Macherey-- Conflicting Ideals

Pierre Macherey’s excerpt from “A Theory of Literary Production” focuses on the relationships between different ideals and how they contradict. These contradictions are portrayed to be vital for critics to analyze literary production. With that being said, critics must search and examine what the author isn’t saying in order to truly decipher a piece, instead of focusing only on what an author states. “Speech eventually has nothing more to tell us: we investigate the silence, for it is the silence that is doing the speaking” (Macherey, 17). Here, we see this idea of the spoken and unspoken, leaving us to wonder what is more important, the speech, or what is not stated by the author. The unspoken is what Macherey is more interested in—which I find very interesting. Now I’m having a difficult time thinking about all of the times I’ve read pieces and not thought about what was not stated by the author—haha.

            Macherey also discusses the concept of incompleteness. Books and texts are seen to be incomplete because we cannot assume, as the audience, the authors true thoughts. This goes back to the idea of the unspoken, which I previously mentioned. Macherey refers to this “missing piece” to a literary work as the “area of shadow.” “The recognition of the area of shadow in or around the work is the initial moment of criticism” (Macherey, 15). Criticism comes into play when we look at what is not said by the author—introducing implicit and explicit. Implicit is generally understood as not being directly stated, where as explicit is directly stated. From what I understand, the explicit part of a piece is what is written and the implicit part of the piece is what lies in the “shadow.” The implicit aspect is what critics focus on speaking the truth about.

            I found this reading terribly interesting (and complex) because it left me pondering the silence. I now have all of these contradicting ideals in my head and cant help but think about them when reading something! To explore what is unspoken in hopes of finding out the truth is pretty radical.