[MUSIC]
ROBERT OLEN BUTLER: I have a mortal fear of the scholars and critics. The few people I've seen writing about my work have been very good actually. I've been very lucky, though there haven't been very many of them yet. But I have a real problem with the way literature is taught in this country, as well, because so many places, especially at a university level-- and for some reason, the bigger name the university, the worse this problem is. What happens is the theorists and the critics and the academics, actually I think what they deeply believe, many of them, is this-- that artists are kind of idiot savants who really intend to say these abstract, philosophical, theoretical, political, sociological things, that they will find and express in abstract ideational ways. The artist really wanted to say these things but just couldn't really bring himself to do that in those terms. And so that the critic is there, the academic, the theorist is there as really the fulfillment, the final necessary stage of the artistic process. And this is absolute nonsense, of course, because you do not understand a work of art. You thrum to it. The artistic experience is an active harmonic that's set up inside you, a resonance that you understand the world in ways that do not involve the rational analytical faculties, that bypass them, that, in fact, supersede and improve upon them. And the true literature course in this country, the truest ones, the ones that are truest to art as it really is created and as it really should be experienced would do two things. The first thing, at the beginning of the class, the teacher would say, what we're about to do is a purely secondary and entirely artificial thing. The primary thing is your direct and sensual visceral aesthetic encounter with the work of art. But we're going to do this artificial secondary thing for a very good purpose, and that is tune up the instrument in you that thrums to the work of art. We'll add some strings in the upper and lower register. We'll tune up the other strings so that when you leave this course, and you encounter another work of art, you will thrum more harmoniously with it. So as a result, the last assignment that you will have in this class as you walk out the door, your last assignment is to forget everything that we've said. If you're in a writing workshop, and you are required, as is the case in I think the vast majority of writing workshops in this country-- I'm talking creative writing-- if you're required to offer criticism each week of your fellow students' work, and, of course, this is the mode. It's the blind leading the potentially sighted out there. The workshops depend on peer criticism. And the criticism is required. You come in, you must say something. Even more, most places require it in writing-- one copy to the student, one copy to the eminent writer sitting in the classroom whose goodwill you are desperately courting, because he's the man who will help you or woman who will help you get published. And so one way you can do that is to show off the acuteness of your critical perceptions, or even you just intend to be really helpful to the other student. In that kind of climate, when you get a piece of writing in front of you that aspires to art, and you begin to read, you are programmed to read it in a way that makes it impossible for you to ever criticize it validly, because from the first sentence you go, what am I going to say? How am I going to criticize this? What's going on here? How can I analyze this? And if you do that, you do not know how to read. You must approach the manuscript if it aspires to art as you should approach a real work of art. The problem is that having been in the grip of all those academics and literary courses, literature courses, they probably read books like that now too, and so they have also been taught how not to read a work of art. But they must, to give proper criticism, let their analytical faculties go, their critical faculties go, and they go in, and they must open themselves up to thrumming to the work. And the true criticism should be based on thrum, thrum, thrum, twang, you make a mark, and you go on. In just the places where that harmonic is disturbed in you, you just know that something's wrong there. And you might make a mark in your margin just to say, well, that's where it was. And later you go back, and you try to see what it was that went twang.