Value
In an episode of The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon and the boys are shopping for new comic books when the storekeeper comes over and tells them that the new issue of Hell Boy is “mind-blowing”. Sheldon is furious at this information and complains that now his mind has already been blown, thanks to that information, it cannot possibly be blown again.
Undoubtedly everyone has had a similar experience of a friend giving their opinions on something. Ascribing their own personal value to something, and this in turn affects your own perception of the value of that object. Your opinion of the value may not have changed, but your perceptions have had to alter to this new opinion, and so you cannot remain the same.
In chapter one of Barbara Hernstein Smith's book, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory, she explores how this value is created, how we react to it, and how we ensure or dismiss its continuing value. In particular, Smith calls for literary theory to, “explore and describe the dynamics of that system and to relate its operations to everything else that we know about human behaviour and culture.” (p. 16) This rather grandiose idea obviously has inherent problems, of which she points out a few, but the sheer imposibility of creating a universal resource like that is what strikes me first.
Forget for a moment about the historical problems and the fact that we cannot possibly know the peoples of that history. Forget about the problems of our cultural understandings, and the problems of our Western viewpoint in approaching other cultures. Imagine that we are building this database right here, right now, and only with the immediate and contemporary information. Is it even geographically possible to visit every single collection of peoples on the planet? Is it possible to record every single viewpoint? And what of the cultural activities that simply cannot be expressed intellectually, that are all in the process of being there and personally experiencing?
When I consider the magnitude of that impossibility I have to look back to Smith's earlier statement, in reference to Shakespeare's sonnet 116, “its really nice to hear a good strong, unqualified absolute or two.” (p. 8) Which, I feel, describes completely our very Western and modern desire to know the definite scientific answers to the great questions in life. The need for boundaries and rules that we can, in turn, play off and develop ourselves in relation to. Smith acknowledges that our ideas of value are very specific to out time, place, history, etc. and I for one am glad that I have that background with which to approach novels.
Without my personal history and values I doubt that I would have the first clue where to start with evaluating a novel. And Smith praises this type of personal standpoint as a way for more evaluation, not less. To acknowledge yourself and your values in order to explore how these interact and react with the novel.
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Hernstein Smith, Barbara. Excerpts from Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1988.
