Stories and Theory

Despite it’s unenviable timeslot of seven-to-ten on Monday nights, my fiction seminar is quickly becoming my favorite class in my time at Grinnell. That shouldn’t be surprising, given my interests, but what it surprising is that one of my highest level classes at Grinnell is also the least pretentious, the most welcoming. We read a novel every week and spend the class discussing it, no theory besides what people come up with on their own, no oneupmanship over who’s the best read, just people sharing their experiences with fiction. Maybe that casual vibe isn’t an anomaly, but more of a reward for getting through the denser classes. We’ve proven that we love this stuff, now they’ve finally given us free reign to just love it without stamping in some arbitrary quote from Foucault in every paragraph of our essays.

My love for the fiction seminar becomes all the clearer when I realize how hard it can be to get through the theory for my Gender, Sex, and Critical Theory class this semester. Unlike my fiction professor, whose course selection was basically just his all-time favorite novels, my critical theory professor assigns articles that he knows we’ll hate, that he personally hates, but that we need to know anyway because these are the works of the scholars that academia has decided to deify for some reason. Most of the time the prose is needlessly dense but the ideas are good, if a little hard to apply to actual human living. But sometimes it’s so bad that I just can’t help but rant. For example, the chapter “The Future is Kids Stuff” by Lee Edelman, the introduction to his book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. 

Basically, he thinks that we should stop caring about the future so much. That making a better world for our children is stupid. That, because gay people cannot reproduce (totally ignoring that a gay relationship where one person is trans can reproduce, and that gay people can raise children and should have more opportunities to adopt) all queer people should be part of a death drive and tear down the dominant culture in some highly abstract and functionally useless form of revolution. Maybe I, a straight cisgender person, shouldn’t comment on a piece intended for a queer audience, but so many queer people in my class were enraged by this article that I feel like I’m free to give Edelman a piece of my mind. He says that he wants the queer to represent everything that the worst fundamental preachers fears that it is, to destroy the very idea of building a better future for future generations. Building a better future is a tool of the dominant discourse, according to him, and therefore it should be completely annihilated, without a thought for what should replace it. That’s what gets me the angriest: that he wants to destroy our societal love for children without replacing anything with it. “I do not intend to propose some ‘good’ that will thereby be assured,” he writes. “To the contrary, I mean to insist that nothing, and certainly not what we call the ‘good,’ can ever have any assurance at all in the order of the Symbolic.” Never mind making a world where children feel free to express their own gender identity and love whoever they want; just burn it all. That’s what I really hate about theory: these scholars complain and problematize back and forth, then problematize each other’s complaints. It’s not their job to fix it, apparently, wallowing in it is a day’s work in itself.

But maybe I should pull back. Because I’m not sure I’d be much happier if Edelman did propose some kind of good to come out of all this. When these theories promise some good at the end of all the criticism, the good never feels real. Marxist endgame, for example, never holds much appeal. If our work, our entertainment, our families, and nearly everything else is all based on capitalism, and therefore must be destroyed, then what does that leave in the utopia, exactly? If you structure your worldview out of the problems you see in it, then there’s not much world left for you if you ever get around to fixing it.

I don’t want to dismiss theory out of hand, because it’s done a lot of good for a lot of people, particularly those less privileged than me. But it gets hard not to, when the problems it presents are unfixable, and the best hope for a happy future hardly seems worth achieving. But the one time when theory feels real to me (and the reason why I’m enjoying my Critical Theory class, despite all my whining) is when it’s coupled with some kind of narrative. Because then it’s not just floating in the mind of some author, held up by long words and quotes from a couple deified scholars. With stories it’s real, it’s personal. It’s connected with characters who feel real, or with people who are. That’s theory’s place, I think: not to replace stories, but to come up against them, to allow for deeper understandings, even if the importance of the stories can never be reduced to something so general. 

I don’t want to say that stories need theory like theory needs stories, mostly because I like believing that the stories I write stand on their own, or at least with a little support from genre trappings and good fiction teaching. But maybe the reason why the fiction seminar is so good in the first place is because we all made it through the theory classes. We’ve learned the stuff until it’s a paradigm, a way to filter and reconstruct stories without even thinking. I won’t say so definitively because, again, I don’t want to give theory any more credit than it’s worth. But here it is, you can take it or leave it.