I’ve been seeing some meta-narrative stuff concerning blogging, anime, blah blah blah.  As my father is currently watching a basketball game on our only tv — mine is in Memphis — I am stuck in my room, so here I am, doing some of this meta-criticism as well.  Don’t expect anything amazing.  My only real contribution, when I get around to it, is in bringing Stanley Fish to the party.

First, I had a response to lelangir’s thoughts on the otaku-rhombus’s blogging teams.  He speculated on grouping similar-minded people together and bringing in like-minded readers, so on.  I happened to think a little while ago that this phenomenon isn’t exactly strange.  It’s magazines.  When a reader picks up a magazine, certain things are going to be set in — if we’re talking short fiction magazines (which is what I’m most familiar with), there’s an editor who decides what does and does not go in — and besides looking at “quality,” editors have a vision for what sort of content the magazine should have, what focus it should use.  One of my professors, who used to edit for a few different magazines, always told us that if an editor thinks the piece you’ve submitted isn’t right for them, that’s what they mean, they’re not trying to veil comments about your piece sucking.  My point is that, as a reading people, we collate things into groups that make sense to us.  It’s not strange that group blogs do the same thing.  This doesn’t mean everyone involved is exactly the same — any given issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science-Fiction will have humor, near-horror, drama, (obviously) fantasy and sci-fi, so on, so forth.  There’s variety, just a basic guiding direction in the background.  I’ve stopped sending my parodies of epic fantasies to them, for example.  Of course, since Blood, Blade, and Thruster closed, I’ve stopped sending those out altogether.  Hm.

Anyway.  That’s my thought on the process lelangir describes.  The internet makes getting things easier, but I don’t really think it will change content all that much, save where content is at least partially defined by delivery method (please note that provides for things like Zero Punctuation, where the delivery method defines the content quite sharply).  

With that out of the way, let’s get to Stanley Fish.  If you’re not aware, Fish is a big name in reader-response criticism, a school of criticism that, according to my copy of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Fish said, is concerned with the “analysis of the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time” (1373).  Now, I have one problem with the reader-response critics:  they only regard the responses of readers who have the “correct” backgrounds to read the text.  I was told by a professor that Fish finally broke down and admitted, once, that yes, you had to be basically like the reader-response critics to read “correctly.”  (That is, one does not have to buy into their theory, but have the same background, inclinations, and ways of thinking.)  

Anyway.  Fish also wrote about a bunch of odd stuff, and I found, through JSTOR, an article he wrote for The Yale Law Journal titled “Dennis Martinez and the Uses of Theory.”  I found this article when I thought the reader-response critics would be useful to that Gothic in Video Games paper I keep mentioning.  Fish describes this scene where a sports reporter spotted Martinez, a pitcher, after a game and asked him what the coach said to him on the mound at this one critical juncture in the game.  Martinez responded [and I'm paraphrasing here] by claiming he said, “throw strikes.”  The reporter was looking for critical advice, but, as Fish argues, at that moment critical thought wasn’t required, and would have gummed up the works.  He mentions another story concerning a similar situation where engineers were trying to improve a prototype of a synthetic brush, and could only, after the fact, describe cricitally the process they had gone through to do so.  

Fish goes on to apply this to law practice, but I think it’s useful (not necessarily analogous, but useful) in dealing with writing — and keep in mind, no matter what they say on Fox News, that blogging is writing.  Well, most of it.  Fish, in capitulating his anecdotes with his proposed topic, says

First, what they [the examples] together suggest is that performing an activity — engaging in a practice — is one thing and discoursing on that practice another.  Second, the practice of discoursing on practice does not stand in a relationship of superiority or governance to the practice that is its object.  (1777-8)

There are two good things and one caveat that we must discover to do anything with this.  First, the second part of his statement is absolutely true — criticism is not superior to the original act it uses as a springboard (that statement, that criticism uses the act as a springboard, is of course contentious, not universally believed, and counter to what Fish is claiming here).  There is a perhaps mythic story of a scholar presenting on some topic, let us say a theme present in a novel.  In the audience is the novel’s author, and he or she stands during the question and answer period, then says he or she never put any of that in the book, it was never in his or her mind.  The scholar responded that he or she understood the book better than the author, that it was the scholar’s job to do so, and the author had no real business in the discussion.  Now, as true as this is in many senses — if you haven’t figured out by now, I usually hate the Word of God — the sense of superiority is misplaced.  If the author shows up, he or she has just as much right to discourse about the book as anyone else.  A local Memphis author came to visit one of my classes, and revealed that he wrote his book with the sense that the characters were people, and as such he didn’t quite wrap up every plot line, because he didn’t know what had happened to some of them; at a reading a woman asked why one character had killed another, and he was stunned to find out that was precisely what had happened, but he hadn’t known it until then.  So authors can discourse, but I don’t believe they necessarily have any extra clout in the conversation — at least, not when the conversation concerns interpretation.  

Now for the first part of Fish’s statement.  It seems obvious — talking about something is not, in fact, doing it.  And the act of criticism takes a different skillset than the act of creating — whether it’s an anime or a novel we’re talking about here.  However, Fish’s apparent attitude that the act of criticism is something else entirely is false for our discussion here.  It’s prevalent to view criticism in this way, and this attitude is basically what I’m here to try to counter.  Because while talking about baseball isn’t at all like playing baseball — imagine how much more fun those terrible ESPN analysis shows would be if the critics had to throw their critiques — writing criticism about writing is still writing.  And narrative subjects are, ultimately, writing; at least, read them as the same if I switch the words around.  

Simply, someone had to write that episode of Kannagi you want to write a blog post about, and your act of blogging it is similar to the originating act of creation behind the episode.  The difference is in method and execution rather than kind.  When we’re dealing with prose writing, of course, there is almost no difference at all.  There is, supposedly, an originating “spark” of inspiration that drives creative work that is, also supposedly, not present in critical work.  However, as Harold Bloom recognizes, even though he claims it’s not so good, all creative work is colored by what he calls “the anxiety of influence.”  Michael Chabon is more to my liking — in an essay in Maps & Legends he directly responds to Bloom, claiming he is comforted by the reach of influence, that all writers are, essentially, responding to other writing.  Clarifying that makes it sound a lot like criticism, in that criticism is accepted to be writing responding to other writing.  

What I think the real trick here is — we ought to extrapolate and really get to some awesome conclusions.  If writing is like criticism, then criticism is like writing.  Hopefully I’ve at least provided enough of a groundwork for you to accept that long enough to drive forward to the end here.  

So, the two arts here (criticism and writing) have similar methods, similar inspirations, and similar forms.  Should it not be true, then, that they would have similar goals?  I’ll refer to Chabon again, here, as he puts this very succinctly.  In the first essay of Maps & Legends, after claiming that he reads and writes for no other reason, ever, than entertainment, he says, “I would like to propose expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature” (14).  Glorious.  I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating (like a Freudian compulsion):  criticism is entertainment.  It stimulates the brain.  The audience of criticism enjoys thinking over things in the way criticism does, and makes the audience do.  As Fish said, it’s not better, but it’s not worse either.  It’s fun.  Not all kinds of fun are for all kinds of people.  Don’t like criticism?  Don’t read it.  Don’t like shounen?  Don’t watch it.  Simple.  

The point of criticism, its goal, is simple:  to entertain a group of people who are entertained by criticism.  That is, it has the same goal as every other kind of art.

Tags: blogging, criticism, Internet, michael chabon, otaku-rhombus, stanley fish

Thus spake Cuchlann on Sunday, 28 December 2008 at 1:51 am, and Anime, Internet expanded tenfold. Become privy to further discussion on the matter via RSS 2.0. You might grace us with a brilliant comment, or trackback from a distant podium.