The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [61]
In his classic essay on the “author-function,” Michel Foucault described Freud and Marx as belonging to a class he called “initiators of discursive practices”:
The distinctive contribution of these authors is that they produced not only their own work, but the possibility and the rules of formation of other texts. In this sense, their role differs entirely from that of a novelist, for example, who is basically never more than the author of his own text. Freud is not simply the author of The Interpretation of Dreams or of Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious and Marx is not simply the author of the Communist Manifesto or Capital; they both established the endless possibility of discourse.64
Foucault is quick to anticipate objections to his placement of such authors in a more influential position than that of novelists: “The author of a novel may be responsible for more than his own text; if he acquires some ‘importance’ in the literary world, his influence can have significant ramifications.”
But his main point is to try to distinguish between a writing practice that spawns imitators and one that generates productive thought and resistance. “Marx and Freud, as ‘initiators of discursive practices,’ not only made possible a certain number of analogies that could be adopted by future texts, but, as importantly, they also made possible a certain number of differences. They cleared a space for the introduction of elements other than their own, which, nevertheless, remain within the field of discourse they initiated.”65 These writers have begun a conversation that would have not been possible without them. Thus, the twentieth century saw the popularization of adjectives like Freudian and Marxist. Given the blurring that often comes with cultural transmission, such terms were almost guaranteed to be caricatured and misunderstood. Nonetheless, their prominence in popular media is a telling indication of the role these writers have played in literary criticism and interpretation, as well as in the way modern thinkers think. “There are,” Foucault says provocatively, “no ‘false’ statements in the work of these initiators,” because the issue is not false or true or right or wrong but what he called the possibility of discourse. This drives unsympathetic critics crazy. For some, the flat claim that “Freud was wrong” or that “Marx was wrong” becomes an article of faith and one that definitively halts any possibility of discourse. But Foucault’s contention is that such initiators teach a new way of thinking, not a set of prescribed (or proscribed) thoughts. “A person can be the author of much more than a book—of a theory, for instance, of a tradition or a discipline within which new books and authors can proliferate.”66
So are Marx and Freud literary authors? Are Capital and Civilization and Its Discontents works of literature? I’d say yes, and not only because these authors write so well, though it is important to me that they do. The moves that they make in setting up an argument, in offering detours and counterexamples, in not being afraid to contradict and reverse themselves, are literary in the most complimentary sense of that elastic term. The literary critic Peter Brooks wrote an essay called “Freud’s Masterplot,” about the argument and stylistic development of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that became a centerpiece for Brooks’s book about narrative fiction, Reading for the Plot.67 Freud, Marx, Darwin, and other major intellectual and cultural theorists provided a range of plots and languages for creative writers and critics who came after them.
What isn’t literature? It might make sense to adapt the saying about New England weather and suggest that if something isn’t literature now, we just need to wait five minutes—or five years, or fifty, or even five hundred. The process takes time (often centuries or decades) to change Thomas Bodley’s “riffe-raffe” into the masterpieces of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama,