Stated in its barest sense, the foundational idea upon which an ideological critique of popular literature stands is the strategy of understanding a given society through an analysis of one of its literary practices. But this seemingly simple idea raises the complex question on how is it possible for a society in general and its ideology in particular to be mirrored in its literary practices. Pedestrian reason demonstrates to us rather convincingly that there exists a chasm between society and ideology as belonging to the order of the real on one hand, and the literary practices as belonging to the order of the imaginary on the other hand.

As early as the 60's, we already had some Filipino literary theorists who speculated on the links between society and ideology, and the literary practices. In a 1964 Symposium on the Relation of Literature and Social Change, Florentino S. Alberto already asserted:

Literature is a social institution: it is created by the writer, who is a member of the society. Its medium is language, which is a social creation. It represents life, which is a social reality. It is addressed to men who form a social body. It is centrally conditioned by social and other forces and in turn, exerts social influence.¹

Clearly, Alberto took long strides and failed to notice the problem of the chasm between the real and the imaginary. Though Alberto's assertion strikes the heart of our concern, it needs finer tuning and more theorizing in order to successfully mediate the distances between society and ideology on side, and the literary practices on the other. The broad outline the necessary theoretical endeavor may be provided by the incisive thoughts of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in their effort to solve the seemingly paradoxical relationship between man and his social world.² Whereas, the social world is the creation of man, man is also a creation of his social world. Berger and Luckmann broke this circuitous genetic relationship by schematizing three heuristic moments: externalization, objectification and internalization. These, we graphically represent in the following chart.

Berger and Luckmann affirmed that the social world is a creation of man. Meaning, from the cacophony of sense impressions and bewildering details of experience, man organizes a social world. Berger and Luckmann call this process the moment of the externalization, or the production of the social world. After this production, man forgets that the social world was his creation. Through language and other discursive practices of man, the social world acquires a reified existence. Berger and Luckmann named this stage the moment of objectification. Finally, when the objectified social world acts back on the human consciousness during the process of socialization, the third stage occurs, the moment of internalization. Thus, through a dialectical loop of relationship, Berger and Luckmann were able to traverse the distance between man and his social world, a distance which is similarly a distance between the real and the imaginary.³

Using Berger and Luckmann's schema, we can also plot a dialectical loop of relationship between society and ideology on one hand, and the literary practices on the other hand. This, we graphically represent in the following chart.

Though the Berger-Luckmannian dialectical loop can traverse the distance between society and ideology, and literary practices, the resulting bridge is still too shaky and unfinished. In traversing the loop, we are confounded with two theoretical problems. The first of these problems lies in between society and ideology, and the literary practices during the Berger-Luckmannian moment of externalization: How far can we assert that literary practices are products of a society and not an idiosyncratic document of the individual psychology and experiences of the author, and how far can we say that literary practices mirror the collective psychology and ideology of the society? The second of these theoretical problems lies in between the literary practices, and society and ideology during the Berger-Luckmannian moment of internalization: How far can we assert that indeed literary practices could alter and form human consciousness in particular and society in general?

SOCIETY, IDEOLOGY AND TEXT IN THE MOMENT OF EXTERNALIZATION

With the first theoretical problem -- that is, how far can we assert that literary practices are products of a society and not an idiosyncratic document of the individual psychology and experiences of the author, and how far can we say that literary practices mirror the collective psychology and ideology of the society? -- we can find a resolution in the idea of the popular culture. This means we have to identify some of the literary practices as belonging to the sphere of the popular culture. John Storey in his book An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture equated popular culture with 'the culture of the people and for the people', 'the culture that originates from the people', and 'the authentic culture of the people'.⁴ Though Storey does not resolve our first problem with his slogan-like assertions, he is nonetheless leading us to a very promising theoretical path. The sociologist and theorist of social development David McClelland in his effort to justify the move of one of his students to read the Greek spirit from the works of Homer and Hesiod, wrote:

Homer and Hesiod. . . were extraordinary men. They captured the spirit of their times as their contemporary popularity attests, and that popularity may have actually helped create the spirit of the times. In other words, popularity becomes another and probably better guarantee of representativeness than sheer number of authors. Homer and Hesiod were classics during the rise of Greek civilization and continued to be quoted throughout its course, though as a basis for further commentary in later centuries. Why? The assumption is that they were popular because they somehow managed to express what many of the early Greeks were feeling and wanted to hear and read about.⁵

The Homeric and Hesiodic works, though exceptional in their literary qualities, owing to their popularity can be assumed as articulative of the Greek spirit. Thus, though written by an individual person, some of the literary practices, more specially those that belong to the sphere of the popular culture, by the reason of their popularity had to accommodate the consciousness of the society, making them in the real sense products of a given society and mirrors of its ideology and collective consciousness. Alexander Nehamas, in his essay Writer, Text, Work, Author, gave this insight another turn by a radical strategy of deconstructing the idea of authorship. For him, the author is just a discursive entity that emerges from the juxtaposition of writer and text, and of the critic and interpretation.

In general, the author is to be construed as a plausible historical variant of the writer, as a character the writer would have been. The author actually means what the writer could have meant, even if the writer never did. In producing texts, writers are immersed in a system with an independent life of its own. Many of its institutional or linguistic features, many of its values or connections to other systems, are beyond the most unconscious grasp of any writer.⁶

By defacing authorship, Nehamas places a number of literary practices closer to their social matrix. For him, the writer is more like a medium of his society than an authoritative figure standing behind his text ready to clarify all points and ready to defend all assertions. Taken in the context of McClelland and Nehamas' arguments, Storey's claims that popular culture is the culture of the people and for the people, the culture the originates from the people, and the authentic culture of the people acquire a lot more sense. With these, we can now confidently assert that some of the literary practices, specially those that belong to the sphere of the popular culture, are indeed products of a society and not merely idiosyncratic documents of the individual psychology and experiences of the writer, and that they can indeed mirror the collective psychology and ideology of the society.

SOCIETY, IDEOLOGY AND TEXT IN THE MOMENT OF INTERNALIZATION

Moving on to the second question--that is, how far can we assert that indeed literary practices could alter and form human consciousness, in particular and society in general?--necessitates a two-level solution. The first level would deal with the question of alteration and formation of human and collective consciousness in relation with the possibilities of learning from literature. The second level would probe more deeply into the process of the constitution of the self with reference to literature's most evocative aspect, that of narrativity.

We might not be directly aware of them, but there are in fact a number of learning processes that we can glean from an engagement with a literary practice. David Novitz, in his book Knowledge, Fiction and Imagination, enumerates five different types of this learning process. First, literary practices may provide their readers with 'propositional beliefs' or 'factual beliefs' about their world.⁷ Novitz calls this the purely cognitive learning. Second, Novitz writes, "as we know from the many censorship boards all over the world, it is possible to acquire certain values or attitudes from fictional worlds."⁸ Such type of learning he calls purely affective learning. Aside from these two purer instances of learning, Novitz argues that there is also a range of more practical learning experiences, which he groups into three categories: (1) skills of strategy, (2) cognitive skills, and (3) emphatic beliefs. "A favorite hero," Novitz writes, "may furnish us with purely practical strategies for handling a tricky situation: strategies which we may adopt when we find ourselves in a similar situation."⁹ This is an instance of skill of strategy. Alternatively, skill of strategy may mean intellectual strategies imparted by a fictional work that may enable us "to take more aspects of a problem into account, and in this way to think more comprehensively and efficiently about it."¹⁰ Literature, then, can stretch our thinking by "drawing to our attention previously unconsidered aspects of the problem."¹¹ Cognitive skills refers to the "radically new ways of thinking about or perceiving aspects of our environment." Literature, specially novels and plays, "may enable us to place new and helpful constructions on an otherwise baffling array of events."¹² Lastly, emphatic beliefs refers to the "beliefs about, indeed knowledge of, what it feels like to be in certain complex and demanding situations. . . A feature of such an awareness is that it is irreducibly non propositional, in the sense that it cannot be captured or adequately conveyed in linguistic descriptions."¹³ Thus, Novitz enumerates five learning instances from literature which may alter individual consciousness specifically, and by extension the collective consciousness.

In the past, narratives were placed in a rather inferior light in relation to the real. Reality is reality and narratives are not part of reality, they belong to the order of the imaginary, the world of fiction. This, asymmetrical juxtaposition of the narrative on one hand, and the real on the other hand runs back to ancient Greece's penchant for diegesis (description), at the expense of mimesis (imitation). The postmodern distrust for objectivity invited many theorist to re-examine the long standing opposition between mimesis and diegesis, and between the narrative and the real. Among these theorists are the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur and the American post-structuralist historiographer Hayden White. But it was the American literary critic Frederic Jameson who forwarded the most stunning deconstruction of the above-mentioned binary opposites. Jameson looked at the narrative as if it were Kantian categories of space and time. "Narrative may be taken not as features of our experience but as one of the abstract or 'empty' coordinates within which we come to know the world, a contentless form that our perception imposes on the flux of reality, giving it, as we perceive, the comprehensible order we call experience."¹⁴ For Jameson it is not a matter of making narratives in order to make sense out of the world, rather it is a matter of the world coming to us in the shape of narratives. Thus, what we previously esteemed as real are now revealed as an entity constituted by narratives.

Through deconstruction, these postmodern theorists have placed the narrative on equal footing with reality. Mimesis is now as good as diegesis, or for the incurable pessimists, diegesis is now as bad as mimesis. Unhampered by the old chasm between reality and the narrative, they started to theorize on the evocative power of the narrative. Ricoeur, appropriating Hans-Georg Gadamer's idea of fusion of horizon, explores the subtle processes involved at the very moment of the self's reading of a narrative.

A text is not something closed in upon itself, it is the projection of a new universe distinct from that in which we live. To appropriate a work through reading is to unfold the world horizon implicit in it which includes the actions, the characters and the events of the story told. As a result, the reader belongs at once to the work's horizon of experience in imagination and also that of his or her own real action. The horizon or expectation and the horizon of experience continually confront one another and fuse together.¹⁵

Ricoeur was highlighting here the dialogue involving the self and the narrative. The narrative's covert otherness unfolds to the self during the moment of reading. Reading is the event during which the sameness of the self confronts the otherness of the narrative, and sustaining this confrontation may result to the fusion of the same and the other. That means the same will appropriate the otherness in the former's horizon. Or more simply, the self will appropriate the universe that previously was covert in the narrative. Thus, narratives can indeed change, or more radically can constitute and reconstitute the self singularly, and the society collectively.

The evocative power of narratives, that potentially can change, constitute and reconstitute the self, seem to be rooted in their being foundational to human understanding-in their being similar to the Kantian categories of space and time, to use Jameson's analogy. Our personal experiences and life, the others' experiences and life stories, nature and even science are only possible because of narratives. Take away narratives and there will hardly be anything left in the human consciousness, if there will be anything left at all. Ricoeur even talks about our human self as a narrative identity which is constantly interpreted and re-interpreted "in the light of the narratives proposed to us by our culture."¹⁶

Thus, Ricoeur continues

our self understanding presents the same features of traditionality as the understanding of a literary work. It is in this way that we learn to become the narrator and the hero of our own story, without becoming the author of our own life.¹⁷

Hence, by linking the literary practices' most evocative aspect, their narrativity, with the moment of the constitution and re-constitution of the self we finally closed the gap between the literary practices on one hand and society and ideology on the other hand during the Berger-Luckmannian moment of internalization. Ideology that is dormant and covert in the literary practices unfolds itself and diffuses back to the society in moment of reading. We may cite here has an example the formation of values, a rather important component to any ideological system. It would be absurd to think that values are transmitted to the members of a society through a dogmatic constitution. Values, as Charles Altieri has lucidly demonstrated in his essay From Expressivist Aesthetics to Expressivist Ethics, are "established by the authority of personal exemplars, not by the authority of rules or dogmas, or even shared material interests." ¹⁸ The transmission of values is a matter of mediating the distance between the individual's attitudes and priorities on one hand and the society's values on the other. For Altieri, it is the symbolic values embedded in the society's literary practices that can effectively mediate the distance between the individual and the society. "Here the conjunction takes explicit human form, allowing a direct equation between the psychological processes that constitute the ego ideals and ideal egos and the symbolic ones sustained by cultural traditions."¹⁹

With Novitz isolation of the multiple learning possibilities from literature, with the literary practices' narrativity, and the with the self's openness to the evocative powers of the narrative, we can confidently assert that indeed literary practices could alter and form human consciousness, in particular and society in general?

CONCLUDING REMARKS

At this point, we may now represent our formulated theoretical framework for an ideological critique of popular literature with the following chart.

The foundational idea upon which an ideological critique of popular literature stands is the strategy of understanding a given society through an analysis of one of its literary practices. This is possible for the reason that the literary practices, especially those belonging to the sphere of the popular culture dialectically mirror the society in general and its ideology in particular. This is because of the fact that literary practices are constituted by the society at the heuristic moment of externalization, and constitutive of the self and the society at the heuristic moment of internalization. Thus, if Ricoeur insisted on the understanding man via the long route of the analysis of narratives, we similarly will try to a society's ideology via the long route of the analysis of one of its cultural practices.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alberto, Florentino S. "Social Comment in the Theatre." Literature and Society: A Symposium on the Relation of Literature and Social Change. Manila: Alberto S. Florentino, 1964.

Altieri, Charles. "From Expressivist Aesthetics to Expressivist Ethics" Anthony Cascardi, Ed. Literature and the Question of Philosophy. London: John Hopkins University Press.

Berger, Peter & Luckmann, Thomas. The Social Construction of Reality. New York: Anchor Books, 1967.

Dowling, William. Jameson, Althusser, Marx: An Introduction to Political Unconscious. New York: Cornell University Press, 1984.

McClelland, David. The Achieving Society. New York: Irvington Publishers.

Nehamas, Alexnader. "Writer, Text, Work, Author." Anthony Cascardi, Ed. Literature and the Question of Philosophy. London: John Hopkins University Press.

Novitz, David. Knowledge, Fiction and Imagination. Philadelphia: Temple University Press: 1987.

Ricoeur, Paul. "Life in Quest of Narrative." David Wood, Ed. On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation. London: Routledge, 1991.

Storey, John. An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture.