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T H E O R Y
o f literature to the problem o f identity, which has been so central to re
cent theory. Is the self something given or something made, and should it
be conceived in individual or in social terms? Literature has always been
concerned with such questions, and literary works offer a range o f implicit
models o f how identity is formed. There are narratives where identity is es
sentially determined by birth: the son o f a king raised by shepherds is still
fundamentally a king and rightfully becomes king when his identity is dis
covered. In other narratives characters change according to the changes in
their fortunes; they acquire identity through identifications, which may go
awry but have powerful effects; or else identity is based on personal quali
ties that are revealed during the tribulations o f a life.
The explosion o f recent theorizing about race, gender, and sexuality
in the field o f literary studies may owe a good deal to the fact that litera
ture provides rich materials for complicating political and sociological ac
counts o f the role o f such factors in the construction o f identity. (I think,
for instance, o f Eve Sedgwick’s and Judith Butler’s discussions o f cross-gen-
dered identifications in Willa Gather’s novels— accounts undreamt o f by
sociologists.)^^
Consider the underlying question o f whether the identity o f the
subject is something given or something constructed. Not only are both
options amply represented in literature, but the complications or entan
glements are frequently laid out for us, as in the common plot where char
acters, we say, “discover” who they are, not by learning something about
their past but by acting in such a way that they become what then turns
out, in some sense, to have been their “nature.”
This structure, where you have to become what you supposedly al
ready were, has emerged as a paradox or aporia for recent theory, but it can
be considered a defining feature o f narratives. Western novels reinforce the
notion o f an essential self by suggesting that the self which emerges from
trying encounters with the world was in some sense there all along, as the
basis for the actions that, from the perspective o f readers, bring this self
into being. The fundamental identity o f character emerges as the result of
12.
See Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, “Across Gender, Across Sexuality: Willa
Gather and Others,”
South Atlantic Quarterly 88, no. i (winter 1989): 53-72; and
Judith Butler, “Dangerous Grossing: Willa Gather’s Masculine Names,” in Bod
ies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits o f “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993),
143-66.
The Literary in Theory
3 5
actions, o f struggles with the world, but then this identity is posited as the
basis, even the cause o f those actions. Isn’t that what we are struggling with
in theory’s debates about essentialism— ^whether certain aspects o f identi
ty are essential, necessary, or whether all are constructed and in that sense
contingent?’^
A good deal o f recent theory can be seen as an attempt to sort out the
paradoxes that often inform the treatment o f identity in literature. Liter
ary works characteristically represent individuals, so struggles about iden
tity are struggles within the individual and between individual and group:
characters struggle against or comply with social norms and expectations.
In theoretical writings, though, arguments about social identity tend to fo
cus on group identities: what is it to be a woman? to be Black? to be gay? to
be a man? Thus there are tensions between literary explorations and critical
or theoretical claims. Here we arrive at a crux o f the literary in theory— a
tension between the literary and theory. The power o f literary representa
tions depends on their special combination o f singularity and exemplar-
ity: readers encounter concrete portrayals o f Prince Hamlet or Jane Eyre or
Huckleberry Finn and with them the presumption that these characters’
problems are exemplary. But exemplary o f what? The novels don’t tell. It
is as critics or theorists that readers take up the question of exemplarity, in
such a way as to decide and tell us what group or class o f people the char
acter instantiates: is Hamlet’s condition “universal”? Is Jane Eyre’s the pre
dicament o f women in general? Even when such a decision is not explicit,
it can provide the critical account with pathos or intensity, a sense o f im
portant stakes, mitigating the effects o f abstractness or distance.
Theoretical treatments o f identity can seem reductive in comparison
with the subtle explorations in novels, which are able to finesse the prob
lem o f general claims by presenting singular cases while relying on a gener
alizing force that is left implicit— perhaps we are all Oedipus, or Hamlet,
or Emma Bovary, or Janie Starks. And it is for this reason that theoretical
reflection on the structures o f exemplarity o f literature are crucial to both
the kinds o f uses theory is making o f literature these days, in its reflections
13.
See, e.g., Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking (New York: Routledge, 1989).
The most powerful and influential exploration of this aporia, through the theori
zation of a performative notion of identity, comes in Judith Buder, Gender Trou
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