Philosophy Reading

Spurred on by an IB Extended Essay I am supervising, a couple of months ago I waded precipitously into Gayatri Spivak‘s 1988 essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In this vitally important essay on the West’s erasure of non-Western women, Spivak makes the case that colonial ideology stops Westerners from knowing anything about the most disenfranchised members of the societies they dominate. Western philosophy, she says, claims to be transparent, but really, in doing so, it silences the people it claims to reveal.

In truth, however, I struggled to read Spivak’s essay. The student who had brought it to me, I feared I was not able to help her with what she wanted. I recognized to my chagrin that I lacked the philosophical vocabulary, the academic reading, the understanding of Marxism, and perhaps even the fluid thinking abilities necessary to really understand what I was reading.

I want to return to Spivak. I am committed, as a piece of my social justice work, to finding and dismantling the structures in my own mind that are complicit in the oppression of others. But I’m not ready to write about Spivak yet. I saw that I needed to step back and build some of the background I currently lack. I decided to read some philosophy.

How does this relate to fiction?

This connects to a broader insecurity that I have been feeling as a writer. Sometimes I wonder what fiction and literature really are. Sometimes I don’t know if what I am working on has value or not, if it is true or not, if anything is true or not, or what any of this means. In analyzing literature with my students, I feel a great dilemma between the edict I remember being passed down to me in 10th grade, that when analyzing literature, you must stick closely to the text; you can’t look outside the text to understand what something means, and then the seemingly way-outside-the-text theories of textual analysis, especially as laid out by Lois Tyson in Critical Theory Today, where theories like Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Queer Theory, Postcolonial Theory, and others, themselves largely external to literature, are applied to literature in an attempt to say what it means. What is right? What is meaningful? What is good analysis, and what a misstep?

I was speaking with my friend Lauren last weekend, and somehow together, I’m not sure which one of us said it, but we arrived at the idea that all reading requires going outside the text, and of course it does, because we ourselves are outside the text. So maybe my hangups are all for naught. Maybe I have been trying to stick too close to texts and not put them into the context of the wider worlds in which they are written and read.

All of this is to say, I am realizing enormous gaps in my knowledge about the world that I think are important to fill in as a fiction writer. I am realizing I need to study something more. I primarily read fiction, but I’ve been realizing recently that I think I need to read philosophy. I think I need to have some more solid grounding in ideas, and this will be relevant for my own writing, and relevant for me as a human being.

What I’ve been reading

So a few weeks ago, I went by the philosophy classroom in the school. I found Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (Volume 1). I have devoured it. Foucault is making the argument that, rather than being repressed, discussion of sexuality has been proliferating in the West since the 1600s. That although we might think of stuffy Victorians who could barely speak of sex through euphemisms, actually around them there was a whole science of sexuality and psychoanalysis being developed.

For me, there’s personal interest here, because The History of Sexuality is a work that is often mentioned in Queer Theory, and as I try to understand more about my identity as gay from a philosophical point of view, this is meaningful. Foucault argues that homosexual behavior, which used to be categorized and dealt with as a sin that could be committed by anyone, in the 1800s became pathologized as a whole identity, among other “perversions” of the only acceptable sexuality, which occurred in marriage.

And so more things than we ever think are perhaps socially constructed, which does not mean that they lack reality and power, but it does mean, perhaps, that the way we think about them does not have to be the only way. They can evolve and change. Just because particular ideas have been handed to us by our forbears, that does not make them necessarily false or true. These ideas are things I want to explore in my writing, to see how they play out, to see the places they might take us.

What I’m recognizing is, I think, that when I’m reading philosophy, the ideas feel sturdy in a way that fiction does not. I can cite Foucault and say, even if others disagree with him, that at least he is setting out to create knowledge. I’m not sure that I could cite fiction as a source of knowledge. I don’t know actually. I don’t know. But it isn’t knowledge in the same way, because fiction is not attempting to be general. It is attempting to dive into the specifics of one moment and character and story. It particularizes the big ideas, while philosophy seeks the general in the myriad particulars. Is that true? I’m not sure.

I am moving on from Foucault. I’ve now begun Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which so far I am finding fascinating. It’s enormous, but hopefully I will make it through. I’m going to read A Sand County Almanac. I’m going to read Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. I want to read Edward Said’s Orientalism. I don’t know where else I’ll go. At some point, I’ll make it back to Spivak and see if I can understand her ideas more fully.

I am writing this on Saturday, June 12th, although I won’t post it until Sunday. Sunday afternoon, we will drive down to Bergen, and then we’ll fly west, west, west, all the way to Billings, Montana to visit my husband’s parents, who we haven’t been able to see in a long time. We’ll get our first vaccine shots. I hear the weather is going to be hot. The land will be different. I have never visited Billings in the summer. It will be good.

Thank you for reading, and best wishes for the week to come,
Jimmy