On my Influences

In academic writing, it is normal practice to exhaustively reference all the sources of the ideas in an essay or treatise. Partly this is to create the impression that the work is engaged in dialogue with other scholars who have written on the same subject; partly it demonstrates that the writer has done his research and that his opinions are credible. The main reason for this practice, though, is simply to avoid plagiarism. One should not appropriate another’s idea without attribution, as if it is his or her own, because to do so is a kind of theft. It is, in a way, an issue of intellectual property. There may well be an undergraduate in the US somewhere who is reading my blog and passing my ideas off as his or her own – I can do little about that. But what I can do is describe from whence I got my own ideas.

When I was an undergraduate and graduate student in the early 2000s, I spent a lot of time in the library reading critical writing about literature and film. I can no longer remember precisely what I read except that my reading was highly eclectic. Some scholars seem to have perfect recall not only of everything they’ve read but also where they read it. - I am currently digesting Year 501 by Noam Chomsky and he certainly gives this impression. Unfortunately, my memory is not so good and it is conceivable that I may accidentally borrow another’s idea without intending to. I don’t think I have done so so far.

Philosophically, my favourite thinkers are Nietzsche and Foucault, although I cannot pretend to be an expert on either. Oddly enough, Nietzsche often described himself more as a psychologist than as a philosopher and Foucault is usually considered more a kind of social historian; nevertheless, both presented perspectives that bear on fundamental problems of ontology and ethics. Like these two thinkers, I try to adopt an attitude of what Robert Anton Wilson in his book The New Inquisition describes as ‘radical agnosticism’ – radical because one should doubt everything, including the received truths of science. Another philosopher I like is John Searle. His theory of speech-acts provides a bridge between what Saussure calls parole and langue – Searle’s theory is a theory about how words can change the world. The theory of speech-acts is central to my theory of literature. Most philosophers I don’t have much time for, however. Although I think the methodology of ‘phenomenology’ developed by Husserl is interesting and important, I find the phenomenologically inspired philosophers that followed him unconvincing. I have read a little Heidigger, a little Satre and a little Levinas and was dissatisfied with all three. These philosophers tend to present subjective impressions as objective fact and do so without evidence to support their claims. It is though they are inspired by special revelation. This methodology is different from mine. My work is not phenomenological: when one is elaborating a theory of narrative, as I am doing, one can adduce actual narratives as proof.

Closer to home, my theory of literature, the one that I proposed in my first posting the Preamble, is especially influenced by two writers. Both writers approach the issue of literary texts from a writer-ly rather than a reader-ly perspective. The first writer is Lajos Egri. It seems, having just now had a peruse of his wikipedia page, that my theory is closer to Egri’s than I realized when I wrote the Preamble – Egri himself used the terms ‘thesis’ and ‘antithesis’ in his major work The Art of Dramatic Writing (1927) and presented the idea of a literary text as a kind of argument. Nevertheless my theory differs from Egri’s in two key respects. The first is that, in my view, a literary text presents two opposing propositions at the same time and is essentially ambiguous - it arises from and explores the liminal space between two opposing world-views; Egri believes, in contrast, that what he terms the ‘thesis’ and the ‘antithesis’ are subservient to what he terms a ‘premise’ – a thematic truth such as ‘stinginess leads to ruin’, a thematic or moral truth that precedes and engenders the story. (What Egi calls the ‘premise’, I call the ‘thesis.) The second respect in which my theory differs from Egri’s is that I believe that a story should best be understood as a kind of rhetoric in favour of some necessary fiction– I am far more sceptical about the nature of truth than Egri was.

The second writer that I should cite (and who I have actually properly read) is Robert McKee. McKee is, I believe, one of the more influential screenplay-consultants working in Hollywood and many consider his book Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting an essential resource. McKee’s notion of ‘the controlling idea’ influenced my notion of the ‘thesis’, and itself must be derived from Egri’s concept of ‘the premise’ (although McKee does not acknowledge Egri’s influence); to the notion of ‘the controlling idea’ McKee adds the notion of the ‘counter idea’, something that may or may not be original with him. In my own theory I call the counter-idea the antithesis.

Although McKee has influenced me to some extent, I find his main hypothesis unconvincing to say the least. McKee proposes that narratives should all be construed as kinds of quests – in this he is probably inspired by Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) ­– although McKee again fails to acknowledge the influence. McKee puts desire at the heart of all stories. I think McKee is completely wrong and wrongheaded about this but right now is not the moment to try to refute him. I shall leave that to a later instalment of this blog.

In a way, this post is a kind of house-cleaning. I shall return to Egri and McKee some time in the future. I may also have to deal with the vexed issue of deconstruction because I believe Derrida may bear on the narrative theory I am trying to elaborate. But this I shall also leave for a later time.