The Author: Persona Gratis

The Author: Persona Gratis (on the hyperbole of authority)

            One would not imagine that any author, let alone one prolific and broadly based, would disclaim credit for his works, but I want to examine how the notion of ‘The Author’ has not only come about, but as well, how it has accrued to itself what I think is a too-bountiful accreditation and thus an over-generous genuflection. It is well known that publishers play on the names of best-selling authors, who, since the mid-nineteenth century, may not have written all of the titles upon which their name appears. Readers are attracted to a famous name, and anything published thereunder will sell, and far more so than that of an unknown figure. The name of an author is a autograph persona which is both free to the press – they get undue mileage from it if the author has himself sold well in the past – and presents a free pass even to the more discerning reader who has previously enjoyed books by this ‘same’ person. These two forms of gratis make the author’s name most welcome, for it eases the process at both ends of the productive-consumptive cycle for such products. The name of the author thus takes over the function of fetish for this kind of commodity, freeing the author herself to write, perhaps under another name, something else not as beholden to market interest. This third form of gratis is not as gratuitous as the first two, but it still acts as an hyperbole, extending the reach of the writer as an actual person, simply because this same person as author no longer struggles to make ends meet through her actual work.

            It is always of interest when a singular concept iterates itself. The ‘author’ may be dead, in Barthes’ terms, in part due to the death of the idea of the work as Werke, and in part due to the death of God, the ultimate author, but this passing in fact has freed up the ‘writer’ – in terms yet wider than Derrida’s – to become an authority without relying upon authorship per se. One of Barthes’ motives arrives via a basic hermeneutics. Dorothy Smith, in her gracious dialogue with me many years ago, told me this: “When you publish a book, it is like writing a message and putting it in a bottle. You cast that bottle over the side and you have no idea where it will end up, or when. If it finds a beach at all you still can’t guarantee anyone will find it!” Certainly this is a wisdom, and indeed, the implication that one’s work will find itself rather shipwrecked on a reef or on the rocks remains a likely outcome, especially for philosophical books. This apt image speaks at first to the sense that the author loses control over ‘his’ work as soon as it is released, and for celebrity authors, perhaps sooner than this, when their avid editor and then marketer gets a hold of it. But historically speaking, if the book is read at all, the author in fact dies due to the function of the reader.

            The reader brings her own life experience to the text, and interprets it thereby and therefrom. I have had a number of such experiences, mostly with fiction, since the interpretative latitude that fiction allows for is far wider than that of non-fiction. The interpretation of discourse is, however, a more profound movement in authorship, if not necessarily authority. Kant reading Hume is called to mind; certainly one of the most serious moments in modern readership and interpretation. Heidegger reading Husserl is another, the former taking apart his mentor’s work and moving from it. Far less profound, but somehow of perduring import nonetheless, are other like moments, such as Riefenstahl reading Mein Kampf andthen criticizing its author to his face about it. As with most such encounters with those he admired,Hitler laughed it off with the no doubt self-conscious equivalent of an ‘aw shucks, girl’. One is tempted to insert a Leonard McCoy line, such has ‘I’m an artist, Leni, not a politician’, but so it goes. As modern hermeneutics explains to us, the text is eventually the world itself, and so Hitler’s later brushing off with a grin and a chuckle his top fighter pilot’s sage advice regarding how to destroy the RAF ended up carrying a far more fateful weight to it.

            The exegetical function of the reader broadens as readership did itself widen. However authoritarian and social class reproductive was the new bourgeois education from the 1820s onward, what it did produce was several generations of readers both apt and rapt, especially women, who ripped through a copious library of volumes, of pulp as well as of more precious paper. It is not a coincidence that the same decades saw figures like Schleiermacher and Schlegel break open the narrow scriptural definitions of hermeneutics and declare that its methods applied to all kinds of text. By the 1870s the ‘world as text’ sensibility, first associated with Dilthey, himself a profound student of textual revolution the early ‘post-Enlightenment’ period of the 1820s and 1830s – recall his first major work, the biography of Schleiermacher, widely hailed as a masterpiece and establishing Dilthey’s reputation as a major scholar even though its second volume was never completed – had captured the intellectual imagination as well as popular authorship, coming to its first nadir with Conrad and Wells. With some irony, given how hermeneutics freed itself from its lengthy roots in religious scholarship, the world as a text was in itself not a new idea. The medieval outlook had it that the ‘prose of the world’, to use Foucault’s expression, was literally written into the cosmos at large by the divine hand itself. The world was an autograph edition, not of itself, but indeed of the creation.

            All authors, therefore, had their apical ancestor in God. The logoi of human writers was a species of the Logos, the text made in His own image kindred with the being itself. But not only authorship was at stake here. Authority was itself linked up to that divine, and so the author was able to accrue to himself a kind of meta-narrative: in the main, that authorial intent was understood to be the key to any rightful interpretation, and though Schleiermacher extended the scope of hermeneutics he did not deviate from this ancient sensibility. To read scripture, and later nature, was to understand the mind of God as an intentional structure. No one claimed that they could know the divine mind as a whole, of course, only what God deigned communicate to humanity. Still today, there are those who imagine that what the author thinks of their work is the standard by which all other interpretations must be judged. This is an error at a number of levels, not the least held within Smith’s image above. In fact, we know today the author to be simply another reader of the text, since the text has taken on a life of its own after publication, or, even after being written in the first place. For myself, I do not return to my philosophical works. They would require me to patiently study them again, for one, and the earlier ones are often too prosaic to provide any pleasure in their decipherment. I have enjoyed re-reading many of my fictional works, mostly to share them with others aloud, but even here, I find myself either not recalling how I wrote this or that part, or, more radically, that I myself even wrote them at all! This is more than the wiseacre writers guide’s ‘healthy distance’. I have changed in the interim, which is my much-wanted ‘intents’ must be taken with a grain of hermeneutic salt. I have changed, and my interpretation of ‘my’ work has thus also changed. Sometimes we hear a question, if the author is famous, along the lines of ‘would you have written this or that today, or in hindsight, what are your thoughts about…’. To attempt a response other than ‘that was who I was then’ or such-like, is to gainsay the life process and as well, perhaps avoid acknowledging the ultimate outcome of that selfsame process.

            We as well sometimes hear of authors who tell us that they have ‘forgiven their younger selves’, but this is at best unnecessary and at worst a piece of personal sophistry. At the same time, authorial authority demands that I ‘stand by my works’, even though ideally any such work should be able to stand by itself. One can immediately understand how the historically inclined aura of the author casts a broad pall over both free interpretation as well as individuality, all the while allowing such persona to become both grander than they are as persons while at the same time losing their own textual freedom. From Barthes to Foucault and beyond ‘the author’ is a bad idea from the start. Derrida’s sense of it being ‘replaced’ or trans-substantiated into ‘the writer’ also did not hold up. For the writer too has both a pedigree and an aura – even the foppish but yet fashionable line, uttered in a Bohemian accent, that ‘I am a writer’, carries with it an indelibly clannish crest, declaiming a kind of cultural, but not at all necessarily cultured, elitism – and the former cannot provide nobility any more than can the latter become a halo. Perhaps the most an author should ever do, in responding to the effect of what he has written, is express an unfeigned caution about augmenting any interpretation through the use of authorial sources: ‘Yes, at one point I did write this book, and here’s what I like about it and here’s what I don’t’. One can consider this the author’s version of Richler’s deadpan, ‘I write books; some people like ‘em, some people don’t’. In this gruff but apt epigram lies the basic operation of both the writing process and the reception of the text itself, especially for fiction. Its very simplicity affords the listener all due freedom to work her own line. It is this hermeneutic space which in turn provides the very life of the work in question.

            To counter the gratis of persona the concept of the author holds out to us, we must realize over against it the freedom to become the kind of reader the text does itself require: One, in its most understandable and necessary, a basic literacy, including that of one’s culture history, which I then bring to any text; Two, within the discourses, a growing and cumulative base of knowledge, know-how, and even experience that a more demanding text asks of its potential readership. Without any reliance on the author to ‘explain’ his works and, at the last, shedding the perfect safety also of the expert or specialist in this or that literary or philosophical genre, also often hyperbolic in both its presentation and its own vicarious persona – ‘did you know that Derrida was also a Joyce scholar?’ – the reader comes face to face with both her own limitations, but also her creditable self-improvements. The one is as valuable as the other, for in their face must I continue to become more literate and wise. The deeper meaning of the world as text is thus brought forth, through interpretation, as its ownmost and superlative historical gift: I am one person but to me is bequeathed the species entire.

            G.V. Loewen is the ‘author’ of over 60 books and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Hermeneutic Self

The Hermeneutic Self (Interpreting a life)

            We are aware of the skill said of some, that they ‘read others’ well. But how do we read ourselves? We are also aware that our self-conceptions rest mightily upon not how others actually see us – this would be too harsh a portrait in most cases – nor how we see ourselves – too bright-eyed, most likely – but rather on how we imagine others see us. This projected otherness, the looking-glass self of Cooley, functions as a kind of Goldilocks zone for our personhood, somewhere in between the too-soft of solo self-perception and the too-hard of the authentic other. We are also told, on top of all of this, that we are generally ‘too hard’ on ourselves, no doubt to give us the sense that our imagined other, that constructed mirror, is more realistic than it might be if we had always patted ourselves on the ethical back. The echoist cares too much what others think or might think, the narcissist too little either way, and thus we are compelled all the more to seek some middle-ground which thence turns into a kind of groundedness for Dasein as a public self. Nevertheless, this attenuated and extrapolated selfhood still requires ongoing interpretation, not only to adjust its own expectations, reading its life-chances in the wider world, but also to process what are now becoming but biographical memories.

            The manner in which we do this mimics a more general hermeneutics, the method and theory of interpretation, dialogue, and understanding. Verstehen into Deutung, one could remark, is the dynamic of our dialogue with the self. Understanding into meaning, with the third term being either comprehension, if one is of a more empiricist-rationalist bent, or meaningfulness, if one is taken by the more existential sensibility in life. For the hermeneutic thinker, however, the apical term in this personalist auto-dialectic is rather Selbstverstandnis, or with its double intent, ‘self-understanding’; understanding one’s selfhood but also being utterly conscious that one is also doing that work oneself; that is, it is an exercise in the self understanding itself. The combined effect of ‘standing under’ oneself occurs when we defer to experiences already committed to both an authorship and a memorial authority. On the one hand, we have done this or that in the past and it has ‘worked’ for us. On the other, we are said to, or say to ourselves, that we thus ‘own’ it; it is ours and we not only take responsibility for it in the casual and popular sense of ownership, but also, perhaps more obliquely but also more profoundly, we see it as part of our self-definition, a way to own not only our actions and thus take care, ideally, about their implications in the world and for others, but also the chief manner of identifying them with our own agency.

            This volitional vector gains its verve not merely from whatever personal panache we bring to it as a kind of patent or insignia, but also simply from how consistent it appears to the others. This is, generally, also the most consistent feedback loop from the social world back to ourselves; we are regularly adjusting our self-presentation not only in accord with others’ rights and feelings as defined by both State and the state of mind of individual persons around me, but all the more so, in order to ensure that we ourselves do not fall out of the cultural frames as given and taken by the idealized other in its most ‘generalized’ and Meadian sense. I hijack George Herbert Mead’s surname not only because this conceptualization of the self’s agency is mainly his, but also to link it homonymally with the simple median; the moment in the graphic distribution of all actions wherein the most expected ‘cause-effect’ in the social world comes to be. Certainly, just as we are rarely our ideal self, our actions in the world can thus only approach what might be their idealized form. Even so, each of us confronts that same disjuncture, and the farther we are off the mark the more we generally feel it. Only those with a diagnosed mental illness or the unguarded criminal appear not to register the affront the remainder of us ourselves register with them, given their behavior. In both cases, however, the discourse suggests that indeed such an objection is taken in, it is just that both sub-sets of our fellow-persons are attempting to gauge, from moment to moment, just how much it is they can ‘get away’ with, not unlike the poorly socialized younger child. This pseudo-autism, if you will, is prevalent far outside the raft of so-labeled cases, and is better seen as a consistent function of neurosis. This takes its effect far beyond Bleuler’s original definition, which, as a hallmark early symptom of schizophrenia, did not carry any especial weight in either social or popular understanding.

            The blind side of this lack of confrontation with one’s own actions is of course that interpretation both holds little sway over our personal sensibilities but as well, marking this hic draconis against others unwary, any diagnosis would suggest a deliberate avoidance of becoming a selfhood in the first place. It is well known how the schizophrenic, or even those with lesser challenges such as authentically independent autism, suffer from a lack of ability to develop the self in relation to others. Indeed, ‘self’ has no real meaning outside of this relationship, an element of the social bond more generally. Which in turn suggests that the rest of us also incur an ongoing challenge in understanding just what it is this or that subset of fellow-persons needs from us, or what it is they cannot, or are unwilling, to give in return. The lesson for one’s own self here is, I think, that we must be aware, astutely and even acutely, of the regular disconnects between our expectations of others and what they are actually able to give us of themselves. It is also germane at this moment to give impetus to the idea that those with ‘two-spirits’ or ‘multiple persons’ in the fashionable sense are simply trying out various versions of the self’s division of social labor; one part of me adjusts to the world-as-it-is and another, perhaps seen as more authentic, does not. The ‘theyness’ of this yet other subset of human contemporaries in Schutz’s sense, views themselves as a more-than-one due to the lack of cohesion they observe between social ideals and realities, a tremendously troubling problem each of us must confront, perhaps on a daily basis.

            It is likely that this phenomenological explication of theyness is what is actually occurring, but just so, each of us bears this same intersection of selfhood, either aligned in a crucial crucis of motive and action which in turn is authored by the singular self of those who decide that their authorship denotes as well an authority upon social relations, or those whose division of agentive labor connotes a sense that the world authors them overmuch. In older terms, this would have been interpreted along the lines of ‘strength of ego’ versus ‘presence of superego’ or the like, but today we might suggest rather that the two-spirited selfhood is attempting to split the difference amongst competing ideals and social contexts, and is thus perhaps taking the sense of role conflict too literally, or perhaps actually experiences this conflict too sharply to thence too-closely adjoin these competing roles or role–sets. The expectations which others have on ourselves must then be adjudicated, reorganized and redistributed in a manner suggestive of those who subcontract their efforts or, in managerial language, ‘delegate’ tasks and are therefore able to reallocate their attendant resources, even if all of this action is internally defined and only externally observed as skirting the theatrically ‘schizoid’.

            Even so, none of this exempts any specific person from the purely human questions of ‘what I am’ or ‘who am I’ as the process of self-interpretation must needs continue, perhaps with a heightened sense of urgency in all those who work to divide and thus conquer, as it were. For most of us, the history of hermeneutics works itself out much as it had done in History ‘proper’, from the generalization of textual exegesis in Schleiermacher to the world as text in Dilthey, through the ontology of Selbstverstandnis in Heidegger to the effective historical consciousness of the selfhood approaching its own ‘fusion of horizons’ in Gadamer. For others, this more patent lineage is adjusted or yet skewed, though in wholly patterned ways: the sacredness of selfhood is conserved and made into a reliquary only for the individuated modernist soul, preserved from role-conflict and competing expectations by being held aloof from textual generalization as well as from the world. For the ‘theyness’ of being, it is Heidegger’s instanciation of hermeneutic ethics that is taken most to heart, excerpted from its own wider pedigree both past and future and caressed as would be the chalice of amethyst Richard Strauss has his singer extoll in one of his most famous songs, ‘Take my Thanks!’. For the multiplied persona, the divided selfhood is, quite literally, thanking itself for preserving what it of its utmost; their ownmost Being-aside-the-world. In our most personal moments, we too understand, belatedly, what it means to be ‘two-spirited’; the effect of retreating into our own singular self, even if just for a moment, placid and at peace with existence, bereft of world and of history but for the most noble of self-understandings: that in running along toward death I am also living mine ownmost life.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, aesthetics, education, religion, social theory and health ,as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Understanding and Comprehension

Verstehen und VerstÄndnis (Understanding and Comprehension)

            In my life I am confronted with both history and world. Neither of my own making, nevertheless they dominate my existence, and could be said to both originate and predestine it. History includes the tradition, all that which is customary in the sense of Hexis, which I must learn in order to function as a viable being in the social world-as-it-is. But history also includes all that has come to be known as ‘cultural capital’; the very ‘stuff’ of the human career, from ancient archaeology through to contemporary popular culture. It is an open question how much of this capital must be possessed in order to maintain social viability. To each is granted his specialties, perhaps, and in a complex organic social organization wherein each of us plays multiple social roles and thus wears many hats, the daily discourse of informal interaction is muted to the point where Verstehen, or ‘interpretive understanding’ is rarely called upon. This bracketing of interpretation is significant due not only to it being so by design, but also, and as a result of this, that each of us is left to assume that the other knows what she is about, as well as knowing what we ourselves meant by this or that interaction. In a word, we favor Deutung over Verstehen in everyday life.

            Since our very sanity is at stake, both in terms of our self-perception and that of the others, Deutung, or ‘interpreted meaning’ must indeed carry the day to day upon its presumptive shoulders. Most of us presume one another to already and always understand what is called for, and thus what is also called forth, in a great variety of social contexts. But since all of these are learned, and mostly in our childhood and youth, we cannot be certain that either we ourselves or any other person has fully comprehended every possible social context and thus knows how to act to a tee in each. The ‘social’ person used to be casually equated with the most ‘sociable’ person. The very conception of what can constitute a ‘social’ gathering might be interpreted by class and status, ethnicity or language, work relationship or family pedigree. Though all are social in the anthropological sense, the vast majority of us are not students of society in any formal way. It is perhaps ironic that though we do learn to tread on much or even most of the stages upon which civil behavior is to be enacted, very few of us choose to dive more deeply into just how all of this ‘sociality’ actually works.

            And there is, on the face of it, no good reason to do so. If all of us know the score in terms of how to act, what to say, and of course, the opposite as well – the shalt not is duly implied by the shalt – then what would be the point of expending the effort in order to take everything apart just to see how it functioned? Would there not be a risk, in reassembly, that I would then get it wrong? Taking society apart to examine its mechanics and its organics both would seem a risky, even radical act. And since there is no clear consensus on society itself being ‘broken’ – though many claim to know just where and how this or that part of it is broken and should be replaced by some other part, equally proclaimed as being ‘obvious’ – the idea of taking it all down and reconstructing from point zero seems to have little merit. Even the most astute and vigorous social scientist does not attempt such a cosmogonical feat, contenting herself with an examination only, noting the parts and how they interact, just as the ethnographer of modern culture might stalk the streets and observe actual human interactions. An examination of society generates the means by which Deutung can be performed. It does not require any consistent interpretation but rather looks more like a connect-the-dots diagram. The pieces lack order until the connections are made, surely, but just as certainly, all the pieces are present and can be ordered. And it is the resulting order that generates both customary performance but also much of the history of the world itself.

            Between Max Weber and Georg Simmel, ‘Verstehen-Sociology’ gained much traction in the first third of the twentieth century, making a deep impression upon other seminal sociological thinkers such as Alfred Schutz and Robert Merton. It faded post-war given the ascendence of functionalism, which is instructive for our topic as interpretation was just that tool of questioning that mere examination need not access. Taking it all apart and rebuilding it required interpretation, poring over it and noting its connections, as functionalism mostly did, required only already interpreted meaning. Not that this is an either/or situation. Indeed, one might argue that one would have to come to an understanding of the parts themselves before generating an overall comprehension of the whole. While interpretational understanding could do the first, it seemed only functionalism could do the second. Even so, in between these two stood social phenomenology. This third stance suggested that it was the very interactions of living persons that constructed and reconstructed the cultural parts of the social whole in an ongoing and even daily basis. In short, society itself was a performance, or better, a performative understanding of itself.

            The roots of this more active interpretation are diverse. Durkheim’s famous epigrammatic definition of organized religious belief is a case in point: ‘Religion is society worshipping itself’. No more concise editorial can be imagined. But within this pithy fruit is the very essence of performative social action. Borrowing from the older idea that in order for a deity to exist at all it must be actively worshipped, the very structure of society itself has to be borne up by our participation in its manifestations. I am a social actor, yes, but I am also a social founder through my action in the world. Similarly, and perhaps just as profoundly, history too is enacted insofar as we are historical beings. This is not to say that what is known as ‘the past’ must be reenacted – though Mesoamerican cultures have this as a benchmark understanding of human history; the most famous of these consistent performances is the re-enactment of the Columbian Conquest – but at the very least, history ‘continues’ only due to our actions in the present and our resolute being oriented towards the future.

            What is interesting for both the student and the social actor is the fact that performance requires interpretation. The customary scripts may be given and learned by rote, but there is always slippage between an ideal and a reality. The spectrum of improvisation is vast, ranging from stifling a belch during a dinner conversation to reworking a political speech given the pace of world events. Society in its mode of being-social is very serious theater indeed, and part of the fulfilling quality of actual theatrical performance, stagecraft and script, paid actors and paying audience, is that all involved recognize themselves outside of the drama and cast upon the wider social stage. We are, in our own way, not so different from the conquered cultures of Central America, though our settings are perhaps more abstract and work not so directly with historical narratives but rather with an indirect allegory. This too is by design; like the examination of the mechanisms of society without taking the whole thing apart, allegory allows each of us to take the broader view without fully imbricating, and perhaps thus also immolating, ourselves within or upon society’s reason-of-being. For if it is only the ‘moron’ who resists social custom and flouts both mores and moralities alike, most of us would rather preserve our semblance of sanity as part of our own social performance, so that we never risk the ire of others who can justifiably say to us, ‘Well, I’m doing my part to keep all this nonsense together, why aren’t you?’.

            Hence the suspicion and even aspersion cast up against all those who question things ‘too much’. The professional philosopher, who is only doing his job, is perhaps the only socially sanctioned role wherein the practitioner can legitimately say as part of his vocation that nothing is sacred. Outside of this, we are all expected to give at least nominal service to specific renditions of what the majority feels society to be, and to be about. The ‘what’ of society is the first, the ‘why’ the second. Even the thinker, in order to be judged as human at all, must bracket her radical investigations, insights, and indictments some of the time. Society is at once a performance and a comprehension. In true Durkheimian fashion, it performs itself in order to comprehend itself. But because such real drama requires ongoing improvisation and interpretation, society is also made up not so much of cut and dried mechanisms as quick-witted examinations and re-enactments. Society gives the appearance of a machine only insofar as we social actors have honed our individual and thence collective skills upon its various stages. A well-polished theatrical performance never leaves the fiction of its allegory, but a well-staged social performance upshifts itself into a stable social reality.

            The question for each of us then is, do I continue to improve my acting skills within the historical context of the culture into which I was born, in order to preserve the manner in which that culture enacts itself in the wider world, or do I pretend only and ever to be an understudy, letting others do the work which is in fact the duty of all? Or, do I walk off the stage entirely, into a hitherto obscured human drama called ‘conscience’ by the world and ‘the future’ by history? In fact, it is our shared birthright, as both gift and task, to accomplish both of these essential acts. For society as mechanism is only the resulting case, and society as performance the manner in which the present presents its case. In order for any modern culture to reproduce itself, it must eschew pure reproduction in favor of a self-understanding, a Selbstverstandnis or holistic comprehension-of-itself that is developed in history but seeks the future of and in all things. Interpretive understanding is both a tool and yet a way of life for human beings. But comprehension is the mode of being of the social whole, which means no one person can provide it, even for himself. That we are social beings tells upon us in two elemental ways: we are called to conscience by the ongoingness of the world, and we are called toward the future by the ongoing presence of history, which distinguishes the social world from the world at large. That I am myself never socially larger than that historical life is for me the Kerygma of existence.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, social theory, health and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

To Still a Talking Turd? (maybe not); Peel School District and Harper Lee

I  was recently placed in the unenviable position of agreeing with an interpretation that was subsequently enforced by Draconian and anti-democratic measures. When Peel School District in greater Toronto announced that from here on in, the official manner of teaching Lee’s famous novel To Kill a Mocking Bird would be lensed through an ‘anti-oppression’ rubric, I was both disconcerted and delighted. That the text appears to be some kind of ‘white man’s burden’ propaganda, dear to all liberal hearts who imagine that heroism comes from taking up a cause due to irrevocable deficits on the part of those so benighted  – from the cognitively disabled black defendant to the obsequiously slatternly and slavish servant; are these characters not metaphors for how white persons imagined blacks at the time and beyond? – that they require their very oppressor to free them from their bondage, and on his terms, presents a problem. The bravado masculinity of the lawyer and the cliché naivety of his daughter round out most of the narrative stage. In a word, the book stinks. And yet it still speaks to us. It is, if you will, a ‘talking turd’.

But to still its voices, to narrow the interpretive lens to such a degree that other things that just might be in this book somewhere, or any book, is to step uncomfortably close to the very social frameworks that are sourced in the attitudes the book seems to represent. One correct way, one lens. Beyond this, to attempt to enforce this through official suasion within a set of institutions dedicated to learning, consciousness, knowledge, and ultimately, human freedom, is ironic at best. Teachers who were interviewed fear that this is but the opening salvo in a war against the written word, cannons versus canons. I think this at least is premature. There is no evidence Peel SD is out for the lifeblood of the Western literary world. But their actions still presented a puzzle. Why not simply issue a statement regarding the text itself? It could contain what I think is a strong argument that the book is a piece of internecine colonialism and a decoy against structural change. That it was recently voted as the best American novel of all time is not, as one journalist had it, an indirect indictment against Peel SD, but rather is suggestive of the plausibility that racism in the USA has not altered much since c. 1960 as well as of a general illiteracy throughout the American public.

It is the scandal of art that evidences its relevance and its radicality. But popular art can play at scandal while in fact defending social institutions as they currently are. Much popular music charts this duplicitous course, its apparent critiques commoditized and glamorized in a way that serious art eschews. Not that we do not try to assuage the world in the face of thought and art. The art market, especially for paintings, has never been more lucrative. Even so, the effect of art, the aesthetic object, is to provide a consistent and even constant objection to the way things are. In short, it is its own lens. Very often, the content of such lenses are in themselves vulgar – Lolita comes immediately to mind – or they are sentimental – Romeo and Juliet – or are yet updates on ancient parables – East of Eden. Lee’s content is secondary to its quality as a cultural artifact, like these other works. But just here, we have to confront the bad conscience that the book avoids so scrupulously, just as Lolita, for instance, avoids the wider issue of age-related lust simply by having the protagonist, if he can be labelled such, a criminal.

The thoughtful response to any sign of the halting process of species maturity is to open these questions up as radically as possible. Works of would-be art that provide rationalizations for wider iniquities and disquiet can serve such a purpose, perhaps at most. Nevertheless, it is a noble purpose. This or that work can always be reduced to a precise if narrow editorial, popular or serious. Harry Potter? Arthurian romance meets the tuck shop. Narnia? Not-so-cunning soteriological sop. Or yet my own Kristen-Seraphim; X-Rated Enid Blyton. Surely there is more to it, and it is up to educators to discover that more, just as we charge our scientists to discover more of that cosmic truth in which all of us remain enveloped. So as with other discourses, the duty of educational administrators is to radically encourage their pedagogic colleagues to open up the texts at hand and to never shy away from scandal, even evil, for within the realm of the arts, both of these effects are salutary to an enduring human freedom.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over thirty books and is one of Canada’s leading contemporary thinkers.