Image: Dürrenmatt’s Die Physiker

A formative moment in my literary studies education, such as it is: a German class in high school, just before graduation, and we’re reading and discussing Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Die Physiker. We’re on the appendix, where Dürrenmatt outlines a theory for the play, which may be a theory of drama as a whole. Here, Dürrenmatt begins by offering a logic of storytelling: plays are about stories, not theses; stories should be thought through to their end; you’ve thought a story to the end when it’s taken the worst possible turn; and the worst possible turn isn’t predictable, but occurs by coincidence. Those are the first four bullet points of the theory. And I went and said to our teacher: that’s weird, right? Because nothing in Die Physiker happens by coincidence. So it’s like Dürrenmatt just blew his own theory? To which my teacher replied, a hint of shock in her voice: You can’t say that!

“You can’t say that!” I’m not sure I’m right about Die Physiker—I haven’t read it in twenty-five years. Dürrenmatt may have been playing us in his theory of the drama, too—I don’t know. But I do regularly return to the idea that “you can’t say that.” And, to be frank, very often, now that I also teach, I return to this idea and adopt it as a teacher. Because, well, some things you can’t really say, at least in the context of how we usually teach literary studies. Surprisingly, saying that the author of something misunderstood his own theories is not actually one of those things you can’t say, but there are plenty of other things. You can’t talk about Shakespeare’s own feelings when you’re talking about the Sonnets, for instance. You shouldn’t bring in too much of your own investment in a text to your criticism of it. You cannot be overtly ahistorical. And to be sure, you cannot say things that are wrong about a text.

I will be more serious about all this below, more focused on saying something critical and interventionist, but permit me to stay in the confessional mode for a couple more paragraphs. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time over the last couple of years thinking about issues such as these, the underlying assumptions about the discipline of literary studies, the things we do, think we do, think we can do, actually can do, and so on. The things we think we know and those that we actually know, how we relate to our work and how our work relates to the wider world. And—this may be a failing on my part more than anything else—I’m increasingly less sure about any of it. I’m less and less concerned with the proprieties of literary studies, and I’m less and less convinced we really know why we’re doing anything at all. For all the answers we’re giving ourselves—answers to questions about Truth and Method, about Literature and its Importance, to name a few things—I feel like we’re not really working deeply at the core of the discipline’s assumptions, about all the stuff that’s enshrined in doing “proper” academic work, and in my case, “proper” literary studies. And of late, part of that question has involved thinking about what you can and cannot say.

What would happen if we let literary studies probe the boundaries of the permissible more often. Or even to breach them? What would happen if we said things we can’t say? I’m putting this here as a set of questions because, you know, I’m genuinely not sure. Because, in all honesty, I have my doubts about the illimitability of literary studies, strong doubts that start at the minor interventions that would ask us to take into account even, say, the affective dimension of literature in our readings. I have theoretical commitments here that have grown over time, and at the same time as my doubts, so that, now, I can diagnose my own cognitive dissonance: I’m really holding two incommensurable things to be true. At least two things! Specifically: I am writing articles that suggest there are some methods that are better than others, and articles that argue that we should be allowed to just make stuff up, if something interesting falls out the other side. I am willing to commit to the importance of textual intention, but I’m also okay with suggesting that it’s really all about use in the world. I am ready to say we should take the concept of “art” seriously, but also find myself wondering why I think that, and that I actually have very little patience for the idea of “art”. I do not just contain multitudes, but witness them squabbling day in and out.

I would love for all this to cohere. The fact that I would love for all this to cohere is, probably, an effect of my own disciplinary and social conditioning, and a generalizable human discomfort with ambiguity. I really do think that literary studies has a purpose as a profession, has an expertise in need of and worth defending, must be committed in that sense at least to a certain seriousness of purpose. I think we should defend methods that are more productive against methods that are less so; I think we must defend readings that are better against ones that are worse. I’m just not sure anymore what “better” and “worse” mean. I do think you shouldn’t do violence to a text. I also think that if we—though not the mere you, the individual reader, entirely on your own—we, as a society, become “better” (whatever that means) by completely misreading a novel, by doing it all the violence we’re capable of, then we should do that violence. Because, and don’t get me too wrong here: books don’t matter. Literature does not matter. Except in the way books and literature work on us (they have no intrinsic value). To be serious about literature is, it seems to me, in this sense a very odd thing: we defend literature against misuse (misreading, misinterpretation, misunderstanding) even as we value it for its constitutive openness. “Celebrate literature for what it can do in your life,” we say in the two largely separate spheres we travel in, “but check with us if what it does in your life is actually a thing it can be reasonably said to do.”

Is it not an aporia—I ask in all honesty—to advocate, as we do, for the illimitable capacity of Literature to widen the mind, broaden horizons, affectively situate us among our Others, imply hopeful avenues for thinking about the future, utilize playful conceits to estrange our all-too-real world; while, at the same time, we delimit ourselves as serious professionals to the non-playful, the serious, the arguable, the restrictive, and say of some things (but not others, often equally as silly to disciplinary outsiders): “you can’t say that?”

As professionals, we understand the ways in which everybody but ourselves will be free to use literature to whatever good they can draw from it, while we are limited to serious uses that relate to the wider uses of literature only in arbitrary ways. This is where I segue out of the confessional. What seems to me to be at stake in the questions I puzzle over—at least, among other things—is the relationship between creativity and seriousness. The latter limits the former: the boundaries of propriety are not to be crossed in the service of a more creative critical reading, not even if that creative critical reading—like literature itself—usefully widens the mind, broadens horizons, and so on. While we champion our own creativity in the critical act, celebrating it as a necessary precondition of producing knowledge, we bound it off by appealing to claims about what you can’t say that are ostensibly theoretically validated but potentially just arbitrary. You can say that Shakespeare’s Hamlet, for instance, instantiates a theory of the human psyche that postdates Hamlet by three hundred years or so. You can do that even if that theory of the human psyche is not, by some standards, true. You can do so because that theory has a claim—an absolutely unverifiable claim—to universality across the human species, or perhaps just throughout Western modernity (it’s really not clear), and because it has become accepted by our discipline as a valid way to doing disciplinary work. You cannot say that Shakespeare’s Hamlet, on the other hand, is an allegory of the collapse of the nuclear family in the wake of the sexual revolution of the 1960s. And you can’t say that very much independently of the question whether there’s such a thing as that collapse (the issue, that is, is not whether or not your theoretical background is correct). Because you can say “Oedipal complex” in your reading of Hamlet independently of the question whether there’s such a thing as an Oedipal complex. Rather, you can’t say that thing about the 1960s because you’d be told that Shakespeare lived a long time before the 1960s, so he could definitely not have been writing about that. No matter how persuasive your textual interpretation of Hamlet as an account of the 1960s would be, it would not be true. Also no matter that you don’t know Shakespeare’s date of birth and death, or anything about Hamlet besides the text: we, consummate professionals, would tell you you’re not right. Also, no matter what useful consequences emerge from your reading of Hamlet as being about the nuclear family: you can’t say that.

We are limited in our creativity by our professionalism. As professionals, we are bound up in systems largely of our own making whose rules bind us; and that’s, broadly speaking, fine. And they also don’t necessarily explain themselves, those rules—they have organically grown and grown to be accepted, another thing that’s, broadly speaking, fine. For any discipline, some set of rules, some idea of method, is necessary, as apparatus of our seriousness, our scholarliness.

I was trained, teach, and work in Germany, where literary studies is Literaturwissenschaft, the latter half of which term designates science and scholarship equally. At least nominally, our claim to knowledge production is the same as that of physics, biology, or chemistry. Despite the different materialities of our objects of study, literary scholars may be partially caught in the scientific-positivist trap. In our case, paradoxically, it’s a positivism of the negative: we’re unsure of the existence of our facts, but we’re really convinced some things are wrong. My sense is that this general truth holds for other academic systems as well, and so maybe it’s not solely an artifact of the German Wissenschaft.

What’s ultimately at stake here is the value of our knowledge, and the nature of our knowledge as knowledge—very much a question that’s bound up in the system of the university. As scholars, we’re in the business of producing knowledge, which means nothing less than to say: we’re only in business if and when we can raise a plausible claim to produce knowledge. We need to be able to say: this is correct. And this is wrong. That Shakespeare’s life dates don’t cover the 1960s is simple knowledge, and it drives the more complicated that knowledge that Hamlet isn’t about the nuclear family. At the same time, this simple equation doesn’t really answer the ulterior question, which might be: are we thinking about literary knowledge correctly? Is this really what we should know about literature, and is this the best possible way of thinking about literary studies knowledge? What is restriction of what we think about literary studies knowledge for? In other domains, that question is much easier: it’s good to know that arsenic is poisonous so you don’t kill yourself accidentally and/or can off someone else on purpose. What or who exactly is helped by delimiting our readings of Shakespeare only to the causally correct, by contrast, is far less clear: and who, having made a society-changing discovery in a false reading, is helped by us telling them: well, actually, it’s like this, maybe even less.

My own first encounter with the idea that you can’t say that, in German class, is, as I’ve noted, a bit odd in this connection. In a university setting, no-one would bat an eyelid if I argued that Dürrenmatt is in fact wrong about his theory of Die Physiker. I very much could say that. So let me close on another anecdote, this time from my own teaching. I once received a term paper in a poetry class that discussed Wallace Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar,” a poem most often understood to speak to the question of art’s relation to nature and the ordering impulses of language. The term paper I received argued instead that it was about alcohol addiction, something it tied to the poem’s references to Tennessee, to jars, to the word “slovenly,” and its writing during prohibition, among other things. It was—as far as any undergraduate writing goes, for sure—a very good reading of the poem. It was also, I think it’s fair to say, not true, and I was very much inclined to tell my student so. And yet it seemed to my student to have revealed something to her: something literature could do, something literature could say, potentially something that would help other readers come to term with their own addiction. This was not just a take she could justify, it was a take that she could say was generally helpful.

What’s the relationship here between my professional convictions and her uses of literature? Of course, I needed to train her in the conventions of the discipline; of course, I needed to make sure she understood what kinds of things she could not say. Of course, I also needed to give credit to her independent and original thinking. So, like all good professors, I guess (I don’t have the files anymore; but I think still would do the same) I must have given her a B (a 2,3 in the German system; a second, or 70% in the UK, I think). Neither firm enough in my convictions to fail her for missing the poem’s point, nor courageous enough to award her a better grade for being a very good, if unorthodox and wrong, close reader. Reflecting upon this, and fully realizing that I just said I still would do the same, I wonder why I should not just acknowledge that her reading of Stevens was perhaps much more valuable, even in its wrongness, than the more accepted ideas she might have mostly reproduced.

I realize I’m verging close to advocating for an “anything goes” approach to literary studies: just say any old wild nonsense, if it helps. I want to take a determined step back from that. I don’t think that that’s correct either, and my reaction as a teacher is a sign of that. I may have a diagnosis of a problem without an actual solution. So what now? It can’t surprise you that I’m of two minds about this. I think we need to acknowledge our disciplinary requirements as valid. I think we need to acknowledge that anything good you can do with literature, you probably should. Where, on this spectrum, lies a good position? What would be the sublation of this potential dialectic? For me, for now, I think the answer lies in practice, in doing literary studies slightly differently whenever you get the chance. Let’s actively probe the boundaries of our seriousness with awareness that we are probing: acknowledging that this is not the way we’re used to arguing, that we are stretching the rules, and that we are pulling at the dash in the creative-critical with some strength. When we do that, of course at some point, that connection will break, and we’ll fly off in one direction or the other, and some people might then call our work boring (too critical), or silly (too creative) or just wrong (too little, or too much, of both). Or perhaps they’ll just say: you can’t do that. And if they do, I think we should just reply: maybe I can’t do that, but at least I tried.

Dr Tim Lanzensdörfer is Heisenberg Fellow in Literary Theory, Literary Studies, and Literary Studies Education at the Goethe University in Frankfurt