Captain Outrageous, Macherey

"work does not say what it does not say" - Macherey
"if the author does not say what he states he doesn't necessarily state what he says." -Macherey
"I've no idea what I'm talking about...I'm trapped in this body and I can't get out." -Thom Yorke

Let me start off by saying that this was one seriously confusing text. It felt that he was saying the same thing repetitively though moving through different things to say.

Moving on.

My first subject regarding this text is the bottomless hole that is created through the journey of Macherey. We live in an absence that isn't necessarily there relying on or not relying on an ideological theme due or not due to an external history caused or not caused by ideologies that form questions that shouldn't be questions but are questions necessary to ask due to the unnecessariness of...something. That I don't know. Because apparently I'm not supposed to know? But it is that not-knowing that is important? Hence the Thom Yorke quote. No clue what I'm talking about...but I can't seem to get outside of it anyway.

My second subject is this: allegory, symbolism, theme. These things, I interpreted at least, are sort of what Macherey was getting at in terms of a work saying or not saying things, stating but not stating, and of course all that confusion about the history. For example, "The Crucible" by Arthur Miller. The book DOES NOT DIRECTLY SAY "this book is ACTUALLY about the McCarthy era and the concepts and conspiracies behind being red-listed". The book does not directly say anything about being a factual account of the Salem Witch Trials either. This is the ever widening 'gap' of relationship that Macherey described between what is there and what isn't there. Furhtermore this connects to the issue of questioning. Eventually, Macherey explains that looking for meaning within the work is good for asking the questions because we will find that the work is already prepared to answer them. There's no great or grand outside theory of the book- this obscene silence to be answered or completed- it is all WITHIN the book (unless it is a Toni Morrisson book but that is my personal opinion) due to an unspoken meaning; or, as Macherey says, the necessary secret that gives a book its life. So, if Arthur Miller had, within the text of "The Crucible" somehow told us what he was saying, the book wouldn't be saying very much at all. In that matter, "The Lord of the Flies" wouldn't say much about society. But these examples fall under a specific group, however, that's the connection I made.

I think, in the end, Macherey is very very complicatedly saying that what is not directly stated within a text is not necessarily what the text isn't saying. Not that that is any less complicated. The "What does this mean?" concept must be studied, as he says, the rupture between the questions of within and outside.

What it all comes down to is "All that a man allows to appear"- whatever you allow to be seen is what shall be seen as author or as reader, at the same time mangled underneath 'history' and 'ideology' and theme and so very incredibly open and realistic.