On the one hand, Heidegger’s obsession with tautologies can get a little annoying, on the other, it’s the whole point. Like Barthes, he sees language as being…I want to say empty. It’s really pretty poststructuralist (I really am incapable of not always jumping ahead somewhat, it seems, huh?). Although, it’s not really that language is empty, it’s that the things we assume to create language – the person speaking, the author – and what they’re trying to say, isn’t really where the language comes from. What it really comes from is the language itself, alone. Nothing else.
Again, I’m going to have to mention Prof. Haake here, because this is more or less her very philosophy and how she teaches writing. She has a method she likes to call “burrowing,” in which while writing you focus on the language, and where it takes you…basically, you shift your focus from yourself speaking, to the language speaking, as Heidegger says.
I can’t help but often feel this seems to imply an “emptiness” – I recall a student making this complaint recently in my creative writing class. This used to make me really uncomfortable…sometimes it still does. The author is pointless? They have no control? Initially, that seems a bit strange, and wrong. But over the last several years, I’ve really come to embrace this fundamental truth about writing and all other art. It is something I completely depend on when I’m creating.
I think I first began to really get this artistic approach thanks to a theatre class I took here at CSUN my second year, where we learned “method” acting. One of the books we read for class was Zen in the Art of Archery, in which the author, Eugen Herrigel, talks about learning archery in Japan, and how the masters taught in a Zen way that required a letting go of control over the shooting of the arrow. Herrigel describes how amazed he was to find that once he got the hang of it, it was very much like the arrow was shooting itself – he had no power over it.
This I believe is Heidegger’s point about language. Language speaks, the arrow shoots itself… In my acting class we learned that the best acting is that which is almost done unconsciously… This is something I’ve found to be equally true of writing, the visual arts, music… Art makes itself on some level. It’s really quite magical.
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| Not to be confused with a certain previously mentioned book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance...both are excellent, and have very interesting things to say about Zen-type teachings that relate on many levels to literary theory...read them! |
This was really a bit of a shocking realization for me at first, and it took me a long time to become comfortable with it. I had just never quite viewed making art in such a way before, even though I know I had always been doing so on some level, probably the majority of the time. I think a lot of people find this uncomfortable, “empty,” because there’s an assumption that the writer (or other artist) always has control and does things intentionally. It’s something I think we want to believe. But really, I’ve found for me as a writer, that Heidegger, and moreover Barthes, is right – I don’t always create my meaning in the writing stage…often that happens more in the reading stage.
Moreover, any intentions I begin with or use are ultimately taken from me and morphed, directed, and overall controlled entirely by the language, or other medium, as soon as I begin to write, or otherwise make a piece of art…that’s just the nature of creation. It may seem magical, but it’s really just reality. Try it – I’m not making this up.
And you want to hear something even more shocking? Another thing Prof. Haake likes to say is that “all writing is creative,” and I’ve realized that for me this is enormously true. I do this to a large extent when I write essays too. I have always utterly detested teachers who tell you to outline your paper before you write it. As Prof. Haake says, this is “writing backwards” – I have always felt this way. I might exercise more “control” over what I want to say in an essay than a piece of fiction, but I still let the language speak as I go, and I let it lead me where I don’t always expect. I never plan to any great extent – the language will just ignore the plans anyway.
Heidegger is right.
Barthes: It’s About the Reader, never the Author
I found it very interesting that Barthes talks about language being destructive… “Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin” (Barthes 1322). I’m sure he must have been influenced by Derrida and poststructuralists here, considering he wrote this at the same time period.
But what is he really saying? Ultimately, that the reader holds all the power in the author-reader relationship, and this must be acknowledged. Like Heidegger, and unlike Iser and Sartre who advocate a mutual relationship and importance for both author and reader, Barthes recognizes that the author has very little to no power. He points out that the kind of worship of the author is a more or less modern thing, that “in ethnographic societies the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman or relator whose ‘performance’…may possibly be admired but never his ‘genius’” (Barthes 1322). This is again along the lines of that kind of magical, almost supernatural feeling artists sometimes get, the idea of the muse…language writing itself, once again.
But once more, if this makes us uncomfortable as readers, and writers, who want to believe in intentional meaning, Barthes offers a solution I’ve personally found to be quite helpful. Why put all our demands on the writer? What about the reader? Ultimately, the reader is the one who creates the meaning – meaning is created in reading, not writing. (To be honest, I do place a bit more emphasis on the writer than Barthes does, but I agree with him generally that the reader holds more power.) And why this is even more important… “by refusing to assign a ‘secret,’ an ultimate meaning, to the text…liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law” (Barthes 1325). I think I may have brought up Existentialism in a previous post before, but this seems to me to be it (which is ironic, I suppose, because the reading we did on Sartre seemed in some ways a little less so than this) – existence precedes essence – first a text must exist, and only then can it gain its essence from the reader. There is not an ultimate essence, an inherent meaning, that the writer gives to the text as he/she writes it. We must supply the essence – and the great thing about this is it can be whatever we want, whatever is most meaningful to us. This is Existentialism, and as Barthes says, it’s more than just a way to read a work of literature – it’s a way to “read” life.
Like Existentialism, this is really, ultimately, quite liberating. It promotes a certain freedom, not unlike that discussed by Sartre…
Sartre: It’s About Freedom
I found everything Sartre said in Why Write? to be beautiful and true on the whole. But I’ll admit that, by the end, his final claim that it’s impossible to use literature to oppress, that it can only promote freedom, seems unfortunately a bit doubtful to me. I think art can be used to oppress, especially if writers and readers are ignorant to the ways in which they may be oppressing others. It seems a little too dangerously dismissive to say this doesn’t happen, and that we should ignore it when it does.
However…I can see that this itself is Sartre’s ultimate point. It might take time, but eventually if a work of art is recognized as oppressive, it will lose its power, it will become a piece of history that is looked down on, seen as inferior and wrong. Ultimately, great art can’t retain lasting greatness if it somehow oppresses someone. Even works that might be alright on the whole, but contain elements of prejudice that aren’t used to support a theme of freedom, will find criticism for these components, even if they are otherwise respected, and will lose some of their overall power because of it.
Ultimately, Sartre again points out the reader’s power…without the reader’s consent to accept and participate in what the writer has created, the writer’s work becomes worthless. Sartre sees it as a mutual relationship where the writer and reader must trust and respect each other in order to both create the final work. It’s a collaboration, in the end.
It’s as though the writer and reader have a conversation with one another, almost…and here I’ll let Iser shine in my next analysis…
(And, by the way, this post got so long because the language just kept talking. It really needs to learn to quiet down sometimes.)
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