Iser Still my Hero, Sort of…

Back in college I started looking at literature from different critical perspectives.  At the time I was like, “Gee — I wonder which one is best for me.”  It was like trying to find a church.

I dabbled my toes in feminism and found it too narrow for my tastes.  To be honest I found it elitist and paranoid unless you added water.  It was like a cube of chicken bullion.  Bite into one of them suckers right out of the foil.

But, to be fair, elitist and paranoid are adjectives that I think fit many critical perspectives in their most raw and pure forms.  Putting on green glasses helps you understand the color green but it also gets damn old after a while.

I looked at Formalism (hate), Archetypal (meh), Poststructuralism (zzz).  Deconstructionism and its twisted brother Phenomenology were cool.  Phenomenology was a hot time because basically it let us say crazy shit about what we read for no good reason.  It was like being high even without drugs.  True believers may disagree.

In the end I didn’t like any of them enough to get baptized.

So I wandered off down the path and into the big wide world where I got some jobs, made less than I needed to survive and stopped thinking about critical approaches.  I just read stuff that I liked.

Finding stuff I like has always been difficult.  I can scour B&N for over an hour (once or twice a month) and not wind up taking anything home.  I worry sometimes that that makes me a snobbish prick.  Why can’t enjoy book “X” that everyone else is reading?  What’s wrong with me?

I dunno.

An example of a book that charmed me from the start was Ekaterina Sedia’s “The Alchemy of Stone.”

I read the first couple chapters in the bookstore over a chai latte.  I hate coffee.  And I wound up taking it home.

Another example of a book that grabbed me right away was Jane Yolen’s “Except the Queen,” which I almost bought — and still might.  But for some reason I passed.  I think it’s because I’m allergic to faeries (and elves and goblins and so on) and I worry that they’ll cause me to groan and squirm and maybe even retch a little no matter how good the writer is.

Unfair, I know.

“Except the Queen” will probably get another chance.

Both the authors I mentioned use extraordinary language, which was what stopped me and held me.

Example from Sedia’s “The Alchemy of Stone” p.9:  “She glided past him, the whirring of her gears muffled by the room — it was so full of draperies and old rugs rolled up in the corners, so cluttered with bits of machinery and empty dishes.  Mattie reached up and swung open the shutters, admitting a wave of air sweet with lilac blooms and rich river mud and roasted nuts from the market down the street.”

It’s nice.  I like smells.  I like textures.

And this is why I still have a fondness for Iser even after fourteen years away from writing critical papers.  Because he helps me understand why I respond to some texts and not others.

I kind of hate rules junkies and text zealots and all that sort of crap.  (You couldn’t tell, right?  Based on my “Opinions are like…” post from a few days  ago?)  I mean, to me, no matter what industry you’re in, you will find people adept at scraping together the subjective shards of their discipline, soldering them into some kind of pulpit, and climbing atop it to dole out their expertise.

Maybe I don’t like them because I distrust authority.  Maybe it goes back to childhood fears yadda, yadda.  Or maybe it’s just that I really believe people that want you to wear green glasses all the time are genuinely evil.

I like Iser.  He gives me the reins and says, “Giddyup!  Tell me about your trip when you get back.”  And later, when I tell him how the text made me feel, he doesn’t open up the ancient tome, lick his finger and say, “Yes.  But you see, the Oedipal complex teaches us to exist in rigidly defined categories of blah blah Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.”

Anyway, I’m just babbling now, which is what I do here.  Go read a book.  Tell me what you think.