L I T E R A R Y   C R I T I C I S M

I still can't read Hemingway or Faulkner or Fitzgerald or Steinbeck or any of those guys. Literature courses tend to be taught by second-rate writers who insist that nothing means what it says, that every paragraph, every sentence, every word, has some deep hidden meaning that must be ferreted out, otherwise you don't really understand what the author was saying. (Note that this helps second-rate writers avoid having to do real work.)

There's even a crowd these days who take this approach to its extreme, claiming that no writing has any meaning at all. According to the "deconstuctionists," when you look closely enough at anything, all meaning breaks down into absurdity and existentialism. (Note that this helps avoid having to work at being even a second-rate writer.)

Eventually I caught on that all this stuff is baloney. Most writers in human history have had a single basic meaning behind their work: "Someone will pay me for this." The fact that we now have technical names for seeing too much or too little meaning in writing just makes it baloney with a hifalutin name to awe the peasants. Either way, the realization comes too late for me. My tastes are set, and they tend not to include "literature."

One thing I did come away with, however, is a powerful disrespect for the "Lit. Crit." set. I've read some literary criticism that actually does illuminate an author's mind and intent. But this rare form is additive criticism. It doesn't reduce words to meaninglessness in order to demonstrate the critic's superiority; it clarifies the meaning of a writer's words by placing them in a useful context.

By far the more common variety of plant in the Garden of Knowledge is the deconstructive weed. Here's an example of one such pest.

He sat on a rock.

He fell off.

The End.

These are the times that try men's souls, yes, and the souls of women and persons of color and otherly-gendered persons as well, because this reviewer is no Thomas Paine. Who is this Bart Stewart, who so heedless of the gods of the copybook headings mocks us? What Titan is he, to take incandescent pen in hand to rebuke the mighty Olympus Corporation and its international subsidiaries and shareholders?

For our answers--as best as feeble intellects can grasp them--let us turn to the words of the Master himself.

"He sat on a rock." What does the author mean by this? What does the rock symbolize? A rock is a hard, unyielding object; obviously it represents the difficult situations in which we all find ourselves. But a rock may also be used as a tool. The fact that we can use it to sit upon, to employ it in the purpose of taking our ease, is a clear analog to humanity's technological prowess in the service of leisure. (Facilis descensus Averni!) Thus we see that the rock stands for both the opportunities and the challenges faced by every individual, whose use of objects may in time become a dependence on them. And in a final fillip of subtlety, the author chooses a rock not only to indicate technology in general, but energy technology specifically--the Greek word for rock, petra, the word given by the Christian world's "savior" in naming his first bishop Peter, is also the base for our modern-day savior, "petroleum."

"He fell off." Aha! Here the author strikes us in the face, crying "Wake up, fool! Do you not see the terrible danger of nuclear annihilation inherent in your blind snuffling for the nipple of cheap energy from your Mother Earth?" The "fall" is reminiscent of that quondam angel and would-be savior Lucifer, whose name itself ("lightbearer") symbolizes the blinding flash of the atomic genie let loose from his magnetic bottle. Are we not all slowly slipping from our collective rock?

"The End." And here we find the fundament of this brilliant work of minimalist fiction. (Though this reviewer hesitates to impugn such a noble work with the appellation of mere "fiction.") The author deftly ridicules modern bourgois society, with its anal fixation on the "movement" and "processing" of consumable resources into waste, sure harbinger of self-inflicted social strangulation. Yet he offers us hope, too, in the Wertfreiheit suggestion that, by not making "asses" of ourselves, we can escape the doom that seems to beckon to us, siren-like, from Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

This reviewer will not sleep tonight. But whether Morpheus flees from a soul tried by the tramping of high-energy gamma radiation through mortal flesh, or from radiant joy at discovering another soul with social acuity to equal this reviewer's, ah! Who can say?

And there you are. This is what passes for enlightened comprehension these days.

Welcome to the world of postmodernism, in which the goal is not the expansion of understanding but the imposition of pseudointellectual authority. In other words, "I understand this stuff and you don't, so get down on your knees and thank me for acknowledging your existence, you miserable little white-bread, middle-class, homophobic, bourgeois trolls."

And the elite wonder why sensible people ignore them....

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