Questions of Theory / Javier Suarez The Wake of theory In the sixties, Roland Barthes announced the death of the

author and the birth of the reader. What does it mean? It means that there is not a truth within a text, a truth that would come from the author. On the contrary, the text is an endless net of interrelationships. Ok. Nowadays, this is a wellknown truth, I would say a truism. However, instead of democratizing reading (there is not the authority of an auctor), the proliferation of hermeneutical jargon, which has become each time more and more sophisticated, has produced a gap between the readers and the critics (theorists?). Literary theory seems to be dead, and theory is more alive than ever. Maybe we need to wake (up) literature as the wake of Finnegans, but a wake is always a mourning as well as a new beginning. So I want choose one book, the last work of Joyce: the Finnegans Wake. Joyce wants to create a new understanding of literature, not to destroy it, but open the concept of what literature is. Maybe, we should do something similar with theory, re-make literary theory and not delete it. But how can we do this? Once again, we should think about the purpose of literature. But literature has any purpose? It does not have an essential purpose; but it could have potential purposes: one of them, expanding our imagination. Literature is not an end in itself, but it is the excuse for dialogue. What does it mean? Maybe, and this is just a suggestion, we should not have only a written understanding of literature, but also an oral one. It means that the end of reading is , first, to learn how to talk with ourselves and then how to listen and talk to others. This could be, maybe, an essay to reunite writing and orality. Vico, for instance, has a different approach to literature that is not only written; maybe we can learn from him a bit. However, to wake up literary theory we need to take a standpoint, that is, a commitment with what we want to do. In this sense, Sartre affirms that it is not possible to be neutral when writing; even the people who want to be neutral are not being neutral because writing (and publishing) implies a specific point of view of our labor as critics. I would like to put one example: nowadays, we do a lot of research; however, many times, we do not know the reason why we do the research. Ok, probably, you can tell me that the reason is because I love that topic, it is a personal choice. Sure, it is. But once again, I return to Sartre. Everything starts with our personal experience, but we have to do something else with that experience that surpasses our individual ego. And maybe that is the biggest limitation of contemporary theory which trying to be for everything and for everybody, it ends being for nothing and for nobody. What is the purpose of literary theory? That is the question. And not only: I research because I want to do it. That statement is already highly political because it underlines a liberal conception of criticism that starts from the individual ego as the supreme judge of our action. For Sartre, when we understand that literature is commitment, we understand that is commitment within society, together with others. In this sense, writing is a political act because, when we write and publish a book, we throw in in the public sphere; the book is necessarily for others. However, if our rhetoric is incomprehensible, this is a reactionary political act because our public sphere is reduced to the ones (an elite) that can understand the theory. For that reason, in Sartrean terms, if we do not widen and expand our listeners and dialoguers (because reading is a conversation), we, as literary critics, despite all our discourse, are far from democracy and justice1. So when I talk about the wakening
1

Something similar said Martha Nussbaum about the cheerful theory of Judith Butler: Finally there is despair at the heart of the cheerful Butlerian enterprise. The big hope, the hope for a world of real justice, where laws and institutions protect the equality and the dignity of all citizens, has been banished, even

of literary theory I am talking about the necessity of writing (or filming, talking, dancing or any kind of human expression) for persons not for theorys sake. And maybe, the best way of doing this is via poetry and myth, which were born oral and communal, two things a bit forgotten in our contemporary world. The poets, the poets!

perhaps mocked as sexually tedious. Judith Butler's hip quietism is a comprehensible response to the difficulty of realizing justice in America. But it is a bad response. It collaborates with evil. Feminism demands more and women deserve better.