I’ll take time to touch up on the literary “subject” to compare this to the literary “self” later, but for now I’d like to discuss the latter. ‘Why?’ you ask? Well, imagine this… Or not. But to begin, Your Computer. Is it a “self”? (If you want to call it an AI, you may be ahead of me).
In a lit. theory summarizer (author Mary Klages), we are told that the ancients (Plato, Aristotle, Horace, etc.) all the way up to around the 1970s, thought of texts (books, literature, none in discriminate) as being able to communicate “universal truths” about human nature. Did texts have a God-complex? Do words know more about us than we, who made them, do? Should we aspire to less like Martin Luther King, Jr. and more like Martin, Luther, King, and Jr.? I don’t quite know the answer to these, but Klages tells us that Humanist Critics (the ones who made the aforementioned statement of texts) considered texts somewhat “intradermal”; “the text can speak to the inner truths of each of us because our individuality, our ‘self’, is something unique to each of us, something essential to our inner core,” much like Starbucks Coffee (Klages 47). This is a beautiful statement, but I’d like to go ahead and contemplate further about the relationship between the text and the “self”, because I’ve never felt a text speak out to me much, somewhat like God. I should pray to the text, you say? No. But, I wonder in entertainment of these ideas, if someone created a text, and it should connect with me somehow, but doesn’t, if I create a text, is there a possibility that it couldn’t either? Because it would seem to be that it would have to necessarily connect with me to meet some genesis for itself. Or do all texts, even those created of your own endeavor, have a dissociative character? Then how do we bind to them, and how to we learn “universal truths” from them? Surely we’ve learned little from dust bunnies under the dark crevices of a rusted-brown, beaten-down sofa chair in some abandoned halfway home in China, right? I’m bothered by this thought of texts. That they necessarily have something to say about you just by virtue of having a medium by which to connect with your “individuality”, “self”. And why aren’t you indivisible? Lobotomy experiments of the 1900s have proved many a times that you are divisible, and, moreover, when certain parts of you brain are removed from you, you cease to be the person you once were, or at least change strikingly. Did texts have a plan for that? If not, at what level do they cease to have substance? Vegetative-state by the would-be reader? And the medium, it still hasn’t been explained. Can you show me a “self”? If so, I’d like to meet the Real Slim Shady. Maybe I’m not so bothered by the fact that texts can say something because we’re human and some can have an understanding of them. But, I am bothered by some of the parts, particularly this proposed implicit connection without perception. What does a text have to say to a vegetable? It might have something to say about a vegetable, but not to it. I’m being rude and brash on experimental purpose, and I hope that this rant doesn’t upset too many people, nor do I advocate rudeness and brashness, but (as I hoped, from the title of this post) I’ve learned that I can get necessarily wordy, without ever being mad. I mean, whatever mood you thought I was in while writing this was probably null. I was pretty blank-faced (-_-) throughout the whole thing. Again, this was just experimental, but it’s given me some confidence in feeling I really can do much to play with the concept of the “self” for the upcoming revisals for the course essay(s), so thank you Reader for your attention as I (the text; no longer am I David Trebejo) endeavor to creep deeper and deeper into your impressionable mind (: P)
Klages, Mary. Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed. Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Text. 47.