There are few things as depressing as a shower full of motorcycle parts.
Eventually, these parts will be scrubbed and cleaned, scoured free of rust and dirt. They'll be repainted and reassembled, pieces of an overgrown model kit for slightly older boys. All that's missing is the smell of the glue.
But for now, they're just filling up the shower.
I've got to admit, it's hard for me to see how it's all going to come together. Though I theoretically understand that the knee bone is connected to the leg bone, it's hard for me to visualize how all these seemingly random parts are going to come together to make a coherent whole.
This might be because I'm not a New Critic. New Criticism, in case you don't remember, is a mode of literary criticism that reached its zenith in the 1950s. It is, in essence, a positivist approach to literary analysis. The idea is that literary study is an objective endeavor, a hard science, like math or chemistry. Proper literary interpretation comes from a close reading of the text and the text alone. A text that sits on the library shelf for 100 years and is never read still "means" something, because the meaning is embodied in the lines and dots of ink printed on the page. Meaning, then, does not derive from historical context, authorial intention, or even the response of the reader. In fact, in 1954 Wimsatt and Beardsley coined the phrase "the intentional fallacy" specifically to refute the notion that what the author intended a work to mean should have any bearing on what it actually does mean.
For meaning comes from the text and only from the text, sola scriptora style. We can't know what was going on in Shakespeare's head, but we do know what he wrote down on the page. And so New Critics study literary devices such as meter, rhyme, metaphor, syntax, diction, and the like because they're the building blocks of meaning, amino acids to a literary protein. And, because words on a page are static and quantifiable, the entire process of literary analysis is rendered objective. Furthermore, because of the sanctity of the text itself, it is unthinkable to separate meaning from the form in which it is packaged, a particularly egregious sin known as "the heresy of paraphrase." Form and meaning are inextricably intertwined in what New Critics call "organic unity." And so the method of analysis known as "close reading" (which is the method taught in nearly every high school in America) is a New Critical method; to understand what a text "means" it must be taken apart, analyzed piece by piece, and then carefully reassembled in order to construct meaning. If the job is done correctly, the pieces will come together, merging into a revelatory mass of form and meaning. This is what constitutes "good" literature: a perfect marriage of packaging and content.
There's a certain elegance and beauty to the New Critical approach, and as an English teacher I find myself daily indebted to the New Critics for their contributions to the field of literary analysis. Of course, New Criticism as an end in and of itself died a spectacularly fiery death in the 1960 and 70s with the advent of feminist, post-colonial, and other contextually-focused modes of analysis, and this is probably for the best. It has a tendency to promote the interpretations of a select few (read: white, male, educated, European) as the "proper" interpretations, and its internal logic doesn't hold up to serious scrutiny. But the tools given us by the New Critical establishment are good tools, very good tools, indeed. It is a rigorous and demanding approach to literary interpretation, and that rigor is now an integral part of the discipline.
But what does this have to do with the manifold in my shower?
If my motorcycle were a text, a New Critic would say that the literary elements - the pistons, the suspension, the wiring harness - all work together to create the "meaning," which is, I presume, to ride the darn thing. Without all elements working in harmony, the bike doesn't do what it's supposed to do. It is a very poor motorcycle indeed that won't take you from point A to point B, and it's a very poor text that doesn't have all its parts working together to mean something. I get that.
But is the purpose of a motorcycle to get from A to B, or is it something more? Is the meaning of a text merely a function of its constituent parts, or is it something more, something greater? What the New Critics can't account for is mystery and joy, or the wind-in-your-hair, sheer terror acceleration of a good book. They can't account for the hope and freedom of the open road, the searing loss of coming to the end of a multi-volume series, the quiet beauty of an open book, spine up, waiting for you on the kitchen table. And while none of these things are possible without the marriage of form and meaning, neither can any of them be so reduced.
So when I look at the pile of motorcycle droppings in my shower, I don't know exactly how they're all going to come together. What I do know, however, is that when they do, it's going to be more than any Yale educated, stuffy, uptight New England critical theorist could ever imagine: it's going to be magic.
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