lit crit vs. fannish speculation

[marycatelli]

I think I have put my thumb on the difference between fannish speculation and serious literary criticism of a work.

The difference is that lit crit not only starts with what the text suggests, it goes back and sees if there is evidence of it.  The fans who speculate that the Patrician in the first Discworld books was really Snapcase, because he fits the later descriptions of him much better than Vetinari does, have actually come up with a more coherent history than Pratchett has; he attributes it to his having been a less competent writer at the time.

Similarly, speculating about Romeo and Juliet and what would have happened if either or both of them had realized their fundamental problem was living in a nest of vipers, and the only escape being getting out of there -- all very well, but not literary criticism, because nowhere in the play does the possibility of voluntarily leaving arise.  (It can be very hard to rip up your roots, and at that time, immigration wasn't really present as an intellectual possibility.)

To which one might state that much of what is now put out by English departments, particularly as deconstruction, would therefore be fannish speculation.

To which I state, feature, not bug.

Comments

[writerjenn.livejournal.com]

Good points. I like literature to trigger both criticism and speculation, but I suppose people should understand which one they're doing.

[marycatelli]

Glad you like it.

One thing the Internet has enable is a positive feedback loop on the speculation -- which, as any engineer can tell you, is bad because it oscilliates out of control. You need a negative feedback loop to curb things, and they don't, which explains why fans can get nasty when things don't turn out as they like.

[superversive.livejournal.com]

I think we have two orthogonal things here: (soundly based on the text) and (interesting speculation about the story).

Let P = (soundly based on the text), and Q = (interesting speculation about the story).

Then we have a truth table:

P AND NOT-Q = valid literary criticism, but interesting only to specialists
Q AND NOT-P = fannish speculation
P AND Q = literary criticism of general interest, capable of being literature in its own right
NOT-P AND NOT-Q = pseudo-learned B.S.

The world is infested with lit-crit shysters who think that NOT-Q necessarily implies P. ‘If it’s difficult and boring, it must be Deep and Important.’ That ain’t necessarily so; in fact, a betting man will generally lay money against it.

By the way, a great deal of J. R. R. Tolkien’s enduring appeal comes from the fact that most of what he wrote was solidly in the P AND Q class. That applies, for instance, both to his learned paper on Beowulf, ‘The Monsters and the Critics’ (which was P but also thoroughly Q), and to the chapter ‘The King of the Golden Hall’ from LOTR, which drew heavily on motifs from Beowulf (and was therefore Q but also quite definitely P).

[marycatelli]

how true that fans do at least try to make it interesting -- the problem is that they are frequently so monomaniacal that they are unaware of what is and is not interesting -- and for all we know, the pseudo-learned souls really imagine their deconstructions and whatnot are interesting. . . .

I'm always wary about criticism that turns on what someone was thinking. (I blame C. S. Lewis's essay on how reading reviews of his non-critical work influenced his criticism.)