Hardly a day goes by that I don’t hear someone speak of literary theories as so many lenses one pulls from the metaphorical camera bag. Or maybe they are from the optometrist’s shop as professionals select from a variety of lenses to correct our vision. In any case, figuring literary theories as lenses appears to be the metaphor that embodies a widespread understanding of the role of theory today.
Before this was the critical toolbox. For several decades leading up to the appearance of the first edition of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism in 2001, critics referred to the concepts and ideas in literary theory as tools. The assortment of those tools taken together represented a toolbox the reader might carry from one text to another. The toolbox perhaps signaled a level of training and know-how that distinguished a “professional” reader trained in various methods of investigation from the lay reader who lacked such formal training.
That metaphor drops out of use around the turn of the century. The MLA Index clearly demonstrates the shift in the metaphor when in the 2000s the toolbox metaphor trends down to nearly nothing, while the lens metaphor begins and in the later 2010s rises to a peak. The publication of the canonical Norton Anthology may or may not have something to do with the changing of the metaphorical guard, but a debate arose at the time of the book’s release in which the editor Vincent Leitch argued that theory is not a toolbox, but, as a concern and understanding of the world, theory is an end in itself. If it is indeed an end in itself, where does that leave the literature?
This is not the place to rehearse that debate, but Leitch’s argument seems to have won the day. Or perhaps he was out front of a major shift in our thinking about the role of theory and its relationship to the arts. New paradigms require new metaphors. Does the paradigm behind the lens metaphor assume that the literature is just another commentary on, or exemplification of, the theory? Does that paradigm relegate the primary source to a secondary status? It is significant to note that the adjective Literary in the titles of competing anthologies is absent from the Norton volume.
Leitch’s primary objection to the toolbox metaphor seems to be the idea that criticism serves as an ancillary activity to the once more central work of literary analysis. That is what the toolbox metaphor essentially suggested: meaning resides in the literary text, and some application of tools might be effectively used to recover that meaning. One does not need a phenomenological theory of the tool as equipment (Heidegger: das Zeug) to get there. The toolbox metaphor may be more ad hoc and informal than Heidegger’s notion of a tool as “ready-to-hand,” though the two might overlap. The idea of an array of tools suggests that they might even be interchangeable as long as they accomplish the job. A screwdriver can be used as a gouge or pry bar, a pipe wrench used as a lever or hammer. There are only seven simple machines, after all. The toolbox metaphor may be completely too mechanical in its implications to apply to the nature of meaning, but the idea that one tool may be as useful as any other to extract meaning does shift the attention from the tool to the meaning.
At first, the critical lens metaphor seems functionally equivalent to the critical toolbox metaphor. Both, for instance, can be used in isolation or combination with others of its kind. But whereas the tool serves a temporary usefulness, a lens suggests a permanent way of seeing, a way of seeing perhaps not otherwise available. The lens metaphor likely succeeds because it relies on the figure of vision for understanding. As such, it also suggests a perspective on the object viewed. But after this, the metaphor runs into problems. In fact, both metaphors do. One might naturally ask, can we uncover meaning without a tool, and how many lenses are required to see a literary work? As we further consider both metaphors, we might wonder the degree to which either is really useful or clarifying.
The current usage suggests that many “lenses” of critical theory are necessary to “see” the work of literature. But if we follow the logic of the metaphor, clearly only one lens is needed. That would be the lens that brings the object into sharp focus. All other lenses, to the extent that they deviate from those optics, would distort the object. For those wearing glasses to bring objects into the correct focus, using other lenses proves defeating and futile. This is where the metaphor fails and fails quite spectacularly. The idea behind the metaphor might be that multiple perspectives are needed to understand a work of art, but lenses are not perspectives. A single lens can be moved around an object to generate all kinds of perspectives. But, opthalmically, lenses are corrections to faulty vision, focusing or orienting eyes in need of correction to a standard, optimal vision.
Do those who use the metaphor mean optical filters like those photographers use? Photographically, these lenses render an object in various pronounced color tones. Many of the color-bathed images they produce might presumably be added together to create a single composite image. Yet, filters by definition strain out portions of the available light to create such effects. We know that filters miss important details, intentionally deviating from what is available to create varied effects.
Or we might expand the lens metaphor in the direction of vision augmentation devices. Maybe that is the sense in which those who use the metaphor mean it. That would include technological innovations like infrared, heat imaging, and more. The advantage of understanding the metaphor this way is that it captures a sense of the progress of knowledge to which we in the university long ago committed ourselves. But these cannot be critical “lenses,” either, in the sense of multiple incompatible perspectives. These technologies open the wider spectrum of light radiation to human observers. They nonetheless view the same light band, and the object they illumine is still the same object. So these devices cannot be “lenses” in the current sense of the metaphor used in critical contacts.
As we sort through possible meanings, it becomes apparent that critics who talk about the literary “lens” seem to mean the metaphor to signify multiple perspectives. But this is also problematic, as multiple perspectives have little to do with lenses since, as noted, any single lens can generate multiple perspectives. As deficiently thought through as the metaphor is, the underlying idea of multiple incompatible perspectives is troublesome. It raises the specter of interpretive relativism—which may not in itself sound objectionable—but the perpetual ambiguity and confusing chaos that relativism creates inevitably leads to textual interventionism.
Maybe it is not a lens but more like a recipe. Maybe critics mix in ingredients to make new concoctions. Maybe they make something new with a different look, taste, and texture. Why not stir some dogma into our reading? Why not revolutionary fervor or the sensibility of another place and time? For one thing, there are very good hermeneutical reasons not to do so. For another, there are good alchemical reasons not to do so. Lye when mixed with one ingredient makes a mild cleanser for the skin; with another it dissolves human flesh. Don’t we still need to listen to and understand one another, not only if we are to be educated people, but if we are going to live with one another in society? Otherwise, we are all just revolutionaries who continue to batter one another in every classroom, every social media encounter, every time we talk to one another or pick up a book.
Or if not like a recipe, maybe a lens is a kind of medical enhancement device. Doctors prescribe lenses. Maybe the prescribed lens uses digital augmented reality to overlay a preferred form and message. Or maybe it is more like a pharmaceutical pill or ointment that when applied makes me feel like the text agrees with me? But before we begin the work of criticism, we must certainly read a work to understand it. I find that too many students who adopt this reading-with-a-lens approach are losing the ability to read literature. They do not know how literary conventions convey meaning and that literature is a unique use of language that speaks a meaning over and above ordinary language. Too many students have been taught how to use a lens to find the oppressor, for instance, but somehow that singular focus leads away from other matters of which the text speaks.
At a sentence and discourse level, too many university students cannot engage a literary text. They are taught to favor partisan simplicity over complexity. They are taught to pass over the ways authors use tone and a variety of viewpoints to explore complex issues that confront us as human beings. Sometimes those issues they can immediately relate to; sometimes not. But as they lose the ability to have a primary experience in their reading, they lose what other minds and other cultures offer them. They miss the richness of figurative language that captures all kinds of ambivalences and intersections of human will and aspiration they might find there. Sometimes I wonder if what the critics call a lens really is a lens at all. I find it interesting that these students don’t need a lens to read what the critics say. If that is the case, maybe the lenses critics advocate for are lenses after all: maybe they are cyborg lenses that sketch the barest outline around objects to find that one thing they are programmed to find. “Must find John Conner!”
But this is not so much seeing as it is critical monomania. Whatever it is, it is hardly critical anymore since to see the same thing every time we read is as critical as taking a ride on Uncle Toby’s hobby horse. Is a lens a kind of tunnel vision? Maybe the purpose of the lens is to conceal? Maybe it is like the card sharp’s colored lenses that screen out the ornate designs on the backs of cards to display instead a hidden code.
In this connection, I think of the critic Christopher Norris, who says in effect that we can’t read texts anymore, but we can read ideologies. Is this looking at a work of literature through a “lens,” or is it a surreptitious switching of meanings in which literature is treated as appearance and the critical theory reality? Maybe all writers of texts produce only “surface” and all writers of theories only “depth”? In this case, what the critic says is more “real” than what the text “appears” to say. Consequently, does the critical lens “write the text,” in Stanley Fish’s sense, or does it rewrite it? Perhaps a lens is a set rose-colored glasses or maybe a terministic screen. Maybe it is one of those mood spectacles or illusion glasses we find at parties. How about a kaleidoscopic lens with bits of sea shell, glitter, and tiny shapes rattling at one end to produce a captivating image at the other? Maybe our chosen lens produces an Escher pattern that tessellates across the field of vision, covering everything in sight? All sorts of lenses are available to us, and the Dutchman’s interlocking angels and demons explain an awful lot, after all.
The problem with lenses is that with them students don’t know what they know. A friend who went to medical school said he worked in the clinic his first year. When I asked, “Isn’t there a danger that might lead to malpractice,” he answered, “They trust us to know what we don’t know.” Our students in literary studies outfitted with lenses don’t have that same epistemic circ*mspection. This kind of awareness is greater than that which any lens could provide. I don’t blame these students as much as I do the critics and others in the profession who promote the lens as an interpretative carte blanche. Is a lens simply what the text would say if someone with my philosophy or political persuasion wrote it? To metaphorize what they want to say about a text as a lens is to make it official. Henceforth, it is unquestionable. Since we’re searching for metaphors, maybe we should include those characters in Tolkien whose superior minds seek lower intelligences to carry out their will, a chief difference between wizards and orcs. Or maybe reading is a kind of ventriloquism act? Metaphors abound for the kind of reading practiced in our profession today.
Do those who replace the meaning of a literary work with some understanding of the world they favor regard the new meaning as somehow communicable and stable? Do they then present this “real” meaning to the rest of us to see without the aid of “lenses”? Or do they argue that all not only literary works but also literary interpretations require lenses, so we might as well adopt their lens as well as any other? Should we expect a battle of the lenses, a hermeneutic ground war where perspectival possibilities multiply and clash because other new critics with their respective lenses insist on the primacy of their visions? In the end, how many acts of lens-viewing are a matter of withdrawing the veritable message in the bottle and simply inserting our own?
Of course, the pluralism we espouse as critics need not be a tendentious process of self-validating and unquestioned perspectives that turn the text into something other than it is, nor a competition for recognition in Kojève’s “struggle to the death for pure prestige.” For Coleridge’s definition of beauty as “multeity in unity,” plurality in Western philosophy and art was heretofore seen as the complex variety of things integrated in a much larger whole, even if the identity of the whole was unknown. Only in the postmodern did that change. Deleuze was the principal philosopher for the “fundamental” nature, as he described it, of discontinuity. But even though the discourse of discontinuity currently dominates academia, there is a pressing need for a semantic-cognitive opening in which evidence and the remaining laws of logic help us sort through the teeming plurality that overruns us even on a practical level each day. Or does our egalitarianism extend to every idea and impression we have irrespective of its plausibility and moral payoff? Truth is not so much plural as things manifesting themselves in a variety of ways, and individual perceivers with their various histories and values multiply perceptions as they interact with the world and one another. In such cases, we rightly respect plurality as a means to access larger unified truths and discern broader patterns. When we do so, we account for the narrowness of singular viewpoints.
In the matter of the interpretation of art, we take these “perceptions” or “perspectives”—not lenses—and we add them up to see what greater understanding they offer. Otherwise, we might as well have one eye on one side of our head arguing with the other about which one is right. Even two lenses on a single pair of spectacles provide this function in the most obvious of ways. Each vantage point is partial, knows its vision is partial, nor will and does not insist its one lens is true, as if that ended the story. Instead, each coordinates its lesser information with the lesser information of the other as it seeks areas of agreement. Insofar as their lesser information overlaps, they reconcile what they know with one another to attain more knowledge. Their divergence exists for the sake of convergence, their multiplicity for the sake of unity.
Even in our fractious age, perceivers seek to reconcile the various inputs of their five senses. Scientists seek a unified field theory. And can we literary critics still seek a unified understanding of our subject matter as well, even as we allow for the personal response of the individual viewer, which can be integrated in some larger account? When we find that information in one place does not square with that in another, we search for a deeper unity that connects them. Is that unity not requisite to the knowledge toward which we aim in our institutions of higher learning?
The destructive legacy of a poststructuralist insistence on fundamental discontinuity has locked us in the untenable position of Borges’s Funes, for whom “[n]ot only was it difficult … to see that the generic symbol ‘dog’ took in all the dissimilar individuals of all shapes and sizes, it irritated him that the ‘dog’ of three-fourteen in the afternoon, seen in profile, should be indicated by the same noun as the dog of three-fifteen, seen frontally.” The effect of the doctrine of fundamental discontinuity has been to disregard the fertile dance of the one and the many. Yet, neither understanding nor complexity exists without that dance. Our best contemporary artists still move effortlessly with it. As the poststructuralist doctrine of discontinuity ill disposes us toward two thousand years of our civilization’s art and philosophy that coordinates the one with the other, it also ill disposes us to other persons as genuine sources of knowledge, treating us all as discontinuous points of either opposition or assent. I think rather of the great game theorist John Nash who in our time used one bright corner of a diseased mind to leverage his remarkable understanding of the world, adding some perspectives and subtracting others, as he eliminated blind spots and repudiated illusions.
Is there something in this metaphor of the lens that can isolate us from one another and from the past? Not if it is meant as clarifying sight rather than radical reinterpretation and unquestioned alternativeness. But these latter meanings and not the former seem to be advanced and even celebrated in our time. I am afraid that the thinkers who gave us ideology in the place of ideas now give us lenses instead of sight. Critical intervention passes too quickly over what is said to what the critic believes ought to be said. If this is so, the lens metaphor goes a long way to replace both ideas and seeing, thinking and sight—the organic processes of observation, comparison, and patient interpretation of what literary works convey.
Is there a better metaphor than either lens or tool? While it tempting to think of others, perhaps this is one time in literary studies we should reflect on the literal. Literature requires literacy. Literacy at a minimum means the ability to generate meanings out of all manner of texts ourselves. Therefore, insofar as criticism usurps this role and interjects its own meanings, it functions as a substitute for literacy. While literacy comes at the end of a long process of learning that culminates in complex crossroads of cognitive awareness, certain critical lenses offer to short-change the process with quick answers and interpretive schemes that explain far too much away as it foregrounds the critic’s own view of the world. Immersive and reflective readers ought to move not only across texts but equally among ideas in the history of thought, not simply reduce the variety of what they find there to the sameness of the critic’s singular vision in our own time. Increasingly, many students and authors of manuscripts who come to me for review treat criticism as a perfectly legitimate blinder to the things that literate readers of literature ought to know. We appear to be approaching a place in Western intellectual tradition far beyond earlier tendencies either to allegorize or syncretize, where to read a text is to shift the ground of discussion and translate what it says into our own preferred critical idiom and worldview.
Therefore, it is not surprising that the truth value of lenses rarely comes up in the metaphor, whether these interpretations and accounts are hermeneutically sound or not. The same critical lens keeps seeing the same thing over and over, or as overzealous students say, “It’s everywhere I look!” Interesting in this regard is how the metaphor of the lens stands as the perfect inverse of the traditional tale of the four blind men and the elephant. In that tale, narrow perspectives mean limited information, and limited information takes the logical misstep of mistaking the part for the whole. Saramago’s Blindness updates the tale in a horrifying parable that shows how deep the mistake still runs in our nature. The synecdoche error dogs us too much these days as we grapple with the meaning of the postmodern and what might await us after it.
Regarding our professional pursuits, then, perhaps such errors and faulty metaphors follow naturally from critical orthodoxies when they are uncritically retained. If metaphors are supposed to sharpen our understanding, not obfuscate it, then the lens metaphor falls short. The toolbox metaphor was beset by its own problems, too, but not for the reasons that gave us the lens metaphor. Still, we literate readers, to the degree we consider ourselves such, should be more aware of our metaphors. Not swept along by them. Least of all, blinded by them.
Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers 2019.
This work is written by a US Government employee and is in the public domain in the US.
