VBS Frustration and Lit Crit

I have been sick all this week, which has made it nearly impossible to write. Fortunately I had the first half of the week covered with previously scheduled posts, and was able to fill in a couple even in the midst of feeling lousy. The week wasn't supposed to go this way.

I had envisioned getting all sorts of things done while the children were away at vacation bible school. I was going to have plenty of time to think and read and write. I was going to get some things organized in my bedroom and at my desk. I was going to make a dint in the level of dust that is always in my house. None of those things actually happened, and I started thinking that the week was over even when it had barely begun.

After dropping the boys off at the church each morning I would drive home with all sorts of ideas in my head about things I was going to write. Having gotten a voice recorder for Christmas last year, I neglected to bring it with me, and even if I had brought it with me, I wouldn't have been able to articulate all of the things I was thinking.

I think in both words and pictures, but even when my thoughts do take the form of words, it isn't always possible to articulate them. That's why I can read a stimulating essay and still not be able to discuss it with anyone. That's why I can have a lucid discussion with my husband, but still not be able to write a short essay on the same topic. I wish that these things would happen more organically, but they don't.

I get especially tripped up when I try to write. Writing and speaking are not the same sort of activity, although they do have elements in common. I was reminded of this fact as I was skimming Literary Theory: An Introduction by Terry Eagleton the other day. I had picked the book up in order to find something out about Jacques Derrida. Before you start thinking I'm being all pretentious and dropping names on purpose to impress you, either of my intellectual superiority, or my obsessive craziness, know that I desperately wanted to do a degree in English Literature. I also desperately wanted to read and understand theory. I have a philosophy crush, if it isn't inappropriate to say so. I have tried reading and understanding and, more often than not failed miserably. I'm still trying. The dream hasn't died because of failure. And I admit that it is a peculiar dream by most people's estimation. I guess in a way that it is and it isn't a pretension. One of the things they told me in graduate school is that everyone there feels like a fraud at some point, especially on their first job, and that there is some value in putting on the mindset of writer or critic, if that is the sort of activity you are trying to engage in. If you pretend to be a critic, maybe you can write critically.

I want to read Literary Theory: An Introduction, because when we read an excerpt from it's introduction in a 200 level lit course I took as an adult (as apposed to “as an undergraduate”), the teacher said it was a book read by all English Lit graduate students. I read several chapters of it right after giving birth to my first child, impressing my friend's professor-husband with my oddness, or dedication to abstraction, or something. In the preface to the second edition Eagleton says that it was written with the non-practitioner in mind. The book is full of detail, and I'm not certain how to read it profitably, even if it is written for the non-theorist. I had thought I might use Adler's instructions for inspectional reading, sort of as a proof text or experiment. Yeah, I kinda don't think that it's going to work, not because Adler's instructions aren't good, but because I don't think I'm actually willing to work hard enough to carry them out. We'll see.

Sometimes I speak sensibly to myself about giving up theory, but that is a deception that never lasts. I can not give it up, which I suppose in the end is a good thing. I can't give up trying to write either.