Critical Contexts

Each essay in the “Critical Contexts” section is designed to illustrate a particular way of approaching literature. This section begins with an essay exemplifying a historical approach. It then moves to an essay designed to offer an overview of previous work. This is then followed by an essay adopting a particular “critical lens” with its own distinctive focus. And then, finally, the “Critical Contexts” section closes with an essay emphasizing the technique of comparison and contrast.

In this volume, the “historical” essay is by Steven D. Ealy, who deals with the so-called “Kentucky Tragedy,” a bizarre event little known today but notorious when it occurred in 1825. The “Tragedy” involved a mysterious midnight murder committed by an even more mysterious murderer whose identity and motives were much debated at the time. Ealy notes that “[i]n the broader world, the tale of the ‘Kentucky Tragedy’ lived on in Edgar Allan Poe’s play, Politian: A Tragedy, and in William Gilmore Simms’s Beauchampe and Robert Penn Warren’s World Enough and Time,” as well as various other later writings.

The critical overview article here is provided by Joyce Ahn, who, surveying the essays contained in a volume titled American Secrets, notes that they “engage with literary and cultural representations of a wide variety of issues involving different forms of secrecy.” These include “public policy issues such as government secrecy and corporate greed, the suffering of Vietnam War veterans, conspiracy theories about the 9/11 terrorist attack, nuclear issues surrounding the Nevada Test Site, and treatment of ‘deviant’ sexualities.” They also include “private issues such as pedophilia, secret family histories, Borderlands treatment of women, madness, and the art of doubt and the unspoken.” Other issues dealt with concern “waking to nature’s secrets, homosexuality and cowboy culture, secret histories of Haitian immigrants, and AIDS.” According to Ahn, “American Secrets implies that we must overcome our tendency to keep secrets since, by doing so, we often lie both to ourselves and to others.”

Following Ahn’s survey is an essay by Derek Allan, an Australian scholar who specializes in “aesthetics,” or the study of beauty. Discussing “Literature and Knowledge,” Allan not only reexamines the question of whether literature can offer knowledge or “truth” but also tries to answer it, even as he also shows how difficult the attempt to provide an answer can be. He concludes that “if one were seeking to describe what is involved” in responding to literature “as a form of knowledge, the phrase ‘propositional knowledge’ would not seem to be the right choice, because that term implies statements whose truth or falsity can be verified against a known state of affairs. The ‘knowledge’ we are now discussing,” Allan suggests, “would be much more suitably described as a form of ‘annexation’—that is, the transformation of what was previously in the realm of the unapprehended—that is, outside the realm of the known—into the known.”

Finally, the “Critical Contexts” section concludes with an essay by Brandon Schneeberger that compares and contrasts the ways Shakespeare and Jane Austen—in Hamlet and in Mansfield Park, respectively—deal with issues of both literal and metaphorical “masking.” Schneeberger contends that in this novel “Austen displays her most sophisticated use” of the theme of playacting and lying. “During the recital for Lovers’ Vows,” Schneeberger continues, “Fanny Price observes the truth about Henry Crawford, and as the plot in Hamlet revolves around the play-within-a-play and the fencing match, so too, does Mansfield Park revolve around the recital of Lovers’ Vows and Henry’s pursuit of Fanny. Like Claudius, Henry Crawford masterfully deceives everyone, and only Fanny knows the truth.”

Critical Readings: I

The opening essay in the “Critical Readings” section is by Edwin Wong. Titled “Truth and Lies in Life, Literature, and Literary Theory,” it is even more wide-ranging than its title already suggests. Citing not only scientific developments but also philosophical theories, Wong, trained as a classicist, also draws many of his examples from the literature of ancient Greece. But he also deals with writings by Poe, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, and many others. His discussion of Poe’s detective stories is especially relevant to the focus of this volume, but he also has larger points to make. He concludes that we know that in the “real” world “the scientific method separates the truth from the lies. We know, in literature, the creator of worlds fabricates true and false things. In literary theory, however, we were unaware of how to separate true and false, unaware if the undertaking were possible, or even desirable.” Wong argues that “[b]y questioning the possibility of objective knowledge, proclaiming the ‘death of the author,’ and walling off the text from the outside world,” recent literary “critics appropriated literature to serve social justice instead of truth.” Wong, however, is interested in moving the needle back in the other direction, and he is also interested in suggesting one way this might be done.

Wong’s article is followed by an essay by Robert Evans dealing with two intriguing poems from the early English Renaissance. Both poems have sometimes been attributed to Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, one of the two most important English poets from the time of Henry VIII. In these companion lyrics, a male speaker accuses a woman of being a lying, deceitful temptress who toys with his emotions and plays games with his desires. In an accompanying lyric, written as a direct response to the male’s poem, a female speaker pulls out all the stops and alleges that the accusing male is not merely an unscrupulous liar but also a potential rapist. The first poem was almost certainly written by Howard; the second, although occasionally ascribed to Howard, is now more commonly assumed to have been written by some unknown (possibly female, but probably male) author of the period. Evans argues that these two poems, taken together, not only provide a fascinating “dialog” about love and lies in the Renaissance but also imply that male speakers of “Petrarchan” poems of this era may often have been seen as deceitful and self-serving.

Following the Evans essay, Brandon Schneeberger returns with an essay discussing examples of truth-telling and lying in literature of the “Early Modern” period—the period that used to be known (and sometimes still is) as “the Renaissance.” Schneeberger explores issues of truth-telling and lying in works by such important authors as Sir Philip Sidney, George Herbert, John Donne, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, and, of course, William Shakespeare (with examples drawn from both his poems and his dramas). Schneeberger concludes that “[w]hether concerned about the truthful nature of poetic expression or the beloved, or anxious about the impact of lies in communities, families, and religion, literature in the early modern period clearly expresses a deep concern” with the kinds of issues he surveys so well.

In an essay on “Lies, Truth, and Parable” in “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” Christopher Baker argues that Tolstoy’s famous story offers a “penetrating account of a man whose life is filled with everything except meaning, a fact he discovers only on his deathbed. By dwelling in excruciating detail on Ivan’s end,” Baker suggests, “Tolstoy leads us to ponder along with Ivan the authenticity, the ethical genuineness, of his life. The novella,” he maintains, “leads us into the moral tensions between lying and truth-telling,” behaviors of deep interest to Tolstoy. He concludes that “Tolstoy subverts any admiration for the smugly self-satisfied members of the Russian bureaucracy by satirizing their endemic misrepresentation and pretense. We are instead led to the truth by the generosity of someone from the margin of society who does not lie, a surprising turn of events typical of a scriptural parable.”

Matthew Thiele, in an essay on “Subjective Truth and the Unreliable Narrator in Lord Jim,” discusses one of the most problematic issues in all of literature: the issue of when and to what degree we should trust the voice that tells us a story. In Lord Jim (and also in The Heart of Darkness, which Thiele also explores), that voice belongs to a character named Marlow, who also plays a major role in Heart of Darkness. Thiele argues that Lord Jim often juxtaposes the loyalty of other characters with Marlow’s disdain for that loyalty and his own lack of loyalty and integrity. “Marlow,” according to Thiele, “seems to construct his subjective truth for the purpose of justifying his lack of loyalty.” Thiele concludes that “[w]hile many scholars have established fairly certainly that Marlow functions this way in Heart of Darkness, there has been less interest in investigating whether something similar happens in Lord Jim. I think it does, unquestionably, and the consistency of the pattern gives me confidence that it happens by design.”

In an essay titled “‘Truth’ and ‘Falsehood’ in the Paranormal Thought of J. R. R. Tolkien,” Nancy Bunting contends that Tolkien’s strong interest in supernatural ideas may have been rooted in certain traumas he suffered as a child. These contributed to “paranormal thinking” that led him to believe that “all nature was alive.” Consequently, his thinking was often “both orthodox and eccentric because for him there was no ‘true opposition’ between the two. For him, Christian ‘truth’ and non-Christian ‘falsehood’ could mutually illuminate not only each other but also the deepest, truest thinkers who could appreciate both.” She concludes that “[w]hile many people in the twentieth century and beyond have considered Christian belief and other supernatural claims merely false, Tolkien, along with many of his friends and many of his readers, saw deeper truths within them.”

Critical Readings: II

The second half of the “Critical Readings” section opens with a pair of interrelated essays by Robert Evans dealing with Zora Neale Hurston. Evans argues that issues of “truth” and “lies” were important to Hurston’s career almost from the very beginning. After she became a noted writer, she was often praised for telling “the truth” about African Americans and their culture. But just as often, Evans continues, she was condemned for telling “lies” about the same subjects. Hurston saw herself as a fearless truth-teller but was frequently accused of lying by the increasing number of enemies she developed as her career progressed. According to Evans, by the 1950s, the last decade of her productive life, she was repeatedly seen by many other black people, as well as by her numerous political opponents, as a person willing to lie either for financial advantage or simply to gain attention. But Hurston consistently presented herself as a person unafraid to speak the truth, even if doing so damaged her career and her reputation. Evans draws on numerous articles from African American newspapers to substantiate these claims. His purpose, he emphasizes, is not to support the assertions of either Hurston or her critics but is simply to report a good deal of evidence that often seems to have gone unnoticed.

Evans’s essays are followed by an article by the Italian scholar Franco Manni titled “Multi-level Truths and Lies in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.” Comparing and contrasting this novel with other important post-war “dystopian” texts, Manni discusses “the relationship between truth and falsehood (sometimes conscious falsehoods and, therefore, lies)” in Bradbury’s book. He explores these issues “according to four different points of view: that of the interior of an individual character in the fiction; that of the society described within that fiction; that of the author and his first readers in the real society of 1953 [when the book was first published]; and that of the author and others, including ourselves today, in the decades since the novel’s original publication.” But Manni also emphasizes “that although our own judgments of what is true and what is false may change over time,” he does “not endorse the kind of philosophical ‘relativism’ so prevalent nowadays, which suggests that no objective truths exist, that only subjective opinions do.” He suggests, instead, “that anyone who knowingly states a falsehood is objectively lying and, therefore, wants to deceive, while one who reports a falsehood without knowing it is false is objectively ignorant. Different perspectives,” he concludes, “do not imply that objective truth is impossible.”

Darren Harris-Fain, in an essay on Ian McEwan’s well-regarded novel titled Atonement, explores that book’s complex treatment of issues of truth-telling and lying, themes that are not only among the issues the book examines but that are also central to its narrative design. According to Harris-Fain, “[t]wo reasons are often given for the novel’s success. One is its vivid treatment of the intersections of class and sex at an English country estate in the 1930s and of the English retreat toward Dunkirk and of a wartime hospital during World War II.” Another, he continues, “is the surprise twist at the end of the novel and its adroit combination of realism and metafiction. One could add, among its points of interest, its multilayered treatment of the intersections of truth, lies, and literature.” Interestingly, McEwan was even accused of plagiarism when the novel first appeared—yet another way in which, as Harris-Fain concludes, it is intriguing “because of the questions it raises about truth, lies, and literature.”

Resources

This volume concludes with two secondary bibliographies, a note about the editor, notes about the contributors, and a comprehensive index.