Literary critics must carefully fill in ‘incomplete work of sculpture’

As Joseph Conrad was taking down notes in the jungles of Congo, he would not have foretold that his work would arouse debate involving a future American president at a university café nearly one hundred years later. But there was Barack Obama at Occidental College, having to defend Heart of Darkness from the charge of racism. He tells a lady whom he names Regina that “the book teaches me things, about white people....... The book is not really about Africa. Or black people. It’s about the man who wrote it. The European....... I read the book to make me understand just what makes the white afraid the way ideas get twisted around. It helps me understand how people learn to hate.”

Here, we can call Obama a critic. For every reader becomes willingly or inadvertently a critic of same sort. But today we will focus on the professional critic. He, who reviews, teaches at the university and earns his living by methodically poring through other people’s works.

Given that he has to as a matter of fact share his ideas, we want to talk about the toolkit available to him.

Here we are minded of the cautionary words of an old hand Ross C Murfin who called for an approach that is “sober and almost (pays) worshipful respect for knowledge and truth.”

Readers will see different things in a text. But a different point of view does not mean we become unfair to a writer and thereby misrepresent their work and as a consequence be disrespectful and contemptuous of their many years of toil. As Henry Indangasi has said, works of literature approaches issues from the point of letting us in on the feelings of the actors who live through certain events. So that Obama’s Dreams from My Father is more concerned about the feelings of the black man or woman living through years of discrimination and intentional deprivation.

So how do we approach a work rich in style like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness? Of it one reviewer has told us that “sentence after sentence discharges its smoke screen into our abashed eyes.”

Nobel Laureate John Masefield talked of too much cobweb in Heart of Darkness. Serious readers of works of literature must reflect carefully before being rewarded with meaning.

But for those who may wish for greater latitude in their interpretations, let us check if two novel methods are available to them; affective fallacy and reader-response interpretations.

These critical approaches move slightly away from the manifest meaning of texts to what it does. Instead of asking for example; what does this sentence mean? We end up with, what does this sentence do?

On this Adena Rosemarin has said that a work of literature is more like an incomplete work of sculpture “To see it fully, we must complete it imaginatively, taking care to do so in a way that responsibly takes care of what is there.”

This responsibility must always lead us to look at literature for what it is; argument and study of texts, not a sterile and open ended argument about theories of interpretation.

The basic question(s) must remain, what is this about? How has the author delivered the message? Is there a judicious admixture of truth and beauty?

So that literature more than any study at the university gifts its reader with the possibility of wide reading, explanation, pontification. For the genuinely clever (as they should be) literature is an avenue for real and serious scholarship. It is the best breeding ground for critical thinkers. In fact literary devices are used very effectively by advertisers. Good adverts are those that use a subtle narrative line which slowly allows the listener to figure out incrementally what the message is all about. The listener must reach an abruption.

If it is about milk, equate it to a cow. If it is flour, let us see a happy, well fed family. So now that advertising is such a big business, how can we claim that literature graduates are unemployable? Only they can add colour to messages. Making them memorable, even poetic.