name. She is popular, and generous, almost, or perhaps intentionally, to the point of being cartoonish. She has wasted her money abroad, having spent the last few years in France, and does not accept help where it is offered. She is sentimental, wishing to keep her home, and her beloved cherry orchard, the way she remembers it. Only when it is too late does she face the fact that, to pay off her debts, her beloved cherry orchard is to be auctioned off right from under her.

Yermolay Alexeyevitch, or Lopahin, represents the rising middle class. He is a merchant descended of serfs, a self-made man with money enough he can enjoy comforts that were unknown to his parents. And he too is generous: he offers to help Madame Ranevsky, suggesting she replace the orchard with cottages to be rented out to supplement their income and pay off her debts. He is well off, successful, but not represented as greedy; he is supportive and friendly. He is frustrated by his unheeded advice, and ultimately takes his own advice, buys the estate, and chops down the cherry orchard.

There are, of course, a range of other characters: servants, a governess, and other aristocrats, collapsing the social strata so everyone interacts with everyone else while each character is keenly aware of their status and situation. There is some griping from the aristocracy about the days when they had generals and dignitaries at their parties, but there is no conflict over the mixing of the clearly defined social spheres. The conflict itself revolves around the fate of the cherry orchard. A conflict Lopahin, juggling the roles of businessman and friend, knows all too well, while Ranevsky doesn’t even acknowledge, let alone, face it.

But there's still the issue of comedy and tragedy. Chekov wrote a comedy, and yet his director made something else. When you consider the public, performative nature of drama, you can see how the thin line between comedy and tragedy can be, and how easily it can be crossed based on which character you sympathize with. In the case of The Cherry Orchard, do you sympathize with Lopahin, the self made man who is rising up from a difficult past by virtue of his own wit, intelligence, and skill? Or Madame Ranevsky, whose way of life, heritage, family land, and culture are being threatened and ultimately taken from her?

As we’ll see in future posts, this isn’t as simple of a question as it seems.

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Works Cited

Chekov, Anton. The Cherry Orchard. The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11th ed. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. W.W. Norton, 2013. 2066-2104. Print.

Themes and Motifs - What’s the Difference?

The terms “theme” and “motif” are related concepts, so related that they frequently get lumped together. I don't like to do that. The way I see it, while they are certainly related and similar, even co-dependent concepts, they are not the same.

When we read a story, we deal with something that doesn't exist but we imagine it as if it were: characters are like real people, imaginary worlds are as real as our own, and we measure them in ways similar to how we measure real people and the real world. This means we engage with stories as if they are genuine, if not possible. This is the level of reading that says...

• Elizabeth Bennett misinterpreted Mr. Darcy.
• Intelligent raccoons and trees can be partners in crime.
• Firemen burn books.
• And a long time ago, there was a galaxy far far away...

We tend to refer to this as the “story world”; we conceptualize a world wherein these people, places, and events exist and interact.

But literature is able to operate in more than just making something that didn't or couldn’t happen seem as if it could. In addition to the story world, there's also the thematic or symbolic level of a text. This is where, as readers, we recognize patterns in a story and across other stories so we can identify the themes. If something appears multiple times and in different forms in a story, it probably has some thematic significance. Themes don't exist within a story world any more than they exist in real life, but an author will focus on specific details and describe them to highlight these themes.

So, there's the story world, and then there's themes. The two are separate, and it's motifs that bring them together. Motifs are the parts of the story world that generate themes. Similar to symbolism, motifs and themes unite the concrete with the abstract.

A motif is an element of a story world that recurs in the same story and in other stories. We are able to recognize motifs because we encounter them frequently. In a way, stories are merely collections of motifs. The more motifs we encounter, the clearer the pattern they develop becomes, and the clearer the themes of the story become. The theme is the abstract concept invoked by the motifs.

For example, in my post on “Babylon Revisited” I referenced the “ghosts” and old friends who reappear and cause conflict in the narrative. These old friends, aided by Fitzgerald’s florid style, bring the theme of a regrettable past to the front. Similarly, in my post on “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the details that suggest the narrator is imprisoned are motifs for this theme: the locked door, the bars on the windows, the room being a former nursery, etc. And even though the bars are the only bars in the narrative, they reappear whenever the narrator tells us they are there.

One of the powerful traits that themes have, though, is that they go beyond individual narratives. I addressed this in my introduction to theme, discussing how Robinson Crusoe and Life of Pi are both narratives that are very different but they share the same theme of survival. It’s their differences and how they treat this theme that makes them interesting. The relationship between themes and motifs is still quite complicated, because while different stories will share themes, they will still present them with different motifs, treat the themes differently, and will juxtapose different themes. Robinson Crusoe has themes about middle-class pride and industry absent from Life of Pi, which takes a more dour look at a more dangerous situation.

Looking for themes can be one of the first exercises undertaken when analyzing a story or a poem. It gives the piece unity and meaning. It helps us make otherwise incomprehensible pieces fascinating and pieces that are centuries or millennia old significant and relevant. It helps us understand how stories are similar and different. If, when reading a narrative and anything recurs, odds are, the author is trying to invoke a certain theme. Themes and motifs are quite distinct, but one begets the other. They are inseparable.

Consider paisley. Paisley is a pattern, recognizable by its droplet or leaf-like patterns and intricate designs. Not every instance of paisley will be the same, but we can recognize it. The elements, its designs and shape, that make it recognizable can be considered its motifs: the shape, the intricate designs. Remove the designs, and it won't be paisley. Make it a square instead of a droplet but keep the designs, it won't be paisley. The theme? The fact that we can name and categorize it as such gives it its theme: its theme is paisley. The same themes will reappear, but every instance will be unique.