CRITERION 9: COMPLEXITY (typical feedback: include something you didn’t include, reductive, simplistic, pat, too easy)
To download my handout on Complexity in pdf, click here.

If your essay claims to present a thesis on a literary subject, and then presents pat simplifications or tidy statements of fact, then you are likely:

a) being shallow (i.e. the opposite of Depth, on which see here);
b) being reductive (glancing over, or removing the rough edges of, something more complicated than you realize);
c) or not writing about literature at all — perhaps by committing the heresy of paraphrase (a term coined by Cleanth Brooks — you can click here to read his whole essay), in which you confuse a literary work with a summary/outline/“gist”/“basic point”/“main idea” of that work, forgetting that the whole point of literature is to do something more than a paraphrase of its content could ever do. 

The job of the humanities scholar is always to think through a complex inquiry. It is never to provide a simple answer. In the process of arguing a complex thesis, it will certainly be necessary for you to express simple ideas.   However, it must always be clear that those simple ideas are building toward, or making possible, a complex inquiry. Literature is fueled by complexity — by ambiguity, inquiry, imperfect reflection.  Straighten out the tangles and it dies.

RAMIFY. Use if/then statements (see Rigor page) and dig (see Depth page) to find a cause for every effect—and to think through an array of effects for every cause. In your drafting process, allow your argumentation to branch out; hone in on one branch, by understanding it in relation to the limb, trunk, and roots from which it grows, and to every twig, leaf, and fruit it produces. (Prune those ramifications with Focus when you edit.)    

LOOK FOR TROUBLE.  Develop your hypothesis from a close reading that hones in on ambiguities (see Specificity page), rather than from broad ideas and assumptions you already had before you started.  Then seek out evidence that unsettles, undermines, or disproves your hypothesis (see Rigor page) or makes it redundant (see Innovation page).  That will force you to continually re-articulate your hypothesis to adjust to challenges.

Prompts and feedback from your professor or instructor often urge you to include, cover, or consider a topic that you wouldn’t otherwise connect to your hypothesis.  That usually is not an instruction to add tangential material to your essay (see Focus page); it probably is an instruction to use the new topic as a way of looking at your thesis, to complicate it productively (think of it as a new lens to be used in studying the specimen, rather than a new specimen to study).

FOCUS ON FORM. Complexity tends to inhere in form (how something is said) more than content (what is said). If your argument isn’t centered fully on form (which is often the best choice), then it should engage with form fundamentally, and then should return again and again to form.  DISTINGUISH THE TEXT FROM ITS AUTHOR AND AUDIENCE: You can only study the bow and arrow, not the archer or target: but by studying the bow and arrow, you can learn plenty about its aims and effects.

YOU DON’T KNOW THE AUTHOR!  Nothing limits complexity like the intentional fallacy (a term coined by William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, filtered through Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, and here reductively summarized): it’s the specious idea that an author’s intent can ever be known by the scholar, that such an intent could ever be articulated or understood plainly even by the author, and especially that such an intent determines or governs the meaning of the author’s work after it has been written.  Utterances bear meaning independently of the utterer.  It helps to remember that the author’s apparent identity, as received by any reader, emanates not directly from the author’s mind but rather as a construction of the texts associated with that author—the “author function” can be analyzed as a made object, a product (not producer) of the text.  

YOU DON’T KNOW ME!  Don’t try to sidestep complex analyses by making claims about what “people feel” or “readers think” in relation to your subject.  If you are planning on doing many years of surveys (perhaps raising the dead in the process?) you might begin to scratch at the fullness of the range of responses an audience might have to a single moment in a text.  Otherwise, you may be committing the affective fallacy, another Wimsatt and Beardsley term.  

LITERATURE HAS NO “WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON.”  No fictional character is “really thinking” anything—they’re not real. There’s nothing that a literary text is “really about”—no secret code or message that your essay will suddenly reveal. Behind any mask you pull away is another mask: what literary scholars are interested in is the way the artifice is constructed, the complex of illusions and impressions that art creates.