Subjectivity, Modernity, and the Uses of Literature
The term “literature” has a fairly wide range of reasonable uses. One can talk of the literature on x—ladybugs or chess or cello varnishes, as may be—and mean only all or much of what has been written about a particular subject. In German-language scholarship, one often begins an essay with a Literaturverzeichnis, a review of the most important prior work on a topic, whatever the topic might be. Children’s literature refers to books specially written for children to enjoy. These uses, however, are surely not what the Nobel or Booker Prize committees have in mind in awarding prizes for literature, nor are they what is suggested by the commendatory adjective “literary,” as in “a literary person” or “of literary merit”; nor do they figure in the senses of English literature or Francophone literature as names for disciplines of study within a university curriculum.
Even where what is in view under the heading of the literary is some sort of value, there are nonetheless many different valuable experiences that literature affords. These include, among others, entertainment, consolation, the pleasures of archaic regression (reminiscent of being read to as a child), the acquisition of historical knowledge, the sharpening of personal or political hope, and absorption in and admiration of verbal virtuosity. It would be a mistake either to overlook or to underrate the considerable variety of uses that works rightly classed as literary can and do invite and support.1
Despite this variety of uses, however, there persists for many people a sense that literature, at least sometimes, has a central and distinctive way of mattering for human life. Such a sense supports the existence of special curricula of literary study, including the cultivation of habits of close reading, as these habits have developed with increasing, multiple specificities from the late eighteenth century to the present. Both literary scholars and many ordinary people now read novels, short stories, films, lyrics, plays, television programs, and advertising, among other things, with habits of attention to form, diction, imagery, ideology, materiality, use, and much more. Yet it is not always clear exactly what close reading discerns, nor is it clear why one should bother to read certain works closely, rather than doing the many other things there are to do in life. Somehow—or so many people think—a life would be less rich or less informed by sympathetic understanding without engagement with a specifically literary curriculum or with habits of close reading. But exactly how might this be so, if it is so at all? The undoubted existence of some persons of refined literary experience and sensibility but with little moral discernment or responsiveness shows that reading literature is not by itself sufficient to produce moral understanding. Conversations with actual people—parents, friends, neighbors, and so on—is in most cases far more important than reading in the shaping of character. Could reading some literary works nonetheless help to shape character in valuable ways? Perhaps, but then many literary works are fictions, so that there is no actual person with whom one can immediately sympathize, and some people who read literature intensively may use it mostly as a compensation for the pains of life or as a distraction from them. Might it not be easier and more reliable to learn sympathy by talking at length with wide varieties of people? Is reading literature only a shortcut for that?2 And if it is, then why not read memoirs, history, and journalism instead? Why all that fiction? And if sympathizing with actual persons is the aim ultimately in view, then what is the significance of the specific verbal densities and formal structures of exemplary literary texts? Why are many of them so difficult, and why, if at all, does that matter?
If there is any hope of articulating plausible and useful answers to these questions, then the hard question of what a human life as such is all about will have to be faced. If human lives have no common structure and directions of achievement but instead aim at only whatever individuals, in interaction with possibilities afforded by their cultural settings, arbitrarily undertake to pursue, then literature and literary curricula will have no distinctive places in the cultivation of human life as such, for there will be nothing significantly shared to cultivate.
During the past two hundred to four hundred years in Europe and the Americas, common projects and senses of purpose were largely sufficiently established by common national language, culture, and material situation to make national literatures matter to many, at least within certain educated circles. However, in an era of increasingly global commodity markets, national and linguistic barriers become more permeable, competitive individualism and reactive fundamentalism increase, and the salience of national literatures as forms of reflection on common cultural life diminishes, as cultural life spreads out and diversifies.3 Common and overlapping projects give way to various forms of getting, spending, enjoying, and entertaining, supported by technological advancements, unless those should turn out to be self-defeating or subjectively undesirable. As a result, factionalism increasingly displaces any sense of a political commonwealth, and culture becomes often a matter more of multiple fluid and commodified styles than a stable source of significance. Yet there is little chance of simply returning to older sureties. In a modern social world with a highly complex division of labor and with the distinctive satisfactions that attach to different social roles, religious commitments of any kind may seem either pale, abstract, and empty (churches open to all shoppers) or tyrannical and self-consciously sectarian (closing the doors to all but the pure). Either competitive individualism or competitive factionalism comes to the fore, and chances of learning to live out a common humanity with more depth become increasingly attenuated. And yet it can seem in some moments of reading that certain literary works offer us some access to increased reflective depth without dogma or tyranny. How might this be so? Can this sense in any way be trusted? And might literature help to open up some senses of possible common purpose and some routes of possible mutual engagement, hesitantly and nondogmatically, without either denying or undertaking to rule over the complexities of modern social life?
In his valuable recent study Why Does Literature Matter?, Frank Farrell takes up these questions, arguing that literary works function for human subjects as vehicles of partial and provisional recoveries of meaningfulness. Modern subjects, Farrell argues, suffer various kinds of loss in the courses of their developments. Thick, premodern social rituals are displaced in social space by economic transactions according to mysterious equivalences. The magical and metaphorical languages and ways of thinking that figure significantly in childhood experiences and in premodern cultures are displaced by analytical, grammatical, and scientific casts of mind and thought. Engagements with significances that are widely felt according to “the way things are done” are supplanted by individuals going opaquely about their mysterious “private” businesses.4 For these various losses of felt significances, “the space of writing,” Farrell argues, “offers us a modest compensation.”5
The compensations that literature affords occur, according to Farrell, in various registers.6 Phenomenologically, experience itself, for example, of a landscape or of the face and bearing of another person, is recorded in and recovered through the literary text as meaningful, rather than being left either as a source of mere “sensations” or data or being submitted to automatic, preformed categorizations. Metaphors and other devices of figuration are used to achieve and express psychic investment in and attention to what is being presented. Metaphysically, mood as an overall style or color of engagement with a natural and social world is registered, and some engagements and moods are registered as more truthful than others. Psychologically, a childhood sense of self as being caught up, fuguelike, in mysterious, larger processes of development is posed against a too assured, too rounded sense of accomplished mastery of discourses and social roles. Archaic but not quite lost rituals and senses of place are recovered or refigured. And there are the compensations of “style …as a staging of the psyche,”7 with richer and more satisfying investments than are ready to hand in daily life. Overall, “we seem to have the language of literature as a necessarily repeated, even obsessive, reworking of that transitional space”8 between the prelinguistic and the linguistic, childhood and maturity, the premodern and the modern, the metaphorical and the literal. Its modest compensations for loss challenge punctual, individual hubris and open up routes of richer attention and engagement.
Farrell has here located the function of literature against a compelling background story of how subject development is marked by the loss of various kinds of richness and intensity (experiential, premodern, ritual-archaic, fuguelike repetitive, etc.). His idea that literature works to recuperate these losses has much to recommend it. At the same time, however, it is possible to wonder how stable and assertational about human life the recuperations that literature offers finally are. Farrell himself calls them modest, as though to mark their difference from stable discovery of standing sources of sharable felt significance in life. When the recuperative and instructive powers of literature are emphasized, then both its powers to disrupt and its failures to arrive at conclusive doctrinal closure are underplayed.
David Wellbery usefully registers literature’s disruptive force and formal distinctiveness as he describes the “problematic and uncertain representational, or perhaps epistemological status”9 of certain poems and, by implication, of exemplary literature in general. Wellbery develops his conception of the literary as a site of formed disruption through commenting on Goethe’s lyric “Maifest”—a lyric that on a narrative-thematic level describes the achievement of bliss. The concluding couplet of “Maifest” represents and summarizes an outburst of bliss that is grounded in an experience of the gaze of the beloved. “Und doch, welch Glück! Geliebt zu werden. / Und lieben, Götter, welch ein Glück [And yet, what bliss!, to be loved, / And to love, you gods! What bliss!].”10 Within the very structure of its formulation, however, this outburst reveals itself as artfully and rhetorically achieved, not simply the spontaneous, naïve, and accessibly inimitable product of immediate passion. As Wellbery puts it, “the chiastic structure ‘Glück …-lieb // lieb-Glück’ and the passive-active reversal of the verb …constitute a structural emblem for the entire poem.”11 That is, the concluding lines (“lieb-Glück”) embody an inversion, both thematic-semantic and phonological-formal, of material that has been used earlier in the poem, so that this “closing formulation proves to be in many respects a recapitulation within a reduced format of the essential features of lines 25–30.”12 Through this use of semantic and formal figuration, repetition, and condensation, the poem is marked as literary and achieves its end. It achieves aesthetic closure in historically specific ways, and it disrupts simpler communicative assertion of independent facts. It invites absorption in its artifices as much or more than proposing any recommendations for individual or social recuperation. Disruption and absorption in formal achievement significantly displace any moment of theoretical-instrumental instruction, individual or social. On the larger historical-thematic level, moreover, “Maifest” figures the gaze of an individual beloved rather than, say, either the presence of God or involvement in ritual as the source of bliss. Thus the poem is marked as a more or less modern work that, in using its theme, carries “inadvertent traces and remainders of cultural production.”13 Once upon a time, that is, things were otherwise: bliss was either figured as having other sources or was not so intensively pursued by subjects who were less inward and more clan-immersed and either epic-heroic or immiserated than the modern, individual speaking persona of “Maifest.”
So it is, always, with exemplary literature. The most successful writers use both thematic materials and devices of figuration that are in some measure historically specific. They use these materials and devices self-consciously to register and attend to a moment of crisis or loss in an individual, within a culture, or between cultures. They manage to represent this crisis fully, avoiding repression and cliché, and avoiding also resolution according to the terms of any philosophical or religious doctrine of value. Yet they manage to achieve, in and through the interaction of thematic materials with formal devices that mark the work as literary, densities and closures that compel their readers—or those among their readers who share enough of their losses and crises—to become absorbed in them, to follow their self-sustaining work, without taking away any formulable-assertible message about reality outside the work. Hence the terms of the modest compensations that literature offers are simultaneously thematic in relation to specific historical materials and formal-aesthetic-disruptive-autonomous. There is no single path, smooth and bright, for either the achievement of literary value or its transportation into the rest of life. The occasions of crisis and loss that provoke literary attention are too various for that, ungoverned by any superintending historical logic, and the use of figures as devices of attention is likewise both historically marked and bound to specific thematic historical materials. Yet somehow, nonetheless, exemplary writers come to terms in exemplary ways with a kind of permanent human immigrancy or fracturedness, with what Eric Santner has characterized as “the signifying stress at the core of creaturely life.”14 Human beings in their courses of development are able sometimes to give voice to the situations of crisis and loss that mark their lives as subjects of and within culture, capable of awareness of their situations. They can attend to and work through the stresses, both individual and cultural, that mark their lives. But the work they accomplish is less the work of arriving at a doctrine than it is, in Heideggerian terms, the working of the work itself: its having its way of bringing together its thematic materials and figural-rhetorical devices to embody a fullness of attention coupled with a satisfaction in the forming of the work in which its readers may share (or may not).
Within modernity, the stresses that force themselves into consciousness—stresses to which the work of art then responds—come increasingly from the late eighteenth century on to involve conflict between the claims of the sensible (what we discern and attach ourselves to through embodied feeling) and the intelligible (what we discern and attach ourselves to via distantiation and the controlled measurement of what there is). Claims of intimacy, solidarity, and cathexis to daily routine jostle against claims to knowledge, objectivity, and clear-sightedness about what there “at bottom” “really” is. Feeling is itself internalized, by being cast as something “subjective” with measurable intensities and durations, and its claims to being a mode of responsive knowledge are challenged. Whatever any individual happens to like or dislike becomes a matter only of more or less measurable fact (perhaps as a revealed preference, perhaps something one can report about oneself); what emotion, feeling, and mood discern as worth responding to or being involved with fades in cognitive power. Our work, our intimate relations, and our political citizenship, among other things, become matters, at best, of private satisfactions, troubled by the fact or threat that the private satisfactions of tomorrow may displace them, as either the menus of options or one’s own whims change. Stability, depth, and lived meaningfulness founder. As J. M. Bernstein puts it: “The most profound challenge to the unity and unifying work of [modern] culture is the separation, diremption, gap, or abyss separating the sensible world we aspire to live in every day, the world of things known through sight and sound and touch and feel, from the exactitudes of scientific explanation.”15 Unsupported by a sense that they are rooted in any accurate discernment of how things are, “our moods do not believe in each other,”16 and we drift, perhaps seeking medication to dull anxiety and depression.
One way to begin to address the problems of drift and of the disruption of cathexis is to see the modern work of art as occupying “a strange place at the intersection of the axes of the actual and eternal,”17 as Jürgen Habermas usefully characterizes Baudelaire’s conception of the artwork. According to this conception, the authentic modern work of art “is radically bound to the moment of its emergence; precisely because it consumes itself in actuality, it can bring the steady flow of trivialities to a standstill, break through normality, and satisfy for a moment the immortal longing for beauty—a moment in which the eternal comes into fleeting contact with the actual.”18
It is, however, not so easy to say what the eternal’s coming into fleeting contact with the actual amounts to. Baudelaire himself speaks of “eternal and invariable …Beauty” taking on an “amusing, teasing, appetite-whetting coating”19 from circumstantial actuality. Whatever the “shining forth” of the eternal within the coating of the actual may involve, however, it evidently does not involve accession on the part of the audience to any guiding doctrine or articulated sense of where beyond the work meaningfulness is to be found. Aesthetic absorption in the work overwhelms any moment of instruction. Where, as in the novel, more generalized reflections on meaningfulness sometimes appear, writers are continually forced to exercise powers of construction and of the making of meaning against the grain of an actuality that significantly involves the merely happenstantial. Fates experienced as meaningful—certain exemplary marriages or deaths, say—are as much the inventions of modern writers as they are found ready-made in modern life. As long as it avoids cliché and sustains attention to life, the modern novel, along with modern art in general, suffers from what Georg Lukács calls a characteristic “normative incompleteness”: it cannot say what is to be done. In Bernstein’s similar perception, “at its highest reach, [modern] art turns cultural melancholy into form.”20 The work invites and sustains absorption in it, in the face of the pains of modern life, and within the work complexities and unresolved resistances come increasingly to displace meaningful closures.
Historically, modern and modernist literary texts present dramas of heroic individual resistance against decayed or opaque social formations. The forms of resistance may range from Quixote’s comic fancies to Hamlet’s tragic uncertainties to the compressed intensities of the lyrics of Goethe or Keats, among many others. Trauma and failure of fully stable and meaningful subject formation are registered in tragic losses, comic flights, or asides of lyric ecstasy. Sometimes a good enough resolution is found for a few, against the grain of the prevailing social order, though in chastened awareness of its presence, as in Jane Austen. Good enough resolutions become, perhaps, less available in more characteristically modernist as opposed to modern texts.21 More “postmodern” texts use devices of collage, juxtaposition, and intertextuality (satire and allusion, especially across genres and between popular and “high” culture) in order to emphasize the inabilities of cultures or individuals to settle on specific, clear, final narrative arcs. Positions, ideologies, cultures, and points of view collide with one another all but endlessly. It is impossible, however, to distinguish in sharp and absolute terms modern-modernist dramas of individual crisis (partially resolved or not) from postmodernist anarchic collage and juxtaposition. Where, for example, would one place Tristram Shandy? Is Gravity’s Rainbow not in part a drama of individual crisis? When they achieve exemplarity, literary texts present both dramas of crisis and moments of sheer contingency. Hence in either form—relatively modern-modernist or relatively postmodern—what modern literature knows is that no comprehensive resolution of crises within individual or social development is possible: some satisfaction must be found within the working of the work itself, as a kind of placeholder for what is never finally achieved. Human beings, at least within the orbit of a modern individualism that remains powerfully with us, persist as caught up in signifying stresses arising out of a sense of slippage of “inner,” passionate, embodied, archaic selfhood away from “outer,” articulated, social role and agency.22 In modernity, such slippage is inevitable, and the task of literature is more to figure its forms than to propose standing resolutions.
There are, in all likelihood, deep reasons for this kind of literary practice, deep reasons that suggest that literature’s registerings of human finitude and the impossibility of specifically legislative moral knowledge are apt to human life as such. Human consciousness is marked by intentionality. That is, human beings not only represent their environments to themselves through perception, they are also aware of their own representings. They can “intend” objects that are not materially present (golden mountains, centaurs, time-travel machines, and the like) and they can imagine themselves perceiving and acting in counterfactual situations with much greater range, depth, and flexibility than can other animals.
Hence for human beings questions of correctness in judgment can arise explicitly. “Am I,” we are capable of asking, “correct to judge that this is a stick or a weapon or a digging implement or firewood (or all four)? Or am I rather imagining a context of use that is either not ready to hand or not shared by others? Just what am I doing when I am judging that things are thus-and-so, and am I here and now right or not?” Other sensate and conscious creatures do not display this kind of plasticity of attention, self-awareness, and engagement with questions of correctness.
As philosophers as different from one another as Aristotle, Hegel, Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Adorno have argued, this combination of plasticity of attention, self-awareness, and involvement with normativity is not a purely material phenomenon, even though it has a necessary material basis. This thought is further supported by the detailed ethnographic observations of childhood language learning carried out by Michael Tomasello.23 Instead of being wholly determined by biological-material processes alone, conceptual consciousness begins in training and mimicry, in learning within contexts of joint attention to see this (this stick, this wooden object, this whatever it is) as this or that (as a stick, a weapon, a digging implement, firewood, etc.) The emergence of self-awareness and the emergence of involvement with normativity are coeval with the emergence of conceptual consciousness. (“Am I right to see this as that? How do others see it? Am I doing what is wanted of me in picking up this stick, this ball, this penny [as the child learns later to call them]?”) Is there a proof from contact with ultimate givens that conceptual consciousness, self-awareness, and involvement with normativity thus emerge? No. But try to explain its emergence either metaphysically or purely materially: all the familiar problems of the ineliminability of normativity and responsibility arise. (Do we live in order to represent or represent in order to live?)
Because, however, human beings are capable of plastic attention and face widely divergent and ever-changing problem situations, multiple patterns of engagement with objects under concepts are always available, and these patterns of engagement (conceptual repertoires) change and are contested. The dream of rooting perfect and unchallengeable conceptual consciousness, freed of all critical engagement with normativity, in ecstatic, intuitive contact with ultimate givens (Platonic forms, sempiternal atoms) is haunting but idle.24 Training in contexts of mutual attention that are open to contestation cannot be overleaped. Meaning—what things are for in relation to contexts of use, what courses of action are fulfilling in what ways—is not to be discovered in anything simply given in the absence of circuits of training and imitation. “There will not be books in the running brooks until the dawn of hydro-semantics”25—and hydro-semantics shows no sign of dawning.
The idea that we bear a continuing responsibility for and continuing anxieties about our lives as conceptually conscious subjects who are caught up in patterns of attention that are subject to contestation is originally and most powerfully formulated by Kant. Kant’s philosophical anthropology is rooted in a sense of human life as having two aspects or dimensions. (Human reason has this peculiar, divided fate.) First, we are beings who possess apperceptive awareness or self-consciousness; that is, we are beings who are at least implicitly and potentially aware of our judgments and actions as our own. We further possess the power to become more explicitly aware of our judgments and actions as our own and to raise questions about their correctness: to submit them to critical reflection in the pursuit of greater reasonableness, fluency, stability of character, and human command. Second, we are finite beings who exist within nature and culture and who are unable to refer that existence to any ultimate grounding. Within both nature and culture, there is the possibility always of surprise, of a discovery of one’s own itinerancy, and of being at this moment out of attunement with nature, culture, and oneself.
The fact that we possess both these senses of ourselves is brought powerfully into awareness by the experience of modernity. That Kant expresses both senses is what makes him, along with Descartes, a modern, even modernist, philosopher. Descartes proposes that “a good man has no need to have read every book, nor to have carefully learned all that which is taught in the schools; it would even be a defect in his education were he to have devoted too much time to the study of letters.”26 Thus he sets his face as a freethinking individual against the authority of culture as it stands, seeking a new form of the purely rational expression of purely individual rational powers in the practice of modern mathematical-experimental science. We must, as Kant will later put it, “dare to know,”27 against the grain of the culturally given.
Descartes’ confidence in the availability and value of this new form of practice is underwritten officially by his initial certainty of his own existence, coupled with his subsequent a priori arguments for the existence of God and for God’s having made physical nature such that we can know it by doing the right kind of science. But one can also, if one listens closely, hear an undercurrent of anxiety in Descartes’ formulations.28 “‘I am, I exist’ is necessarily true each time that I pronounce it, or that I mentally conceive it.”29 But what if I fail to do this, fail to pronounce my own existence, perhaps out of timidity in the exercise of my rational powers, or perhaps because I am more caught up than I suppose in the culture that does not embody fully human, rational life, or perhaps because nature in the end will not fully support the exercise of rational powers? Do I then fail to exist necessarily? “I am, I exist, that is certain. But how often? Just when I think; for it might possibly be the case if I ceased entirely to think, that I should likewise cease altogether to exist.”30 Coupled with the thoughts that the mass of humanity has more or less continuously failed to think fully or clearly and that nature is not intuitively or immediately knowable, this form of self-certainty is not exactly a recipe for confidence in life, even if the practices of modern science turn out to be comparatively fruitful and cognitively satisfying. The power to reflect on one’s judgments and actions has here established a certain distance from ultimate grounding in either metaphysical givens or mere naturalness, no matter what assurances follow and no matter what the successes of modern science are. And is it clear that we either can or should forego wide-ranging reflectiveness? There is, in Stanley Cavell’s terms, a kind of standing “nextness of the self to the self.”31 As Thoreau puts it, “I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you.”32 Hence, in Cavell’s gloss, the self bears, always, two attitudes toward itself, as it finds “that it is the watchman or guardian of itself, and hence demands of itself transparence, settling, clearing, consistency; and that it is the workman, whose eye cannot see to the end of its labors, but whose answerability is endless for the constructions in which it houses itself.”33 (If one can hear an inflection of class in the distinction between superintending watchman and laboring workman, one should also remember that, as in Hegel, it is the workman to whom any future belongs.) Our freely formed commitments are entangled in and yet outrun reflectiveness—a sense of self that while perhaps always existentially given also becomes especially prominent in modernity, as possible directions of commitment multiply and sheer immersion in necessities of survival diminishes somewhat.
Kant then widens, sharpens, and literalizes a modern, Cartesian sense of the possibility and value of awakening through reflectiveness into new and better commitments, coupled with a sense of lingering anxieties and uncertainties. We have, always, according to Kant, apperceptive awareness of the possibility of noting and reflecting on our commitments as our own. While we are bound by the categorical imperative as a law of pure practical reason or reflective deliberation in abstraction from inclinations and desires (and what is that?), we know neither how or why this is so nor what the proper specific directions of response to our being so bound must be (even if certain prohibitions are clear). Nature “reveals little, but very little”34 of a path toward a kingdom of ends. “Man must give [the] autocracy of the soul its full scope; otherwise he becomes a mere plaything of other forces and impressions which withstand his will, and a prey to the caprice of accident and circumstance.”35 But how? And, especially, how over time, continuously, in relation to others and to the changing affordances of culture? We seem to bear, always, and especially in modernity, senses of ourselves as both capable of reflection and cast in courses of life we cannot wholly survey.
To the extent, then, that these senses of ourselves can be reconciled, that reconciliation will take the form of the expression in judgment and action of an increased (but not perfect) sense of reasonableness, fluency, character, and command mixed with a sense of finitude, apartness, and contingency. This reconciliation will always be partial and provisional. It is not circumscribable according to any fixed policy or order of conceptualization. (Claims to such a circumscription would transgress standing human finitude.) Instead, it is best conceived of as a kind of temporarily displayed power, roughly what Kant calls Mündigkeit, or maturity. (“Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage [Unmündigkeit].”)36 The implied metaphor in Mündigkeit (Mund = mouth) of coming to speech or voice is apt. We are able to achieve, and we are to achieve, not final moral knowledge but rather a certain kind of more fluent, clearer, more formed, more focused, and more articulate stance or address to or in life. As Thomas Pfau remarks in commenting on the use of “voice” (Stimme) and associated terms such as mood, attunement, determination, and agreement (Stimmung, Bestimmung, Übereinstimmung) in the Critique of Judgment, Kant’s conception of voice is understandable as “aiming to reconcile, however provisionally, the experience of a deeply significant interiority with an articulation of its social significance” in a way that “manifests a unique form of desire”37—a desire for fluently expressive, reasonable self-command in judgment and action within social space: a desire for recognition, which desire does not admit of perfect satisfaction.
Our efforts to move toward increased fluency, clarity, and command begin not simply in a grasp of abstract universals, not simply in the law-governed motions of physical particles, and not simply in our psychological hardwiring but also in and through following, imitating, and reacting to the subjectivities of others, as manifested in directions of gaze and interest. Aristotle captures this point in remarking that human beings, in contrast with other animals, are “thoroughly mimetic and through mimesis take [their] first steps in understanding.”38 Others use words of some generality and potential for use on further occasions; in doing so they manifest certain directions of gaze and interest. They manage their uses in virtue of having mastered prevailing routines well enough. But their masteries and the uses that flow from them remain ungrounded in any ultimate realities. Hence at least some uses are liable and likely to shift over time as routes of interest and feeling shift. To come to conceptualization through the mimesis of specific routes of usage, gaze, and interest is to be caught up in a stable enough but also pluralized and partially contested life of subjectivity in the world. There may be good reason to regard certain kinds as “really instanced” in nature. There is no good reason to suppose that water or tigers, say, are arbitrary human constructs, and this situation is unlikely to change. But this stable situation does not root the life of concepts “in” nature alone, independently of mimetic circuits.
Mastery and fluency within a life with concepts are hence to be understood not simply as a grasp of fixed archetypes, patterns, or Bedeutungskörper that lie “behind” usage in a standing way, but rather as matters of a grasp of patterns together with an ability both to imitate and to redirect gaze and interest—to respond anew to life. Only when we see that conceptualization involves all this can we arrive at a form of philosophical understanding that is not blind to the life of human subjectivity in its life with words. Adorno makes this point eloquently in recommending “extinguishing the autarky of the concept,” that is, recommending that we see both the possession and the very nature of concepts as bound up with stable enough but also sometimes contestable mimetic circuits rather than rooted in “contact” with absolute givens.
A philosophy that … extinguishes the autarky of the concept strips the blindfold from our eyes…. Insight into the constitutive character of the nonconceptual [i.e., the deictic, sensuous, and mimetic] in the concept would end the compulsive identification which the concept brings unless halted by such reflection. Reflection upon its own meaning is the way out of the concept’s seeming being-in-itself as a unit of meaning.39
Only this recognition of the nature of the concept—the beginning and partial continuance of the life of concepts in mimesis, where there are always residues, remainders, and other possibilities—blocks philosophy from dehistoricized, potentially smug policymongering and permits a grasp of life. “Disenchantment of the concept is the antidote of philosophy. It keeps it from growing rampant and becoming an absolute to itself.”40
Here “disenchantment of the concept” and “the antidote of philosophy” might well be taken as significations for literature and its work. Literature foregrounds reconfigurative responsiveness to incidents and actions that take place in time over static depiction of the physically objectual, and it foregrounds figuration and the expression of attitude and emotion toward what is depicted over measurement and neutral classification. But literature is also a form of thinking that uses concepts in order to seek orientation in life under forms of emplotment and in order to work through perplexity. Conceptual identity thinking and mimesis, thought and emotion, recognition and pleasure in form, philosophy and literature—the members of these pairs are all essentially interrelated, as human beings take their first steps in understanding (toward conceptualization) through mimetic responsiveness in practice and then continue to seek more fluent, stable orientation in their lives in time. Working against conceptual ossification and taking seriously perplexities and failures of orientation that demand address, literature undertakes to reconfigure patterns of mimesis so as to embody freer and fuller responsiveness, in order to form more whole and stable individuals, forms of culture, and conceptual repertoires. “The trace of memory in mimesis, which every artwork seeks, is simultaneously always the anticipation of a condition beyond the diremption of the individual and the collective.”41 “Always the anticipation”—diremption, within individuals and between individual and collective, is never wholly overcome. There is no arrival at complete, detailed, specific understanding of shared, coherent institutions and practices and at satisfaction within them, no coming to fulfillment of any Hegelian idea of freedom. But greater fullness of orientation, resolution of perplexity, and clarity and adequacy of feeling remain possible, and literature remains, always (along with other forms of art, but with its own special verbal achievements and sense of temporality), a central form of the pursuit of these possibilities.
Put somewhat more domestically, the thought is that literature helps us to engage anew—more reasonably, with more wholeheartedness and fullness of attention and less incoherence—with life. As Catherine Wilson puts it,
A person may learn from a novel [or other work of literature] … if he is forced to revise or modify, e.g. his concept of “reasonable action” through recognition of an alternative as presented in the novel [or other work]…. The term learning applies [here] primarily to a modification of a person’s concepts, which is in turn capable of altering his thought or conduct, and not primarily to an increased disposition to utter factually correct statements or to display technical prowess…. The ability to go beyond what has actually been fed in in the teaching process stems … from a more fundamental—and perhaps even radical—alteration in the way in which he perceives [certain phenomena of life].42
To these claims it needs to be added only that the occasion for literary writing and for responsive literary reading is typically perplexity in life or something not making emotional or narratable sense; that the modification of concepts involves also the modification of emotion, stance, and action; that the aim is increased fluency, clarity, coherence, and felt aptness of orientation within life in culture; and that the occasions for modification are endless.
Pressure is placed on our concepts, stances, and attitudes as they stand by perplexities—in large cases by traumas—that those concepts, stances, and attitudes do not readily accommodate. By taking up literary work as either a writer or a reader, one may respond fruitfully to such pressure in a variety of ways. Sometimes one may successfully work through a perplexity or trauma so as to arrive at a fuller, more emotionally and attitudinally apt stance and story about what is going on. Perplexities of emotional entanglement and of stance can sometimes be resolved in the achievement of a kind of more stable and apt calm, in a way that Spinoza describes in his Ethics. Or sometimes one can (also) become more actively engaged in and satisfied within the sheer activity of either making or following a literary form as an expression of alert and masterful subjectivity, as Charles Altieri has suggested, in tracking what he calls the particulars of rapture that writers sometimes achieve and in which readers sometimes share.43 Or sometimes one can (also) modify one’s courses of action in life, so as to embody more fully both more resolved stances and more accomplished energies of form-making. Always the work of the formation and enactment of subjecthood and culture remains unfinished, remains to be done anew.
If that work remains always unfinished, one might nonetheless hope to elucidate it (rather than to master and explain it by reference to fixed externalities) by setting various exemplary pieces of that work in comparison and contrast with each other. Instead of subsuming all cases of the work of literature under a master universal or Platonic form, one might see some cases as forming what Wittgenstein calls a perspicuous representation (übersichtliche Darstellung), an arrangement of cases that enables “just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connexions.’”44 One can, or at least one can hope that one can, come to see how subjectivity begins its life within intersubjective, mimetic relations and thence seeks orientation within that life in a variety of ways via literary attention, with different achievements of composure, focus of attention, and deployment of energy. A particular arrangement of such cases will be, at least when it is successful, a “Darstellung der Darstellungen”45—a figured, materially specific presentation of various figured, materially specific presentations of the life and work of subjectivity. Here, in the chapters that follow, a play, a novella (coupled with a philosophical self-interrogation), an extended lyric poem, an unconventional sonnet, and a long story are set in juxtaposition, together with various more generalizing materials, in the hope of constructing an elucidation of the workings of literature in relation to the lives of modern subjects.
This presentation of cases will neither erase all differences among them nor spare readers the critical work of comparing differences as well as similarities. Stoppard’s recovery of the patterned ritual of dancing, for a viewing audience outside the action, is not the same as Goethe’s letting go of Werther in order to continue his own life of writing. Wordsworth’s ending in modest prayer and chastened hope is not the same as either Rilke’s call for a turn or Sebald’s witness and wonder. Notably, Stoppard and Sebald as contemporary writers seem less committed to hope and resolution, or are less able to give them articulate expression, than are Goethe and Wordsworth, as though the times were bleaker than they were one hundred or two hundred years ago. (Do our moods believe in each other less than they did around 1800? For what reasons? Are we to conclude that they are unable to believe in each other at all?) Yet there are also affinities among these cases. Relative calm and aesthetic closure are achieved, and life is seen through the work more steadily and whole, without denying complexity and conflict.
Seeing that the reading and writing of literature cultivate a kind of reflective depth, a kind of complex seeing that is achieved through figure and form, may help us then to avoid reducing literature to “anything that is written.” It may further help us to find a way between the Scylla of didacticism and the Charybdis of formalism. Surely literature must “say something” about life. But surely, too, the way in which what is said matters, and literature produces less “moral news” than didacticism supposes. The suggestion, then, is that literature is a sort of formally significant attention to life, where what shows in literary forms of attention and arrangement of materials is a continuing aspiration for expressive freedom and fulfillment, typically both shaped and frustrated, in part, in specific ways in specific cultural settings. We see ourselves as pursuers of expressive freedom in situ, under difficult conditions, and we so see ourselves in the protagonists and authorial personae whom we encounter (or create). By thus recognizing ourselves, we can become somewhat more reflectively deep about the contours of human life in time.
In a recent book on the philosophy of art, I claim that “works of art [literary and otherwise] present a subject matter as a focus for thought and emotional attitude, distinctively fused to the imaginative exploration of material.”46 This definition of art—if that is the right word—specifies criteria in Wittgenstein’s sense for the use of the word “art.” It undertakes “to elucidate and organize our linguistic and conceptual practice, in a situation in which we are confused by the varieties of artistic practice, by the varieties of things people say about them, and by the powerful but obscure character of our own responses,”47 and yet where, still, something can be said about what we do.
In relation to literature, what this means is that literature as an art, when it is successful, has representational-thematic, expressive-attitudinal, and formal-material dimensions, all in interaction with one another. This thought is in the spirit of Aristotle’s claim in the Poetics that a successful tragic drama will be a presentation (mimesis) of an action with all of plot, character, thought, melody, diction, and spectacle. According to Aristotle, each of these parts of a successful tragic drama must be properly coordinated with the others. Too much spectacle and too little plot, for example, will yield in one way the episodic and in another way what are perhaps the excesses of Euripedean stagecraft or the special-effects movie. Too much plot and too little thought will yield a dramatic structure that lacks general thematic significance or that will fail to satisfy the requirement of presenting the universal in the particular. Too little melody, diction, and spectacle—that is, too little concern for the embodiment of the presentation in just a certain set of words and stagings, both crafted and felt—will likewise fail in presentational power or illumination, presenting instead only what is already known and distinctively clarifying nothing.
More abstractly, content and form both matter, and they matter in their specific ways of relating to one another. As Wolfgang Huemer has recently remarked, “If we try to define what is particular about literary texts, we find that they put an emphasis not on what is said, but on how it is said; literary language makes itself manifest…. At least to some extent in literary texts language itself becomes the topic.”48 An emphasis on how what is said is said is especially prominent in the so-called L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E poets, such as Charles Bernstein and Clark Coolidge, with their radicalization of both the voice of lyric poetry and the symbolistic-imagism of objectivism. Yet even they, while foregrounding the sheer look, sound, and feel of words and assonances, produce texts that admit of some paraphrasability and readability. One can—just barely—say what they are about. Hence one should say instead that literary texts put emphasis not only on what is said (represented and expressed) but also on how it is said.
Such emphases are also often in play in so-called ordinary speech and writing, in contexts from journalism to conversation to criticism to history. But this just shows that, as Huemer goes on to remark, “Literature … is not a niche phenomenon; it must not be viewed as an unnecessary but entertaining ornament, but rather as a practice central to our language without which we might not even be able to master a language as complex as ours in the first place.”49 The special intensities literature achieves are not sideways to life, with their own special domains of objects known such as possible worlds or fictional objects; they are rather part of specially apt attention—all at once representational-thematic, emotional-attitudinal, and craftlike-sensuous—to ordinary life. These intensities are achieved through the controlled and aptly original use of devices that structure perception, thought, and feeling, including emplotment, metaphor, allegory, irony, hyperbole, understatement, and assonance, among many, many others.
Through the apt use of such literary devices, fullness of attention (ideational, emotional, and sensuous) is achieved rather than shirked. Cliché, or unthinking repetition of what is merely rote and stock, is the enemy of literary art. The satisfaction sought in literary art involves what Spinoza called the transformation of an inadequate idea of an affection into a more adequate idea.50 Through literary art one gains a better understanding of what is worth feeling and caring about in what ways, where this better understanding is grounded in what one does in fact feel and care about when one pays the fullest possible attention to the objects and quality of one’s experience. By following the work of literary art, one may move into a structure of care, reflection, and investment in activity that is more stable and appropriate to the objects and events of human life. Such moves may also include involvement in the work itself, in its specifically formed patterns of attending, partly (but only partly) beyond the objects of attention. Literary art has its disruptive powers as well as its powers of focusing on phenomena of human life.
To be interested in literary art thus means being attentive to what William Rothman and Marian Keane have called “the astonishing capacities for meaningfulness that [works of art] have discovered within the singular conditions of their medi[a].”51 These capacities of meaningfulness involve in literature the achievement of fullness of attention to phenomena of life through the use of literary devices. Through such fullness of attention, a structure of care, reflection, and investment in activity is achieved, so that we lead more freely and fully the lives of persons or selves who take an interest in their worlds, rather than being buffeted about by experience received only passively and inchoately. Apart from the kinds of noticings, expressings, and respondings that art and literature can embody and support, our lives can become pale, conventionalized, anonymous, or, one might say, not deep, not so fully the lives of subjects. And beyond the attention to life it affords, there is also the astonishment of the work itself, that it has found a way to mean once again or anew.
A significant corollary of this view about literature, attention, and fuller personhood is that writing and reading are understood as neighboring modes of activity, both of which involve the cultivation of attention. What we do when we read well is follow and identify with achievements of fuller attention as they are managed in situ by both writers, on the one hand, and protagonists in literary works, on the other.52 What I am suggesting is that the life of persons inherently involves the pursuit of a fuller and more stable structure of care, reflection, and investment in activity (despite or across tragic inhibitions) in densely textured ways in specific cultural settings.
In describing the various individual cases that I take up, I am sometimes led to formulate claims about how we respond to a particular line or image, or even more broadly about what we are like. I am aware that this usage of “we” is far from common in literary studies and that there are significant reasons for being suspicious of it. Perhaps, therefore, it will be of some help to say something explicitly about exactly what kind of enterprise is implied by this usage.
“We” as I use it (and as it is typically used by philosophers of certain kinds) is meant to be improvisatory and invitational: to invite others to share in and test a thought for themselves. It is not meant to be a report on the results of research into what countable individuals have in fact said or thought or felt. Claims about how we respond, what we feel, and what we are like are, therefore, in a distinctive way vulnerable, naked, and exposed. This invitational (philosophical) usage of “we” traces back at least to Socrates, when he remarks in the Republic that we can be (must be) “ourselves both jury and advocates at once”53 in considering what will count as more fulfilling conditions of human life. We may try, that is, to be clearer and more articulate about fundamental interests, in such a way that others may also share in both the process and the articulation of results—a very tentative and vulnerable enterprise indeed, and not at all declamatory. This same usage of “we” appears in ordinary language philosophy when what we say is investigated. Astonishingly, such claims about what we say can sometimes command assent of some circumference, and they can do so for those within that circumference with an air of overwhelming naturalness, reasonableness, and rightness to the ear. (J. L. Austin was a master at articulating such claims.) When this happens, a community of articulate understanding and commitment discovers itself in and through the common acceptance of such claims.
Once upon a time, perhaps in the heyday of New Criticism, poetry was read in something like this spirit, that is, with attention to “how we are moved” by the poem, how “we” follow its sense, etc. Since the end of that heyday, it has been “discovered” that not everyone either interprets or responds to a given poem (to any poem) in the same way. This is certainly true. Even the claims about what we feel or say or respond to that achieve the widest circumference will fall short of universality. There is no perfect route for the mimetic enactment of subjecthood; there are too many contending ambitions and senses of self housed within persistent cultural antagonisms for everyone to respond alike. The energy would be drained out of cultural life were that uniformity of response per impossible to come about. Difference neither should be nor can be so easily overleaped. As a result, however, of the “discovery” of diversity of response, the study of literature has become an increasingly sociologized enterprise. Cultural studies as a field arises out of the thought that we should study in a systematic, empirical, nondoctrinaire way who in actual fact says (and feels) what when. (Bourdieu is a paradigm of this study, and his empirical investigations of differences in cultural reception have been taken up in literary studies by figures such as John Barrell, Marjorie Levinson, Jerome McGann, and Edward Said, among many others.) That is, of course, something that can be done, and it can yield interesting and important results. It would by no means be an obvious advance to go back to the smugness and staleness of certain forms of New Criticism without having these other kinds of critical, cultural investigation also going on.
In the face of all this, why then might anyone still bother with the vain effort to articulate what we say, feel, or respond to, knowing that any such effort is doomed to partiality and so to a form of failure? The worry is that without such efforts we abandon ourselves to a modern, materialist, competitive, value-denigrating individualism that destroys all circuits of the mimesis of response and so destroys the very life of subjectivity as such. What is left without this effort is a culture of the competitively individualist seeking of the satisfaction of subjective preferences, without any sources of a commonwealth and without stability or depth of individual identity over time, but instead only pervasive cultural crassness, economic and political exploitation, and individual anomie. Hence it may be worthwhile, at least sometimes, to persist in the vain effort to form both communities of interpretation and evaluation and a more stable and fully invested life for individual subjectivity in and through the common acceptance of what we say. The effort to do this is a defining ambition for philosophy, literature, and criticism that it would be impoverishing to forego, however impossible it is to complete it. Ich kann nicht anders.
If we cannot productively engage in this work of the formation of deeper, subjectively fuller senses of self and of shared commitment, then we are, as subjects, lost, dead. But out of a fear of loss of culture and subjecthood in culture as it stands, one can sometimes do something. One can pay attention to what is perplexing in life (and in art) in the hope both of resolving one’s emotional and attitudinal stance into something calmer and more stable and of mobilizing greater energies of commitment. One can write about one’s perplexities, and one can read one’s way through others’ ways of encountering perplexity that are more articulate and more persuasive than one’s own. And then one can, and must, wait, unable either to control the response of any audience or to form an audience of universal circumference. This is what certain writers (and other artists) have always somehow known how to do for us in detail, endlessly, with power, grace, and responsiveness to life, and in the furtherance of life.