Well, here we are, together again for a few moments, my thoughts bridging a gap to enter yours. Why so philosophical, you might well ask? I read this post over at Animanachronism, and thought I should really tender a response of some kind.
Now, before I enter anything that approaches an opinion, I want to first say that I adore Daniel in the way only an obscure anime blogger with crazy literary ideas can. He does good work for the community; in a practical sense, it is the promulgation of serious literary study of a work that makes the work “literary,” rather than anything inherent in the work itself, and so work like Daniel’s furthers the general cause of getting some serious mainstream consideration for anime.
I’m afraid I let some of my opinion leak out there — the thing about what makes something literary. That’s now quite what I want to talk about, but it’s related.
Here, then, is the short version: what’s the difference between “good and bad” and “I liked and didn’t like?”
I have to disagree with Daniel’s conclusion: in my opinion there is no difference at all.
Bold, I know. Allow me, for a moment, to wield the powers of quotation at you. According to Northrop Frye,
the difference between good and bad is not something inherent in literary works themselves, but the difference between two ways of using literary experience. The belief that good and bad can be determined as inherent qualities is the belief that inspires censorship, and the attempt to establish grades and hierarchies in literature itself, to distinguish what is canonical from what is apocryphal, is really an “aesthetic” form of censorship. (The Stubborn Structure, Essays on Criticism and Society. 85.)
Let’s take this in two parts. First, “good” and “bad” are determined by how one uses the work in question, not by anything in the nature of the work itself. On the level of “serious business” criticism “good” works are works we can take things away from that affect our lives.
We can move away from that realm now to something a little more fun: enjoyment. At its core, literature (and I use the term here to mean anything consumed that functions with narrative) must be entertaining. Indeed, the whole “taking something ‘good’ away from a work of literature” concept is merely a form of entertainment. Just between us friends, right now, we could, if we wanted to, define “something good” as “having a good time.” So, if you have a good time when you watch an anime, or read a book, then the anime or the book was “good.” In the same way, something that bored you would be “bad.”
The issue with this — or, at least, one of them — is that it seems to leave us with nowhere to go. If everything is subjective, you might be saying, then what’s the point? Well, look at it this way: Derrida claimed that any work based on another work — he was primarily concerned with acts of criticism and scholarship here, probably not being aware of fanfiction at the time — is its own self-contained work, and not a kind of “lens” to view the original through. That is, T. S. Eliot’s famous essay about Huckleberry Finn is just as much an original piece of work as his The Waste Land is. The audience for criticism, then, reads criticism to get “something good” out of it, just as they might read the “original” pieces that the criticism is based on. Hopefully I was clear enough there to illustrate why it doesn’t matter if a critic is objective or subjective, but here’s the short version: it doesn’t matter because readers read the criticism to be entertained, given that intellectual stimulation is just another form of entertainment.
The second part of the above quotation is important as well, and also provides another reason why we might consider sticking to the “everything’s subjective” view. Frye argues, and I agree, that claims of objective reading lead to censorship. “This is good” and “this is bad” are judgments passed on the works in question, just as much as verdicts are in the courtroom. However, recast thost statements: “I thought it was good” and “I thought it was bad” say the same thing — because anyone who spends a moment to think about the first pair of statements will likely believe they’re opinions anyway. What the second pair of statements does is allow for disagreement. Of course we can disagree with any statement, but discussion, criticism — the forms of entertainment we’re concerned with here — aren’t safe when things are phrased as fact. (I know this forthcoming example has exceptions, just bear with me.) We can argue with theories about why gravity exists — scientists don’t know yet why mass, rotation, and other things cause bodies to pull at one another — but we can’t argue with the facts that gravity does exist.
Like the cast of House often say — there are two diagnoses, and only one of them has a solution. We don’t need a “solution” so much as a continuation of our discourse, but I would claim that discourse can’t function at its best when objective judgments rule the day. On the other hand, discussion can take full flight when we all accept that it’s just our opinions — because, re: Derrida, we’re all just entertaining each other.
