Fundamentalist Poetics, or "Grandma, Where Did Dead People Go Before Jesus Came?"

To paraphrase Viktor Frankl quoting Nietzsche in Man's Search for Meaning - we humans can live with any how as long as we have sufficient why.

For my grandparents, the King James Bible was all the why they ever needed.

In After Theory, Terry Eagleton calls this "a neurotic hunt for solid foundations" (204) - I always called it Chasing the Devil. According to my Assembly-of-God-minister grandfather and my born-to-be-Preacher's-Wife grandmother, anyone who couldn't see that every word in the Bible was minutely, excruciatingly, and, at times, horrifically true and must needs be read in exactly the way Grandpa preached it on Sunday, was obviously and irrefutably being influenced by, if not completely filled with, The Devil.

Eagleton believes this stance is a denial of the "roughness" (204) of life, that Fundamentalists expect to feel life as "a matter ...of treading on thin air" (204) - I must, respectfully, disagree. My grandparents grew up in rural areas of Texas and Louisiana in the early part of the last century with over ten children in each family - lots of chances for children to get sick, get hurt, and die. My great-grandmother was a midwife, which meant that my grandmother, as a young girl, witnessed both birth and death - sometimes simultaneously.

My grandparents married and began a family while traveling many dusty roads of the South around 1930, leading tent revivals, just as the Depression was getting into full swing. Unlike today's t.v. personalities-cum-ministers, my grandfather made only what he received in tithes - they often lived on toast and coffee for weeks at a time. They knew life was "rough;" I argue, they expected nothing else but, instead, waited patiently for reward.

When my grandmother passed away, it was not the thought of "treading [the] thin air" of this world her soul flew toward, but the purified air of a Heaven she felt sure the Bible had promised.

Though I have never been able to share in their "pure ice of absolute certainty" (205), I came to respect very early that they were not trying to hide from reality - they lived long, full lives filled to the top with good and bad, and they embraced every moment. Maybe it's because they didn't have a lot of time for theorizing.

Barry, Super-Readers, and Truth with a Capital "T"

When I first came back to school - and after a semester or two of taking literature "survey" classes - I became frustrated with the idea that, unless I found a way to live forever, I would never have enough time in my life to really get to know every author, every poet, every playwright I was interested in on more than a cursory level.

This semester, I've felt as though I were turning myself into a pretzel trying to capture the "essence" of whatever theory we were studying at the moment. I felt as though I were losing my own perspective in the process of trying to wear someone else's mantle; more than this, I felt, more often than not, detached from what I was writing and that my words were way too often "[bland and superficial]" (Barry 191).

When Barry wrote:

"A genuine interest in one [field of theory] can really only arise from aspects of your own circumstances. These perspectives cannot be put on and off like a suit - they have to emerge and declare themselves with some urgency" (192),

I was grateful.

Theory is like the field of literature itself, too deep and varied for one person to ever be able to focus well and with relevance on more than one area in any one lifetime.

A Talking Book and the Silence of the Dominated

How does silence make, deconstruct, and appropriate meaning? Language has no inherent meaning - what we state, whether written or oral - is true before we verbalize it. Even without words - truth exists.

No matter how eloquently we speak, language only signifies truth (Truth) and our words only create the metaphor for meaning. We can argue, then, that, in silence, we are closer to original intent, especially when the signifier is a member of a dominated group who is merely appropriating the language and structure of someone else's cultural point of view.

In silence, we may refuse to "play the game;" sometimes it's the only move of power available.

In "Writing, 'Race,' and the Difference It Makes," Henry Louis Gates, Jr. teaches that "language use signifies the difference between cultures and their possessions of power... the difference between subordinate and superordinate, between bondsman and lord" (1894).

In a social structure in which race "[lends] to even supposedly innocent descriptions of cultural tendencies and differences the sanction of God, biology, or the natural" (1893),

a society in which a poet like Phyllis Wheatley must prove her grasp of the dominant language after proving her facility by writing a noted volume of poetry in that language,

how can any dominated group fight using the only linguistic weapon available with impunity - when even "to attempt to appropriate [their] own discourses using Western critical theory [at the very least] 'uncritically' is to substitute one mode of neocolonialism for another" (1902)?

"The trope of the talking book," says Gates, "is not a trope of the presence of voice at all, but of its absence" (1900), the absence of the black [minority] voice which, through an appropriation of legitimate language "[preserves]...a tradition of [difference]" (1901).