A disadvantage, it must be said, to studying a lot of literature is that you have to spend too much time with the type of person whose soul has been sucked away by theory. I’m an English major at the university, and I have to be around them all the time.

I understand that the woes of a senior English major seem far removed from the quiet, semi-idyllic neighborhood we call home (actually, I still don’t live in Tenney-Lapham, though I kind of feel like I do; now I live in the Old Marketplace neighborhood), but it’s frightening how much of what goes on in a literature department does affect even the quietest of neighborhoods in the smallest of cities.

Let me tell you how:

We whose lives have been devoured by literature started out as youngsters who just liked to read a lot, mostly (come on, admit it) because we were too socially inept to get any real friends, so we had to make do with Frodo and Huckleberry and James with his giant peach. That was fine. Most of us somehow made it through high school and into college, and eventually began to figure out how to talk to real, live people. Some of us even have girlfriends now.

But that love of fantasy, the thrill of meeting someone new and having to imagine what they look like, never dies, ever. The price of a mostly-friendless childhood has gained us a lifelong connection to the world of the imagination, a dark, sparkling, fantastic place that is always welcoming, always happy to see you return. A great weight, which you hadn’t even realized was there, lifts off your shoulders as you enter. It feels wonderful, amazing, freeing.

Nothing ruins that faster than critical theory. Have you, dear reader, ever read or tried to read anything by Jacques Derrida? (If you don’t know who he is, he’s a French critical theorist who writes incredibly long treatises on subjects which never seem to, technically, appear anywhere in the body of the text. Instead the text’s all taken up with sentences like "Difference is not only irreducible to any ontological or theological (ontotheology) reappropriation, but as the very opening of the space in which ontotheology produces its system and history, it includes ontotheology, inscribing it and exceeding it..." See? Pretty dense, huh?)

If you have read him, congratulations. If you haven’t, I say go for it. It’s an exercise in exploration, a twist of the mind, a struggle to wrap your mind around Derrida’s wildly obscure thoughts and associations. I read Derrida. I thought it was fun.

But theory, as I said above, is exercise. It’s not the real thing! It’s practice! Do you know what happens when theory is left by itself, unattached to that aforementioned naïve, passionate world of the imagination? You get something that I am not sure I can write in this paper, but I will say it begins with an “m” and rhymes with exacerbation: an un-creative act. Theory is practice.

Now, hold with me, I’m getting to why this concerns you: our world is held together by stories. Who we are, how this world seems to us, how we interpret ourselves, our families, and even the ‘Universe Guy’ (as a friend of mine calls it), if you truck with such stuff; these are all filtered through the stories we tell ourselves. Furthermore, stories do come true. There’s only so long we could tell ourselves the story of Manifest Destiny before some white guy found himself peering through a telescope at Hawaii, asking for his rifle. And how many movies and books like 1984 and Bladerunner can we read and see before someone comes up with the idea of the Total Information Awareness Act, a piece of lawmaking so cartoonishly scary in name that it seems better suited to a 25-cent paperback homage to George Orwell?

What I’m saying is, storytellers have a responsibility. And right now there’s this big rift in their ranks, one side composed of, well, hacks, who may really enjoy telling stories, and have that sense of what people want to see on a screen or in a novel, what imagination is all about, but probably don’t have much theoretical knowledge (I realize I’m making a generalization here, bear with me). On the other side we have the Derridas of the world, theorists who interpret and study literature but obviously have not talked to a hobbit themselves in decades. Do you see where I’m heading?

Storytellers cannot be theorists. They cannot be hacks. They need to be right in between. They need both sides. That’s why it gets to me to see so many English majors walking around, glaze-eyed, pondering Foucault and Derrida. Their potential as storytellers is dwindling.

Do you see, Tenney-Lapham, why the troubles of a university English department, thirty blocks from your door, will end up affecting you and your neighbors? And Madison and Wisconsin and the world?

This world needs stories like a river needs rainwater, like a mountain range needs earthquakes. We must keep flowing. We must grow. The critics have their place; it is the interpretation of literature. It is a valuable role. But writers and storytellers cannot begin to think like critics, to forget that world of magic-dust and enchanted forests, because that world is where our world comes from. The veil between them is thin, and stories must be told. What grows in the mind will be what arises in the world. Pay attention to what arises in the mind, and don’t let the Derridas of the world plant too many seeds in there.

-Connor Wood

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