Robert Olen Butler, On Responding to Literature

00:08 [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

00:30 literature is taught in this country as well because so many places, especially at the 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

01:00 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 bring himself to do that in those, and so the critic is there, the academic, the theorist is there

01:30 as really the fulfillment, the final necessary stage of the artistic process. And this absolute nonsense, of course, because you do not understand a work of art, you thrum to it. The artistic experience is an act of harmonic that's set up inside you, a resonance, that you understand the world in ways that

02:00 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,

02:30 the teacher would say, "What we are about to do is a purely secondary and entirely artificial thing. The primary thing is your direct and sensual, visceral, aesthetic encounter with a work of art. But we're going to do this artificial secondary things for a very good purpose, and that is to tune up the instrument in you that thrums

03:00 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."

...

03:28 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, you know, it's the blind leading the potentially sighted out there. The workshops

04:00 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 good will you are desperately courting because he is the man, or the woman who will help you, get published. So one way you can do that is to show off

04:30 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.

05:00 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. Problem is, that having been in the grip of the academics and the literature courses, they probably read books like that now, too, and so they have also been taught how not

05:30 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. 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 that's where it was. Later you go back and you try to see what it was that went twang.