Conclusion: Nothing Better than a Theory

Summary

Oh, theory

Yes

There is nothing better

Than a theory

[…]

An unrealizable theory

Has just been realized

I am happier than I thought I was going to be when we started.

– Carla Harryman, ‘There Is Nothing Better Than A Theory’

‘Oh, theory’, writes Carla Harryman in a 1984 verse play, a line to be read perhaps offhandedly, perhaps exasperatedly, perhaps affectionately: ‘Oh, theory’, in the same tones as ‘Oh, you’. For those who engage with the humanities, ‘theory’ is at the same time strange and familiar, difficult and passé. So her ironic statement that ‘There is nothing better / Than a theory’ exposes both the ideal that theory is supposed to solve problems and the practical upshot that it never does. Barthes's writings are full of theories which can never be realised, but this fact is what makes them useful to writers and to active, writerly readers. ‘The theory of the Text’, Barthes’s ‘From Work to Text’ concludes, ‘can coincide only with the practice of writing’. The theory that is not a theory of anything, but just Theory, is the only kind of theory that has no practical application, but just goes on to make more of itself. This is only true for a given value of ‘practical’, however; as we have seen, ‘the practice of writing’ with and after Barthes transformed the way we think about authorship, readership, and our relationship to a text.

Engagements with Barthes are specific to a given time and place. For Forrest-Thomson, the mid-to-late Barthes goes too far, but we will never know what Forrest-Thomson thought of the very late Barthes, his quest for the novelistic and retreat from the avant-garde in The Preparation of the Novel. For Silliman in 1975, the early Barthes of Writing Degree Zero provides a few key ideas which are extracted to form a system which in fact has very little to do with what Barthes was developing at the time. Some of the Language writers and similar avant-garde thinkers tried to move closer to the text of Barthes, but they likewise found that he conflicted with their ideas: his focus on the novel was old-fashioned, and surely poetry was what offered true textual freedom and bliss?