An excerpt from a work in progress:
“Any interaction with a book is a type of intercourse: a ménage a trois between reader, writer, and work. The way literary theorists interact with a text is sadistic. They take pleasure in the pain of the text and, judging by the contortions of the prose, the pain of the reader. They enjoy forcing the text into painful, unnatural positions. They whip the words into a froth, goad the weakest points between the spines, and bind the sentences with odd implements. They bring in studs—Zizek, Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida—to screw and humiliate the text. Watching a literary critic have their way with a text is like watching a depiction of Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom: moderately interesting to a curious adult, but mostly disgusting.”
“The way a critic—and especially a critic who is a writer—has intercourse with a book is far different. The critic is an experienced lover, one genuinely interested in giving pleasure to the work. The lovemaking between critic and work is mutual, with the critic both respecting the curves and recesses of the work and mining it for her own needs. Unlike the theorist, who sees only the play within the cage of the page, the critic acknowledges the human being behind the work, their all-too-human influences and limitations, which makes interpretation of the work less mechanistic and more humanistic. The critic who is a writer also brings the knowledge of the craft—a tacit knowledge, an experiential knowledge—that shapes their remarks into dialogue rather than the from-on-high proclamations of the theorist. If the theorist’s relationship with books is 120 Days of Sodom, the critic’s relationship is Romeo and Juliet (the love, not the suicide). That’s not to say a critic cannot or should not bring pain in the form of criticism, only that pain is not a critic’s primary aim.”
