Essay 1: Lit Theory
The Essays (A Series)
I have decided to launch a series of essays to show off my academic career. These posts will happen at random intervals with no set schedule, and I do admit I keep changing my mind about how I want to post them. I will also be taking a walk chronologically through my classes, so the essays will start out a little shaky at the first, as I returned to school after a near 18-year break.
The essays will mostly be in Literature, Lit Theory, and History; and I’m still debating whether I should only post my final papers or all of my lesser papers as well. This first Essay has so far had the most back and forth in my reasoning.
First Essay:
My return to school had me dropped into a simple Composition 2 class to reteach me the basics of MLA (I had learned ver 4 and we’re now on version 8) and then I was also dropped into a level 300 Lit Theory Class.
I will admit to some panic with the Lit Theory Class, especially as I was just relearning how to write a proper essay, let alone ready to start understanding Deconstruction, Structuralism, and other terms/ ideas that felt completely Arcane to me at the time.
For this class I had to take apart a Short Story, and to prep for this final paper I had to write 2 lesser essays, each one focusing on a single lens of Lit Theory. Then in this final paper I had to combine both of those lenses and create a whole view of the story.
I started to post those lesser essays and was embarrassed that they were written in first person and with sloppy citations. Again, I started the course with learning about lit theory AND about MLA format at the same time.
I might post those builder essays after this one, but I wanted to come out the gates with a good paper.
A Dual Reading of “The Use of Force”
“The Use of Force” is a short story, not even 1600 words, and yet all of those words are packed with meaning and arranged for maximum affect. By the use of various lenses of Literary Theory one can find these hidden meanings, can bring to light a deeper meaning and gain insights many aspects of the work, from the politics and philosophies of the author, to the truth of the historical ear in which the piece was written. All the elements that add to our collective culture are waiting to be pulled out and examined. I will be using the theories of Roman Jakobson in his school of Russian Formalism and theories of the New Historicists to parse out this story. These two theories work together in an interesting way as they go about doing their reading in a different way. The formalist is a close reader, painstakingly taking apart the various words used in each sentence while the Historicist takes a step back and has to look at the story as itself and how it fits in the era it was written. These two lenses will reveal the truths of the power dynamic between doctor and patient, the forgiving of violence, and also it will show in a poetic, semi-confessional way, the true character of our narrator.
First, we need to explore these theories in greater detail before we delve into the story, and its interpretation. Russian formalism gets its start around 1912 and as the name implies it is greatly concerned with the form the story takes. They believed that meaning, and literariness, could be found in the choice of words, and symbolism and metaphor, to create a defamiliarization (Bertens 30)—the artistic technique of presenting to audiences common things in an unfamiliar or strange way in order to enhance perception of the familiar. While that is the basis for the theory, I will be leaning more on Jakobson’s late work in the 1960s, when he started his “Axis of Combination” work, as I am mainly interested in his use of grammatical devices, as Bertens puts it, “Parallelism and juxtaposition go hand in hand to create ‘poetic’ effect in a prose text.” (43) Formalism was almost scientific in its approach to parsing literature down to find details and picking apart the use of words. A formalist liked to think of themselves as a scientist, and they preferred to define things by “general rules” (Bertens 30). As much as they think like scientists they still prefer flexibility to their theories, “An overall theory must therefore be flexible, but it should also avoid the appearance of being too mechanistic” (Meyers 518). We will go deeper into details when we take apart the story.
New Historicism takes a different direction in its criticism of literature, it rose in the early eighties with the publication of Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, and was founded on learning more about a historical period through its literature, but also learning more about the literature by understanding the history (Green 1). Greenblatt took much of his early theory from the work of Michel Foucault and as such New Historicism tends to look into the dynamics of power, both real and perceived. It hit the ground running as the replacement for deconstruction after that theory’s demise.
“After the demise of Deconstruction, its purely textualist ahistorical approaches were deemed unacceptable. In reaction against the theoretical uncertainties it had evoked, literary scholars seized on the supposed absoluteness and incontrovertibility of historical fact and have used that apparent insuperability with a lack of caution that belies the New Historicist rhetoric of social responsibility. A truly socially responsible literary scholar would attend as closely to precisely how they and their studies are socially involved as they would to the mere fact of that involvement. As New Historicism continues to enjoy a relatively uncontested hegemony over literary studies, a supremacy that is only more entrenched by the mechanisms of professionalization that this article examines, a certain sense of entitlement has entered the tones of many critics who find the obscurity of the work its own justification.” (Haddox 11)
While New Historicism started out as an exploration of the Renaissance and Shakespeare, in the 90s in expanded to include many other historical eras and became very popular throughout American Academia. Responding to criticism that it cared more for the history of the era and less about the individuals affected, it is currently expanding further adopting feminist and other cultural views. (Bertens 161)
“The Use of Force” presents us with a Doctor—used here with a capital D as the character is unnamed and thus we’re using his title as his name—who is making a house-call to diagnose a sick child. The story was published in the 1930s and as such we assume it takes place within the same time frame. In the course of making his examination the Doctor comes to hate the parents of the child, the child becomes violent, and he has to respond in kind, in order to look down the girl’s throat to make a diagnosis of Diphtheria.
Now, using Russian Formalism reveals in a poetic, semi-confessional way, the true character of our narrator and gives insight to complex emotions. Here I am defining character as the sum of the merits and flaws of the individual and not as a role in a story. As the Doctor arrives on the scene, he gives us quick descriptions of the family and tells us they are nervous, quiet and respectful. “[T]hey were all very nervous, eyeing me up and down distrustfully” and “it was up to me to tell them; that’s why they were spending three dollars on me.” (Williams) Here the language reveals tensions between the two groups, the concerned parents and knowledgeable doctor. The use of his bill, the three dollars, to bring him into their home shows that he is used to having to prove his worth, but also that he expects little help from his patients. Going deeper into the Doctor’s character we need to pause and talk about the confessional nature of the piece. The overall structure of the story doesn’t use quotations at all, all of the dialogue is worked into the text in a single voice, which I say, is the Doctor’s own and that he is telling this story for either a memoir or some other point later in his career. Now if all these words belong to the Doctor then we have greater insight into his character. As the story progresses he begins to hate the family, disliking them for the use of keywords and for slights that he perceives to his authority. At one point the mother calls him “a nice man” and tells her daughter that he “won’t hurt you”, both phrases upset the Doctor and from this point forward he becomes more and more hostile to the family. The quickness with which he lashes out shows a shortness of control, and a level of arrogance. His arrogance is further displayed by the use of language in the story. As there is a single voice in the narration one has to ask why the Father’s words are rendered in dialect and with poor grammar, such as “it don’t do no good” and “we tho’t you’d” (Williams). If this story is being told by the Doctor at a later date, as I infer, then he is deliberately using such language to paint the Father as a less intelligent man, reinforcing his authority and dominance in the situation.
We have a lot of complex emotions in this story, and almost all of them are used in opposition of each other. The Doctor is trying to save the girl’s life, or at the least render a diagnosis that he hopes will save her life, he is trying to perform a duty, and yet at the same time he succumbs to rage. He feels shame and guilt over forcing a spoon down the girl’s throat, and yet delights over being proven right. “It was a pleasure to attack her. My face was burning with it” and then his regrets, “blind fury, a feeling of adult shame” (Williams). Now the use of inversion; rage and shame, duty and force, triumph and guilt, all of these create a poetic effect, this is where we bring in Jakobson and his “Axis of Combination”, a very successful formula that finds literariness in the equivalences between the choice of words (Bertens 42-3). Jakobson basically believed that we were bound by grammatical structure in how we put together a sentence, but the words chosen could change meaning. “The selection process that starts up whenever we are on the point of speaking or writing is governed by invisible rules that make us select words from large classes of grammatically equivalent words[.] However, we also constantly make selections in the field of meaning.” (Bertens, 42).
Which brings us to the dynamics of power, Dr. Greenblatt based a lot of his initial theories on the works of Michel Foucault, whose body of work “shows a recurrent preoccupation with power structures” (Green 1). There is a definite power dynamic at work in this story. The Doctor is making a house call to check on a young girl, who must be seriously sick, as inferred by the Doctor mentioning that the family was paying $3 just to have him show up on their doorstep (Williams). The story is very short and within only pages the Doctor goes from concerned for the patient, to disgust for the parents, to outright hatred of the parents, and then wanting to vent physical violence on all present. Even though the Doctor is performing a noble service, the diagnosis of a potentially lethal illness in a small child, he allows himself to literally seethe with rage “But a blind fury, a feeling of adult shame, bred of a longing for muscular release are the operatives.” (Williams). As much as the Doctor tells the parents that everything is their choice, that he’ll stop if they ask, he says all of this directly after he has already mentioned the possibility of Diphtheria. For some background, this story was written in the 1930s, I have information saying it was published in 1938 but have seen articles saying it was published earlier. While there is nothing that places this story in any particular country I assume it’s in America as Williams was living in New Jersey at the time of writing. During the 20’s and 30’s there were massive outbreaks of Diphtheria around the world. In 1925 there were 20,000 US-only fatalities and over ten times that in actual cases of the disease. If this story took place in England then it would have even greater impact, as the 1930s rated Diphtheria as the 3rd highest cause of death of children in England and Wales (Diphtheria Wiki). So faced with a fatal disease and the one person who could possibly save their child, there really is no choice when the Doctor says he’s willing to stop and that the parents are the ones in charge. They are not in charge, and with his inability to control his emotions over the subsequent pages, there was no stopping him from getting his diagnosis.
My first encounter with New Historicism was while perusing the list of literary theories on the Purdue OWL website, so way before I got to research the theory and discover many other aspects which I admire, I was drawn in by a single sentence on the site. They have a list of questions that a New Historicist will ask themselves as they read; “Does the work’s presentation support or condemn the event? Can it be seen to do both?” I actually think the whole point of this story, the whole reason why this story is literary is this question. The story wants the reader to answer this question, it won’t give the answer, and it’s wholly the reader’s job to make that determination. On a first reading it is so easy to quote the Doctor, “What a wretched child,” she won’t cooperate to help herself. It’s very easy to point out that the Doctor is trying to help out, that he’s mad because he’s seen dead children, and recently. But read the story a second and third time and it is very hard to ignore that the Doctor is enjoying the violence, that he actually longs to truly hurt the child at one point and that earlier in the story he becomes dismissive and then angry with the parents as well. After my many readings I have to say that this story both accepts the need for the violence to save the child’s life, but condemns the Doctor for his lack of self-control. That is my final takeaway on that. I know that many people would be appalled by my final diagnosis, and I can understand where they are coming from. They are coming from a perspective that is created by today’s morals and thoughts. Today, any level of violence is seen as a sin, a great evil that immediately makes you a lesser person if you succumb to its call. But the New Historicist does not read with today in mind, “Critical distance finds its natural expression in a third-person discourse that obscures the critic’s moral, political, and aesthetic commitments, as well as his or her place in the contemporary historical moment” (Haddox xv). In simpler words, a New Historicist tries to judge both the work and the author by the standards of the era in which it was written and not through the morality or politics of today.
Bringing it all together, the formalists have given us a
poetic voice through the use of inversion and juxtaposition, and by parsing the
form and lack of punctuation used in all of the dialogue we are left with a
singular voice. That voice is the Doctor
telling his story, and inadvertently revealing his true nature, his arrogance,
and his lack of emotional control.
Placing the story into the historical era of its writing has shown us
the fear engendered by Diphtheria and perhaps even forgiven some of the
Doctor’s use of force. The fact that he
has had other children die before he could diagnose them and get them on the
proper medications, lends some urgency to why he needs to be so forceful with
this patient. The final outcome also
helps assuage some of the guilt, he was right, it is diphtheria and because of
his actions this girl may survive. Hard
to hate the man who just saved your child.
The fact that I used his title as a character name in this essay is a
bit of a formalist joke in and of itself, and I made it to add to my New
Historicist arguments, the fact that his title demands respect. They paid to have him knock on their door,
and once he enters that house he is in charge.
As much as he tells them it’s their choice what he does or doesn’t do,
he’s holding them hostage with his superior knowledge and the implication that
he is the only person who can save the child’s life. All of these complex thoughts, all of these
power plays, are revealed through a close reading of the text, a detached view
of the history of the era, and by understanding the theories of Roman Jakobson
and Stephen Greenblatt, and their respective movements, The Russian Formalists
and the New Historicists.
Works Cited
Allen Brizee, J. et al. “Literary Theory and Schools of Criticism.” The Purdue Owl. Purdue U Writing Lab, 18-Aug-2015.
Bertens, Hans. Literary Theory: The Basics. 3rd Ed., Routledge, 2014
“Diptheria” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 22 July 2004. Web. 10 Aug. 2004, last updated 22-Sept-17, Accessed 13-October-17. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diphtheria
Faust, Mark A. “Ways of Reading and ‘The Use of Force.’” The English Journal, vol. 81, no. 7, 1992, pp. 44–49. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/820748.
Greene, Jim, MFA. “New Historicism.” Salem Press Encyclopedia, 2017. EBSCOhost,ezproxy.snhu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx? direct=true&db=ers&AN=121772889&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Haddox, Thomas F. and Allen Dunn. The Limits of Literary Historicism. vol. 1st ed, Univ Tennessee Press, 2011. Tennessee Studies in Literature. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.snhu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=442338&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Meyers, Walter E. “Literary Terms and Jakobson’s Theory of Communication.” College English, vol. 30, no. 7, Apr. 1969, pp. 518-526. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.snhu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=0000872234&site=eds-live&scope=site.
Williams, William Carlos. “The Use of Force.” Classicshorts.com, www.classicshorts.com/stories/force.html