Rizki
Puji Gustian
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Critical
Theory
The Act of Idolization
In
Plato’s Ion, Socrates and Ion are having conversation about whether Ion is
better at other skills than other people whose skills are told in Homer’s
poem(s) and in the society—which are different things—and why Ion only knows
Homer—who wakes Ion up whenever Socrates brings the conversation about him—and
thinks that Homer is “superior” but other poets are “inferior”. Ion admits that
he is better than any other else when he is asked whether he could do the
things that happen in Homer’s poem; however, it is known later that he makes
some blunders when he answers Socrates’ questions. Ion is lost in his own
arrogance, obsessed by Homer and thinks that other poets are not as good as
Homer. In the end, Socrates reveals that Ion hardly knows other poets talked
about yet he criticizes that they are inferior, and is only inspired by Homer.
Frye in his The Function of Criticism at the Present Time also talks about what
the critic should do before he or she criticizes. Firstly, he has to read
literature to create “an inductive survey” of the possessed field and “let his
critical principles” build “themselves solely out of his knowledge” of the
possessed field. He also says that Mr. Eliot means not to say that Dante is a
better poet than Shakespeare or Milton; however he “imposes on literature an
extra-literary schematism”, a kind of “religio-political colour-filter” (p.37).
They are things that are not done by Ion in Plato’s Ion. De Mann in his Resistance to Theory says:
The loftier the aims and the
better the methods of literary theory, the less possible it becomes. Yet
literary theory is not in danger of going under; it cannot help but flourish,
and the more it is resisted, the more it flourishes since the language it
speaks is the language of self-resistance. What remains impossible to decide is
whether this flourishing is a triumph or fall.
It
is stated that theories are not perfect and “the better the methods” make them
become “less possible”. It is what is not realized by Ion that he idolizes what
he knows; however he does not know that what he knows is not perfect and becomes the fall of him.
