Philosophy of Literature (Ratio Book Series)

PHILOSOPHY OF LITERATURE Ratio Book Series Each book in the series is devoted to a philosophical topic of particular ...

Author: Severin Schroeder

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PHILOSOPHY OF LITERATURE

Ratio Book Series Each book in the series is devoted to a philosophical topic of particular contemporary interest, and features invited contributions from leading authorities in the chosen field. Volumes published so far: Philosophy of Literature, edited by Severin Schroeder Essays on Derek Parfit’s On What Matters, edited by Jussi Suikkanen and John Cottingham Justice, Equality and Constructivism, edited by Brian Feltham Wittgenstein and Reason, edited by John Preston The Meaning of Theism, edited by John Cottingham Metaphysics in Science, edited by Alice Drewery The Self?, edited by Galen Strawson On What We Owe to Each Other, edited by Philip Stratton-Lake The Philosophy of Body, edited by Mike Proudfoot Meaning and Representation, edited by Emma Borg Arguing with Derrida, edited by Simon Glendinning Normativity, edited by Jonathan Dancy

PHILOSOPHY OF LITERATURE

Edited by

SEVERIN SCHROEDER

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

This edition first published 2010 Originally published as Volume 22, No. 4 of Ratio Chapters © 2010 The Authors Book compilation © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley. com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Severin Schroeder to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Philosophy of literature / edited by Severin Schroeder. p. cm.—(Ratio book series) “Originally published as volume 22, no. 4 of Ratio”—T.p. verso. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1- 4443-3363-3 1. Literature—Philosophy. I. Schroeder, Severin. PN49.P47 2010 801—dc22 2010008426 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Set in 11 on 12 pt New Baskerville by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Printed in Malaysia 01

2010

CONTENTS

List of Contributors

vii

Preface

ix

1

Literature, Knowledge, and the Aesthetic Attitude M. W. Rowe

1

2

The Elusiveness of Poetic Meaning Peter Lamarque

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Fictional Form and Symphonic Structure: An Essay in Comparative Aesthetics Peter Kivy

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Criticism of Literature and Criticism of Culture Stein Haugom Olsen

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Incense and Insensibility: Austin on the ‘Non-seriousness’ of Poetry Maximilian de Gaynesford

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Philosophy and Literature: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Martin Warner

Index

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47 65

90

112 134

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Maximilian de Gaynesford Department of Philosophy University of Reading Peter Kivy Rutgers University New Brunswick Peter Lamarque Department of Philosophy University of York Stein Haugom Olsen Østfold University College Norway M. W. Rowe School of Philosophy University of East Anglia Norwich Martin Warner Centre for Research in Philosophy and Literature University of Warwick Coventry

PREFACE

Versions of four of the papers in this collection (those by Peter Kivy, Peter Lamarque, M. W. Rowe, and Martin Warner) were presented to the one-day Ratio conference on ‘Philosophy of Literature’, held at the University of Reading in April 2008. The papers by Maximilian de Gaynesford and Stein Haugom Olsen were contributions invited for this volume. Severin Schroeder Department of Philosophy University of Reading

1 LITERATURE, KNOWLEDGE, AND THE AESTHETIC ATTITUDE rati_441

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M. W. Rowe Abstract An attitude which hopes to derive aesthetic pleasure from an object is often thought to be in tension with an attitude which hopes to derive knowledge from it. The current paper argues that this alleged conflict only makes sense when the aesthetic attitude and knowledge are construed unnaturally narrowly, and that when both are correctly understood there is no tension between them. To do this, the article first proposes a broad and satisfying account of the aesthetic attitude, and then considers and rejects twelve reasons for thinking that deriving knowledge from something is incompatible with maintaining an aesthetic attitude towards it. Two main conclusions are drawn. 1) That the representational arts are often in a good position to communicate non-propositional knowledge about human beings. 2) That while our desire to obtain pleasure from a work’s manifest properties, and our desire to obtain knowledge from it, are not the same motive, the formal similarities between them are sufficiently impressive to warrant both being seen as elements of the aesthetic attitude.

Some philosophers and critics feel that a desire to appreciate something aesthetically, and a desire to acquire knowledge from it, are two quite separate and possibly incompatible motives.1 Peter Lamarque and Stein Olsen, for example, have argued that it is quite possible to acquire truths from a novel, but that the truths thus acquired have no bearing on its artistic quality.2 This does not mean, however, that they endorse aestheticism or feel that novels are unconnected with life. On the contrary, they argue that novels enact, develop, explore and imaginatively realize 1 This paper tries to draw together, and show the consistency of, three of my previous essays, ‘The Definition of “Art” ’, ‘Poetry and Abstraction’, and ‘Lamarque and Olsen on Literature and Truth’, all in M. W. Rowe, Philosophy and Literature: A Book of Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 2 Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction and Literature (Oxford: OUP, 1996).

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perennial human themes – love, death, ageing, and so forth – and that these themes can be developed and explored without endorsing or discovering truths.3 A closely related position holds that the truth or falsity of a novel is relevant to its assessment, but that this, ipso facto, means that novels cannot be, or cannot wholly be, works of art. Elisio Vivas takes the extreme view when he writes that ‘The Brothers Karamazov can hardly be read as art . . .’,4 while the more moderate and popular position is taken by Desmond MacCarthy: It is tenable that one of the mistakes of late nineteenth and early twentieth century criticism has been to regard the novel as ‘a work of art’ in the same sense that a sonata, a picture, or a poem is work of art. It is extremely doubtful whether the aim of the novel is to make an aesthetic appeal. Passages in it may do so; but it aims also at satisfying our curiosity about life as much as satisfying the aesthetic sense . . . I am inclined myself to regard it as a bastard form of art, rightly concerned with many interests which the maker of beautiful things must eschew . . .5 Both positions feel that aesthetic interest and curiosity about life are utterly distinct motives, but they respond to this idea in different ways. Lamarque and Olsen argue that an interest in the truth of literature is misconceived, and this allows them to claim that novels, correctly approached, are unproblematically works of art. Vivas and MacCarthy believe that an interest in the truth of literature is legitimate, but feel this entails that novels are either wholly or partly not works of art. I find Lamarque and Olsen’s position unconvincing because it does not take proper account of the universal practice of using predicates like ‘sentimental’, ‘adolescent’, ‘true’, ‘unrealistic’, ‘probable’, ‘idiotic’, ‘penetrating’, ‘false’, ‘accurate’, ‘correct’, ‘profound’, ‘insightful’ etc in criticism of the arts. All of these contain either explicit or implicit appeals to truth or lack of it, and it is very hard to imagine what literary criticism would look

3

Lamarque and Olsen, Truth, Fiction, pp. 405–454. E. Vivas, ‘Contextualism Reconsidered’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1959. Quoted in Dickie, Aesthetics: An Introduction (Bobbs-Merrill, 1978), p. 54. 5 Desmond MacCarthy, ‘Trollope’, in his Portraits. Quoted in Walter Allen, The English Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958), p. 18. 4

LITERATURE, KNOWLEDGE, AND THE AESTHETIC ATTITUDE

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without such terms. In addition, it’s difficult to believe that the artistic quality of novels which enact objectionable statements (‘Bourgeois individualism must be ruthlessly suppressed’), or idiotic statements (‘Collecting plastic bags is the highroad to health and happiness’) are not affected by the falsity of the propositions they enact. It is strange that Lamarque and Olsen feel it is important for novelists to discuss perennial themes – love and death etc – while being apparently quite indifferent to the plausibility of what novelists actually say about them. MacCarthy’s position is unconvincing because he conceives of the artist as, exclusively, a ‘maker of beautiful things.’ Clearly, this view runs into difficulties with all those works of art which are not beautiful: for example, the finale of Alkan’s Sonatine, Picasso’s Guernica, and Hardy’s ‘Ah, are you digging on my grave?’. These works, while in many ways great, are clearly not beautiful in any straightforward sense, and are more appropriately classified under Nietzsche’s label of ‘interesting ugliness.’6 MacCarthy notices the difficulty with novels, and tries to deal with it by the ad hoc device of claiming them to be ‘bastard’ works of art, but in fact the trouble is much more wide ranging, and requires his theory to be rejected altogether. I suspect that what have been dubbed ‘no-truth’ theories of art are nourished by a too narrow a conception of the aesthetic and too narrow a conception of knowledge. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to examine in detail the reasons why some philosophers and critics find the cognitive and aesthetic impulses in tension with one another, and to provide an account of the aesthetic attitude and literary knowledge which shows that the alleged tension is only apparent. In my view, the ability to impart knowledge can sometimes be a part, and an important part, of a work’s aesthetic quality. I hope that what follows has a general application to all the representational arts, but I shall largely restrict my discussion to literature because that has always been the main focus of debate. And my discussion of literature will largely focus on fiction because that is where the most distinctive features of literary knowledge can best be seen.

6

Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans.: R. Hollingdale (Cambridge: CUP, 1982), §239, p. 140.

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The first prerequisite for showing that the alleged tension between curiosity and aesthetic interest is only apparent, is to clarify the nature of aesthetic interest.7 The aesthetic attitude is a mode of attention to an object of sight, hearing or – to a lesser extent – touch. There are two kinds of attention: willed and unwilled. In the former case my attention is an action; it is something I do for a reason. Thus I may look at a picture to try to discover whether the castle it represents had a portcullis, or whether the canvas is large enough to cover my wall safe, or whether the artist who painted it was a Mason. In all these cases my interest is not in the picture per se but in the castle, the size of the canvas, and the artist who painted it. Consequently, if I am shown conclusive proof that the canvas is not large enough to cover the safe, or that the artist or castle which interest me were not involved in the picture, then my interest will immediately lapse. Even if such proof is not forthcoming, we would naturally expect that my interest would motivate me to move on to other paintings and other documents to do with the safe, the castle or the artist. In all these examples, it is easy to give an analysis of the action in terms of beliefs and desires. On the other hand, unwilled attention is not an action; it is not something I do, it is something which happens to me. Willed attention requires me to hold my attention on an object; in the case of unwilled attention the object holds and absorbs me. This still appears to cover a number of non-aesthetic cases, for example, unwilled attention caused by sexual interest, disgust, hunger, thirst and so forth, but in all these examples looking is merely a prelude to some other action. If these interests take their normal course then sexual interest will be followed by sex, disgust by turning away, hunger and thirst by eating and drinking, and so on. It is frequently true that in everyday life unwilled attention is not followed by the normal actions, but in these cases an explanation is required – the other party was unwilling, I was too paralysed by fear, the food turned out to be plastic etc. In the aesthetic case, unwilled looking is not merely a prelude to some other action, and no special explanation is required to show why I did not move onto the next stage of my interest. Aesthetic interest is an end in itself, and has no “next stage” beyond continuing to look.

7 This section is a brief summary of my ‘The Definition of “Art” ’, in M.W. Rowe, Philosophy and Literature, pp. 148–164.


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Although it is usually possible to give reasons for my aesthetic absorption these will take the form, not of mentioning the beliefs and desires that motivate my project, but of pointing out aspects of the object which will allow another person to share my experience. This unwilled or disinterested attention is exactly what pleasure is on an Aristotelian analysis, and it is an essential component of the aesthetic attitude. The best aesthetic objects need not absorb us immediately. They may require a good deal of willed attention, together with practice with the genre they exemplify, before they begin to reward our efforts by sustaining our unwilled attention. Indeed, objects which absorb us immediately may be unable to sustain our pleasure in the long run, and it is the durability as well as the intensity of our experience which determines the object’s aesthetic quality. In addition, although aesthetic experience is not motivated by beliefs, it may need to be informed by beliefs. My appreciation of Hamlet needs to be informed by a knowledge of what ‘jump’ (for example) means in the play, what era the play was written in, and to what Rosencrantz is referring in the ‘little eyases’ speech. But clearly I am not thereby committed to admiring any play written in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean era, containing the word ‘jump,’ and referring to the War of the Players, as I would be if these beliefs motivated my attention. The advantage of this account of aesthetic attention is that it does not restrict the class of aesthetic objects to beautiful objects. Anything can be an object of aesthetic contemplation as long as it will eventually sustain disinterested absorption, and this can be for any number of reasons. These can include being beautiful, being provocative, being interestingly ugly, or even conveying a certain kind of truth. For the rest of this paper, I shall consider and attempt to refute every reason I have been able to discover which purports to show that a desire for knowledge is incompatible with aesthetic interest. Here’s the first: 1) Aesthetic interest must be distinct from a desire to know because it is impossible to maintain that the nonrepresentational arts such as music and abstract painting give rise to knowledge of any kind: ‘true’, ‘false’ and ‘improbable’ are concepts which simply have no application (at least not in the senses in which we are interested in them) to these cases. It

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follows that an interest in truth and knowledge is not an element in aesthetic appreciation.8 In reply, we can point out that just because certain concepts are not used in criticism of all kinds of art, this does not show that the assigning of truth-values does not play a vital role in evaluating some kinds of art, i.e., the representational arts. We do not necessarily look for charm in tragedy or for profundity in salon music, but it would be foolish to rule out charm and profundity as valuable aesthetic qualities just because they do not have universal application to all forms of art. Similarly, even though truth and falsity may have little role to play in music and dance criticism, they may still play a vital role in the criticism of literature. 2) It is quite possible to have a deep admiration for a work of art while disagreeing profoundly with what it asserts. Isenberg, who endorses the no-truth position, takes as an example the lines from Keats’ Hyperion, when Oceanus, one of the old Titans now deposed by Zeus and the other Olympians, speaks these consoling words to Saturn: ‘So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,/ A power more strong in beauty, born of us / And fated to excel us, as we pass / In glory that old darkness; nor are we / thereby more conquer’d, than by us the rule / Of shapeless chaos . . . . . . for ‘tis the eternal law / The first in beauty should be first in might.’ Isenberg comments: ‘I should think it a fair paraphrase to say that this asserts a constant and unending progress from lower to higher in nature. Herbert Spencer may have believed something of the sort. We do not believe anything of the sort.’9 It is true that many statements or enactments of falsehoods do not affect our literary assessments of the works in which they are made, but again there is no reason to generalize from ‘Certain falsehoods do not affect a work’s aesthetic quality,’ to ‘All

8 This objection is raised by Peter Lamarque in his ‘Cognitive Values in the Arts: Marking the Boundaries’, in Matthew Kieran (ed.), Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 127–139. 9 Arnold Isenberg, ‘The Problem of Belief’, in Aesthetics and Critical Theory, eds: William Callaghan, Leigh Cauman et al. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), p. 88.


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falsehoods do not affect a work’s aesthetic quality.’ The passage Isenberg quotes from Hyperion is part of a speech made by the Titan, Oceanus. Clearly, authors are not committed to endorsing the truth of utterances made by their characters, and Keats is no more committed to the utterances of Oceanus than Shakespeare is to the speeches of Lady Macbeth. Indeed, Keats and Shakespeare might be congratulated on documenting the truth that, in certain circumstances, a sufficiently desperate character will utter falsehoods of just this kind. Assuming we can tell the difference between authors and narrators (although this is not always easy) we shall think the worse of a work where the author articulates false or obnoxious opinions, and we shall be even more unsympathetically disposed to a work that enacts false or obnoxious views. However, it is still possible to love and admire works which both state and enact falsehoods because truth is merely one artistic quality amongst others, and a false or otherwise obnoxious book can still be intensely alive, observant, funny, imaginative, emotionally generous, charming and so forth. 3) Ignoring the truth-value of a work’s propositions is held to be a prerequisite for treating it aesthetically, as opposed to treating it as a source of factual information. Thus, if I am reading a Victorian history book about ancient Rome as a work of history (i.e., because I want to find out about and understand what occurred in ancient Rome) and you produce conclusive proof that this book is a tissue of errors and misunderstandings, then, unless I have good reasons for thinking the rest of the book more reliable, I can no longer explain my reading with reference to my interest in ancient Rome. If, however, I say that I am continuing to read because I envy the style and enjoy the story, you might reasonably reply: ‘Of course you can read it as literature, I merely said it was worthless as history.’ Reading a work as literature (rather than history or science) does mean giving up an interest in the literal truth of most of its propositions, but this does not mean giving up an interest in truth altogether: it means only that literary interest is focused on a different kind of truth. Imaginative literature is concerned not with categorical truths (what is and was) but with modal truths

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(what could be and what might have been);10 it is not concerned with all modal truths of this kind, but only with how human beings (or other rational creatures) might think, feel and act; it does not attempt to understand these things by formulating laws but by using the projective imagination; and finally, literature can not only state its truths, but also enact and symbolize them. As this last clause implies, there are exceptions to the rule of literature’s not being concerned with straightforward factual truth. The first is that we find factual errors (as opposed to intentional authorial deviations from known facts) distracting, and this can lower our opinion of a work, even though reading a work as fiction does not mean reading it to acquire facts.11 The second is that where literature makes a generalization about human nature, we require it to be true or close to the truth because such statements are at least partially based on the kind of modal enactments found in literature. Consequently, even when you are persuaded that the historical works of Herodotus and Sir Walter Raleigh are distinctly unreliable on particular facts, you can still value them from the literary standpoint, not only because of their narrative power and style, but because they state, enact and symbolize profound truths about human nature. 4) Even in the case of representational art, when you feel you have undergone a profoundly cognitive experience, it often seems impossible to say what you know which you did not know before. I.A. Richards therefore dismisses as illusory the idea that the knowledge conveyed by the text is the central core of its value: ‘The central experience of tragedy and its chief value is an attitude indispensable to a fully developed life. But in the reading of King Lear what facts verifiable by science or accepted and believed in as we accept and believe in ascertained facts are relevant? None whatever.’12 In a similar spirit, Jerome Stolnitz claims that it is extremely unclear what the ‘truths’ derived

10 This suggestion is, of course, Aristotle’s. See, The Art of Poetry, trans.: Ingram Bywater (Oxford: OUP, 1920), p. 43. 11 On the importance of factual errors in the evaluation of literature see my ‘Lamarque and Olsen on Literature and Truth’, in Rowe, Literature and Philosophy, pp. 126–47. 12 I.A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1955), p. 282.


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from novels are supposed to be. From Crime and Punishment he derives the moral: ‘The criminal [some criminals?] [all criminals?] [criminals in St Petersburg] [criminals who kill old moneylenders, and come under the influence of saintly prostitutes] desire to be caught and punished.’ The clear implication is that, because the proposition learned cannot be specified, nothing of any kind has been learned from the novel.13 If literature were only concerned with conveying propositional knowledge, then these objections would be well founded. However, there are at least five kinds of non-propositional knowledge: i) Knowledge by acquaintance. This is perceptual knowledge of the world (what a certain shade of red looks like, how the clarinet sounds, what Paris is like). ii) Empathic knowledge. This is knowledge of what it is like to be someone other than your current self (a refugee, a beauty queen, passed over for promotion again). iii) Knowledge of how to do something. This would include knowing how to checkmate, tie a shoelace, play the violin, abseil. iv) Phronesis. This is practical knowledge or knowledge of what to do (e.g., how tactfully to diffuse someone’s anger or when to get married). This differs from iii in at least three ways. First, there are no acknowledged experts in such matters (Aristotle says that in these circumstances we need to speak to a wise and experienced friend) whereas there clearly are experts at playing chess and playing the violin. Second, there are no prodigies. It is evident that there are very brilliant five-year-old violinists and chess masters; whereas a five-year-old divorce lawyer or prime minister is unthinkable. Third, know-how is more localized than phronesis. We would naturally expect someone wise and experienced to make good decisions about getting married, having children, accepting job offers etc, and if his

13 Jerome Stolnitz, ‘On the Cognitive Triviality of Art’, in Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen (eds), Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 342.

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performance is very uneven some explanation is required. But no explanation is required to make us understand why someone who plays the accordion well does not also speak Icelandic, or why someone who can tie a whole variety of knots is not an accomplished watercolourist v) Learning how certain situations could be reconceptualized: for example, seeing some of the people you meet as Salinger’s ‘phoneys’, or coming to see the world through the prism of Hardy’s pessimism, or seeing a landscape as a part of the geology which lies beneath it. This reconceptualization may well have practical consequences, but its perceptual component is equally important. Often, these kinds of knowledge can be increased by interaction with the real world, but sometimes they can also be increased through the use of the imagination. For example, you can imagine a shade of green you have not seen, which lies between two shades of green you have seen; you can suddenly realize how to finger a difficult keyboard passage by practising it in your head; you can rehearse various ways of approaching a difficult person when they need to be told something disagreeable; you can try out different ways of viewing the world by running through them in imagination. Knowing that [such-and-such is the case] can be captured in propositions, the five kinds of knowledge listed above cannot. In the case of knowledge by acquaintance, it is sometimes impossible to say anything meaningful at all about a newly encountered phenomenon (e.g., what red looks like), in other cases, it’s possible to say a great deal about a new experience (e.g., what Paris is like) but no one supposes that what can be said is equivalent to the knowledge acquired by actually undergoing it. Now consider two people who are asked how to tie a shoelace. One may be able to tie a lace rapidly but be utterly inept at translating his practical ability into words; another may give you a fluent description and yet be unable to carry out the practical task. The same distinction – between knowing something and being able to articulate what you know – applies to knowledge of what to do, and knowledge which allows us to reconceptualize reality. I may be able to give a few rules of thumb to help someone be tactful, but understanding my sentences and thinking them true will not, by themselves, make him tactful; similarly, I may be able to say a number of things I have learnt from Hardy, but this will


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not necessarily allow someone to understand what a pessimistic vision of the world is like. If someone asked me what I have learnt form my general experience of the world over the last five years, I could say that I’ve learnt what Bangkok and Bergen were like, what it was like to live in various parts of London, and to teach at two universities. This knowledge is significant because it affects my interests, outlook, feelings and abilities, but much of it is perceptual, practical and empathic knowledge which is too particular to put into words. However, it would be odd to deny that my last five years of experience count as knowledge for this reason. What applies to experience of what has happened also applies to experiences of what might or might have happened, and this is the kind of experience we gain from encountering representational art. All representational art shows us scenarios, but literature has the apparently paradoxical power of being able to show by means of statement. This is partly because a whole narrative can show truths which any one proposition cannot; but mainly because the propositions of literature prompt my imagination, allowing me to feel and picture the things and events described. In reading a novel, I live through something in imagination, I extend potentialities of my own being, and I imaginatively experience people, places and incidents which I could not have imagined unaided. In this way, literature can increase the detail and vividness with which I envisage hypothetical scenes; enlarge my know-how; intensify my powers of empathy; hone my understanding of human affairs, and allow me to discover new ways of conceptualizing reality. All these kinds of knowledge can affect my future life by operating below the propositional level: structuring this in terms of that, highlighting this, downplaying that, making this seem possible, making that seem comprehensible, and so on. I can often describe aspects of the novel-reading experience to another person, but, as with real life, no one supposes that acquiring this information is equivalent to the knowledge derived from reading the novel. Thus both Richards and Stolnitz are quite wrong to think that, because I have learned no general propositions from a novel or play, I must have learnt nothing. If I am asked what general truths about human nature I have learned over the last five years of my life, then I might be able to say something (‘Don’t trust casual acquaintances,’ ‘Seize all opportunities’) but it is more than likely that I won’t be able to think of any such propositions at all. Similarly, you might also be able to

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think of a few propositional truths that a novel conveys (and as novels are sometimes self-consciously constructed by their authors to demonstrate certain truths, such propositions may be easier to find), but again, it would not be surprising if you were unable to discover any. 5) Stolnitz goes on to claim that if, in spite of the pessimism stated in objection 4, you succeed in articulating a propositional account of what you have learnt from a work of art, then these artistic truths will be ‘preponderantly, distinctly banal’. For instance, he infers ‘stubborn pride and ignorant prejudice keep attractive people apart’ from Pride and Prejudice, and ‘Pride goeth before a fall’ from the surviving corpus of Greek tragedy.14 But it is not difficult to think of other works from which it is possible to infer propositional insights which are neither banal nor uncontentious. Measure for Measure, I would argue, offers a critique of act-centred morality and suggests it should be replaced by an agent-centred morality based on enlightened selfknowledge.15 This is not banal. Similarly, Mansfield Park, offers a critique of charm, grace, liveliness, excitement and spontaneity, and suggests these qualities are inferior to conventional morality, piety, withdrawal, sincerity and rest.16 This is not banal either; in fact, many readers of the novel find its moral outlook distinctly distasteful and hard to swallow. It may even be possible to infer a non-trivial propositional statement from Crime and Punishment: ‘There could be a criminal who desires to be caught and punished’ summarizes a truth that can be learned from Dostoevsky’s work (the novel cannot support any statements about some or all such criminals, given that the narrative contains only one) and it is greatly to Dostoevsky’s credit that he renders such a counter-intuitive proposition psychologically plausible. Stolnitz goes on to make two further and interrelated points about the irrelevance of truth to art. 14

Stolnitz, ‘The Cognitive Triviality’, pp. 338 and 340. I argue for this conclusion in my ‘The Dissolution of Goodness: Measure for Measure and Classical Ethics’, in Rowe, Philosophy and Literature, pp. 92–125. 16 See Lionel Trilling, ‘Mansfield Park’, in The Opposing Self (Oxford: OUP, 1980), pp. 181–202. 15


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6) The propositions of folk wisdom – which, according to Stolnitz, are all the truths that can be acquired from the arts – are hardly unique to the arts: ‘None of its truths are peculiar to art. All are proper to some extra-artistic sphere of the great world. So considered, there are no artistic truths. Not one.’17 7) Works of art are insufficiently commensurable to form a body of knowledge: ‘Artistic truths, like the works of art that give rise to them, are discretely unrelated and therefore form no corpus either of belief or knowledge. Hence formal contradictions are tolerated effortlessly, if they are ever remarked.’18 Measure for Measure’s debate between act- and agent-centred moralities can be found in books of moral philosophy; and the case made by Mansfield Park in hundreds of Christian sermons and pamphlets. We can thus agree with Stolnitz that many truths derived from the arts are not only to be found in the arts. Nonetheless, novels can make different visions uniquely concrete, protracted, detailed and vivid. And the author, as well as commenting explicitly on the characters and actions, can implicitly guide us through a novel’s complexities, highlighting this, foregrounding that, hinting at parallels and patterns which we might have missed by ourselves. Consequently, we need feel no embarrassment in conceding to Stolnitz that knowledge conveyed by the arts is not uniquely conveyed by the arts. Some of it can be obtained from a general experience of life, some of it can be obtained from philosophy, but fiction’s distinctive blend of pleasure, imaginative experience, and reflection makes it uniquely well placed to convey certain kinds of experiential and practical knowledge. However, we should not concede that the knowledge conveyed by novels is too ‘discretely unrelated and therefore form[s] no corpus either of belief or knowledge [,] hence formal contradictions are tolerated effortlessly, if they are ever remarked.’ The language here is misleading. There is certainly no corpus of artistic knowledge, and normal propositions of fictions do not contradict one another (‘X might be the case’ and ‘Not-X might be the case’ is not a contradiction). But having said this, the statements about

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Stolnitz, ‘The Cognitive Triviality’, p. 341. Stolnitz, ‘The Cognitive Triviality’, p. 342.

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human nature stated or implied in different works of fiction can contradict one another, and the visions of individual authors are often sufficiently commensurable and various to make comparison and evaluation profitable. Strawson, outlining some of the ideals which literature has to offer us, emphasizes their opposition: As for the ways of life that . . . present themselves at different times as each uniquely satisfactory, there can be no doubt about their variety and opposition. The ideas of self-obliterating devotion to duty or to service of others; of personal honour and magnanimity; of asceticism, contemplation and retreat; of action, dominance and power; of the cultivation of ‘an exquisite sense of the luxurious’; of simple human solidarity and human endeavour; of a refined complexity of social existence; of a constantly maintained and renewed sense of affinity with natural things – any of these ideas, and a great many others too, may form the core and substance of a personal ideal. . . . ‘The nobleness of life is to do thus’ or, sometimes, ‘The sanity of life is to do thus’; such may be the devices with which these images present themselves.19 8) The durability of our absorption in a text is one criterion of aesthetic merit. If, however, we are simply interested in learning something from a work of art then it would seem to be very difficult to explain why we return again and again to a text we understand perfectly well. Given that we cannot learn what we already know, continuing curiosity is only a comprehensible motive if we have never learned or have simply forgotten what a text can teach us. There are a number of answers to this. The first is that works of literature are often long and complex and we can never be sure that we have completely mastered them or have learned all they have to teach. Second, even if we restrict ourselves to propositional truths, we realize that these truths can be known with different degrees of intensity. We can agree to a proposition, and acknowledge its truth, without realizing or assenting to all its

19 P.F. Strawson, ‘Social Morality and Individual Ideal’, in his Freedom and Resentment (London: Methuen, 1974), p. 26. The literary origins of Strawson’s ‘images’ are obvious.


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propositional implications, or all its implications for our emotions, dispositions, actions and habits. ‘Traffic is dangerous,’ is a statement I can happily assent to now; but after a traumatic car accident my assent is both deeper and more intense, and it has a far greater effect on my thoughts, feelings and actions. This is part of the distinction Cardinal Newman attempted to draw in his writings about Real and Notional Assent. The third and the most important response, once again, is that literary knowledge is not propositional. You either know the proposition ‘Beethoven died in 1827’ or you don’t, but knowing your way around a town, having the ability to diffuse anger, knowing what it’s like to be a refugee, are all matters of degree. Your skill, or the intensity of an experience, can wane or fade with time, and continual returns to a work may be necessary to ensure your abilities are honed and your recollections vivid. The only time you would not have a reason to return to a work for the knowledge it conveys is when you have absolute and photographic recall of it. But this, of course, is exactly the same circumstance as when you would not need to return to a non-representational work that conveys no knowledge at all. 9) W.W. Robson suggests that doubt has been cast on the relevance of truth-value in assessing the quality of literature by phrases like the following from Leavis, which describe how the thought processes required for understanding a work of literature differ from those required for understanding a scientific text:20 ‘Words in poetry invite us, not to “think about” and judge but to “feel into” and “become” – to realise a complex experience that is given in the words.’21 This fails for a similar reason. It may be true that poetry does not invite us to ‘think about’ and ‘judge’ in some analytic or deductive sense, but thoughts and judgements of this kind may not be the only route to truth. Indeed, as I’ve tried to show above, we sometimes derive knowledge from literature by use of empathy, and this exactly requires that we, in Leavis’s words, ‘feel into’ and ‘become.’ 20 W.W. Robson, ‘Ivor Winters: Counter Romantic’, in his The Definition of Literature (Cambridge: CUP, 1978), p. 263. 21 F.R. Leavis, ‘Literary Criticism and Philosophy’, in his The Common Pursuit (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), pp. 212–13.

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10) Isenberg’s other central objection to the relevance of truth to aesthetic judgement receives a condensed summary from R.K. Elliott: . . . Aesthetic experience is the contemplation of an imaginary world, which is the meaning of a literary work. The imaginary world is the ‘aesthetic object’, and only properties internal to it are relevant to aesthetic judgement. If attention is directed away from the aesthetic object in an attempt to discover its value in its correspondence with something external to it, the aesthetic point of view is therefore abandoned, experience ceases to be aesthetic experience, and any evaluative judgment grounded upon any discovered correspondence (or lack of correspondence) is not an aesthetic judgment.22 If Isenberg’s objection is correct, then a) the idea of correspondence must make some sense, b) the kind of investigation required to determine a representation’s truth-value must distract attention from the representation, c) there is at least the possibility of a considerable lapse of time between understanding the representation and deciding whether or not it is true. (Isenberg is quite explicit on this last point when he writes, in his paper ‘Critical Communication’, ‘[that] questions about meaning are provisionally separable if finally inseparable from questions about validity and truth is shown by the fact that meanings can be exchanged without the corresponding cognitive decisions.’23) All these considerations apply to a bald a posteriori proposition like ‘Between sixty and eighty thousand people live in Keighley’. I can understand it perfectly well but I have no idea whether it’s true, and to determine its truth-value would require considerable labour over and above the apprehension of its meaning. It is also clear that the idea of truth as some kind of correspondence between the proposition and a state of affairs is at least an intuitively plausible idea; and one aspect of this is that the population of Keighley must have played a part in causing the cognitive states of the knower. However, none of these considerations apply to a priori knowledge. As Descartes argues, to apprehend a simple a priori proposition clearly and distinctly is to be immediately convinced of its

22 23

R.K. Elliott, ‘Poetry and Truth’, Analysis, 27, (1967), p. 77. Arnold Isenberg, ‘Critical Communication’, in Aesthetics and Critical Theory, p. 156.


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truth, and if someone were to deny that ‘2 + 2 = 4’ or ‘If A then A’ then the usual explanation would be that he did not understand them. There is no time-consuming evidence gathering to distract us from the proposition, and the idea that the truth or justified assertion of ‘If A then A’ depends on a correspondence between the proposition and ‘If A then A’ states of affairs is not even intelligible let alone attractive. Literary truth is normally thought to be a posteriori truth, but when we look at Wordsworth’s claim that literary truth is not ‘individual and local, but general and operative; not standing on external testimony . . . but truth which is its own testimony [my italics]’24 or Blake’s remark that ‘Truth can never be told so as to be understood but not believed,’25 it is evident that they think literary truth is akin to a priori knowledge, and therefore avoids Isenberg’s objection. What arguments can be offered in favour of the idea that literary truth is akin to a priori truth? Let me begin by considering a passage where an author has an unexpected insight into one of his characters. It comes from John Carey’s book, Thackeray: Prodigal Genius, where Carey paraphrases a passage from Vanity Fair. Rawdon is the neglected husband, Becky his wife, and Lord Steryne her lover: Rawdon, escaping unbeknown from the sponging house, surprises [Becky], aglitter with guilt and diamonds, in Steryne’s company, and flings the nobleman bleeding to the ground. At a blow, Becky’s schemes lie in ruins. Years of hard work and hypocrisy are cancelled in an instant. She might justifiably feel both aghast and aggrieved. But in fact she watches Rawdon, quivering with something like adoration and something like desire. ‘She admired her husband, strong, brave and victorious’. ‘When I wrote that sentence’, Thackeray told Hannay, ‘I slapped my fist on the table and said “That is a touch of genius” ’.26 Is it a touch of genius? Is it even plausible? Looking for some kind of empirical correspondence will not help decide the matter. Thus interviews with wives who have seen their lovers assaulted by 24 William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1802)’ in Stephen Gill (ed.), William Wordsworth, The Oxford Authors series, (Oxford: OUP, 1984), p. 605. 25 William Blake, ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’, in Selected Poems of William Blake, ed.: F.W. Bateson (London: Heinemann, 1963), p. 68. 26 John Carey, Thackeray: Prodigal Genius (London: Faber and Faber, 1977), p. 182.

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their husbands will not decide the issue. Nor will interviews with young wives caught with elderly aristocratic lovers, or young wives called ‘Becky’ surprised while dining with elderly aristocratic lovers by handsome military husbands. Trends, laws and generalities have no bearing on the kind of dispute described. Even if there were an interviewee whose character and circumstances were identical with Becky’s, and who said that she was aggrieved by her husband’s behaviour, then this would still not show that Thackeray had made a misjudgement. There are clearly an infinite number of possible people and circumstances that satisfy Thackeray’s description, and the fact that one possible person does not behave in the way he specifies does not show that other possible people might not behave in exactly the way he describes. In fact, two kinds of consideration are relevant to this kind of dispute. The first, and most important, is imaginatively engaging with the details of the text, thinking about the individual character’s motivation and background, and reviewing the various interpretations of her behaviour. When literary critics argue about this kind of issue, the overwhelming majority of their considerations are of this kind, and they will usually emphasize certain features of a text so that they become highlighted in the reader’s consciousness. One critic will say: ‘Becky’s far too cynical and self-interested to allow herself to be overcome by such a feeling’; while another will emphasize her impulsiveness and susceptibility to handsome men. Thus, in order to justify a literary insight, a critic generally does not have to leave the page. In this, the justification of literary knowledge resembles the justification of a priori knowledge. A mathematical calculation, for example, is justified, not by talking about your maths teachers, but by working through the stages of a calculation, asking for assent to each step. Leavis describes literary criticism as functioning in the same way: ‘The critical procedure is tactical: the critic, with his finger moving from this point to that in the text, aims at so ordering his particular judgments (“This is so, isn’t it?”) that, “Yes” having in the succession of them almost inevitably come for an answer, the rightness of the inclusive main judgments stands clear for prompted recognition . . .’27 27 F.R. Leavis, ‘Thought, Language and Objectivity’, in his The Living Principle (London, 1975), p. 35. Leavis is here talking about how a critic evaluates a poem, but, as I argue below, exactly the same kind of argument is employed when we argue about the plausibility of a fictional character’s feelings and actions.


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The second consideration is general knowledge of human nature and the kind of character being discussed. This may seem to contradict what I said above about the irrelevance of empirical evidence in disputes about literary truth, but this is not the case. Our view of how a character could behave can be adjusted by our experience of other human beings and, in particular, of the kind of human being in question, but there will always be a gap between previous real cases and the fictional example being discussed. This gap can only be crossed by means of judgements, and judgements of this kind are always open to dispute and later modification. But the opinion of a critic with extensive knowledge of the relevant kind will have, all things being equal, more weight then one which lacks it; and a book we find utterly compelling when young can become increasingly implausible as we grow older and acquire more knowledge of life. In this, literary judgement more closely resembles a posteriori knowledge, since how we came by our knowledge, and how reliable it is, are clearly relevant issues. However, when engaged in critical argument, we are not conscious of passing from the fictional character to the real cases and back again; rather, we use the sensibility these real cases have helped form, to guide us through the fictional world presented. Pursuing literary truth does not mean setting aside a text, at least temporarily, in order to compare it carefully with some original. This procedure, as Isenberg correctly sees, would distract us from the aesthetic object. On the contrary, pursuing literary knowledge means paying closer attention to the text, engaging with it more imaginatively, and looking for patterns and coherences we may have overlooked before. As in mathematics, truths and errors are not discovered and rectified by empirical research, but by reflection on the concepts employed and the events depicted. And as in mathematics, literary truths are not conveyed via a text, they are conveyed by a text; or perhaps it is more accurate to say that they become known through a reader thinking with a text. I suspect this is because, in both mathematics and literature, we are not interested in real existences. We begin with certain fictional assumptions, and then in both cases we use the imagination to discover what the consequences of these assumptions will be. Both subjects are not concerned with correspondences (although these might exist) but with certain kinds of coherence which the reader must follow and assent to. In sum, I would argue that literary truths are akin to simple a priori knowledge. There is no notion that a fiction corresponds to

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reality; there is no notion that investigating the truth of a fiction need distract us from the fiction; and we are usually in a position to determine the truth or falsity of a fiction immediately, even if our judgement later changes. The only respect in which literary truth is not like a priori thought is that experience of life and people can influence and change our judgements. Literature, we feel, might have conveyed truths about mathematics, physics and botany. Why, therefore, is it only concerned with the limited class of truths discussed above – modal truths about rational creatures discovered by the projective imagination? The reason, I think, is as follows. If I am asked to evaluate an abstract painting, I do not need consciously to go outside the work, I can make my judgement immediately, and if you do not share my judgement I can attempt to bring you round by emphasizing one aspect and playing down another. The way I evaluate and argue about the qualities of an abstract work is therefore exactly the same as the way I evaluate and argue about the plausibility of a fictional character’s behaviour. In both cases, what I have elsewhere called ‘critical reasoning’ is employed.28 This is the reason why, of all the kinds of truth which could have been conveyed by literature, it actually enacts and conveys modal truths discovered by the concrete imagination. The two kinds of interest (pure form and human truth) we take in representational art appear, when superimposed, indistinguishable, and we thus feel no sense of strain when passing from one topic to the other; indeed, the way an artist uses one to enhance the other will be an object of keenest interest. 11) ‘If literary works are construed’, write Lamarque and Olsen, ‘as having the constitutive aim of advancing truths about human concerns by means of general propositions implicitly or explicitly contained in them, then one should expect some kind of supporting argument, the more so since the purported truths are mostly controversial. [In this, they clearly disagree with Stolnitz who claims that artistic truths are “banal”.] However, there are no such arguments or debate either in the literary work itself, or in literary criticism.’29

28 29

See my ‘Criticism Without Theory’, in Rowe, Philosophy and Literature, pp. 22–43. Lamarque and Olsen, Truth, Fiction, p. 365.


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12) Critics of cognitive theories of aesthetic value frequently ask how it is possible to distinguish between the alleged knowledge supplied by literature and mere opinion; how can we tell the difference between what is true and what merely purports to be true? Since they conclude that, in a literary context, we cannot tell the difference, they reject literature’s claim to impart discoveries and insights.30 Objection 11 says that we distinguish between knowledge and opinion by means of argument. The current objection is open to the idea that there are methods other than argument for distinguishing between the two, but claims that, whatever these methods are, literature and criticism lack them. Contra Lamarque and Olsen, there are endless arguments and disputes in literary criticism, not only about the views stated or enacted in various works, but also about the plausibility of characters’ behaviour and reactions. Indeed, the generalizations stated in fictions are generally based on the behaviour shown in the work; the generalizations enacted in a work are clearly logically reliant on the behaviour shown. A recent example is the dispute between John Banville and Craig Raine about the plausibility of an incident in the last chapter of Ian McEwan’s novel, Saturday.31 In this scene, the hero’s daughter reads Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ to a violent thug who is threatening her family, and in the resultant mood-swing he allows himself to be overpowered. Admittedly, he is suffering from a degenerative brain disorder, but the whole incident, where the art of poetry triumphs over violent philistinism, is uncomfortably close to a literary man’s fantasy. A critic is only justified in claiming that a certain character’s actions are unlikely if he has imagined a more plausible set of actions. In certain cases, a critic, outraged by the implausibility of what he reads, will actually write what should have happened and what the author should have written. Thus Strindberg obligingly revises some of Helmer’s speeches in A Doll’s House:

30

Lamarque and Olsen, Truth, Fiction, p. 368. Ian McEwan, Saturday (London: Vintage Books, 2006), pp. 218–228. See John Banville’s review, New York Review of Books, Vol.52, No.9, May 26th 2005, and Craig Raine’s reply, Times Literary Supplement, 2/12/2005. 31

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Nora: ‘Doesn’t it occur to you that this is the first time that we two, husband and wife, have talked seriously to one another?’ Helmer is so taken aback by this mendacious question that he (or the author!) answers: ‘Seriously – what do you mean by seriously?’ – The author thus achieving his object, Helmer has been made to look a fool. He should have answered: ‘No, my little pet, it doesn’t occur to me at all. We talked very seriously together when our children were born, we talked about their future. We talked very seriously when you wanted to install the forger Krogstad, as head clerk in the Bank. We talked very seriously when my life was in danger, and about giving Mrs Linde a job, and about running the house, and about your dead father, and our syphilitic friend Dr Rank. We have talked seriously for eight long years, but we have joked too, and we were right to do so, for life isn’t only a serious business. We could indeed have had more serious talk if you’d been kind enough to tell me your worries, but you were too proud, for you preferred to be my doll rather than my friend.’ But Mr Ibsen does not allow Helmer to say these sensible things, for he must be shown to be a fool . . . The scene is absurdly false.32 Sometimes discursive prose is dispensed with altogether and a writer simply takes the starting point of a work and then wholly reworks it. Golding was apparently so irritated by the implausibility of Ballantyne’s Coral Island, that he took its starting point – a group of boys marooned on a deserted island – and then showed, in Lord of the Flies, what he felt would actually happen. Had Ballantyne been alive, he would rightly have thought Golding’s book critical of his own work. From these cases we can see that there are other ways apart from evidence and analytic argument of showing that a view is true or false. One of these is demonstrating how a state of affairs can come about through showing it evolve in a complex and plausible narrative. For example, a policeman might ask a youth how he comes to have three car radios in his knapsack, and the latter’s fate may well hang on how convincing and coherent the narrative he produces is, even before its factual content has been checked. Narrative is also literature’s method, and it can be used to answer certain questions. Thus, if someone wonders ‘How can 32

A. Strindberg, Getting Married (London: Quartet Books, 1977), p. 35.


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someone be reduced to a virtual non-entity through irony?’, then we might well direct him to Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice33; if he wants to know how a virtuous man can admire someone not in spite of but because of his particularly hateful crimes, then we might recommend he look at Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.34 The desire for imaginative knowledge of rational creatures is not the same as the desire to enjoy certain formal patterns of sound, movement and colour, but the two desires show remarkable formal similarities, and both are part of our desire for aesthetic experience. Thus, when a correct understanding of aesthetic knowledge is combined with a correct understanding of the aesthetic attitude, we see that there is no conflict between aesthetic interest and curiosity about life.35

33

Trilling, ‘Mansfield Park’, p. 181. See Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Oxford: OUP, 1974), pp. 106–111. 35 I would like to thank audiences at the various institutions where versions of this paper have been read: Oxford, 2006; UEA, 2007; Reading, 2008; and the London Aesthetics Forum, 2009. The contributions of John Hyman, John Cottingham, Peter Lamarque and Stacie Friend were particularly useful, as were a set of comments from the editor of this issue of Ratio, Severin Schroeder. 34

2 THE ELUSIVENESS OF POETIC MEANING

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Peter Lamarque Abstract Various aspects of poetic meaning are discussed, centred on the relation of form and content. A C Bradley’s thesis of form-content identity, suitably reformulated, is defended against criticisms by Peter Kivy. It is argued that the unity of form-content is not discovered in poetry so much as demanded of it when poetry is read ‘as poetry’. A shift of emphasis from talking about ‘meaning’ in poetry to talking about ‘content’ is promoted, as is a more prominent role for ‘experience’ in characterising responses to poetry and its value. It is argued that the key to poetic meaning lies less in a theory of meaning, more in a theory of poetry, where what matters are modes of reading poetry. Content-identity in poetry is said to be ‘interest-relative’ such that no absolute answer, independent of the interests of the questioner, can determine when a poem and a paraphrase have the same content. Interpretation of poetry need not focus exclusively on meaning, but on ways in which the experience of a poem can be heightened.

My title ‘The Elusiveness of Poetic Meaning’ can be construed in three ways: first, that the meaning of some poems is elusive, i.e. obscure or hard to grasp; second, that the very idea of ‘poetic meaning’ is elusive to critics and philosophers seeking a theory of poetry; and third, that poetic meaning has the peculiar feature of eluding adequate paraphrase. These construals are separate in that each could be true without the others (a poem might be obscure, for example, but nevertheless open to paraphrase, by an expert reader; and a satisfactory theory of poetic meaning might be hard to obtain without poetry being either obscure or unparaphrasable). These kinds of elusiveness, then, might be separate but they are also related. The aim of the paper is to explore them and to relate them. I will come last to the issue of obscurity in poetry as that will fall out of what I have to say about the other kinds of elusiveness. My starting point, indeed the focus of much of what is to follow, is that old chestnut, the relation of form and content in poetry. It

THE ELUSIVENESS OF POETIC MEANING

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might be supposed that post-New Criticism, indeed post-Literary Theory, the debate, for example about the ‘heresy of paraphrase’, has moved on. My interest stems, at least partly, from a paper by Peter Kivy, in which Kivy aims not to praise, or revive, the ‘unity of form and content’ but to bury it once and for all.1 I am not quite convinced, though, that Kivy has had the last word.2 It strikes me that there is something in what he calls form-content unity that, suitably formulated, should not be lost. It takes us to the heart of that elusive ‘poetic meaning’. Kivy’s discussion is an impressive wide-ranging treatment of a great many topics. I should emphasise that, while I disagree with one of its key themes, I wholeheartedly agree with a lot else. The paper is part of a wider polemic, hinted at in the title of the book Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences, to discourage efforts in aesthetics always to look for commonalities across the arts and to encourage more focus on differences between the arts. One objection he has to the unity of form and content is that it is often treated as a feature of all the arts; he thinks that is palpably wrong, not least because absolute music, as he sees it, has no content at all, so in that case there is no content to be united with anything. In fact, I agree with Kivy both on his general enterprise and on the specific application to the form-content debate across the arts. It is no part of my purpose to make claims, even implicitly, about form and content other than in poetry, although I will make some brief remarks about other literary arts like the novel. Kivy also offers an illuminating survey of the history of the debate, tracing it to elements in Kant and running through the likes of Eduard Hanslick and Walter Pater. I have no quarrel with any of that. His principal quarry, though, is A C Bradley, particularly Bradley’s renowned inaugural lecture at Oxford, ‘Poetry for Poetry’s Sake’ first published in 1901.3 My aim is to defend Bradley or at least, through a somewhat loose reconstruction, to make Bradley’s central thesis both plausible and resistant to Kivy’s criticisms.

1 Peter Kivy, ‘On the Unity of Form and Content’, in Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 2 In fact another recent paper, Kelly Dean Jolley’s ‘(Kivy on) the Form-Content Identity Thesis’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 48 (2008), pp. 193–204, also addresses Kivy’s discussion, although Jolley and I differ on where we think Kivy can be challenged. 3 A.C. Bradley, ‘Poetry for Poetry’s Sake’, in Oxford Lectures on Poetry 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1926).

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I So, then, to Kivy’s argument. His target is the claim that form and content are identical (across the arts but especially in poetry). That is the view he attributes to Bradley and he calls it the ‘noparaphrase’ claim: The ‘no-paraphrase’ claim . . . with regard to poetry is that any attempt to state the content of a poem in any words other than those of the poem itself will not accurately paraphrase its content. So if we think of the words of the poem as its form, and what the poem says as its content, it turns out that they cannot be prised apart. . . . [I]f the words, the form, were one thing and what the words said another – then, according to Bradley and his followers, what the poem says could be said in other words, its content could be put in another form. However, such is not the case. The poem cannot be paraphrased. Therefore, its content and form, what it says and how it says it, are one and inseparable.4 Kivy thinks this is ‘pretty implausible’ and immediately cites a potential counterexample, namely Lucretius’ De rerum natura, which, although in poetic form, is essentially a treatise on Epicurean natural philosophy. Kivy is certain that Lucretius recognized a difference between form and content – he cites a passage where Lucretius states that the verse form is just a way of making the doctrines a bit more palatable, implying that the content could easily have been expressed in prose, i.e. in a different form. This in turn raises the question whether Bradley is using form-content identity as a mark of poetry in general or only as a mark of good poetry. This, for Kivy, is further evidence of how confused Bradley is. Kivy sometimes calls the ‘no-paraphrase’ claim5 the ‘ineffability thesis’: the view that ‘the content of a poem is ineffable [i.e.

4

Kivy, ‘On the Unity’, pp. 86–7. It is perhaps significant that Bradley only uses the term ‘paraphrase’ once in his lecture (p. 20), and that only incidentally. It was Cleanth Brooks who highlighted that term in his essay ‘The Heresy of Paraphrase’ (1947), in The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (London: Methuen, 1968). Bradley speaks frequently of a ‘heresy’ but not explicitly of a heresy of ‘paraphrase’. Kivy makes no mention of Brooks yet in this regard runs Bradley and Brooks together. 5


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inexpressible] in any other vehicle but the poem itself’.6 He thinks the ineffability thesis is motivated by an aspiration of poets to have a special access to knowledge, or access to a special kind of knowledge: what makes the thesis of form-content identity attractive is its seeming power to regain for poetry its ancient epistemic status, lost in the wake of the scientific revolution and the specialization of the “knowing game”. If the content of the poem could be paraphrased, then that paraphrase would inevitably fall into one of the categories of human knowledge populated by resident authorities who perforce would outrank the poet in expertise. . . . The ineffability thesis assures the poet his expertise . . . making him sovereign over a special, unpoachable knowledge reserve.7 I mention this claim because it plays quite a central role in Kivy’s argument – it gives us a further reason, he thinks, for rejecting form-content identity – but I am going to set it aside partly because it has no place in my own defence of the unity of form and content, partly because, as I see it, it has no place in Bradley’s either. Kivy asks: ‘How plausible is the thesis that we cannot successfully say in words other than those of the poem what the poem is expressing?’.8 He quite rightly insists that we cannot answer that until we have a criterion of success. His worry is that the standard of success will either be set so high that it couldn’t reasonably be attained or, worse, that successful paraphrase is made impossible in effect by stipulation. He calls the latter ‘conventionalist sulk’.9 One way he thinks the bar is set unreasonably high, or perhaps is the wrong kind of bar altogether, is an appeal to the experience of the poem. If the criterion for successful paraphrase is the ‘reproduction of the poem’s total effect on the reader’ then of course, he agrees, paraphrase will not be possible: this criterion of success [’reproduction of the poem’s total effect on the reader’] . . . is in fact nonsensical, because it 6 7 8 9

Kivy, ‘On the Unity’, p. 89. Kivy, ‘On the Unity’, pp. 90–1. Kivy, ‘On the Unity’, p. 104. Ibid.

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demands of paraphrase something that never was the object of the exercise in the first place. . . . No one who sets out to say in prose the content of what a poem says in poetic form intends as the goal of the task to provide an alternative way of experiencing the poem. And to fault the interpreter for failing to do what is not the point of interpretation in the first place is plain nonsense.10 We will need to return to the issue of ‘experience’. But meanwhile, following the dialectic of the argument, Kivy’s strategy is this: finding no reasonable criterion for success in Bradley he proposes one himself. Forget about ‘complete’ or ‘perfect’ paraphrase and settle for ‘the modest claim that we can say in plain words more or less what the content of a poem is’.11 Capturing a poem’s content ‘more or less’ in a paraphrase is, for Kivy, enough to scotch the strong form-content identity thesis. On the matter of how we experience a poem, he also proposes a ‘moderate’ view, namely that ‘sometimes the form and content of a poem are experienced as “indissolubly fused”, sometimes (quite properly) not’, a view he takes to be ‘harmlessly true’.12 Interestingly, he doesn’t say what it is to experience form and content as ‘indissolubly fused’ and even that possibility might seem a surprising concession to the Bradleyans. He thinks, though, that Bradley’s likely response is to insist that when we experience a poem properly we fuse form and content. But here Kivy smells a rat. What’s the test for a ‘proper’ experience? Well, fusing form and content. And that, of course, Kivy quite rightly notes, is hopelessly circular. It is always hard to argue against ‘moderate’ or ‘modest’ positions and Kivy’s reassuring commonsense is, as ever, very seductive. Drop the ‘identity’ of form and content, he tells us, replace it with ‘special intimacy’. Drop the thought that form and content are always intimate, replace with ‘sometimes’. Drop even the thought that this is a peculiarity of poetic meaning; acknowledge, innocuously, that we can find it all over the place. The strict form-content identity theorist is left seeming unreasonably extreme, flying in the face of obvious facts. It does indeed seem obvious that in the vast majority of cases a careful paraphrase can capture ‘more or less’ a poem’s content. 10 11 12

Kivy, ‘On the Unity’, p. 105. Kivy, ‘On the Unity’, p. 106. Kivy, ‘On the Unity’, p. 108.


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The trouble is it seems so obvious that it is hard to believe that its denial is at the heart of the form-content identity thesis. In defending Bradley I shall not seek to deny Kivy’s ‘moderate’ proparaphrase claims. Instead I want to shift the whole focus of the discussion. As I see it, Bradley’s central concerns are less about paraphrase, more about value, less about what poems mean, more about how to read poetry. To anticipate, I don’t think that the unity of form and content is something we discover in poetry but something that we demand of it. I don’t think it is a contingent fact that in some poems form and content ‘fuse’, while in others they don’t. I don’t think it is a matter of degree whether form and content coincide (that it happens more in some cases than others). I don’t even think that content is best explained in terms of meaning. Indeed I think it is misleading to say that poems as such (as opposed to parts of poems) have meaning at all (the expression ‘the meaning of the poem’, taken literally, never picks out something), so if ‘paraphrase’ means ‘give the same meaning as’ then it is not a contingent but a logical truth that poems are unparaphrasable. I don’t think that interpretation of poetry aims primarily at paraphrase. Nor do I think that interpretation is only marginally or contingently connected to experience; it is essentially so. Finally, I don’t think the Lucretius case is a counterexample to form-content unity.

II I will defend and expound this alternative perspective, in the first instance by drawing out what I take to be the insights in Bradley’s inaugural lecture. There is much in Bradley’s lecture that I shall not discuss, nor try to defend. But I think on fundamentals he is right, construed in a certain way. There will come a point, perhaps fairly soon, when my reformulation of his views takes on a life of its own and as we proceed I shall become less concerned whether I am offering a faithful exegesis of his work. But I do believe I am writing in the spirit of Bradley and I share his conclusion that a special feature of poetry is the unity of form and content. Bradley’s whole discussion of poetry is focused on the idea of value. Wherein, he asks, lies the value of poetry? His general answer, in my own words, is something like this: that the value of a poem lies in the intrinsic value of the experience that a poem

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invites.13 I think this is broadly right and in outline it is the same view that Malcolm Budd defends in his book Values of Art. Budd’s view is more sophisticated than Bradley’s, not least because he recognizes the need for a normative element in the characterisation of the appropriate experience. Not just any experience that a poem evokes is relevant to the value of the poem. For Budd it must be the ‘experience of interacting with [the work] in whatever way it demands if it is to be understood’; furthermore, ‘to experience a work with (full) understanding your experience must be imbued with an awareness of (all) the aesthetically relevant properties of the work’.14 In other words the experience must be suitably tied to the work. Nor need it have merely, if at all, a sensuous, phenomenological character (like a pleasant feeling); it might involve, in Budd’s words, ‘the invigoration of one’s consciousness, or a refined awareness of human psychology or political or social structures, or moral insight, or an imaginative identification with a sympathetic form of life or point of view that is not one’s own’. The main thing – and Bradley shares the point – is that it be an intrinsically not merely instrumentally valuable experience. Bradley seeks to target, and forcefully reject, two views about poetic value: on the one hand, a naïve formalism that says that the essence of poetry, and thus the root of its value, lies in its formal properties; after all, so the formalist claims, a poem can be about more or less anything but we judge its worth not by its subject matter but by its handling of the subject. On the other hand, Bradley targets a kind of naïve reductionism about content that says that the essence of poetry is in what it communicates; its exploration of the great topics, like the Fall of Man, lies at the heart of its value, not niggling facts about its rhythms or rhymes. It is Bradley’s rejection of both these naïve positions about poetic value – naïve formalism and naïve content-reductionism – that leads him to his thesis of the unity of form and content. They [i.e. these naïve positions] imply that there are in a poem two parts, factors, or components, a substance and a form; and that you can conceive them distinctly and separately, so that when you are speaking of the one you are not speaking of the

13 14

Bradley, ‘Poetry’, p. 4. Malcolm Budd, Values of Art (London: The Penguin Press, 1995), p. 4.


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other. Otherwise how can you ask the question, In which of them does the value lie? But really in a poem, apart from defects, there are no such factors or components; and therefore it is strictly nonsense to ask in which of them the value lies.15 This is a strong claim – it is strictly ‘nonsense’ to ask which of substance or form is more valuable. Bradley’s reason is that in a poem they are one and the same, identical. It would be just as nonsensical to ask which of the Morning Star or the Evening Star is more valuable. In order to see why Bradley thinks that substance and form are identical we need to lay out a distinction absolutely crucial to his discussion: between ‘subject’, ‘substance’ and ‘form’. First, ‘subject’: The subject . . . is generally something, real or imaginary, as it exists in the minds of fairly cultivated people. The subject of Paradise Lost would be the story of the Fall as that story exists in the general imagination of a Bible-reading people. The subject of Shelley’s stanzas To a Skylark would be the ideas which arise in the mind of an educated person when, without knowing the poem, he hears the word ‘skylark’. . . . [T]he subject of The Ancient Mariner was a sailor who killed an albatross and suffered for his deed. Now the subject . . . is not, as such, inside the poem, but outside it. The contents of the stanza To a Skylark are not the ideas suggested by the word ‘skylark’ to the average man; they belong to Shelley just as much as the language does. The subject, therefore, is not the matter of the poem at all; and its opposite is not the form of the poem, but the whole poem. The subject is one thing; the poem, matter and form alike, another thing.16 The subject, then, for Bradley, is broadly speaking what a poem is about; it includes well-known stories, the Fall of Man, say, or the tragedy of Agamemnon and the House of Atreus, of which there might be many versions, but it might also include particulars, King Arthur or Queen Victoria, or general concepts, like skylark or

15 16

Bradley, ‘Poetry’, p. 14. Bradley, ‘Poetry’, p. 9.

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fame, or it might include more universal thematic concepts, like jealousy, or despair, or the conflict of love and duty. Here, of course, I am extrapolating; these are not Bradley’s examples. The reason he thinks these subjects are ‘outside’ any single poem is that they can be identified and characterised without essential reference to any one work. Lots of works might be about skylarks, despair, or King Arthur. The two other key terms are more difficult to characterise accurately, partly because of the complex dialectic within which they are introduced by Bradley. Substance and form are initially to be distinguished, to capture popular conceptions, but in the end they will be shown to be identical, at least in the relevant contexts. Here is his account of ‘substance’ (which he also calls ‘content’): Those figures, scenes, events that form part of the subject called the Fall of Man, are not the substance of Paradise Lost; but in Paradise Lost there are figures, scenes, and events resembling them in some degree. These, with much more of the same kind, may be described as its substance, and may then be contrasted with the measured language of the poem, which will be called its form. Subject is the opposite not of form but of the whole poem. Substance is within the poem, and its opposite, form, is also within the poem.17 About ‘form’, as a putatively separable entity, he says little, referring to it as ‘measured language taken by itself’18 or just ‘style and versification’.19 The mistake of the naïve formalist and the naïve contentreductionist is that they confuse two distinctions: between substance and form, and between subject and poem. The naïve formalist ‘lays his whole weight on the form because he thinks its opposite is the mere subject’, while the naïve content-reductionist ‘gives to the subject praises that rightly belong to the substance’.20 Bradley’s dialectic here is subtle. Let me try to reformulate it in a way that highlights its insights. A poem’s subject consists of those stories, ideas or themes that the poem shares, at least potentially, with other poems or other works. The poem’s substance (or 17 18 19 20

Bradley, Bradley, Bradley, Bradley,

‘Poetry’, ‘Poetry’, ‘Poetry’, ‘Poetry’,

p. p. p. p.

12. 16. 18. 13.


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content) is something like this: the-subject-as-realised-in-the-poem. And the form, I suggest, something like this: the-mode-of-realisation-of-thesubject-in-the-poem. For continuity’s sake let us talk not of ‘substance’ but of ‘content’, defined in this way (Bradley says he uses the words interchangeably). Now it is Bradley’s claim that content, so characterised, and form, so characterised, are identical: ‘they are one thing from different points of view, and in that sense identical. And this identity of content and form . . . is no accident; it is of the essence of poetry in so far as it is poetry’.21 How do we identify the content, the-subject-as-realised-in-the-poem? We point to the poem. How do we identify the form, the-mode-of-realisation-ofthe-subject-in-the-poem? Again we point to the poem. The poem itself just is the form-content unity. For Bradley, as we have seen, this has immediate consequences for value. It is absurd to ask whether the poem’s value lies in its form or its content; if we are to value the poem properly, as a poem, we must value it as a form-content unity. Its value lies in the intrinsic value of the experience of this unity properly constrained. There are a number of points to be made about this if it is to seem plausible and immune to Kivy’s objections. The first concerns what might seem a potentially disastrous concession on Bradley’s part, that we can after all distinguish content from form, perhaps just in the way that Kivy dwells on. ‘To consider separately the actions or the characters of a play, and separately its style or versification, is both legitimate and valuable’, he claims.22 But he qualifies this immediately: ‘so long as we remember what we are doing. . . . [T]he true critic in speaking of these apart does not really think of them apart; the whole, the poetic experience, of which they are but aspects, is always in his mind’. I think there are at least two lines we can take on the possibility of an abstracted form and content, both compatible with each other and hinted at by Bradley. On the one hand it can be conceded of course that we can talk about the actions and characters in Hamlet (Bradley’s example) without always using Shakespeare’s words. We can reconstruct the play in our own words, in effect through paraphrases. But according to this first line of defence what we are doing in such a case is not, strictly, specifying the content, as defined, but rather the

21 22

Bradley, ‘Poetry’, p. 15. Bradley, ‘Poetry’, p. 16.

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subject, as defined. The characters in Hamlet can be prised out from the text and talked about with any suitable descriptions; there could even be other works (as, for example, by Tom Stoppard) about these same characters. But these characters are precisely not the characters-as-realised-in-the-play through a specific mode-of-realisation. They are not, then, part of the content of the play, strictly conceived, only part of its subject identified loosely. I suggest that a similar move can be made on behalf of an abstracted conception of the form of the play. Yes, we can talk about the rhymes, rhythms, metres, line lengths, rhetorical devices, symmetries, and so forth, in abstraction from their specific role in the play. But to the extent that they are abstracted they can be thought of as the very same formal properties that could appear in other works. In that sense they fall into the same kind of category as the abstracted subject: phenomena that can be multiply instantiated. Under the strict conception of a poem’s form, however, as defined – the-mode-of-realisation-of-the-subject-in-the poem – no such abstraction will be illuminating because it fails to capture the specificity of the form in the form-content unity. What counts with respect to the form-content unity is not just the exemplification of metre or rhythm but the precise role that the metre or rhythm plays in determining the poetic experience of this work. Taking this first line on apparent abstracted content and form we find that they are not strictly content and form as defined, because the abstracted elements lack work-specificity; they are simply a more loosely defined subject or instantiations of independently identifiable formal properties. A different but not incompatible line is to concede that we can indeed turn our attention to content and form separately, even in the strict sense, by genuinely treating them as aspects of a single unity. We might attend aspectivally to, and thus say different things about, thesubject-as-realised-in-the-poem and the-mode-of-realisation-of-the-subjectin-the-poem just as we can characterise the Morning-Star-aspect and the Evening-Star-aspect or the Clark-Kent-aspect and the Superman-aspect of, in each case, one and the same being, using different descriptive resources, without impugning the identity of each pair. If the parallel is right, then, with caution, we can allow separate content-specific and form-specific descriptions, while retaining strict form-content identity. We should note that Bradley defends the strict identity claim, namely, that form and content in poetry are numerically identical.


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In effect he is saying that to speak of one is to speak of the other. However, the interest of his thesis does not rest on strict numerical identity of this kind and his core idea could be captured in slightly less strict terms such as ‘unity’, ‘indivisibility’, or ‘mutual dependence’. The crucial point about the definition of ‘content’ as subject-as-realised-in-the-poem and ‘form’ as mode-of-realisation-of-thesubject-in-the-poem, as in my own reconstruction, is that neither can be specified or identified independently of the other. In this sense form and content are united, indivisible and mutually dependent.23 III None of this, I take it, will satisfy Peter Kivy, who will want to press his question about paraphrase and conditions of success. Why, he will ask, should we accept the form-content unity, as defined, and the extremely stringent conceptions of content and form that underlie it? Why can’t we settle on a conception of content that is not tied so tightly to mode of realisation, a conception that allows a ‘more or less’ close paraphrase to satisfy sameness of content in the case of poetry? The answer is quite complicated and calls for reflection on the very idea of ‘sameness of content’. Note at the outset the subtle shift in the relevant idea of ‘content’, as defined in what I take to be the spirit of Bradley, away from ‘meaning’. We mustn’t beg any questions here – replacing ‘meaning’ with ‘content’ by fiat – but we should recognize the quite proper emphasis given to ‘aboutness’, a poem’s being about such-and-such, in characterising poetic content. My contention is that content-identity for poetry is interestrelative. In another context I have explored the idea of interestrelativity applied to the identity of fictional characters.24 My claim was that there is no absolute answer to the question whether this fictional character is identical to that fictional character (e.g. in 23 Think of the back and front (top or bottom) of a thinly moulded object like a plate or shaped glass where the configuration of the back (bottom) is determined by the configuration of the front (top) and vice versa. The two are indivisible as there could not be one without the other. And they form a unity. But we wouldn’t say front and back (top and bottom) are numerically identical or that speaking of one is no different from speaking of the other. 24 ‘How To Create a Fictional Character’, in Berys Gaut and Paisley Livingston, eds., The Creation of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 33–52.

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different works). An answer can only be given relative to the interests of the questioner. Is Goethe’s Faust the same character as Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus? Relative to literary history, the answer is yes, they share enough salient common qualities; relative to literary critical analysis the answer is probably no, within the detail of the two works the characters are sufficiently different to be thought distinct. In another example, the fool or jester is a recurring character in Western literature; relative to the widest cultural interests we could reasonably claim there is a single archetype manifested in different works. Is Feste, the fool, in Twelfth Night the same character as the Fool in King Lear? Yes, perhaps, relative to the archetype, but no, certainly, in terms of their specific roles. One way of capturing the difference between such answers is to say that character-specification can be more or less fine-grained. The more coarse-grained the specification the wider is the net of inclusion. Content-identity in poetry is interest-relative because it too allows for coarse- or fine-grained specification, and thus again debars any absolute answer to the question of whether two items, perhaps a poem and a paraphrase or a poem and another poem, have the same content. Sameness of content will depend on the interest brought to the question. Of course there are many different interests in reading poetry. If our interest is in generic themes as they crop up in poetry – forsaken love, or the quest, or the march of time – then we could find large clusters of works with broadly enough the same content (Bradley’s ‘subject’). However, as interest focuses on particular works the content, becoming more fine-grained, will doubtless diverge. Both Coleridge and Shelley wrote odes on Dejection, similar in content as well as in structure and tone. We might, I suppose, imagine a context where we would say to someone: if you are interested in romantic treatments of dejection read Coleridge or Shelley, it doesn’t matter which, they are sufficiently similar. But to anyone interested in poetry itself it would be extraordinary to say simply take your pick between these poems. Thus we come to the nub of the argument. Is there an interest in poetry per se where content-identity is constrained in the manner of form-content unity, as defined, or, in other words, where content-identity is so fine-grained that it can only be specified in this way? My answer is Yes; relative to an interest in poetry as poetry, there can essentially only be one way in which a work’s content can be expressed: content-identity is lost under any


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different form. I think this is at the heart of Bradley’s repeated claim that he is interested in ‘poetry in its essence’25 or reading ‘poetry poetically’26 or indeed in ‘poetry for poetry’s sake’ (the title of his lecture). Reading a poem as poetry demands the assumption of form-content unity. The indivisibility of form and content is not something that is discovered in works – more in this, less in that, not in this one at all – it is something that the practice of reading poetry imposes on a work. It is hard to see how it could be otherwise. Reading a prose paraphrase of a poem could never yield the precise content that captures our interest in reading the poem itself, any more than reading one poem on a particular theme could be a substitute for reading another on the same theme. There are no doubt interests where those equivalences are accepted, where only the subject not the content in Bradley’s terms is at issue, but they cannot be the interests we bring to poetry, as poetry. The reason that De rerum natura is not a counterexample to form-content unity is simply that our interest in that poem characteristically is not as a poem; the versification, as Lucretius himself admits, is extraneous to what is of interest in the work. Were we to read the work as a poem we would indeed assume form-content indivisibility and seek out what Bradley calls the ‘poetic experience’. Then it would not just be the subject – Epicureanism – that concerns us, even the subject-as-conceived-by-Lucretius, which could no doubt be paraphrased or rewritten, but the-subject-asrealised-in-the-poem, which rests on a unique ‘mode of realisation’. Such a focus of attention might or might not prove rewarding. We shouldn’t be confused by the verse form as a demand that we read it as poetry. Recall Aristotle saying: ‘The difference between the poet and the historian is not that one writes in prose and the other in verse – indeed the writings of Herodotus could be put into verse and yet would still be a kind of history’.27 Kivy’s response can perhaps be anticipated – he might have no trouble in principle with the interest-relativity of content-identity (this might be thought of as a version of his point about conditions of success in paraphrase) but his objection is likely to be that form-content identity (or unity) is just too stringent a condition to impose on reading poetry; it is arbitrary and unjustified. He is 25 26 27

Bradley, ‘Poetry’, p. 4. Bradley, ‘Poetry’, p. 14. Aristotle, Poetics 1451b.

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likely also to bring out his other big guns: ‘conventionalist sulk’ and vicious circularity. Am I not defining the practice of reading poetry in terms of form-content unity and then saying that anything not conforming to the practice is not poetry, or not reading as poetry? But the charge of arbitrariness or mere stipulation won’t stick. I haven’t invented the practice of reading poetry – it is of ancient lineage (the inter-relation of ‘thought’ and ‘diction’ in Aristotle’s account of tragedy is but one example). But more needs to be said about the practice to meet the charge of arbitrariness.

IV Without getting too far into the ontology of poetry one thing seems clear: that poems cannot be treated just as strings of sentences or phrases waiting to be assigned meanings. They are not merely texts. Identifying poetry rests on more than just linguistic or textual facts. Because of the innumerable poetic forms, sonnets, lyrics, epics, free verse, iambic pentameters, and so forth, it is misleading to speak of a ‘language of poetry’ as such. What all poems share, as poems, cannot be specified through formal linguistic properties alone. Poetry is identified not linguistically but through other kinds of conventions: notably conventions relating participants, poets and readers alike, in a practice. These conventions cover expectations, modes of response, assumptions about values and interests. One familiar convention has been called the Principle of Functionality: broadly the idea that what is there (in the poem) is there for a purpose, things are not just accidentally as they are.28 This need not be read unduly intentionalistically but is a basic assumption of reading poetry: an assumption that is the first pointer to the indivisibility of form and content. Reading poetry demands a sharper attention to detail than is characteristic of other kinds of reading, not surprisingly as the form of expression – the actual choice of words – is assigned unusual salience; that follows from the Principle of Functionality. It is common to think of ‘poetic language’ in its many manifestations as language that somehow 28 See Stein Haugom Olsen, The Structure of Literary Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 94–5.


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draws attention to itself, is concentrated or ‘dense’ or expressive. There need not be any necessary syntactic or semantic conditions that make this possible but conventional usages (metaphor, imagery, rhythm, rhyme, versification, etc.) might facilitate it. All this is commonplace. Incidentally, the conventions for reading poetry and those for reading novels are not identical, although they have much in common. A kind of formcontent fusion applies to fictional characterisation; what a fictional character is is intimately connected to the modes of its presentation.29 But salient form in novels relates conventionally more to structural features than fine-grained facts about, say, word order or alliteration. The shift of focus from intrinsic linguistic properties of texts to reading practices in characterising the unity of form and content in poetry has important repercussions for the elusiveness of ‘poetic meaning’. Those inclined to think that form-content unity is discoverable in certain kinds of texts (but not others) will most likely have in mind poetry that seems especially resistant to literal paraphrase, i.e. ‘difficult’ poetry. Everyone could produce their own favourite examples of difficult poetry and clearly there is not just one way of being ‘difficult’. These lines, fairly randomly picked, seem to resist easy paraphrase, but for different reasons: Not but they die, the teasers and the dreams, Not but they die, and tell the careful flood To give them what they clamour for and why. (first stanza of ‘The Teasers’ by William Empson) when by now and tree by leaf she laughed his joy she cried his grief bird by snow and stir by still anyone’s any was all to her (fourth stanza of ‘Anyone lived in a pretty how town’ by e e cummings) In such lines there does seem to be an intimate connection between what is said and how it is said, and the compression of 29 See my ‘On the Distance Between Literary Narratives and Real-Life Narratives’, in Dan Hutto, ed., Narrative and Understanding Persons. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 117–132.

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both no doubt contributes to the difficulty. But the case for formcontent unity does not rest on examples of this kind. Indeed when both Bradley and Cleanth Brooks seek to exemplify their thesis they reach for quite different kinds of cases. Brooks picks the final lines of Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’: To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. He rightly points out that taken in isolation from the rest of the poem these lines seem either grossly sentimental or ‘patent nonsense’. But if we are interested, as we should be, in ‘the complex of attitudes achieved’ by the poem as a whole we must attend to its ‘effective and essential structure’, a structure that cannot be abstracted from its comprehensive realisation in the work.30 Decontextualising lines dilutes, even destroys, their content. Bradley picks the most quoted line of all and one with, it seems, no trace of ‘difficulty’: ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’. He comments: You may say that this means the same as ‘What is just now occupying my attention is the comparative disadvantages of continuing to live or putting an end to myself.’ And for practical purposes – the purpose, for example, of a coroner – it does. But as the second version altogether misrepresents the speaker at that moment of his existence, while the first does represent him, how can they for any but a practical or logical purpose be said to have the same sense?31 Bradley doesn’t deny the ‘practical’ usefulness of the Kivy-style paraphrase but merely insists that a fine-grained response to the line, doing justice to the dramatic context and speaker, cannot be satisfied with any expression but the line itself. Further points about meaning are near at hand. In normal, non-poetic, linguistic contexts, simple substitution principles apply, exceptions apart. Substitute synonym for synonym and meaning is preserved, substitute name for co-referring name and

30 31

Brooks, ‘Heresy of Paraphrase’, p. 169. Bradley, ‘Poetry’, p. 20.


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truth is preserved. Substitution does sometimes break down, in familiar kinds of cases: nonextensional contexts in the case of truth, perhaps quotational contexts in the case of sense.32 Bradley offers his own example from poetry: People say, for instance, ‘steed’ and ‘horse’ have the same meaning; and in bad poetry they have, but not in poetry that is poetry. ‘Bring forth the horse!’ The horse was brought: In truth he was a noble steed! says Byron in Mazeppa. If the two words mean the same here, transpose them: ‘Bring forth the steed!’ The steed was brought: In truth he was a noble horse! and ask again if they mean the same.33 Bradley clearly implies that they do not. But in the context of the earlier discussion the issue is not straightforward. If interestrelativity is right then there is no absolute answer to Bradley’s question, no fact of the matter. Perhaps we should ask not simply whether the substituted lines mean the same (for which different answers might be given) but can we as readers of the poem be indifferent to the substitution? The Principle of Functionality suggests not. Meaning in poetry is fine-grained and contextsensitive to a degree that is not exhibited or demanded elsewhere. That is why such substitutions fail. It would be wrong, though, once again, to think of this as something we discover in looking at poems, rather than something we demand of poetry. Contextsensitivity and fine-grainedness are conditions readers impose on appropriate response to poetry as poetry. This is true also of other putative features of poetic language, including what Monroe Beardsley called ‘semantic density’ and Cleanth Brooks called ‘irony’, a kind of internal tension. These, like form-content 32

Ernie Lepore has shown how synonym substitution fails in quotation: (1) ‘bachelor’ is the first word in ‘bachelors are unmarried men’ (2) ‘unmarried man’ is the first word in ‘bachelors are unmarried men’

He calls quotation a ‘hyperintensional’ context and suggests that like quoted expressions poems too create hyperintensional contexts. (Ernie Lepore, ‘The Heresy of Paraphrase: When the Medium Really is the Message’, paper given to Oslo conference on Metaphor, Poetry, Paraphrase, November, 2007) 33 Bradley, ‘Poetry’, p. 20.

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unity, are not objective features of certain kinds of texts but imputed features arising from certain kinds of attention to texts. It is not an attention normally given, for example, to philosophical texts where one of Kivy’s rough and ready paraphrases, sufficient to preserve truth and argument, might be an adequate substitute. Even Kivy admits that his paraphrases of poetry will not be, cannot be, ‘perfect’. The crucial question is not how good a paraphrase is but what interests it serves. Where does this leave content and meaning? It has come to seem that if you want a theory of poetic meaning, what is needed is not a theory of meaning as such but a theory of poetry. It is the peculiarity of poetry and the conventional modes of response to it that lie behind form-content unity, more than some mysterious ineffability of meaning. Bradley has shown that the content of a poem, properly so-called, is not just its subject but its subject realized in a particular form. What a poem is about (its ‘content’) is given ‘under a description’, it is maximally fine-grained. That is not to say that it cannot be loosely paraphrased, for, arguably, Bradley’s point is not a point about meaning but a point about modes of attention and ultimately value. A good reader attends not to some content beyond or behind the mode of presentation but to the mode of presentation itself, to the fact that what is being said is being said in this way. A theory of poetic meaning is elusive because no theory of meaning seems able to accommodate this kind of fine-grainedness. V Why does the practice of poetry make these extraordinarily stringent demands on meaning or on content-identity? The answer takes us back to that recurrent if enigmatic notion of Bradley’s, the ‘poetic experience’, the experience that is at the root of poetic value. It might seem futile to try to characterize some single kind of experience associated with reading poetry. Poems are too diverse for that. But that is not the idea, nor is the thought that there is some phenomenology linked to reading poetry. Each poem demands its own unique experience but responsiveness to poetry can itself be characterized as the reaching out for such an experience. By emphasizing response and experience instead of meaning and interpretation, I, perhaps like Bradley, want to move away from the model of poems as linguistic texts waiting to be


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paraphrased and assigned a meaning. The experience sought is precisely an experience of a form-content unity: readers seek to reflect imaginatively on the-subject-as-realised-in-the-poem and the-mode-of-realisation-of-the-subject-in-the-poem as two aspects of an aesthetic whole.34 As mentioned earlier, I don’t believe it is helpful to postulate such a thing as the ‘meaning of a poem’ as a whole nor do I think it is the aim of interpretation to try to identify such a thing. We should reject this notion as misleading in somewhat the same spirit as Donald Davidson rejected the notion of ‘metaphorical meaning’. For Davidson metaphors have meaning, but only the ordinary literal meaning of the words used. Everything that theorists have wanted to say about ‘metaphorical meaning’, as some special kind of meaning, can, Davidson argues, be captured elsewhere, notably in the kinds of effects metaphors have. Those who talk about the ‘meaning of a poem’ mostly have in mind, I suspect, not a comprehensive paraphrase but rather a conception of the poem’s themes, its outlook, its significance or value. Of course readers of poetry do have an interest in meaning but it is usually at the textual level of explication; they ask what this word or phrase means, how it connects with other meaningful units. Even unpacking allusions or references is a somewhat extended sense of ‘meaning’. But interpretation in the context of poetry is not centrally involved with meaning, so much as with recovering broader kinds of achievement. Kivy is right to reject the idea that paraphrase aims at reproducing ‘the poem’s total effect on the reader’ but it would be wrong to infer from this that the effect on a suitably qualified reader – that reader’s experience – is not essentially connected with interpretation.

34 I believe there is some affinity between my ideas here and those of Severin Schroeder in ‘The Coded-Message Model of Literature’ (in R. Allen & M. Turvey, eds., Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts [London: Routledge, 2001]) where he proposes a rather special sense of meaning, ‘intransitive meaning’ (or ‘Meaning’ with a capital letter), which rests on Gestalt and value rather than on encoded messages (p. 224). He criticizes Bradley for hanging on to the latter notion while seemingly recognizing something like the former: ‘what is unsatisfactory about Bradley’s doctrine is not that he talks of a poem’s meaning while refusing to say what that meaning is. The problem is rather that he continues to talk as if there was a meaning of a kind that is normally given by paraphrase. Of course this is what it feels like. But the experience is an illusion’ (p. 226). I wonder, though, whether Schroeder himself might be better using some other notion than ‘Meaning’.

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Consider the following brief critical comments on a poem, ‘Merlin’, by Geoffrey Hill. I will consider the outnumbering dead: For they are the husks of what was rich seed. Now, should they come together to be fed, They would outstrip the locusts’ covering tide. Arthur, Elaine, Mordred: they are all gone Among the raftered galleries of bone. By the long barrows of Logres they are made one, And over their city stands the pinnacled corn.35 One of the best early elegies, ‘Merlin’, again takes an ironic look at rituals of remembrance, this time in the context of Arthurian heroes. Hill shrinks the traditional pastoral elegy into two quatrains, with each of the four lines assiduously rhymed or half-rhymed, and emphasises the vegetal ontogeny of the dead, who are ‘the husks of what was rich seed’ and who, transformed, become the ‘pinnacled corn’. That the locusts have covered the ‘long barrows of Logres’ like a tide suggests their apocalyptic destruction, but the dead, as in ‘The Distant Fury of Battle’, remain more alive and rapacious than the living. Their ghosts, which traditionally feed on blood, come back to prey on the bloodthirsty predators (the locusts), who are in fact bloodless. Predator and prey reverse roles. The corn to be harvested feeds on the corpses of those who are supposed to harvest it. The new heaven and new earth is no holy city of church spires but the ‘pinnacled’ corn field. The knights, who traditionally restored fertility to the king’s domain by killing dragons, now fertilise the soil with their own deaths. Culture (in the museum’s ‘raftered galleries of bone’) is dead unless plowed back into the loam.36 The poem, like many of Geoffrey Hill’s, might seem initially elusive. We welcome guidance on it. The critic offers help, including an account of its formal features, its subject, its allusions, its

35 I am grateful to Geoffrey Hill, Penguin Books Ltd, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co. for permission to reproduce this poem. 36 Henry Hart, The Poetry of Geoffrey Hill (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), p. 22.


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relation to other work by Hill, and a general theme, ‘Culture . . . is dead unless plowed back into the loam’. We need not agree with all aspects of the interpretation or its emphases; it is in the nature of interpretation to be open to challenge or refinement. However, only part, at most, of this exercise directly concerns meaning as such, or paraphrase. A better way of describing what critical discourse (of this kind) achieves is that it aids a reader to engage experientially with the poem. We come to see more clearly wherein the interest of the poem lies. The critic’s comments exhibit the typical kind of attention given to a poem as conventionally determined. It is not the sort of reading found in other discourses. Although, to revert to Bradley’s terminology, the poem’s subject matter, Arthurian heroes, is treated in many other works, what captures our interest is not the subject so broadly conceived but the subject as realised in the poem. It is impossible to attend to so specific a realisation without attending at the same time to its mode of realisation in precisely this form. And that is all that form-content unity demands, supplemented by the Functionality Principle. So where have we arrived at? First the idea of ‘poetic meaning’ from a theoretical perspective can only be satisfactorily explained in relation to the conventions of the practice of reading poetry. It cannot be reduced merely to textual meaning and we should be wary of postulating any single item ‘the meaning of the poem’. The practice makes demands on the kind of attention appropriate to poems, an attention to fine-grainedness, for example, and an attention to the realisation of a subject and the linguistic modes of that realisation. Interpretation, so naturally linked to poetic meaning, does not have paraphrase as its principal aim so much as the encouragement and enhancement of a distinctive poetic experience within readers. The elusiveness of meaning in particular poems, as in the Geoffrey Hill example, can partly be explained by the finegrainedness of poetic content. The words, images, allusions, and names are rich in range and depth of association. A reader has to work at both recovering these and inter-relating them. Poetry offers its own peculiar kinds of difficulty – different in most cases from the difficulties associated with science or philosophy. Poetic difficulty arises out of the very expectations that the practice of reading brings to it. In the end Bradley is right, principally in where he wants to locate poetic value. To reduce the value of poetry to form as the naïve formalists suggest or to

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subject matter as the naïve content-reductionists suggest is to fail to appreciate that unique value manifested in the complex unity of form and content. Whatever else he might have to say, Bradley would have been happy to have persuaded us of that.37

37 I am grateful to Severin Schroeder for perceptive comments on an earlier version of this paper.

3 FICTIONAL FORM AND SYMPHONIC STRUCTURE: AN ESSAY IN COMPARATIVE AESTHETICS rati_443

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Peter Kivy Abstract It is agreed on all hands that both fictional narratives and the familiar genres of classical music possess an inner structure that both can be perceived and be appreciated aesthetically. It is my argument here that this inner structure plays a crucially different role in fictional narrative than it does in classical music, confining myself here to ‘absolute music’ (which is to say, pure instrumental music without text, programme, dramatic setting, or other ‘extramusical’ content). The argument, basically, is that whereas the sophisticated listener to the absolute music repertory is keenly, consciously aware of the inner structure, the sophisticated reader of fictional narrative, the principal exemplar being the novel, is not so aware. Therefore, whereas musical structure directly contributes to aesthetic satisfaction, narrative structure contributes only indirectly (which is not to deny that, at times, the reader is consciously aware of narrative structure, and that, at such times, it does contribute directly to aesthetic satisfaction).

A man who has had no opportunity of comparing the different kinds of beauty, is indeed totally unqualified to pronounce an opinion with regard to any object presented to him. (David Hume)

(1) Introduction In the interest of alliteration, or, in other words, to give this essay a catchy title, I have been somewhat misleading. By ‘form’ and ‘structure’ I will mean the same thing, for which, actually, a better name is one that combines the two, to wit: ‘formal structure’. And that is the name I will apply throughout. I will be defending two theses in what follows. The first is that our aesthetic experience and appreciation of formal structure in the novel is very different from our aesthetic experience and appreciation of it in the symphony, and other large-scale musical

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works of the absolute music canon. And it is, I must add, absolute music, which is to say, pure instrumental music, without text, title, programme, or other extra-musical baggage, that I am solely concerned with in these remarks. The second thesis is that, if the first thesis is true, this helps us to understand another difference between our aesthetic experience and appreciation of the novel and, in contrast, the symphony, namely, what I have called elsewhere, the difference between the ‘interrupted time’ of the former, as opposed to the ‘continuous time’ of the latter.1 For we experience large scale musical works, such as symphonies and string quartets, uninterruptedly, at least when we are experiencing them as they were meant to be experienced. But we experience novels discontinuously: picking them up, putting them down, picking them up again, as the mood takes us, which is indeed, as I believe, how they were meant to be experienced, not merely an artefact of our inability to read War and Peace at one go. The order of business, then, will be as follows. First, I want to make clear what I will be meaning by the vexed term ‘aesthetic’, when I talk, in this essay about aesthetic experience and aesthetic appreciation. Second, I want to make clear what I mean by ‘formal structure’ in the novel and symphony. With these preliminaries out of the way, I will go on to examine and defend the two theses outlined above. First, then, to the ‘aesthetic’.

(2) Aesthetic and Aesthetic The adjective ‘aesthetic’, and the noun ‘aesthetics’, came late into our language. Because of this they are not terms that can be pinned down solely by what used to be called ‘ordinary language analysis’. They are, that is to say, not altogether ‘ordinary language’, but more or less terms of art. Nevertheless, two uses, one very broad, one more narrow, of the adjective ‘aesthetic’, have become something like common coin. The first, from which I want to distance myself, is the use in which ‘aesthetic’ refers to 1 See, Peter Kivy, ‘Continuous Time and Interrupted Time: Two-Timing in the Temporal Arts’, Musica Scientiae, Discussion Forum 3 (2004).

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our experience, enjoyment, or appreciation of any aspect of a work of art that is relevant to its experience, enjoyment, or appreciation as a work of art. According to this usage, then, there is no distinction between my aesthetically enjoying (experiencing, appreciating) a work of art and my doing so for any or all of its artistically relevant features. Or, to put it another way, according to this usage of the term ‘aesthetic’, the ‘aesthetic’ properties of an art work and its art-relevant properties are co-extensive: one and the same class of properties. ‘Aesthetic’ is thus more or less synonymous with ‘artistic’. According to the second usage, however, and the one that I shall adhere to, there is a distinction between the artistic and the aesthetic, as is apparent in cases in ordinary language, where we describe things other than works of art, particularly our natural surroundings, as aesthetic experiences, and frequently describe them in aesthetic terms. When ‘aesthetic’ is used in this way, it is used, roughly speaking, to refer to the ‘sensuous’, ‘phenomenological’, and ‘structural’ properties of art works, in contrast to their narrative and other ‘content’. It is an approximation, as I see it, of the old and, in my view, unjustifiably discredited distinction between ‘form’ (aesthetic properties) and ‘content’ (art-relevant non-aesthetic ones).2 It needs pointing out, by the way, that this is not merely a terminological question, with no philosophical significance. For, as a matter of fact, many people who use the adjective ‘aesthetic’ in the broad sense, according to which ‘artistic’ and ‘aesthetic’ are synonymous, all and only aesthetic properties art-relevant properties, also tend to think of the aesthetic/artistic properties of art works in the narrow sense, which excludes properties like moral and philosophical content from the class of art-relevant properties: in other words, formalism. And it is this substantive philosophical position, as well as the broad sense of the adjective ‘aesthetic’, from which I want to distance myself. In effect, I construe the term ‘aesthetic’ narrowly but the term ‘art-relevant’ broadly. And when I talk about our aesthetic experience and aesthetic appreciation of formal structure I will have reference to that in formal structure having nothing whatever to do with any kind of narrative or other content, which may, indeed, be art-relevant, but not, according to my usage, ‘aesthetic’. 2 See Peter Kivy, Philosophies of Arts: An Essay in Differences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Chapter 4.

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With, now, a general idea on the table of how I am using the adjective ‘aesthetic’ when I talk about our aesthetic experience and appreciation of formal structure in the novel and symphony, the next item of preliminary business is to explain briefly what I mean by ‘formal structure’ when I talk about our aesthetic experience and appreciation of it. (3) Formal Structure In explaining what I mean by ‘formal structure’ I am going to assume that you all really do have a pretty good idea of what I have in mind, since what I have in mind is nothing unusual or exotic, but some of the very familiar sorts of things that fall under that head. And examples are the best way to get a handle on it. The well known classical music forms with names, such as sonata, rondo, theme-and-variations, minuet-and-trio, and so forth, are some of what I mean by formal structures in music. But, of course, a musical work might have a formal structure, peculiar to it, that has no name. And even in the cases where the formal structure has a name, it is not necessary that the listener know the name to be able to hear the structure and, thereby, have aesthetic appreciation of it. I will assume you all agree with me that musical structure, so understood, is one of the aspects of art works susceptible of aesthetic appreciation, even though we may disagree about how important to the musical experience the aesthetic effect of formal structure really is. Nor will I try to go into any detail about how formal structure in music gives aesthetic satisfaction. That is, of course, an important question, worthy of attention. But I have other fish to fry; so I will leave it at that. As for formal structure in the novel, again, I have nothing startling or out of the ordinary to impart. And, again, examples will serve. The various plot structures that Aristotle outlines in the Poetics are certainly paradigm instances of what I mean by formal structure in the novel, when they occur there. As well, what are frequently called ‘plot archetypes’, by writers on narrative structure, I take to be formal structures in novels. For instance, the plot archetype that might be called ‘The Long Voyage Home’, or, to instance another, ‘From Wrong Mate to Right Mate’, are patterns


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repeated endlessly in movies, plays, and, of course, novels. They are rightly seen as the skeleton on which the flesh of narrative is hung. And they are, I am counting on you to agree, the sorts of things belonging to works of art that can be experienced and appreciated aesthetically; that can be the source of aesthetic satisfaction. Now I did say, you will recall, when I was laying out my distinction between the aesthetic properties of art works and their other art-relevant ones, like their narrative, or perhaps philosophical content, that I took aesthetic appreciation to be appreciation solely of those properties having nothing to do with narrative or other propositional content: what I called their ‘sensual’, ‘phenomenological’, and ‘structural’ ones. But how, you may well ask, then, can one aesthetically appreciate the structure of an Aristotelian plot plan, or a plot archetype, without appreciating its content? You can’t, after all, know what plot plan or plot archetype you are confronting without knowing first the plot: which is to say, the content of the plot, what’s happening. Well that is of course true. However it is a contradiction in appearance only. For when we are appreciating the aesthetic properties of plot structure, we are considering how the content of the narrative is put together. We are appreciating the structure, not the content; although we must know what the content is, of course, in order to appreciate how it is constructed. When we appreciate the narrative content itself, in contrast, then we are, so to say, luxuriating in the events and characters, on the edge of our chairs, wondering how things are going to turn out. And that, on my accounting, is a kind of artistic appreciation, but not aesthetic appreciation, which is, of course, itself a kind of artistic appreciation, in the present context. Thus, the difference between appreciating formal musical structure, and formal novelistic structure, is that in the latter we are appreciating how narrative content is put together; whereas in the former there is no narrative (or any other) extra-musical content, so that what we are aesthetically appreciating is how the musical elements are put together. And, of course, if you want to call those musical elements the music’s ‘content’, you are free to do so: there is absolutely no harm in that. As with the aesthetic experience and appreciation of formal structure in music, there is far more to say about it in the novel. But, again, I have other fish to fry. And now, with these preliminary matters out of the way, it is time to begin frying my fish.

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(4) Fictional Form: An Implausible Thesis All agree that novels have structure, and all agree that this structure, like any other artistic structure, can possess aesthetic properties. So we may consider the relevance of the aesthetic properties belonging to novelistic structure without any further preliminaries. About novelistic structure and its aesthetic properties I have a claim to make, the first of my two theses, that will surely seem, on first reflection, highly implausible. It is that the perception or direct awareness of novelistic structure, and therefore its aesthetic properties, plays little or no part in the novel reader’s understanding, appreciation, and enjoyment of novels, even when the reader is a sensitive and sophisticated one, the novel a serious or even great work of literary art. My claim, here, is the mirror image of Jerrold Levinson’s claim, with regard to absolute music, ‘that insight into large-scale form simply does not enter into the basic understanding of [absolute] music, [and] that such understanding can be attained without any awareness whatsoever of overall structure.’3 I hasten to add, as will become very apparent later on, that I am in thorough disagreement with Levinson’s claim about absolute music, and have argued to that effect at length elsewhere.4 And that is an important point. For the fact, as I take it to be, that the perception of large scale structural form is a vital part of musical appreciation, where absolute music is concerned, and of minimal if any importance in the appreciation of the novel, marks out an absolutely crucial difference between the two art forms, and the role that the aesthetic properties of formal structure play in each. The way I construe absolute music, as I have said, it possesses no semantic or representational content at all. It is not ‘about’ anything. It serves, as art, an entirely different master. It is one of the pure ‘aesthetic’ arts in the sense of ‘aesthetic’ outlined before. Its only artistic properties are its aesthetic properties. And its emotive, expressive properties are not, on my view, properties of extramusical content, since it has none, but properties of its musical fabric, hence, when artistic properties, aesthetic properties as well. Thus, as I interpret his claim, when Walter Pater famously 3 Jerrold Levinson, Music in the Moment (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 28. 4 Peter Kivy, ‘Music in Memory and Music in the Moment’, in Peter Kivy, New Essays on Musical Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), pp. 183–217.


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said that all of the arts aspire to the ‘condition’ of music, what he was, in effect, saying, is that all of the arts aspire to be purely aesthetic arts – arts whose artistic and aesthetic properties converge.5 It is a false claim – but an importantly false claim. A second very important point to notice, in this contrast between absolute music and the novel, is that music of the kind I am discussing, that is to say, absolute music of the classical canon, is a ‘repeated’ art, whereas the novel, usually, normally, is not. By that I mean that we tend to listen to the same musical compositions, particularly the great ones, over and over again in a lifetime. Thus, in our repeated listening to a musical work, we become more and more directly aware of its large, overall musical structure, whereas, in the novel, structure plays little if any part in our direct acquaintance with the artistic qualities of the work. It only could begin to do so if we were to experience the novel over and over again, as we do musical works. This is not to say that the formal structure of the novel plays no part in our experience of it. It plays what Levinson refers to, with regard to music, as a causal role.6 Which is to say, in structuring her novel, the novelist makes those artistic properties that are directly experienced by the reader available to him in the ways she intends them to be. What is not available to him is the formal structure itself, except in subsequent re-readings, or in scholarly or critical scrutiny. It is, rather, like the works of a watch, or stage machinery, behind the scenes, making the effect, not being the effect. It is the silent artistic partner. A crucial question now looms. What kind of reader of novels are we talking about here?7 What kind of musical listener are we talking about? For it might be argued that the serious reader of novels and the serious listener to symphonies are both the same: we expect of both that they experience and appreciate the inner, formal structure of the novel and symphony, respectively, as opposed to the casual, surface reader or listener who experiences and appreciates only the phenomenological ‘surface’ of the work. And so it looks to be a false dichotomy that I have been drawing between the serious reader of novels, who does not experience directly the inner structure of the work, and its aesthetic proper5 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 106. 6 Levinson, Music in the Moment, pp. 43–50. 7 This question, and the answer I give, were occasioned by a comment of Noel Carroll’s.

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ties, and the serous listener to symphonies, who does. It turns out, then, according to this objection, that with regard to the inner, formal structure of both of the two arts, the truly serious appreciator must have direct awareness of the formal structure, and the aesthetic properties such structure possesses. Thus it would appear that, contrary to what I have been arguing, the serious novel reader’s experience of aesthetic properties, in this regard, is not less than that of the serious listener to symphonies. This argument seems airtight. And yet the intuition persists – at least my intuition persists – that there is an important distinction to be made, in this regard, between the serious reader of novels and the serious listener to symphonies. How can this intuition be sustained in light of the seemingly airtight argument? I think that what one wants to say, here, to begin with, is that the simple, course-grained distinction between the serious reader or listener and the non-serious one will not do. It will not capture my intuition of a substantial, if not sharply defined difference between the serious reader of novels and the serious listener to symphonies. So let us see what can be done to refine it. Let me begin with readers of novels, and say that there are four kinds of serious novel-readers. I will call the first kind of serious reader the in-it-for-the-story reader. This reader can best be understood by contrasting her with the non-serious reader. Both the non-serious reader and the serious in-it-for-the-story reader are in-it-for-the-story readers. The difference is in what they read, and what importance the reading experience has for them. The non-serious reader tends to read to ‘fill up the time’. He would prefer watching sports or sit-coms on television. But when in an airport, waiting to board his plane, or on the plane or train with nothing else to occupy him, he will sometimes read a novel. It will be a detective novel, maybe science fiction, or one of the many other genres of ‘time wasters’ that populate the best-seller lists and the paperback racks of magazine stands in public waiting rooms. And of course he is in it for the story. He wants to be captured by the plot: it should be the sort of book that the reviewers or advertising blurbs describe as a page-turner the reader ‘cannot put down’. However once it has been put down, after the story has been imbibed, it is put down – for good. It is never picked up again for a second read. After you know the story, what’s the point? The serious in-it-for-the-story reader is distinguished from the non-serious reader first by the choice of her reading matter. She


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does not necessarily shun time-wasters, but her principal diet is the masterpieces of the past, and the serous novels of the present that aspire to the level of those masterpieces. She is, like the non-serious reader, in it for the story, but she is after deeper, more complex, more richly rewarding stories than the time-waster can supply. Nor, second, is the reading of novels, for her, something to fill up the time when there is nothing better to do. Reading novels is, for her, something better to do. Nevertheless, because she is an in-it-for-the-story reader, she does not tend to re-read a novel except after an extended period of time, when the plot and characters have more or less faded from memory, and the novel can be read ‘almost as new’. A second kind of serious reader is what I shall call the serious thoughtful reader. Like the serious in-it-for-the-story reader, the serious thoughtful reader’s staple diet is the great novels of the literary canon, and the contemporary aspirants to it. And like the serious in-it-for-the-story reader, he is certainly in it for the story in a big way. But many, I am tempted to say most of the great novels in the canon are not only meant by their authors to tell a story (although the importance of story-telling for us should never be underestimated). Rather, they are meant to ‘say something’ to us: much more than one ‘something’, usually, and, into the bargain, something of importance. According to one theory, to which I subscribe, a major artistic purpose of many of the great novels in the Western canon is conveying moral, philosophical, psychological, social, political, and other theses, of deep concern to us, which we are meant to think about or seriously consider in what I have termed, in various places, the ‘gaps’ and the ‘afterlife of the reading experience’.8 The gaps are the periods between episodes of novel-reading (for a novel cannot nor is it meant to be read at a single go); and the after life is the period after one has finished reading a novel, when it is still fresh in the mind and its contents still an object of thought. The serious thoughtful reader, then, is the reader who is both in it for the story and thinks in the gaps and in the after life about the theses that the author of the novel may have meant to convey by the story. Both make up what I would call this reader’s ‘literary

8 See, for example, Peter Kivy, The Performance of Reading: An Essay in the Philosophy of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), Sections 24–26, and Section 28.

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experience’ of the novel or, in general terms, his artistic experience of it. But so far, the experience, on my reckoning, contains no significant aesthetic component. Neither the experience of the story nor the contemplation of the theses that the story is meant to convey have anything to do with aesthetic properties, as loosely defined here. We enter the realm of the aesthetic in the next step. Let me introduce to you now what I will call the serious structural reader. This reader, like the previous two, is certainly in it for the story, in a major way, and in it for the thought content of the novel as well. But unlike the others, the serious structural reader becomes aware of and enjoys, from time to time, the way the novel is put together: its formal structure. During the gaps and the after life, and perhaps even during the reading process, the serious structural reader will perceive and enjoy the various aspects of formal structure that can rightly be described as aesthetic. Part of her artistic appreciation of the novel is aesthetic appreciation properly so called. Finally, to complete this reader-taxonomy, we pass one step beyond the serious structural reader, although this may be a difference in degree only, with a grey area in between, to what I will call the serious studious reader. This is the reader, so I imagine him, not enjoying the novel aesthetically or in its other artistic respects, but, rather, studying the novel, for the purpose, perhaps, of preparing himself to teach it in class, or to write about it in a literary study, or to improve his own writing skills. This is certainly an appropriate way of dealing with a novel. But it is not the way the author had in mind for those she hoped would be her readers. The Greek playwrights did not write their tragedies for the purpose of having Aristotle analyse them in the Poetics. As I understand the philosophy of art, the serious studious reader, as just described, is not part of its domain; or if he is, he is on the peripheries. So I shall set him aside, as I will the nonserious reader. My interest lies in the first three serious readers, the serious in-it-for-the-story reader, the serious thoughtful reader, and the serious structural reader. And I want now to see what analogues we can find for them in the population of serious listeners to symphonies and other such works. For the intuition I am trying to support is that there is an important disanalogy which has to do with the perception of formal structure. I assume, as I have done, but will not argue for here, the view that symphonies and their ilk do not tell stories: are not narrative art works. Nevertheless, without stretching things too far, I think


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we can find a musical analogue of the serious in-it-for-the-story reader. I will simply put ‘story’ in scare quotes and call him the in-it-for-the-‘story’ listener. The obvious question is going to be, of course, What’s the story? If we say that the story of a novel is a succession of connected fictional events, then why not say, analogously, that the ‘story’ of a symphony is the succession of connected musical events? And as the serious in-it-for-the-story reader is the one who experiences this succession of fictional events in the great novels of the literary canon, so the serious in-it-for-the‘story’ listener is the one who experiences this succession of musical events in the great symphonies (and other works of absolute music) in the musical canon. No one has described the latter better than Jerrold Levinson, in Music in the Moment, where he writes, for example, of what he calls the basic musical listener, that ‘that way of hearing is one that involves connecting together tones currently sounding, ones just sounded, and ones about to come, synthesizing them into a flow as far as possible at every point. . . . [W]e miss nothing crucial’, he continues, ‘by staying, as it were, in the moment, following the development of events in real time, engaging in no conscious mental activity of wider scope that has the whole or some extended portion of it [the work] as object.’9 But since, as I have repeatedly said, I reject the notion that absolute music tells stories or contains fictional content of any kind, I must reject, as well, any suggestion that such music might convey, in the way serious novels frequently do, theses of a philosophical, psychological, moral character, or any other such propositional content, through fictional narrative. That being the case, there is no listener to absolute music analogous to the serious thoughtful reader; for there would be nothing for the serious thoughtful listener to think about, in any way analogous to what is thought about by the serious thoughtful reader. There is, however, a direct analogue in absolute music to the serious structural reader: what obviously should be called the serious structural listener. For whereas there is no step, in absolute music, from the serious in-it-for-the-‘story’ listener to the listener who thinks about the propositional content of absolute music, as it has no such content, there is a step to the structural listener, a step encouraged by the repeated listening to individual works, or, 9

Levinson, Music in the Moment, p. 29.

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perhaps the very motivation for repeated listening – in fact perhaps its ultimate pay-off. Indeed, it is the only step beyond in-it-for-the-‘story’ listening that the serious listener to absolute music can take that affords a deeper and more expansive artistic experience of musical works, since the next step after that, as in the case of the serious structural reader, is to the kind of attention to the work that involves studying it for reasons other than artistic appreciation. Here, then, is the situation as I see it. There are four kinds of serious readers of novels: in-it-for-the-story readers, thoughtful readers, structural readers, and studious readers; and three kinds of serious listeners to symphonies, sonatas, string quartets, and the like: in-it-for-the-‘story’ listeners, structural listeners, and studious listeners. I am contrasting, in my argument, serious in-it-for-thestory readers, and serious thoughtful readers, with serious structural listeners, and I am arguing that there is an important disanalogy between them. For whereas serious structural listeners are listeners to an important class of absolute music’s aesthetic properties, serious in-it-for-the-story readers, and serious thoughtful readers, are experiencing a myriad of artistic features, but not experiencing, in any significant way, the aesthetic features of Aristotelian plot plans, plot archetypes, and other aspects of novel structure. But why, it might well be asked, should I be making this comparison, which yields a disanalogy, instead of comparing serious in-it-for-the-story reading with serious in-it-for-the-‘story’ listening, and serious structural reading with serious structural listening, both of which comparisons yield near perfect analogies? It looks as if I have simply chosen, in a completely ad hoc fashion, just that comparison that will yield the disanalogy my argument requires. I cannot give a fully defended answer here. What I can say, without argument, is that I believe the most prevalent class of serious readers, in our tradition, as well as the most demanding of our attention as philosophers of art, is the combined class of in-it-for-the-story readers and thoughtful readers. Furthermore, the class of structural listeners, although smaller perhaps than the class of in-it-for-the-‘story’ listeners is, I believe, the class of listeners which composers of serious classical music have composed for, and hoped for, and, therefore, the class of listeners most demanding of our attention as philosophers of art. That is the substance of my defence; and for now it will have to suffice, but with this added point in its favour. There actually is


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some experimental evidence, emanating from the psychologists’ laboratories, that the general picture I have been drawing, of the reader more or less oblivious to formal structure, and immersed in the story, is an accurate picture. I am very wary of experimental evidence now frequently adduced in regard to the vexed question of music and the emotions; and I have no reason not to be wary of experimental evidence with regard to the experience of narrative fiction. But, for what it is worth, there it is. In sum, then, with the distinctions and qualifications that I have just been making, clearly in mind, the larger formal structure of the novel, although it can be and sometimes is the bearer of aesthetic properties, does not figure much in the direct experience of the average, or even the above average and sophisticated reader; hence is not a source, in the usual novel-reading experience, of aesthetic properties, in direct contrast, in this regard, with pure instrumental music. For the reader’s primary motives, in picking up a novel, at least under the usual circumstances, are to be told a story, and, in the case of the thoughtful reader, to contemplate its propositional content, if there is any; and it is the story that is the primary focus of attention. ‘Literature’, as Nick Zangwill has remarked, ‘is the least formal art because it involves content first and foremost.’10 Whereas the listener comes to the symphony or sonata not to be told a story – there is no story to be told – but to attend to the formal structure and ‘phenomenal’ properties of the musical work: to attend, in a word, to the musical events. So if there are aesthetic properties to be experienced in the novel, they are, for most serious readers, in the story, not the structure. In this very important respect, then, the novel is a non-aesthetic art, the symphony and its ilk aesthetic through and through.

(5) Reading Time, Listening Time I come now to the second of my theses, which is that if the first thesis is true, it may help to explain, or at least to understand what appears to me a puzzling though very important further difference between the way we experience novels and the way we 10 Nick Zangwill, The Metaphysics of Beauty (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 72.

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experience symphonies. The difference is, quite simply, that we experience novels discontinuously, but symphonies at one go without a break. This requires spelling out. And I begin with some terminology. I will mean by ‘literary time’ the time during which I am reading a novel, and by ‘musical time’ the time during which I am listening to a symphony. By ‘artistic time’ I will mean the general class to which literary time and musical time belong. And by ‘real time’ I will mean the total time it takes to have a complete experience of a novel or symphony, which is to say, the period between the time that I begin to read the novel and the time I put it down as finished, or the period between the time I begin to listen to the symphony and the time the last notes are sounded. In the terminology thus laid down, then, we can state the radical distinction I have in mind between the novel and the symphony in this wise: in experiencing the symphony in its artistically mandated, correct way, real time and artistic time exactly coincide, whereas in experiencing the novel in its artistically mandated, correct way, real time and artistic time do not exactly coincide, which is to say, real time far exceeds artistic time because, obviously, of the necessary gaps in the reading experience, where the reader must put down the novel, out of fatigue, or for some other pressing reason. Now someone might object here that although it seems right to describe listening to a symphony without interruption as the correct way, it seems wrong to describe reading a novel with temporal gaps between reading sessions as the correct way, with emphasis on ‘the’. Surely there are unusual cases of people who can read a long novel at one go: I seem to remember Harold Bloom claiming to do that. Furthermore, it might be argued, that really is the optimally correct way to read a novel, rare though it might be; and certainly it is not an ‘incorrect’ way of reading novels. So although reading with temporal gaps in the reading is a correct way of doing the thing, it is not the one and only correct way. Now I am not going to go so far as to say that reading a fairly long novel at one go, as Harold Bloom claims to do, is not a correct way to read novels. But the inability (as well as unwillingness) of almost all readers to do that is surely something that any novelist has to acknowledge and to take into serious consideration when plying her trade. It is a requirement, as it were, placed on her art as the particular shape of a wall is a requirement placed on


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the fresco painter’s art when he is given the commission to decorate it, or the requirement placed upon Mozart, in writing the so-called Prussian Quartets, of providing a prominent part for the cello. And the great, or even the competent novelist accommodates herself to this ‘condition’ placed upon her art work, as the fresco painter or the composer to his. She makes, in other words, a positive virtue of this apparently negative condition, and writes her novel specifically for those who must read in instalments and not at one go: making the ‘breathing’ pauses moments of suspense, for example, or, as I have stated previously, opportunities to ‘think’ about what one has read. And it is the primary task of the philosopher of literature to understand the experience of that reader, not the rare reader who can read a full length novel at a single sitting, just as it is the primary task of the philosopher of music to understand the experience of the musical listener, not that of those extraordinary and extraordinarily rare individuals who can ‘read’ a score and ‘hear a performance in the head’. So let us return, then, to the distinction, as stated, between the listener to symphonies, who must hear the works at one go, and the reader of novels, who must read discontinuously, with temporal gaps between reading sessions. Here is the problem that interests me. Simply stated, it is that the novel reader seems to suffer no feeling of discontinuity in her experience of novel-reading, even though there are temporal gaps in her reading, which is to say, even though in her reading, real time far exceeds literary time. This is not merely puzzling: it is, it seems to me, downright mindboggling. Why? The experience of a novel is the experience of a story-telling. That is to say, it is the experience of a series of events in which fictional characters do things, have things done to them, experience misfortunes and successes, and finally reach some conclusion in their affairs that constitutes a logical ending to the story being told. What I find so puzzling in all of this is that when the reader leaves off, at one point in the story, to pursue other matters, and then returns to it later, she experiences no discontinuity in the story. But how can this be? What were the characters doing, where were they, between readings? You return to the novel and pick up the story where you left off with no feeling that there has been a gap in fictional time. This seems to me to be extraordinary, and in want of an explanation. Things seem to be exactly opposite in regard to the experience of the larger musical forms, of which the symphony has been my

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chief exemplar. Imagine someone listening to a recording of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, getting up to wash the dishes at the double bar where the exposition ends, and returning to hear the rest of the movement, getting up again to open his mail, and so on. Surely no serious listener to the absolute music repertoire would follow such a course. And if a serious listener were to be interrupted in his listening to a symphony, say, by the phone ringing, he would surely experience a severe discontinuity in his musical experience that would render it aesthetically shattered. He would, of course, start the recording over again, not resume where he left off, if he wanted to hear the symphony, whereas a novel reader so interrupted would hardly begin the novel again, and very likely, if I am any representative example, would not even begin the chapter again. What explanation can be offered for this disanalogy between the two? A simple application of Mill’s method of difference would suggest that the explanation lies in the fact that the serious reader does not, and the serous listener does perceive the formal structure of the work as part of the artistic experience. That, of course, leaves unanswered the question of what the connection is between perceiving formal structure and feeling discontinuity in contrast with not perceiving formal structure and not feeling discontinuity, when real time and artistic time do not coincide. But I want to save consideration of that question until the end and try, first, to adduce some evidence in corroboration of the hypothesis that perceiving structure is correlated with feeling discontinuity and not perceiving it correlated with the opposite. Recall that Levinson thinks perceiving the large formal structure of symphonies and such plays a negligible if any role in the listener’s musical experience and that I disagree. What I do not deny is that there are a lot of non-structural listeners out there who listen to classical music in just the way Levinson has described, as involving only ‘basic musical understanding’, which consists in hearing one musical event as a natural, logical consequence of the preceding one, ‘following the development of [musical] events in real time, [but] engaging in no conscious mental activity of wider scope that has the whole or some extended portion of it [the work] as object’11 – in other words, non-structural listening. It is these non-structural, in-it-for-the-‘story’ listeners, or at least some 11

Levinson, Music in the Moment, p. 29.


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of them, I conjecture, that are the ones for whom recordings such as Beethoven’s Greatest Melodies and Classical Music’s One-Hundred Greatest Hits are marketed, and who do listen with interruptions and without the experience of discontinuity. I do not mean to suggest, by this, that all those who listen with ‘basic musical understanding’ alone, and no perception of music’s larger formal structure, are necessarily shallow listeners, completely indifferent to interruptions, and satisfied with Beethoven’s Greatest Melodies. There are, I am sure, many serious devotees of the classical music canon who listen to music in the way Levinson describes, including, one supposes, Levinson himself, a serious listener if ever there was one, who would be as disturbed by musical interruptions as the serious structural listener. Rather, I think one must look upon those who listen with basic musical understanding alone to constitute a continuum from ‘shallow’ to ‘serious’. And I do suggest that in general, listening with basic musical understanding alone, in it for the ‘story’, makes one more amenable to interrupted musical listening because the ‘glue’ of larger formal structure is absent. The conjecture, then, that the perception of formal musical structure is what largely, if not entirely, makes the difference between the musical listener’s sense of discontinuity in interrupted listening and the novel reader’s lack of such a sense in interrupted reading, has some corroboration, if I am right, from the absence of a sense of discontinuity in large numbers of listeners who do not experience the larger formal structure of musical works, and its presence in those that do; and its absence, again, in serious readers of novels who, I am claiming, do not perceive the larger formal structure of the novels they read. So, we may conjecture further, the structural listener to symphonies and such gets, as it were, a double-dose of continuity: the linear, momentto-moment continuity of what Levinson calls ‘basic musical understanding’ and the global continuity of structural listening. Whereas the serious reader of novels, even what I have called the serious thoughtful reader, if my first thesis is correct, normally has no awareness of the novel’s underlying formal structure. It is this double-whammy that makes the sense of discontinuity in interrupted musical listening. So, at least, the evidence seems to suggest. All of this being said, there still remains a crucial difference between the experiencing of a series of musical events and the experiencing of a series of fictional events, even in the absence, in

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both, of structural listening. It is, of course, that the series of events experienced in the novel is a series of fictional events, which is to say, a representation of the kinds of events that constitute the ‘real world’, or, at least, a ‘possible world’ resembling the real world in many respects. But in the real world our experience of events never has a gap, the way our experience of fiction does. So it seems altogether mysterious, at least to me, how we can not feel a discontinuity, a disruption when we pick up a novel, after having put it down the previous day. For in fictional time there may be no gap between Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen, whereas in real time there is a gap of twenty four hours. Where was that fictional world, where were those fictional characters, during that twenty-fourhour period? To put it another way, why doesn’t that question bother us as readers, or, in the case of most readers, ever occur to them at all? I feel that I have here left that question unanswered. (6) Conclusion In another place I have also tried to deal with the question, so stated, and have there, as here, felt in the end unsatisfied.12 The temporal gap in the reading experience still seems a mystery to me because of the peculiar way fictional time remains suspended. Perhaps others do not experience this sense of mystery in novelreading that I experience. I don’t know, although now is certainly the right time to find out. And perhaps this sense of mystery enhances my reading experience, and is part of what draws me on to story-telling, which seems to be a deep and universal human need. Perhaps it would be better for me that the mystery remain unsolved. Better, perhaps, to be a poor philosopher than an impoverished novel-reader. Perhaps here is one of those cases where ignorance is bliss; but about whether it is one of those cases I am in a state of ignorance as well.

12

See Kivy, ‘Continuous Time and Interrupted Time’.

4 CRITICISM OF LITERATURE AND CRITICISM OF CULTURE

rati_444

Stein Haugom Olsen Abstract There is a class of critics who are dissatisfied with the academic status of literary criticism and who want to re-establish for literary criticism the status it possessed in the early and mid nineteenth century as simultaneously cultural and social criticism. This is an impossible task. The ‘cultural critics’ of the nineteenth century possessed their authority because they were without competition and because they could command the attention and respect of the whole of the literate audience. However, at the end of the nineteenth century intellectual authority came to be based in specialised academic disciplines and individual authority was undermined and ultimately disappeared. At the same time, the arrival of universal literacy in Britain fragmented and ultimately destroyed the generally educated audience to which the cultural critics addressed themselves. Consequently there is today no role for the cultural critic. Literary critics cannot speak with authority about social, political, or cultural questions. They can, however, speak with authority about literature. Whether or not this criticism can be grounded in disciplinary knowledge, it serves a necessary function for an audience that no longer possesses the skill of reading literary works and lacks the background knowledge that is necessary to make sense of literature.

I The term ‘criticism’ as it is applied in literary studies today covers a number of different activities. There is a wide sense of the term in which everything said about a literary work of art, a group of works (a tradition, a period, a genre, etc.) or about literature in general, is called ‘criticism’. Then there is a narrower sense where the term means roughly ‘appreciation’. Appreciation involves apprehending a literary work as a work of art and issues in a piece of criticism that one would normally refer to as interpretative criticism. Appreciation does not involve an explicit value-judgement, though it does imply one. The third sense of criticism is the judgmental

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sense: pointing out good or bad qualities in a literary work in order to make a recommendation of some sort either to the artist or to the reading public. Sometimes criticism is also assumed to embrace what has been called critical theory or theoretical criticism. However, the distinction between criticism and theory is a substantive one, and if one extends the concept of criticism also to cover critical theory, it loses much of its value as a theoretical instrument. Moreover, to subsume critical theory under the concept of criticism is itself to make a theoretical statement about the relationship between the two, a statement that would require further argument. In the present discussion, therefore, it will be assumed that critical theory needs separate treatment. Something qualifies as criticism in literary studies only if it is what we may call art directed. Its purpose is to say something illuminating about literature. William Empson’s well known remarks on the following lines from Pope’s ‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady’ (1717) aim to enhance the reader’s appreciation of those lines. Empson shares something with his readers which he has perceived: How loved, how honoured once, avails thee not, To whom related, or by whom begot; A heap of dust is all remains of thee; ‘Tis all thou art, and all the proud shall be. (Pope, Unfortunate Lady [ll.71–4].) The two parts of the second line make a claim to be alternatives which is not obviously justified, and this I think implies a good deal. If the antithesis is to be serious, or must mean ‘one of her relations was grand but her father was humble’ or the other way about; thus one would take how to mean ‘whether much or little’ (it could mean ‘though you were so greatly’), and the last line to contrast her with the proud, so as to imply that she is humble (it could unite her with the proud, and deduce the death of all of them from the death of one). This obscurity is part of the ‘Gothic’ atmosphere that Pope wanted; ‘her birth was high, but there was a mysterious stain on it’; or ‘though you might not think it, her birth was high’; or ‘her birth was high, but not higher than births to which I am accustomed’. Here, however, the false antithesis is finding another use, to convey the attitude of Pope to the subject. ‘How simple, how irrelevant to the merits of the unfortunate lady, are such relationships; everybody has

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had both a relation and a father; how little I can admire the arrogance of great families on this point; how little, too, the snobbery of my reader, who is unlikely to belong to a great family; to how many people this subject would be extremely fruitful of antithesis; how little fruitful of antithesis it seems to an independent soul like mine’. What is important about such devices is that they leave it to the reader vaguely to invent something, and make him leave it at the back of his mind.1 An example of criticism as appreciation, this is criticism in the narrow sense. This form of criticism, sharing one’s perception of a work of art with an audience, is basic to literary studies because all other types of critical comments about a work of literature build on the assumption that it is possible somehow to apprehend the qualities that make a text a work of literature and a work of art. To the extent that criticism involves reference beyond the phenomenon of art itself, this reference is aimed at enhancing appreciation of the work of art. ‘Like every great popular writer’, says Georg Lukács, Scott aims at portraying the totality of national life in its complex interaction between ‘above’ and ‘below’; his vigorous popular character is expressed in the fact that ‘below’ is seen as the material basis and artistic explanation for what happens ‘above’. In Ivanhoe Scott portrays the central problem of medieval England, the opposition between the Saxons and Normans, in this way. He makes it very clear that this opposition is above all one between Saxon serfs and Norman feudal Lords. But, in a true historical manner, he goes further than this opposition. He knows that a section of the Saxon nobility, though materially restricted and robbed of its political power, is still in possession of its aristocratic privileges and that this provides the ideological and political centre of the Saxon’s national resistance to the Normans. However, as a great portrayer of historical national life Scott sees and shows with eminent plasticity how important sections of the Saxon nobility sink into apathy and inertia, how others again are only waiting for the opportunity to strike a compromise with the

1 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguities, 3rd ed. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1953), pp. 22–3.

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more moderate sections of the Norman nobility whose representative is Richard Coeur de Lion.2 All Lukács’s references to the situation in England under Norman rule in the early thirteenth century are aimed at revealing to us what Scott is doing in Ivanhoe. The novel is the object of attention and the object Lukács tries to understand. The argument can be turned the other way. The object of attention and discussion could be the hypothesis that ‘at the beginning of the thirteenth century important sections of the Saxon nobility had sunk into apathy and inertia, while others again were only waiting for the opportunity to strike a compromise with the more moderate sections of the Norman nobility whose representative was Richard Coeur de Lion’. Scott’s Ivanhoe is then quoted as supporting this hypothesis. However, this would not constitute criticism. The object of discussion is the position and the attitudes of the Saxon nobility in the early thirteenth century. Further discussion of the hypothesis would not involve reference to Ivanhoe but lead away from it to written historical documents and other sources. Secondly, criticism as understood in literary studies is subject to norms for argumentation defined by the discipline. Since criticism is a many-faceted activity, there will be different kinds of norms for different aspects or sub-disciplines of criticism. Thus literary history will be subject to those norms that apply generally in historiography. To the extent that there is a discipline of criticism that has a character of its own, it will subject to norms which have their basis in a conception of the nature and value of literature. These norms are complex, taught by example and learnt by imitation, and are therefore not easy to articulate. However, the conception of the nature and value of literature is not disciplinebased, but is logically prior to any discipline. Literary studies could cease to exist tomorrow, but literature could still be produced and appreciated. Literature has existed and been appreciated for hundreds of years before the discipline of literary studies came into being towards the end of the last century. There is, however, continuity between what one may call a literary practice (the production and appreciation of a certain type of art works, i.e. works

2 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 52–3.


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of literature) and the discipline of literary criticism. A discipline of literary criticism can only exist as an extension of a literary practice. There could be no history of literature if there was no practice of producing and appreciating literary works. In this respect the discipline of criticism is different from a scientific discipline such as e.g. molecular biology. A scientific theory defines the concepts that it employs in the identification of data. There would have been no concept of DNA if there had been no theory about the structure of DNA. DNA is conceptualised within the discipline of molecular biology. The notion of a work of literary art, on the other hand, is conceptualised outside the discipline of literary studies in an already existing literary practice. II Criticism is a specialist activity that requires professional training as well as ample resources of knowledge and time. The critic as a professional can bring relevant and necessary information to bear on a work; he has the time to study the work in depth; and he has experience in reading works of literature. His audience, which also includes other critics with other specialisms, has none of these. The discipline of literary studies which provides criticism with a home, is located within the university among other disciplines with their separate disciplinary norms, and the university provides the critic both with a living and with an institutionally defined position from which he can speak with authority. This authority is earned and maintained by producing scholarly work that is evaluated positively by his peers who in their turn know and work within the disciplinary norms. These norms are constitutive of the community of scholars that make up the peer-group for any one of the scholars in the community. The norms constitute the only tie between them. Thus criticism derives its intellectual authority ultimately from obeying the disciplinary norms rather than from the fact that it is produced within a social institution. It is useful to contrast criticism as it occurs within literary studies, with the practice one may call reviewing which goes on in newspapers and magazines. Both types of practice are professional, both are art directed, but reviewing is not subject to the disciplinary norms to which criticism is subject. As a consequence reviewing does not have the authority that criticism has within the peer community. Reviewers are at most leaders of fashion.

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There are two further remarks to be made about literary criticism. The first concerns its diversity and breadth. Within modern literary theory in particular, it is assumed that criticism is largely concerned with interpretation, and that interpretation is mainly textual explication (the term ‘text’ being used to refer to any object that can be interpreted). The latter assumption is simply wrong. Lukács’s comments on Scott’s Ivanhoe constitute an interpretation, in a wide sense of this term, of some aspects of the novel. But these comments are hardly textual explication in the way that Empson’s comments on the lines from Pope’s ‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady’ are. Yet one would not say that Lukács’s comments were atypical or marginal criticism. On the contrary, it would not be unreasonable to suggest that textual explication is a relatively rarefied form of criticism and that more often than not interpretation consists in providing information about, or simply pointing to, various kinds of contexts in which the work can be placed. Thus it is a critical task to provide information about what assumptions Shakespeare could reasonably make about what his audience knew about the transition of Rome from republican to imperial rule when he wrote Julius Caesar. It is a critical task to clarify the social background which confers on Hedda Gabler her social status in Ibsen’s play. It is a critical task to place The Waste Land in the context of the First World War, the general breakdown in European confidence in its own civilised values, or to provide an idea of the economic structures that dictate social position and consequently public duty (as opposed to private pleasure) in Jane Austen’s novels, etc. The other remark to be made about the discipline of literary criticism concerns its influence and its target audience. Some literary critics insist on the hermetic nature of criticism. It is written by academics for other academics and it does not address a larger audience. ‘The academization of criticism’, says Terry Eagleton, provided it with an institutional basis and professional structure; but by the same token it signalled its final sequestration from the public realm. Criticism achieved security by committing political suicide; its moment of academic institutionalisation is also the moment of its effective demise as a socially active force.3

3 Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism: From ‘The Spectator’ to Post-Structuralism (London: Verso, 1984), p. 65.


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Again this is wrong. It assumes that the academic institutions within which criticism is produced have as their exclusive aim the production of knowledge. But even in the most specialised university subject, research is always coupled with teaching. The number of people who are exposed to literary criticism (they are not taught criticism) is much larger than ever before in history. To assume of criticism that ‘its moment of academic institutionalisation is also the moment of its effective demise as a socially active force’, is also to make the much larger and immediately implausible assumption that teaching as it takes place in secondary schools and tertiary institutions has no function and makes no mark. As Tony Bennnett has pointed out: A contrary case could be argued and with equal conviction: namely, that the moment of criticism’s academic institutionalisation, particularly when viewed in the light of its subsequent extension throughout the education system, enormously augmented its power as an effective social force. . . . If Arnold spoke sometimes as a ‘citizen of the republic of letters’ and sometimes as a state functionary, we should not follow his own cultural reflexes in mistaking the former for a more powerful and influential voice than the latter which opened up to criticism a new, vastly expanded and more concretely embedded sphere of activity than it had hitherto enjoyed.4 III ‘Literary criticism’, says Edward Said in his article ‘Secular Criticism’, is practiced today in four major forms. One is the practical criticism to be found in book reviewing and literary journalism. Second is academic literary history, which is a descendant of such nineteenth-century specialities as classical scholarship, philology, and cultural history. Third is literary appreciation and interpretation, principally academic but, unlike the other two, not confined to professionals and regularly appearing authors. Appreciation is what is taught and performed by teachers of 4

Tony Bennett, Outside Literature (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 238.

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literature in the university and its beneficiaries in a literal sense are all those millions of people who have learned in a classroom how to read a poem, how to enjoy the complexity of a metaphysical conceit, how to think of literature and figurative language as having characteristics that are unique and not reducible to a simple moral or political message. And the fourth form is literary theory, a relatively new subject.5 Said includes here reviewing and literary theory, both of which were excluded in the above discussion, but what is interesting for the present discussion is that he is not satisfied even if these two are added: ‘if what in this volume I call criticism or critical consciousness has any contribution to make’, he goes on to say, ‘it is in the attempt to go beyond the four forms as defined above’.6 What Said wants is for criticism to be practised in such a way that it becomes important to the serious political concerns of society: Were I to use one word consistently along with criticism (not as a modification but as an emphatic) it would be oppositional. If criticism is reducible neither to a doctrine nor to a political position on a particular question, and if it is to be in the world and self-aware simultaneously, then its identity is its difference from other cultural activities and from systems of thought or method. In its suspicion of totalizing concepts, in its discontent with reified objects, in its impatience with guilds, criticism is most itself and, if the paradox can be tolerated, most unlike itself at the moment it starts turning into organized dogma. ‘Ironic’ is not a bad word to use along with ‘oppositional’. For in the main – and here I shall be explicit – criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interest of human freedom.7 This kind of criticism differs from disciplinary literary criticism in two ways. It is not art directed and consequently it is not subject to the disciplinary constraints of the aesthetic disciplines:

5 Edward W. Said, ‘Secular Criticism’, in his The World, the Text, and the Critic (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 1. 6 Said, ‘Secular Criticism’, p. 2. 7 Said, ‘Secular Criticism’, p. 29.


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Criticism cannot assume that its province is merely the text, not even the great literary text. It must see itself, with other discourses, inhabiting a much contested cultural space, in which what has counted in the continuity and transmission of knowledge has been the signifier, as an event that has left lasting traces upon the human subject. Once we take that view, then literature as an isolated paddock in the broad cultural field disappears, and with it too the harmless rhetoric of self-delighting humanism. Instead we will be able, I think, to read and write with a sense of the greater stake in historical and political effectiveness that literary as well as all other texts have had.8 In advocating a wide social responsibility for criticism, Said belongs to a group of what I shall call nostalgic critics who regret the present status of criticism as merely an academic discipline dealing essentially with the appreciation of literary works. The reason for calling these critics nostalgic is that they hark back to a situation where it was possible to practise a sort of social cum cultural commentary that could naturally take the whole of culture and society as its province and to pronounce authoritatively on broad cultural and social/political questions. Another prominent member of this group is Terry Eagleton. ‘It is arguable’, says Eagleton, that criticism was only ever significant when it engaged with more than literary issues – when, for whatever historical reason, the ‘literary’ was suddenly foregrounded as the medium of vital concerns deeply rooted in the general intellectual, cultural and political life of an epoch. The period of the Enlightenment, the drama of Romanticism and the moment of Scrutiny are exemplary cases in point. It has only been when criticism, in the act of speaking of literature, emits a lateral message about the shape and destiny of a whole culture that its voice has compelled widespread attention.9 Today, however, because criticism is now merely an academic speciality directed towards art, it

8 Said, ‘Criticism between Culture and System’, in his The World, the Text, and the Critic, p. 224. 9 Eagleton, The Function of Criticism, p. 107.

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engages at no significant point with any substantive social interest, and as a form of discourse is almost entirely self-validating and self-perpetuating. It is hard to believe that, in a nuclear age, the publication of yet another study of Robert Herrick is justifiable. Should criticism, then, be allowed to wither away, or can some more productive role be discovered for it?10 What these critics want is to recreate a situation where the critic can speak with authority but without the constraints imposed by an academic discipline, i.e. strong focus on an object or field of study and disciplinary norms which define what constitutes knowledge about the object or within the field. Says Said, Between the power of the dominant culture, on the one hand, and the impersonal system of disciplines and methods (savoir), on the other, stands the critic.11 This raises the question what happens to criticism when it takes up its stand outside ‘the impersonal system of disciplines and methods’. As a non-disciplinary figure the critic becomes an amateur, a journalist, a reviewer who can create a reputation for himself, but who cannot lay any claim to being heard because he or she represents valid and interesting knowledge. Columnists and reviewers are not asked to be members of government think tanks and commissions that formulate policy. Eagleton presents this dilemma of disciplinarity vs. amateurism in graphic terms: Either criticism strives to justify itself at the bar of public opinion by maintaining a general humanistic responsibility for the culture as a whole, the amateurism of which will prove increasingly incapacitating as bourgeois society develops; or it converts itself into a species of technological expertise, thereby

10

Eagleton, The Function of Criticism, p. 108. Said, ‘Criticism between Culture and System’, p. 220. Said’s original object of attack is contemporary American literary theory which he finds dogmatic and without awareness of ‘historical reality’, ‘society’, and ‘human needs and interests’ (‘Travelling Theory’, in his The World, the Text, and the Critic, p. 242). Though one cannot but agree with Said’s strictures on this kind of contemporary theory, his argument slides over into an argument not only against ‘all and any theory: that is, all conceptually systematised representations of the world of social and human affairs, right across the spectrum from Northrop Frye to Foucault’ (Bennett, Outside Literature, p. 205), but against the disciplinary nature of criticism as such. 11


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establishing its professional legitimacy at the cost of renouncing any wider social relevance.12 Eagleton sees this as ‘The problem of the Victorian man of letters’, but it is a problem ‘which has never ceased to dog the critical institution, and is indeed quite unresolved even today’.13 Eagleton’s own solution to this dilemma is nebulous. ‘Just as the eighteenth century bourgeois critic found a role in the cultural politics of the public sphere,’ he says, ‘so the contemporary socialist or feminist critic must be defined by an engagement in the cultural politics of late capitalism.’14 This engagement in the cultural politics of late capitalism is apparently fulfilled by becoming involved in any one of the ‘preoccupations’ which, maintains Eagleton, are today grouped under the label of ‘English literature’: semiotics, psychoanalysis, film studies, cultural theory, the representation of gender, popular writing, and of course the conventionally valued writings of the past. These pursuits have no obvious unity beyond a concern with the symbolic processes of social life, and the social production of forms of subjectivity. Critics who find such pursuits modish and distastefully newfangled are, as a matter of cultural history, mistaken. They represent a contemporary version of the most venerable topics of criticism, before it was narrowed and impoverished to the so-called ‘literary canon’.15 Eagleton’s conception of criticism is that of a non-disciplinary activity, an activity which has no disciplinary focus of the sort that literary criticism has in literature, nor does it have a framework of disciplinary norms which define what constitutes knowledge about the object. Feminist and socialist critics might succeed in creating a ‘counterpublic sphere’ of ‘discourse and practice’ where ‘culture’ is once more a vital nexus between politics and personal experience, mediating human needs and desires into

12 13 14 15

Eagleton, Eagleton, Eagleton, Eagleton,

The The The The

Function Function Function Function

of of of of

Criticism, Criticism, Criticism, Criticism,

pp. 56–7. p. 56. p. 123. pp. 123–4.

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publicly discussable form, teaching new modes of subjectivity and combating received representations.16 However, such a counterpublic sphere would not solve the dilemma: it would remain a sphere of rank amateurism and coffee-table talk until it was given a clear disciplinary focus and a framework of disciplinary norms. And then it would no longer be cultural criticism. IV The dilemma that Eagleton describes is, however, only a dilemma if one believes that criticism must be cultural criticism and that the duty of the critic is, in Said’s terms, to be ‘oppositional’. The aspiration to be critical in this sense goes back not so much to the Enlightenment coffee house culture as to the figure of the Victorian ‘cultural critic’ and ‘public moralist’. This cultural criticism came into being in the early and mid-Victorian periods as a sustained attack on the kind of society that developed in Britain in the 19th century as a result of industrialisation. The criticism was voiced in the periodicals which dominated the intellectual and social debate at the time, in pamphlets, lectures, speeches, reports and sometimes also in full-length books. Cultural criticism was social and moral criticism, but it gained its peculiar character because of the role it assigned to a humanist education in the preservation and development of national culture. Central to this humanist education was literature and art. The classic example of the merit and value of such an education as opposed to an education based merely on hard facts and figures, comes from John Stuart Mill. In his autobiography he gives an account of his mental crisis in 1826, ascribing it to the strict regime of an educational scheme based exclusively on Utilitarian principles. He was released from his depression by discovering Wordsworth’s poetry, a release which, according to Mill himself, led to a lasting flexibility and openness of mind. The cultural critics were a motley group. Among them one would place Carlyle, Mill, Arnold, Morris and Ruskin, with the addition perhaps of Spencer and some of the followers of these 16

Eagleton, The Function of Criticism, p. 118.


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worthies. Some of them, like Carlyle, made a living by their pen, but most of them had other regular employment. Mill was a bureaucrat at the India Office and Matthew Arnold was an inspector of schools. Their social role and status is somewhat difficult to determine, but they owed this status to their pen. Through their writing they acquired the status of sages – Carlyle was known as the Sage of Chelsea – of public voices that were heard and listened to by the educated audience of the time. They were all of them engaged in public controversy over particular political, social and moral questions, but they often used these opportunities to enounce general principles of conduct and action that they believed should be acknowledged and observed by everyone. Carlyle’s Past and Present (1842) was written as a response to the food riots that took place in the year of crises 1842 and was in particular directed against the Corn-Laws.17 Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869) was published in reaction to the Second Reform Act and the influence that the Act gave the Non-Conformists over all aspects of the political life of the nation. Yet both books are remembered for the general statements they make about morality and culture. The cultural critics were masters of many trades. Mill wrote what became classic works in epistemology and logic, as well as in political economy, but he also dealt with legal and political questions, with the situation of women and the franchise. Arnold wrote on literature, on religion, on the school and university system, on political and cultural democracy etc. Their prestige and authority were thus drawn from their interventions in a number of fields. The cultural critics were dependent for their prestige and their influence on the existence of an audience and the absence of any competing authority. They also based their criticism on certain shared moral preoccupations and assumptions,18 but that is less

17 See Richard D. Altick’s ‘Introduction’ to the Riverside Edition (New York, 1965) of Past and Present. 18 ‘These assumptions’, says Stefan Collini,

may be cast into baldly propositional form as follows. First, Victorian moralists exhibited an obsessive antipathy to selfishness, and consequently their reflections where structured by a sharp and sometimes exhaustive polarity between egoism and altruism. . . . Secondly, they were intensely preoccupied with the question of arousing adequate motivation in the moral agent. Thirdly, they accorded priority to the emotions over the intellect as a source of action, and so addressed themselves particularly to the cultivation of the appropriate feelings. Fourthly, they tended to assume that our deepest feelings, when aroused, would always prove to be not just compatible with each other, but also productive of socially desirable actions. And

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important for the present argument. The dilemma that Eagleton describes arose when Britain, in the final decades of the nineteenth century, saw the professionalisation of the sciences followed by the social sciences and the humanities. This professionalisation centrally involved the growth of the universities and the foundation and rapid expansion of new academic disciplines. The institutional authority of university departments came to replace the authority of the individual in matters concerning the fields in which the cultural critics were accustomed to intervene. Some texts written by these people were co-opted by the new disciplines, as happened in the case of John Stuart Mill’s Political Economy in the new discipline of economics, but those texts that could not be co-opted in this way in the long run lost their authority as did their authors. The man of letters became no more than a journalist who could not really be trusted when he pronounced on matters where new criteria of scholarship and research were developing. ‘The tone characteristically employed by the mid-Victorian moralist’, says Stefan Collini, had rested upon an intellectual as well as a social confidence. The matters at hand were accessible to reflective common sense, and in so far as he spoke with an authority beyond that simply of his social standing, it most frequently derived from practical acquaintance with actual social and political problems, not mastery of a discipline, still less of a theory. (A partial exception always has to be made for the political economist, though even here the general description largely applies.) Increasingly, however, the claim to exclusive or officially licensed possession of a body of theory, which could bring order to the disorientating complexity of intractable social or economic phenomena, was accorded a particular, if sometimes grudging, respect, especially where these phenomena came to seem less transparent, less immediately and concretely knowable, more in need of having their hidden forces illuminated.19 finally, they betray a constant anxiety about the possibility of sinking into a state of psychological malaise or anomie, a kind of emotional entropy assumed to be the consequence of absorption in purely selfish aims. (Stefan Collini, Public Moralists. Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 65.) 19 Collini, Public Moralists, p. 236. See also Ian Small, Conditions for Criticism. Authority, Knowledge, and Literature in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), chapters 2 and 3.


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This development also overtook the study of literature. The study of literature was developed into the academic discipline of literary studies with the result, as Ian Small has argued, that late Victorian men of letters like Edmund Gosse and Walter Pater came to be seen as dilettantes whose writings did not measure up to the standards of scholarship and research developing in the these new disciplines.20 Thus at the beginning of the twentieth century there was simply no room ‘between the power of the dominant culture, on the one hand, and the impersonal system of disciplines and methods (savoir), on the other’, where the cultural critic could take up his position. By the time literary studies attained its status as an academic discipline, all the areas in which the cultural critics used to intervene had been taken over by other disciplines such as economics, historiography, sociology, anthropology, and various branches of psychology. There was nothing left for cultural criticism to speak authoritatively about. The other development that changed the conditions for cultural criticism was the emergence in Britain at the end of the 19th century of a vast new mass readership. In 1870 Parliament passed Forster’s Education Act. It was a result of the obvious failure of the voluntary schools of the religious organisations to provide elementary education for all. The act did not do away with the voluntary schools but empowered the government to ‘fill the gaps’. In the districts where no voluntary schools existed, it set up local School Boards to be responsible for education and with power to provide and maintain elementary education out of public funds. The act did not in itself make school attendance compulsory but it empowered the School Boards to make attendance compulsory within their districts. This speeded up the spread of literacy in Britain so that by the end of the century literacy was almost universal.21 The consequence of this was 20 Small, Conditions for Criticism, chapters 4 and 5. For the struggle to establish literary studies as an academic discipline in the Anglophone world, see Stein Haugom Olsen, ‘Progress in Literary Studies’, New Literary History 36 (2005), pp. 341–58, and ‘The Moment of Theory’, Critical Quarterly 49:4 (2007), pp. 88–119. There is an interesting account of the strategy adopted by the Oxford historians in the last part of the 19th century to establish distance between themselves as professionals and the previous generations of amateurs in Rosemary Jann, ‘From Amateur to Professional: The Case of the Oxbridge Historians’, Journal of British Studies 22:2 (1983), 122–47. A recent and sober discussion of the development of professional, academic criticism is Carol Atherton, Defining Literary Criticism. Scholarship, Authority and the Possession of Literary Knowledge, 1880–2002 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 21 I adopt here the conventional view summarised by Walter Allen, The English Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1958). pp. 260–62:

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a democratisation of culture where a new reading public set their own standards for the reading matter they wanted. This new reading public vastly outnumbered the educated class. The audience to which the cultural critics could appeal was marginalised, and it could be argued that they in the longer run also suffered an almost total disintegration by being partly absorbed by the new mass audience. For the educated class became themselves specialised in their knowledge as a consequence of the new demands defined by the development of new academic disciplines. Thus, with a steadily increasing specialisation within the academies, with the deepening division between a mass and an educated audience, and with the change in the nature of the educated audience itself, cultural criticism lost both its authority and its audience. After the first two decades of this century attempts to practise cultural criticism have been no more than nostalgic gestures.

V The nostalgic critics make the unwarranted assumption that if literary criticism does not have a moral and/or a political func-

Forster’s Education Act of 1870 provided compulsory primary education for all, and the result, over the years, was an enormous increase in the reading public. But the gap between the best education and the worst was so great that the highbrow–lowbrow dichotomy with which we are now wearisomely familiar was inevitable. (p. 260) It is repeated in other surveys and introductory books such as Michael Wheeler, English Fiction in the Victorian Period 1830–1890 (London: Longman, 1985), pp. 155–6, and John Carey, The Intellectual and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), pp. 5–7: The ‘Revolt of the Masses’ which these cultural celebrities deplored was shaped by different factors in each European country. In England, the educational legislation of the last decades of the nineteenth century, which introduced universal elementary education, was crucial. The difference between the nineteenth-century mob and the twentieth-century mass is literacy. For the first time, a huge literate public had come into being, and consequently every aspect of the production and dissemination of the printed text became subject to revolution. (p. 5) An alternative view is presented by Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Anderson argues that the transformation of popular culture into mass culture started in the early 1830s and had been more or less completed by 1860. However, though Anderson’s evidence establishes that there was a considerable literate public in existence before Forster’s Education Act, it does not challenge the conventional view that there was a dramatic expansion of this audience in the late 1870s and 1880s.


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tion, then it does not have any social utility. However, the social utility of disciplinary knowledge, no matter what discipline is in question, is almost never moral or political. Such knowledge may be put to political uses or employed in moral arguments, but the social utility of disciplinary knowledge is independent of such uses. Indeed, it is a requirement of disciplinary knowledge that it should not be influenced by the political or moral concerns of those in pursuit of such knowledge. Thus, the development of the academic discipline of history in England is a development where the concept of history as a way to teach moral or political lessons is replaced by a concept of history defined by Ranke’s goal of constructing an account of the past ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’.22 Nevertheless, disciplinary knowledge is professional knowledge and it is a fundamental requirement for any form of professional knowledge that it has social utility. If a professional group fails to persuade the public that the knowledge it possesses has social utility, then the profession would indeed ‘wither away’. The social utility of disciplinary knowledge is not, however, a simple matter of social usefulness. It is also intimately connected with what Everett Hughes in his classic article on the nature of the professions calls the ‘esoteric’ nature of professional knowledge:23 A profession delivers esoteric services – advice or action or both – to individuals, organizations or government; to whole classes or groups of people or to the public at large. . . . it is part of the professional complex, and of the professional claim, that the practice should rest upon some branch of knowledge to which the professionals are privy by virtue of long study and by initiation and apprenticeship under masters already members of the profession.24 Disciplinary knowledge is specialist knowledge and has social utility only in so far as it is unavailable to the non-specialist but has to be supplied by the representatives of the discipline: The complexity of the concept of social utility lies, then, in its simultaneous relationship to both general and specialist crite22 A summary account is given in Thomas William Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (London: Croom Helm, 1982), Chapter 5. ‘The Impact of Science: The Case of History’. 23 Everett C. Hughes, ‘Professions’, Daedalus 92 (1963), pp. 655–668. 24 Hughes, ‘Professions’, p. 656.

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ria. The general criterion concerns the recognition that, in a discipline such as medicine, social utility depends not on the particular value of, say, embryo research to infertile couples, but rather on a general agreement that knowledge of human illness, its symptoms, aetiology and treatment is important to the survival of us all. To use the terms we employed before, it is the utility of medical knowledge in toto which justifies the existence of the medical sciences. The specialist criterion concerns the companion recognition that human illness is so complex and diverse a subject that it requires a specially trained person to investigate it – a specialist, that is, in medical knowledge. Indeed the special training and formal examinations which we have alluded to exist not simply to enable the professions to safeguard their specialist knowledge; they also exist to ensure that the professions maintain certain standards of expertise which are vital to the retaining of public respect.25 There is indeed a problem about the social utility of literary criticism but this problem does not stem from the absence of a moral or a political function of such criticism. It has its roots in what one may call the epistemic function of criticism. The goal of literary criticism is to establish epistemic access to the object of study in literary studies, i.e. epistemic access to the literary work. Epistemic access to the literary work is through a process that has variously been called ‘reading’, ‘interpretation’, or ‘appreciation’. These terms can refer to a product as well as to a process, but as the product is the outcome of the process, this ambiguity has no theoretical implications. The terms themselves, though used as critical primitives, carry connotations that may lead to looking at this epistemic access in different ways. I.e. the concept of ‘reading’ suggests that the epistemic access is unproblematic and immediate, at least in a chronological sense. The concept of ‘interpretation’, on the other hand, suggests that epistemic access is problematic and that the literary work offers resistance which has to be overcome. At the same time this concept also glosses over significant differences in ways of construing the literary work. The concept of ‘appreciation’ suggests that apprehending a literary work involves an experience of value. These different conceptualisations of the

25 Josephine M. Guy and Ian Small, Politics and Value in English Studies. A Discipline in Crisis? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 54.


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epistemic access to a literary work raise theoretical questions of central importance, which have been extensively discussed in literary aesthetics. However, epistemic access, no matter how it is conceived, is non-disciplinary. As was pointed out in Section One: the discipline of literary studies is a recent one, hardly more than one hundred years old. The writing and reading (interpretation, appreciation) of literary works, what we may call varying forms of literary practice, have been in existence for hundreds of years. But if this is so, if the knowledge produced by literary criticism is not specialist knowledge but knowledge that can potentially be the property of everyone, then criticism is deprived of its disciplinary status because the knowledge it produces has no social utility. What is more, if the point about epistemic access is correct, literary criticism cannot be an academic discipline in the same sense in which historiography or linguistics have come to develop into academic disciplines. The tension between the concept of literary criticism as a generalist discourse addressed and intelligible to a general audience, and as a specialist discourse addressed exclusively to an audience of peers, appeared together with the attempt to turn criticism into an academic discipline. The attempt to develop a discipline of literary studies, says Anthony Kearney, was dividing ‘English literature’ into two separate entities: . . . on the one side was Arnold’s formative power, available to the general reader for aesthetic delight and moral renewal, on the other the academic subject with its own increasingly more specialist concerns. Combining the two was the obvious problem and the period 1880–90 had few answers to it.26 If the present argument is right, this is a tension that necessarily arises with any attempt to turn the study of literature into the academic discipline of literary studies. In Defining Literary Criticism, Carol Atherton has traced in detail how this tension prevented literary criticism from developing into an academic discipline in the same way as linguistics, historiography, or any of the social or natural sciences, arguing that criticism as a generalist discourse survived even among those who took up post as professors of

26 Anthony Kearney, ‘The First Crisis in English Studies 1880–1900’, British Journal of Education Studies 36 (1988), p. 266.

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English literature in the universities as well as among a group of critics outside the universities who were unwilling to let English studies ‘become the possession of a purely academic domain’.27 And the tension is neatly illustrated in a little scene in Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (1975) where the recently appointed lecturer in English, Miss Callendar, responds to the question from Howard Kirk, the history man, who is, of course, a sociologist, about ‘how’ she teaches literature: ‘Do you mean am I a structuralist or a Leavisite or a psycholinguistician or a formalist or a Christian existentialist or a phenomenologist?’ ‘Yes,’ says Howard. ‘Ah,’ says Miss Callendar, ‘well, I’m none of them.’ ‘What do you do, then?’ asks Howard. ‘I read books and talk to people about them.’ ‘Without a method?’ asks Howard. ‘That’s right,’ says Miss Callendar. ‘It doesn’t sound very convincing,’ says Howard. ‘No,’ says Miss Callendar, ‘I have a taste for remaining a little elusive.’ All the isms mentioned by Miss Callendar can be seen as failed attempts to establish the disciplinary nature of literary criticism. Yet, in spite of all these failures, literary criticism is still thriving if not exactly as ‘twaddle about Addison and Pope’28 or mere ‘chatter about Shelley’,29 then at least as ‘talk’ about literary works.

27

Atherton, Defining Literary Criticism, p. 96. The expression is from a letter by Leslie Stephen to a friend when he was appointed to the newly established Clark Lectureship in English literature at the University of Cambridge: 28

I shall have to go to Cambridge three times a week to talk twaddle about Addison and Pope to a number of young ladies from Girton and a few idle undergraduates and the youthful prince. (Quoted in Collini, Public Moralists, pp. 221–2.) 29 The expression is from E.A. Freeman who was Regius Professor of History at Oxford when the discussion of setting up a School of Modern European Languages and Literature was going on in Oxford:

A saying which fell from myself in one of the debates in Congregation on the Modern Language Statute has been quoted in several places, and some seem to have been pleased and others displeased with the phrase of ‘chatter about Shelley.’ But I doubt whether any one has quoted the illustration which I gave of the kind of ‘chatter’ with which we are threatened. I mentioned that I had lately read a review of a book about Shelley in which the critic, in the gravest way in the world, praised or blamed the author – I forget which, and it does not matter – for his ‘treatment of the Harriet problem.’ (E.A. Freeman, ‘Literature and Language’, Contemporary Review, October 1887, p. 564.)


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VI We are, then, faced with what appears to be a paradox. On the one hand, there is apparently a discipline of literary studies established in the university with literary criticism as a central, indeed, as a fundamental part. On the other, there is the impossibility of having such a discipline given the nature of literature as a cultural practice potentially accessible to any non-specialist with a certain intelligence, sensitivity, and experience of life. However, from the fact that the reading, interpretation, and appreciation of literature are non-disciplinary activities it does not follow that they are not difficult or demanding. Nor does anything follow about the possible prerequisites for engaging successfully in these activities. It is through this fact that the paradox will have to be addressed. Writing about ‘The Study of English Literature’ in the Cornhill Magazine in 1887,30 Leslie Stephen discusses a number of ‘certain auxiliary studies which are obviously necessary and yet obviously external’ when one wants to appreciate literature. These studies, he says, ‘give the key, they do not lead us into the sanctuary. For example, one necessary preliminary is to learn our letters’. However, ‘a bare power of reading does not take us very far. That part of our education was probably completed in our nurseries’.31 Stephen next mentions philology, but does not give it great weight. The philologist is not really ‘a guide to the kind of knowledge which we desire, but an humble attendant who has cleared a few stumbling-blocks from our path’.32 Among the ‘other studies which make greater claims’ is the study of literary history, both of one’s own national literature and of classical literature, though this study too is in the end ‘one of the studies by which our tastes may be improved and our perceptions refined [rather] than . . . an indispensable mode of training’.33 The most important auxiliary study, according to Stephen, is knowledge of the social, political, and intellectual environment in which the author worked and wrote. Indeed, discussing this kind of study Stephen sometimes seems to say that it is more than auxiliary and that it is indeed necessary in order to understand and appreciate a work of 30 Leslie Stephen, ‘The Study of English Literature’, Cornhill Magazine 55 (1887), pp. 486–508. 31 Stephen, ‘The Study of English Literature’, p. 487. 32 Stephen, ‘The Study of English Literature’, p. 488. 33 Stephen, ‘The Study of English Literature’, p. 491.

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literature. Stephen does in the end reassert the importance of the direct, spontaneous response to a literary work, but it is clear that it is a response that requires extensive grounding before it can come about. Critics wanting to resist the development of an academic discipline of criticism have since the beginning of this development insisted on the demanding and difficult nature of the act of appreciation. Even the fiercest adversaries of academic criticism insist on this. ‘The most interesting and creative art of our time’, says Susan Sontag, is not open to the generally educated; it demands a special effort; it speaks a specialized language. The music of Milton Babbit and Morton Feldman, the painting of Mark Rothko and Frank Stell, the dance of Merce Cunningham and James Waring demand an education of sensibility whose difficulties and length of apprenticeship are at least comparable to the difficulties of mastering physics or engineering.34 And it was a fundamental assumption among modernist critics like Virginia Woolf that ‘reading’ literature required skills that the new mass audience for written material did not possess. Virginia Woolf’s ‘common reader’ was not common at all except in the sense that he was a non-specialist reader. Woolf’s common reader was uncommon in two ways. The prescription given by Leslie Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s father) in ‘The Study of Literature’ for how to appreciate a literary work is not only to engage in the ‘auxiliary studies’ that he identifies, but also to read extensively. If one is to understand Pope properly one has to make oneself familiar with the environment in which he moved. And how does one do that? By reading some of the most delightful books in the language. By reading Addison and Swift, and Pope’s own correspondence, and Lady Mary’s letters, and ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ and

34 Susan Sontag, ‘One Culture and the New Sensibility’, in Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (1966) (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 295. On cannot but admire one who writes with such wonderful self-assurance about science at the same time as every word she writes demonstrates her ignorance of the field.


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‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ and Gay and Parnell, and a crowd of smaller writers, just as they come in your way.35 One can only do this if one has the necessary time to do it, if one has, that is, leisure. In a little essay with the title ‘Reading’ in The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf has this description of the act of reading Elizabethan travel-literature. ‘There is’, she says, balm for our restlessness in conjuring up visions of Elizabethan magnanimity; the very flow and fall of the sentences lulls us asleep, or carries us along as upon the back of a large smoothpaced cart horse, through green pastures. It is the pleasantest atmosphere on a hot summer’s day. They talk of their commodities and there you see them; more clearly and separately in bulk, colour, and variety than the goods brought by steamer and piled upon docks; they talk of fruit; the red and yellow globes hang unpicked on virgin trees; so with the lands they sight; the morning mist is only just now lifting and not a flower has been plucked. The grass has long whitened tracks upon it for the first time. With the towns too discovered for the first time it is the same thing. And so, as you read on across the broad pages with as many slips and somnolences as you like, the illusion rises and holds you of banks slipping by on either side, of glades opening out, of white towers revealed, of gilt domes and ivory minarets. It is, indeed, an atmosphere, not only soft and fine, but rich, too, with more than one can grasp at any single reading. So that, if at last I shut the book, it was only that my mind was sated, not the treasure exhausted. Moreover, what with reading and ceasing to read, taking a few steps this way and then pausing to look at the view, that same view has lost its colours, and the yellow page was almost too dim to decipher.36 The main feature of this passage is how leisurely and relaxed the reading experience is. And it has gone on until dusk falls

35

Stephen, ‘The Study of English Literature’, p. 498. Virginia Woolf, ‘Reading’, in her Collected Essays, Vol. II (London: The Hogarth Press, 1966), pp. 21–2. The passage is quoted in Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, ‘The Philosophy of Literature: Pleasure Restored’, in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, ed. by Peter Kivy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), pp. 201–2 as an illustration of the central nature of pleasure in the reading of literature. 36

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without the awareness that time has passed or is passing. There is no feeling of pressure or having to spend one’s time ‘profitably’. And in the two volumes of The Common Reader Virginia Woolf again and again describes the reader as idling in the sun enjoying his read. The second way in which Woolf’s common reader is uncommon is that he is cultured, or what in German would be called gebildet. That is he masters his Latin if not his Greek, he is generally well informed about his own culture, about his nation’s historical past, about its literature, art, and music etc. What is more, he has a trained taste. He is capable of making informed judgements about literature, art, and music. And this Bildung is a result of the leisure he has at his disposal and which enables him to spend the necessary time to train his taste and acquire the information that makes him gebildet. Leisure and culture go together. The mass audience for printed entertainment that came into being as the long term result of Forster’s Education Act had no culture as indeed they had no leisure. What is more, the educated audience had no leisure either and therefore no culture. The increasing specialisation in all areas of intellectual activity at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century did indeed require education on a large scale as well as in depth for the individual. However, this education either formed the starting point or provided the basis for specialisation. And once the specialist knowledge was acquired, it was a full time occupation to apply the knowledge in the service of one’s profession at the same time as one tried to keep up with developments in the relevant field of knowledge. Later in the twentieth century this contrast between Bildung and specialisation was to be thematized within tertiary education itself as the conflict between ‘whole person education’ and disciplinary training. The disappearance and disintegration of the public of the cultural critic were also the disappearance and disintegration of the public of common readers. VII If literature were to survive, then, the common reader had to be reconstituted. It was a precondition for the reconstitution of the common reader that there was a social agreement on what Leslie Stephen called ‘an undeniable proposition, that familiarity with


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our literature is desirable’.37 But, this social agreement being in place, the arena where the common reader was to be reconstituted presented itself: it would have to be done within the education system. And the expansion of the education system in the Western world in the twentieth century was indeed phenomenal. The teaching of literature expanded with it, more often than not as part of the teaching of the ‘mother tongue’. This expansion required literally tens of thousands of trained teachers, and the natural place to train these was where other professions like the law, medicine, the clergy, the scientists etc were being trained, i.e. the university. And so the death of the common reader becomes the birth of the academic critic. Given the social agreement that ‘familiarity with our literature is desirable’ the specialist reader who can pass on the skills and the knowledge necessary to appreciate a literary work takes his place among the other specialists at the university. The leisure activity of previous centuries becomes the work of the twentieth century academic critic. So far we have not, however, really addressed the paradox that there is in existence an apparently thriving academic discipline of literary studies while it seems to be impossible for literary criticism to be an academic discipline given the concept of literature as a cultural practice potentially accessible to any non-specialist with a certain intelligence, sensitivity, and experience of life. However, this is a paradox only if one accepts that the justification for including a field of studies within the university is that it is the custodian of disciplinary knowledge and has as its main purpose to produce new knowledge. It is arguable that literary studies and in particular literary criticism is not an academic discipline in this sense. It is nevertheless an area of specialist knowledge that has its justification in the social agreement that ‘familiarity with our literature is desirable’. As long as this social agreement holds, the natural place for the development and transmission of this knowledge is the university.

37

Stephen, ‘The Study of English Literature’, p. 486.

5 INCENSE AND INSENSIBILITY: AUSTIN ON THE ‘NON-SERIOUSNESS’ OF POETRY rati_445

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Maximilian de Gaynesford Abstract What is at stake when J. L. Austin calls poetry ‘non-serious’, and sidelines it in his speech act theory? (I). Standard explanations polarize sharply along party lines: poets (e.g. Geoffrey Hill) and critics (e.g. Christopher Ricks) are incensed, while philosophers (e.g. P. F. Strawson; John Searle) deny cause (II). Neither line is consistent with Austin’s remarks, whose allusions to Plato, Aristotle and Frege are insufficiently noted (III). What Austin thinks is at stake is confusion, which he corrects apparently to the advantage of poets (IV). But what is actually at stake is the possibility of commitment and poetic integrity. We should reject what Austin offers (V).1

I ‘What I have written, I have written,’ said solemn Pilate, and stayed by his words. Some philosophers seem to think such commitment is not required of poets, that they are not called to it. Some poets and their advocates amongst the literary critics seem to think that what philosophers actually mean by this is that poets are, by profession or temperament, incapable of such commitment. Not unnaturally, it incenses poets that philosophers should think this of them. They take it as evidence that philosophers are, by profession or temperament, grossly insensible to poetry, its nature and value. Equally understandably, it incenses philosophers that poets should imagine philosophers think this of poets. Philosophers take this as evidence that poets are, by profession or temperament, grossly insensible to philosophy, its nature and aims. So the ancient quarrel between philosophers and poets suffers another twist. This is depressing, since the wrangle helps

1 I am grateful to Stephen Mulhall, whose paper ‘Deconstruction and the Ordinary’ prompted me to think about these things.

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sustain what is plausibly regarded as an ‘intellectual disaster’: the tendency of works of aesthetics to be both ‘philosophically slight and critically impoverished’.2 As in many quarrels, one side tends to rejoice in its weapons, and the other in its scars. So both parties take a kind of savage delight in recalling what philosophers have frequently alleged: that poetry is ‘not serious’; that it is not to be taken seriously. J. L. Austin is notorious for laying the charge. His scattered, somewhat quisquous remarks continue to provoke vehement reactions from poets and literary critics alike – even, perhaps especially, from those who otherwise admire him. For the insult to poets (if that is what it is), is felt more acutely for having been delivered by one so evidently alive to the ways of words. The critic Christopher Ricks writes: ‘Of the twentieth century philosophers [Austin] is the one who is most to be relished for his sensibility and for what he makes of it in his word-work’; but Austin’s comments on poetry are ‘pseudoprofessional’, ‘unthinking or thoughtless’, ‘askew’, an ‘unruffled lapse’.3 And the poet and critic Geoffrey Hill takes up the strain: It is itself a philosophical irony that a mind which strove for accuracy of definition while registering most acutely the quotidian duplicities, which sought ‘decent and comely order’ as fervently as did the authors of the antique tropes, felt free to regard poetry as one of the non-serious ‘parasitic’ ‘etiolations of language,’ as a kind of ‘joking’.4 The passage keeps its irritation severely in check, but the underlying sense of shocked betrayal gives the surface tension.5 Misunderstanding may lie at the core of the spat. When reading its products, it is difficult not to think so. But that line is easier to 2 Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Architecture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 292. 3 Christopher Ricks, ‘Austin’s Swink’ (1992), reprinted in his Essays in Appreciation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 260–79; see pp. 260–2; 264. 4 Geoffrey Hill, ‘Our word is our bond’ (1983), reprinted in his The Lords of Limit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 138–59; see p. 148. 5 Philosophers similarly alive to Austin’s virtues but who nevertheless find regrettable intimations in his strictures on poetry, include Jacques Derrida ‘Signature event context’ (1972), reprinted in his Limited Inc (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), pp. 1–23; and Stanley Cavell ‘Counter-philosophy and the pawn of voice’, in his A Pitch of Philosophy (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 53–127. They read Austin’s comments on poetry as signs of broader and deeper issues; this paper remains with those for whom the poetry issue is sufficient.

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take if one is of the aggressor’s party. The injured tend naturally to suspect a willed misunderstanding, that some form of malice sustains the mistakes. If so, rooting out error alone would just leave the motivation in place, ready to batten on new opportunities. No resolution will be effective unless the possibility of a will to misunderstand is addressed. So that is the main purpose of this paper: to ask what is at stake, for philosophers and for poets, when Austin says poetry is ‘nonserious’. The topic remains the use of language in poetry, rather than poetical uses of language and the employment of ‘poetic effects’ (the latter are all found outside poetry; in the straight prose for which Austin himself was responsible, for example). II And I might mention that, quite differently again, we could be issuing any of these utterances, as we can issue an utterance of any kind whatsoever, in the course, for example, of acting a play or making a joke or writing a poem – in which case of course it would not be seriously meant and we shall not be able to say that we seriously performed the act concerned. (J. L. Austin, ‘Performative utterances’)6 With this one exception, all Austin’s controversial passages on poetry occur in his William James Lectures, given at Harvard in 1955, and published posthumously ‘with the lightest editing’.7 There are six such passages.8 The points made are few and he repeats them often, giving reason to think he meant to stick by what he said. His target is the composing of poetry, rather than quoting or reciting it – using language to issue (rather than re-issue) utterances. What did Austin intend by dividing the ‘serious’ from the ‘nonserious’, or by adding – in explanation or defence – that poetry is a ‘parasitic’ use of language, an ‘etiolation’?9 Austin did not 6 In J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers, ed. J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock, 3rd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 233–52; p. 241. 7 As How To Do Things With Words, ed. J. O. Urmson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962); see ‘Editor’s Preface’, p. v. 8 How To, pp. 9–10; 20–2; 92 fn. 1; 104; 121. ‘Performative utterances’, pp. 240–1. 9 How To, p. 22; p. 92 footnote 1; p. 104.


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address these questions directly. But others have done so on his behalf, and we obtain some illumination by examining the standard explanations. Poets and philosophers diverge strikingly, of course; but we shall see that what is truly problematic is what they hold in common. Poets start out from the view that poetry aspires to be a serious use of language, neither parasitic nor etiolated; that it is possible for poetry to achieve this end; and that we know it is possible to achieve it because we know that achieving it is actual: there are examples of success, commonly agreed to count as such, and which one can cite in evidence. So Austin must be denying that poetry achieves the end to which it aspires, and on the grounds that it could not be achieved. Hence the tone of derision poets detect in Austin’s writing: poetry is either laughably pretentious (striving at what it is, in fact, impossible to achieve) or contemptibly mendacious (pretending that what cannot be achieved can be). Why did Austin deny poetry could be a serious use of language, and thus exclude it from his theorizing about speech acts? According to the poets, the reason is that he identified poetry with ‘a kind of “joking” ’.10 And this, so they claim, reveals at least one of two things. Either Austin was insensible to the nature and value of poetry. Or he was in the grip of a mistake, one that betrays a background myth, misleading conviction, or falsifying ideology. They acknowledge that the first option is scarcely tenable. The tone (general) and the attention to allusion (particular) of Austin’s writing make clear that he was deeply sensitive to the nature and value of poetry. But the second option, so they suppose, has much going for it. They view Austin’s approach to poetry as distorted by professional antipathy, an ‘averting and something of an aversion’ that is nurtured and encouraged in the institution and practice of philosophy itself.11 So Ricks writes of Austin’s ‘pseudo-professional . . . denigration of literature’; his remarks sum to ‘a philosopher’s slighting of the poet’s enterprise’.12 Hill is both more cautious and more precise: Austin’s view of poetry is distorted not by philosophy simpliciter, but by the empiricism he

10

Hill, ‘Our word’, p. 148. Ricks, ‘Austin’s Swink’, p. 262. He appeals directly to Austin’s use of inverted commas (e.g. around ‘non-serious’) as evidence of his aversion to poetry. 12 Ricks, ‘Austin’s Swink’, pp. 260–1; 264. 11

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espouses.13 Vincent Sherry (taking Hill’s suggestion further than Hill himself, perhaps, would go) describes Austin’s view as guided by a reductionist attempt ‘to control language by restricting its activity to referential functions’.14 The poets then turn the screw. Although Austin’s attitude is a professional (i.e. philosopher’s) failing, he is considerably more at fault than his colleagues. In part, this is because his sensitivity to poetry is greater than theirs; hence his ‘lapse’ is the more inexcusable.15 But it is mainly because his position is more slighting towards poetry than theirs; his aversion goes beyond what can be explained (away) as merely professional. So the explanation favoured by the poets, based on their interpretation of Austin’s motives and attitudes, can be summarized as follows: (1) Austin excluded poetry from consideration. What explains (1) is that (2) Austin regarded poetry as a ‘non-serious’ use of language, parasitic and etiolated. What explains (2) is that (3) Austin regarded poetry as a kind of joking, whatever the pretensions of poets. What partly explains (3) is that (4) Austin had a ‘professional’ (i.e. philosopher’s) aversion towards poetry.

13 Hill, ‘Our Word’ pp. 139–41. This is not convincing: Austin’s approach to meaning is far from the Lockean and immediately post-Lockean accounts Hill has explicitly in mind. 14 Vincent Sherry, The Uncommon Tongue: The Poetry and Criticism of Geoffrey Hill (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1987), p. 32. This is false: Sherry ascribes to Austin precisely the position he rejects; see How To, passim, esp. Lecture I. 15 This is the keynote of Ricks’s ‘Austin’s Swink’, though it is not always clearly sounded. So he writes that Austin’s ‘denigration’ of poetry ‘was not altogether true to himself ’ (p. 264); but that ‘altogether’ is ‘busy ducking and weaving’ in precisely the way that (as Ricks himself rightly complains; p. 261) ‘seriously’ does in Austin’s remarks on poetry.


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What (4) leaves partly unexplained about (3) is that (5) Austin’s antipathy towards poetry is stronger, more virulent than his professional aversion. The position taken by philosophers is equally standard and uniform on essentials. There is a distinction between serious and non-serious uses of speech. This distinction may require further examination. But the idea that it exists, and that poetry falls on the ‘non-serious’ side of it, is straightforward. It calls for no extensive explanation and should prompt no complaint.16 Thus philosophers admit that phrases like ‘parasitic’ and ‘etiolated’ may suggest something morally bad or otherwise anomalous. And this would be unfortunate: partly because it would be false to suggest such things about poetry, and partly because Austin never intended to do so. We should bear Austin’s overall aim in mind, not particulars relevant only to his way of achieving it. That aim is perfectly reasonable and justified: to offer preliminary investigations of speech acts by looking at standard cases of making promises and issuing statements. Poetry rarely makes promises or issues statements, and when it does, it issues them in a non-standard way. So poetry is quite properly excluded from preliminary consideration.17 (Without prejudice, presumably, to subsequent investigations of the properties peculiar to the use of language in poetry.) Thus the explanation favoured by philosophers, making use of their privileged insider appreciation of Austin’s motives and attitudes, can be summarized as follows: (6) (1) is true in a limited sense: Austin excluded poetry from preliminary investigations of speech acts. What explains (6) is that 16 P. F. Strawson gives a particularly clear enunciation of this position; see his ‘Intention and convention in speech acts’ (1964), reprinted in his Logico-Linguistic Papers (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd, 1971), pp. 149–69; esp. p. 149. For other examples, see John Searle, Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 57 and footnote 1; and Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (London: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 5; 85; 103. 17 In replying to Derrida’s paper ‘Signature event context’, John Searle produced something like a canonical version of this response: see his ‘Reiterating the Differences: a Reply to Derrida’, Glyph # 2, Johns Hopkins Textual Studies 7 (1977), pp. 198–208.

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(7) (2) is true: Austin regarded poetry as a ‘non-serious’ use of language, parasitic and etiolated. What (7) means is that (8) Austin regarded poetry as a ‘non-standard’ use of language; ‘non-serious’ is merely a playful way of expressing this. If (6)-(8) are true, of course, then we have as yet no cause or reason to believe (3)-(5). We can explain Austin’s exclusion of poetry without supposing that he thought it a kind of joking, and without ascribing to him a professional aversion – still less an individual antipathy – towards poetry.

III But there is reason to be suspicious of both these explanations. It is not clear that either (3) or (8) represent Austin’s own position, nor that any of the reasons considered so far in support of (1)-(2) represent Austin’s own reasons. The issues can be roughly grouped under four heads: content, tone, context and ornament. The main aim is to discover a more promising interpretative line; so this section will discuss no more than is necessary to reveal it. (a) Content Poets and philosophers assume Austin’s remarks on poetry are unambiguous. By saying poetry is non-serious, poets claim he meant something offensive, like ‘joking’ (i.e. (3)), while philosophers claim he meant something inoffensive, like ‘non-standard’ (i.e. (8)). But neither side is right, as attention to ‘key’ words and to ‘the full and exact form of the expression used’ reveals.18 (i) Pace (3) and (8): The role of ‘not’ and ‘non’ causes ambiguity.

18 This recommendation about procedure is Austin’s; see ‘A plea for excuses’ (1956), reprinted in his Philosophical Papers, pp. 175–204; p. 198.


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When Austin says, in the quoted passage, that an utterance issued in the course of writing a poem ‘would not be seriously meant’, he may mean that it is meant, but not seriously; or that it is not meant at all. In other words, ‘not’ may modify the modifier (‘seriously’), or negate the verb. And context gives no answer. For the first option sits oddly with Austin’s reasons for raising the issue of poetry: to illustrate acts not performed at all (his doctrine of ‘infelicities’), rather than acts not performed in some way. And the extremism of the second option sits oddly with the lack of surrounding defence or explanation: denying that poets mean anything at all evidently demands one or the other. (ii) Pace (3) and (8): Position and word-order are a cause of ambiguity. Austin himself was interested in the difference made by the position of modifier terms, as in ‘Clumsily, he trod on the snail’ and ‘He trod clumsily on the snail’.19 So consider the phrase ‘we seriously performed the act concerned’ in the quoted passage. This might be taken as equivalent to ‘We performed the act concerned seriously’, where the adverb serves to describe the way the action was performed. But it is equally equivalent to ‘Seriously, we performed the act concerned’, where the adverb serves the assertive aspect – that we did indeed perform the action – and neither says nor implies anything about how it was performed. And the fact that the phrase is preceded by a ‘not’ (‘we shall not be able to say that’) adds the first problem to the second: is it that we did not perform the act at all, or that we did not perform the act seriously? (iii) Pace (3) and (8): Austin does not offer a clear, specifiable meaning for his use of ‘(non-)serious’. Austin forestalls the question ‘a serious what?’ by supplying a sortal – a serious utterance, performance, use of language. Doing so sometimes produces a clear, specifiable meaning. For example, there is nothing obviously ambiguous about ‘a serious witness’, ‘a serious headache’, ‘a serious reason’, ‘a serious drink’, or ‘a serious play’, even though the adjective modifies 19

Austin, ‘A Plea’, p. 199.

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the sortal in different ways in each case. But the sortals Austin chooses leave the modifier richly ambiguous. For even if we suppose that ‘serious’ has the same meaning when conjoined with ‘utterance’, or ‘performance’, or ‘use of language’ (which it need not have), that meaning remains legion: ‘solemn’ (stern, grave); or ‘significant’ (critical, important); or ‘sincere’ (earnest, genuine, honest, determined, resolute); or ‘humourless’ (staid); or ‘pedantic’ (dogged, plodding); or ‘pompous’ (portentous). Hence it is at least equally unclear what Austin means when he says that the use of language in poetry is not serious: he might mean it is ‘comic’ (amusing, humorous, funny, jocular); or ‘insignificant’ (unimportant, non-critical); or ‘superficial’ (frivolous, playful, trifling, lacking depth or solidity); or ‘irresolute’ (vacillating, indecisive, unsure); or ‘insincere’ (disingenuous, inauthentic, untrue). (b) Tone Poets argue that they are right to feel offended by Austin’s use of ‘non-serious’ because he intended it to be offensive (e.g. (3)); this is clear from the insulting tone conveyed by the phrase. Philosophers argue that the tone is playful merely and there is no intention to insult; ‘non-standard’ could replace ‘nonserious’ without change to Austin’s overall meaning (i.e. (8)). Neither side is right. (iv) Pace (3): Austin does not identify poetry with joking. Austin says no more (in any of the six passages) than that ‘writing a poem’ may be considered alongside ‘making a joke’. He also lists ‘acting a play’; so we would otherwise have to suppose he identified writing a poem with acting a play (which would be ridiculous), and that he meant to insult actors by identifying acting with making a joke (which no one has charged him with). In fact, Austin decisively separates poetry from joking (‘I must not be joking, for example, nor writing a poem’20), and precisely where the omission of a single word (‘nor’) could slyly have effected the very identification alleged against him.

20

Austin, How to, p. 9; my emphasis.


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(v) Pace (8): Austin is not being merely playful. Austin’s tone is certainly playful, but where he appears carefree, he is certainly not careless. The offhand manner is studied, attentive to its effect. Ten times he uses ‘not . . . serious’ (or some variant: ‘non-serious’; ‘not . . . seriously’) to describe poetry and the use of language in poetry. On two separate occasions, he repeats the phrase three times over. Subtle changes of detail and emphasis may distinguish the passages and justify examination of each repetition. But it is the overkill which is salient, and intended to be.21 (vi) (2): Austin uses ‘parasitic’ and ‘etiolated’ in a technical way. When Austin says that ‘special’ uses of language (as in poetry) are ‘parasitic upon’ other uses, or that they are ‘etiolated’ forms of it, he typically italicizes the words, or invests them with inverted commas.22 This indicates that he means to use these words in the philosopher’s standard technical sense, to indicate respectively the dependency of poetic use on other uses, and the special, supplementary nature of that dependency. This usage is itself dependent (‘parasitic’) upon linguistics, where ‘parasitic upon’ is also used without hint of moral (or other opprobrium); it refers to elements that were not originally present in words but which have been developed from elements that were. In the technical sense, of course, there is no implication that one thing is ‘living off’ another, or that the dependency is of an abhorrent or undesired kind. (vii) Pace (8): Austin does not use ‘non-serious’ to mean ‘non-standard’.

21 To say that Austin was attentive in orchestrating his effects is not to say that they always come off. His one appeal to a line of poetry is unfortunate: ‘If the poet says “Go and catch a falling star” or whatever it may be, he doesn’t seriously issue an order’ (‘Performative utterances’, p. 241; he is evidently proud of the remark since he repeats its essentials in How To, p. 104). The remark would only work if what the poet says would normally count as issuing an order. But as readers who get beyond the first line of Donne’s ‘Song’ know, what is being said here (paraphrased) is ‘Go and catch a falling star / and you will have achieved something easier than finding a woman true and fair’, which is no more an order than a notice saying ‘Assault our officers / and you will be prosecuted’. 22 E.g. Austin, How to, p. 22; p. 92 footnote 1.

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It is not plausible that a writer so conscious of the values of particular words would so frequently use one word – and make a point of over-using it – when he meant another. It is equally implausible that he would have done so without ever using the word he did mean. It is no defence to say that ‘non-standard’ and ‘non-serious’ are sufficiently alike in meaning, for they are not. Granted, they both cover an extensive range of meanings; but they are very different ranges. ‘Non-standard’ extends from ‘unusual’ and ‘extraordinary’ and ‘untypical’, through ‘irregular’ and ‘noncustomary’ to ‘special’, ‘exclusive’ and ‘elite’. ‘Non-serious’, on the other hand (and as we know), extends from ‘humorous’ and ‘comic’, through ‘unimportant’, ‘non-critical’ and ‘insignificant’, to ‘frivolous’ and ‘irresolute’, and from there to ‘inauthentic’ and ‘insincere’. If we bear these ranges in mind, we will not suppose that Austin’s meaning is preserved when we substitute ‘not . . . standardly’ for ‘not . . . seriously’ in remarks like the quotation above. (c) Context Poets cite evidence of a disdain for poetry that is in part ‘professional’, i.e. common amongst philosophers (i.e. (4)), and in part ‘proper’, i.e. individual to Austin (i.e. (5)), to support their claim that he intended his use of ‘non-serious’ to be offensive, and that they are therefore entitled to feel offended. Philosophers insist that what is ‘professional’ is an understanding that poetry is nonstandard, and that what is ‘proper’ is at worst the appearance of disdain; actually, Austin’s remarks are merely playful (i.e. (8)). Neither side is right. (viii) Pace (4) and (8): What is ‘professional’ is the recognition of controversy here, not taking sides. Since Plato at least, if philosophers hold a common view about whether poetry is ‘serious’ or ‘non-serious’, it is not that either view is correct, but that the issue is controversial and merits specifically philosophical investigation. Both Plato and Aristotle chose to examine poetry in the light of ‘what is (good in the sense of) serious’ (i.e. spoudaios). Plato’s view was that poetry is ‘as imitative as it could possibly be’, and that ‘imitation is a kind of game and not something to be taken seriously [paidian tina kai ou


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spoude¯n]’.23 Aristotle argued to the contrary that some poetry (i.e. tragedy) imitates and depicts what is serious. Homer, for example, ‘wrote in the serious style of poets’. And serious poetry is to be taken seriously.24 (ix) Pace (8): If there is a common view amongst Austin’s own philosophical grouping, it is that poetry is ‘non-serious’, not ‘non-standard’. Philosophical groupings tend to define themselves as such by taking a stance on issues which they recognize as controversial and as meriting specifically philosophical investigation. Austin’s own primary philosophical audience consisted of a grouping which distinguished the non-serious from the non-standard, and associated poetry with the former. Gottlob Frege, whose Grundlagen der Arithmetik Austin translated, and who held a pre-eminent position in that grouping, took precisely this view in the two papers for which he is best known (and to which Austin must have realized his own passages would be compared, given their remarkable closeness of topic and message). In the first, Frege argues that ‘in hearing an epic poem’, we are interested only in the euphony of the language and the images or feelings which it arouses, not in truth.25 (He acknowledges that one can ask whether sentences in poetry are true; his view is simply that raising this question ‘would cause us to abandon aesthetic delight for an attitude of scientific investigation’; the point seems to be that poetry – or its value – would not be appreciable as such if viewed from the perspective of someone inquiring into truth). In the second, he explains why. In writing poetry, poets express thoughts which are not put forward as true; sometimes the form of these sentences is assertoric, but their content is not; this is because, in poetry, ‘the requisite

23 Plato, Republic, Book X, 602b7–8; tr. G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), pp. 971–1223; p. 1206. 24 Aristotle, Poetics 1448a25–8; 1448b25–7; 1449a32–7; 1449b25; the Homer remark is at 1448b34; tr. I. Bywater, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. J. Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 2316–2340. Comedy, on the other hand, imitates what is ‘inferior’ (1448b25–7) and ‘laughable’ (1449a32–7). 25 Gottlob Frege, ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’ (1892), reprinted in P. Geach and M. Black (eds), Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960), pp. 56–78; see p. 63.

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seriousness is lacking’ [der dazu nötige Ernst fehlt].26 Elsewhere in the same philosophical grouping, both before and after Austin, we find the same use of ‘seriousness’ to mark a significant divide between uses of language; the same ease in placing poetry on the non-serious side of it.27 (Other philosophical groupings, roughly contemporary with Austin, take different – and sometimes diametrically opposed – views on this issue. R. G. Collingwood, for example, regarded poetry as the most serious of all uses of language, being ‘prophetic’ and hence ‘the community’s medicine for the worst disease of mind’, which he took to be ‘the corruption of consciousness’.28) (x) Pace (4) and (8): Austin is, if anything, less disdainful than attitudes common in his own philosophical grouping. Austin and Plato agree that poetry lies on the non-serious side of a divide in uses of language, hence justly excluded from what is to be organized: the city and the preliminary classification of performative utterances respectively. Both appreciate the use of language in poetry and reveal a talent for the poetic use of language. But Austin does not claim that all poetry must corrupt or corrode, creating a ‘bad constitution’ in the soul.29 Nor does he ban poetry from what is to be organized. His claim is merely that the use of language in poetry is a dependent use (‘parasitic’, in his phrase), and that its investigation should be deferred. Frege agrees that poetry lies on the non-serious side of the divide. But he also denies that poetry may express thoughts put forward as true. Austin is careful to leave truth out of it. In using the offending term as an adverbial modifier (‘not . . . seriously’), he leaves open what Frege straightforwardly denies: that something is actually asserted in poetry. Frege goes on to contrast ‘the poetic’ with ‘the exact’ (streng), whereas Austin never denies that poetry

26 Gottlob Frege, ‘Der Gedanke’ (1918), in his Logische Untersuchungen, ed. G. Patzig (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993), pp. 30–53; p. 36. My translation draws on that of P. T. Geach and R. H. Stoothoff, Logical Investigations, tr. ed. P. T. Geach (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), pp. 1–30; p. 8. 27 See A. J. Ayer Language, Truth and Logic (1936), republished (London: Penguin, 1971), pp. 27–8; P. F. Strawson, ‘Intention and convention in speech acts’, p. 149; John Searle Speech Acts, p. 57 and footnote 1; Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, pp. 5; 85; 103. 28 R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (1938) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 336. 29 Plato, Republic, Book X, 605b7–8.


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can be precise, accurate, correct, faithful. Frege describes the thoughts expressed in fiction generally as ‘mock thoughts’, citing seriousness again: such thoughts ‘are not serious . . . all is play.’30 Austin merely defers consideration of the use of language in poetry; but Frege rules it out, and on grounds that reveal true disdain: ‘The logician does not have to bother with mock thoughts, just as a physicist who sets out to investigate thunder will not pay any attention to stage thunder’.31 (d) Ornamentation Poets interpret Austin’s use of inverted commas as evidence of his aversion to poetry (i.e. (4)-(5)), which supports their claim that he intended his use of ‘non-serious’ to be offensive, entitling them to feel offended.32 Philosophers insist that these marks are innocuous and redundant; they have no significant purpose for Austin and could be removed without change to the meaning or force of his remarks (i.e. (8)). Neither side is right. (xi) Pace (4)-(5) and (8): Austin’s ornamentation is inconsistent and its role is not obvious. Of the ten occasions where Austin uses ‘(non-)serious’ or ‘(non-) seriously’, only four are ornamented with inverted commas or italics.33 Of the six controversial passages in which these and other allegedly offensive terms occur (‘etiolation’; ‘parasitic’), only three employ ornamentation of either sort.34 Since Austin is inconsistent in his ornamentation, we should be more cautious in what we infer from this evidence than either (4)-(5) or (8) require. It is likely that, given the opportunity to correct and improve his texts before their publication, Austin would have standardized his ornamentation. But we cannot infer that he would have used or rejected ornamentation throughout: the evidence gives no more support to one side than the other.

30 Gottlob Frege, ‘Logik’ (1897); translated as ‘Logic’ in Posthumous Writings, tr. P. Long and R. M. White (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), pp. 126–51; p. 130. It is not part of my argument that Austin knew this essay; possibly he did not. 31 Frege, ‘Logik’, p. 130. 32 E.g. Ricks, ‘Austin’s Swink’, p. 262. 33 Austin, How To, pp. 9 (twice); 104; 121. 34 Austin, How To, pp. 9; 92 footnote 1; 104.

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(xii) Pace (4)-(5) and (8): If ornamentation were standardized, it would neither announce aversion nor be redundant. Austin uses inverted commas to ornament ‘serious’ and ‘nonserious’ alike. So if the marks announce aversion, he must be equally as averse to the serious. This would be inexplicably selfdefeating, since the serious includes his own work and these very comments of his. Moreover, inverted commas have precisely the opposite effect from aversion: they draw attention towards the words so ornamented, making them salient in the context. So unless no other explanation is viable, we have strong reason to reject the aversion option. The same holds for the redundancy option. Unless no other explanation is viable, charity and good sense give us strong reason to assume that Austin used inverted commas because they served some purpose. (xiii) Pace (4)-(5) and (8): Three alternatives are superior to aversion or redundancy: allusion, exculpation and scrutiny. Alternatives are superior to the aversion option if they can explain why Austin marked ‘serious’ and ‘non-serious’ alike, and superior to the redundancy option if they can explain the marks in terms of purposes for which Austin might reasonably have employed them. At least three alternatives fit these requirements, and each gains support from previous findings. One is that Austin marked ‘serious’ and ‘non-serious’ alike in order to allude to the positions that others in his philosophical grouping take towards poetry (e.g. Frege), knowing that ‘seriousness’ is the key and common factor, and one that would stir recognition. The commas are then used like quotation marks, drawing attention to a relation between the words so ornamented and their use by others. Previous discussion makes this interpretation seem possible and even likely: there were familiar texts that he was recalling, knew that he was recalling, and knew that he would be known to be recalling. (Allusion does not imply agreement, of course. If Austin were stressing the relation between himself and others, he must have been prepared – and was perhaps inclined – to draw attention to what is different no less than what is common.) The second option is that Austin marked ‘serious’ and ‘nonserious’ alike so as to excuse himself before the reader, tacitly


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acknowledging that the terms are rough approximations, hopelessly inadequate except for the particular task he has assigned them here: to function as a temporary label for a topic whose investigation is being deferred. The commas are then used like scare quotes, drawing attention to the words so ornamented, urging caution about putting much weight on them. (‘Seriously’ is not to be taken too seriously). Again, previous discussion makes this interpretation seem plausible. For if ‘non-serious’ does not mean ‘non-standard’, we have yet to settle which meaning it does have in the range that is left, from ‘humorous’ through ‘insignificant’ to ‘insincere’. Aware of this, Austin would not only have been excusing himself, but stressing the need for excuses, in his use of inverted commas. There is a third option: that the inverted commas are like ‘tweezers lifting a commonplace term out of its format of habitual connection’; Geoffrey Hill ascribes this purpose to Ezra Pound’s use of them in the poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley.35 The marks are then used to bring pressure to bear on the words they enclose, terms so common in these contexts that it would otherwise be easy to let them slip by. This option differs from the second because its aim is not (only) to excuse a personal failing, but to advertise a common blind spot, to hold up the offending term to careful scrutiny. We know Austin shared the aim because he beat Hill to the image: words are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we need therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from and against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and arbitrariness.36 So the third option is perhaps the most plausible of all. But we need not decide between the alternatives. It is possible that Austin’s inverted commas had a complex purpose: to allude, to excuse, and to scrutinize. Where such scrutiny leads is the subject of the two final sections. IV What is at stake when Austin calls poetry ‘non-serious’? We know this now: his remarks neither belittle poetry (as merely a kind of 35 36

Hill, ‘Our word’, pp. 143. Austin, ‘A Plea’, p. 182.

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joking), nor underestimate it (as merely an opportunity for mild mockery), nor set it aside (as merely a ‘non-standard’ use of language), but draw attention to inadequacies in the quarrel between philosophers and poets while doing nothing to remedy the condition which nurtures and sustains them: ambiguities in the key-terms, their role and position. It remains to discover why Austin took this contentedly disengaged stance, pointing out inadequacies rather than rooting them out. It helps to ask a basic question: why does Austin mention poetry at all? The answer is plain enough in the very first of the controversial passages.37 Austin is defending the general claim that ‘saying can make it so’, and his attention is caught by cases in which one’s saying something can make it the case that one is committed to some person, or thing, or course of action. For example, saying the words of the marriage service can make it the case that one person is committed to another in the marital way; saying ‘I promise to V’ can make it the case that one person is committed to a certain course of action in the promising way. And since it is the state or condition of being committed that all these sayings make so, Austin can express his general claim here using the (translated) motto of the Stock Exchange: ‘Our word is our bond’.38 The obvious objection is that one can say things that are commitment-apt – of the right form to make the saying of them a committing – and not actually make a commitment.39 So the objector may complain ‘But the circumstances may not be appropriate’. For example, saying the words of the marriage service may not make it the case that Abelard and Heloise marry – perhaps Abelard is already married. Or the objector may protest ‘But one may not be saying these words seriously’. For example, saying ‘I promise to marry you’ may not make it the case that I promise anything at all – perhaps I am wearing a Groucho Marx mask and imitating his voice. Austin accepts both points. He can do so with equanimity since his claim suffers no retraction or alteration.

37

Austin, How To, pp. 9–10. We use ‘commitment’ and ‘being committed’ to refer both to the state or condition of being bound, and the doing of what one is thereby bound to do (i.e. keeping the commitment); it should be obvious from the context that only the first is under discussion here. 39 This form presumably requires use rather than mention, explaining why phrases are not commitment-apt when they are quoted or recited. 38


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Saying can still make it so; it is just that (to employ the objector’s terminology) ‘the circumstances must be appropriate’ and ‘one must be saying it seriously’. At this point, poetry makes its fleeting appearance. The objector may complain ‘But one may compose poems, issuing utterances which are commitment-apt, without actually making a commitment’. But composing poetry is another case of saying things non-seriously; so Austin says (seriously). Hence here too, saying does not make it so. Here, one’s word is not one’s bond. This tells us what Austin thinks is at stake when he calls poetry ‘non-serious’: (a) he is adopting the terminology of his opponents so as to meet them in reply; (b) he is interested in the ordinary case where there is a ‘making-so’ relation between the act of saying commitment-apt things and the state or condition of being committed; and (c) he is insisting that poetry is an extraordinary case where some of the preconditions for the holding of this relation do not obtain. So it is no wonder that Austin took a contentedly disengaged stance, and that the standard explanations and complaints fit so ill with his remarks. Given (a), the task of being clear and precise about ‘serious’ and ‘non-serious’ falls to his opponents, not him. So their protests rebound to their discredit; any ‘ducking and weaving’ that the terms permit weakens their case, not his. Given (b), the task of giving a satisfactory account of the nature and value of poetry falls to others, not him. Poetry enters with the objections of his opponents, and it exits once he has shown what the objectors themselves accept: that it is a special case, to be dealt with differently from ordinary uses of commitment-apt phrases. Given (c), the tendency of Austin’s remarks is not to insult poetry but to liberate it – from the very people who seek to defend it. For poets insist on their licence: that they are permitted to act other than as their utterances commit them to acting (or at least that they are excused when they fail to act in this way). But if Austin is right, their utterances could not commit them, no matter how pregnant with apt phrasing. So there is no commitment to keep, and no possibility of failure to prepare for. Talk of licences, permits and excuses assumes there is a shortfall to license, a deficit to permit, a let-down to excuse – which is to betray deep confusion about the nature of poetry and what it is that poets undertake.

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V So Austin thought there was little at stake when he called poetry ‘non-serious’; at most a confusion whose correction is, apparently, to the direct benefit of poets. His ‘Defence of Poetry’ is that poetry needs no defence. Hence his contentedly disengaged stance. We can see why he thought this: (a)-(c) prompt it. Whether there is more at stake than he thought depends on the success of these moves. (a)-(b) seem unexceptionable, given the nature of the polemic. But (c) is an independent claim of substance: that commitment-apt utterances in poetry cannot make (issue in) commitments. This raises several concerns; I will end by briefly mentioning two. The first is that we need, but lack, good reason to accept (c). Some assume Austin endorsed a general claim that would have provided one: (GC1)

Utterances in poetry cannot issue anything.40

If so, poetry cannot issue pleas; and according to a hallowed rule, those incapable of pleading are exempt from being judged.41 So this would certainly deliver the exemption Austin offered poetry. Some assume (c) rests on a weaker general claim: (GC2)

Issuing performative-apt utterances in poetry cannot perform anything.42

But neither (GC1) nor (GC2) are true. For if a poet composes lines of the form ‘I sing of so-and so’, or ‘I lament so-and-so’, or ‘I foretell such-and-such’, it would be implausible to deny that they ever succeed thereby in issuing songs, dirges or prophecies (a fortiori, in issuing something). And thus we need, but lack, good reason to accept (c). For if a poet composes saying ‘I vow to thee’, ‘I promise to such-and-such’, ‘I dedicate myself to such-and such’, it would be implausible to deny that they ever succeed thereby in making commitments. 40 E.g. Ricks, ‘Austin’s Swink’; he interprets Austin as saying ‘not only does the poet not seriously issue an order, the poet does not seriously issue anything’ (p. 261). 41 Precisely the rule used to exempt the dumb from judgement in the medieval period; see Naomi D. Hurnard, The King’s Pardon for Homicide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 169. 42 E.g. Hill: ‘to Pound’s embarrassment and ours [poetry] discovers itself to possess no equivalent for “hereby” ’; ‘Our word’, p. 154. Ricks, ‘Austin’s Swink’, p. 261.


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There will be conditions, of course. The poet must not be joking, nor speaking for someone else (a fictional character, for example). But there is nothing surprising here; as we know, these conditions hold outside poetry (neither speech-writers nor liturgists are bound by the vows they compose). Further conditions will be proper to poetry, limning its peculiarities. So there will be complex rules about archaic commitment-apt idioms, for example: when such usage acts to make pronouncements ironic and non-binding, and conversely when it secures the commitment by embedding the pronouncement in past allusion, thus witnessing to the conviction with which the poet binds himself. But the more conditions imposed on committing oneself in poetry, the stronger the case against (c). For conditions imply the possibility of success. Their point lies in the fact that commitment-apt utterances in poetry can make (issue in) commitments. There is a second reason to be concerned about (c): it is not consistent with the claim that poets are ‘serious’ in what they say. To be ‘serious’ in what one says is to acknowledge what is required if one is to be taken seriously. And to be taken seriously in what one says requires making certain commitments, acknowledging certain obligations: for example, to be reasonably clear about what one means; to be willing to explain what one says; to account for what one claims; to supply reasons for one’s position; and so on. To acknowledge these commitments and obligations is to accept that it is possible to fail in these regards – to be less than clear, unable to explain one’s meaning, lacking in adequate reasons – and hence to stand in need of excuses. It follows that (c) is a gift horse whose mouth we should inspect. That poets stand in no need of excuses, licenses or permissions seemed a remarkable commendation. But this would mean they are not obliged or committed in any way, and hence have no call to be taken seriously in what they say. So (c) would place poetry beyond the bounds of the serious – for the best of intentions, undoubtedly. Poets would be under none of the obligations which alone make it possible for what they say to be taken seriously. And the problem would ramify. For if we agree to (c), we forego the possibility that poets are committed in, and by, what they say. And without that possibility, so it is plausible to suppose, there can be no such thing as the integrity of poets gained by (expressed in) their work as poets – what we could call ‘poetic integrity’. So our conclusion is poignant. What Austin intended is better than is usually thought, and what he offered is worse. Those who

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rejected his position when it was mistaken for an attempt to insult poets should not accept (c) when it is recognized for an attempt to support them. Of course, showing that (c) is not consistent with the ‘seriousness’ of poets is not to demonstrate that poets can be serious in the required ways. Showing how this is possible is a major task for another occasion. It is a complex matter, after all, to specify the conditions under which utterances in poetry count as complying with the conditions and obligations on ‘seriousness’. This is particularly so if William Empson is right, that ‘the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry’.43 But the preceding arguments give us resources for two final, tentative remarks. First, the difficulties here seem to be more of the nature of complications than objections. We ask under what conditions these problematic utterances count as serious because we suppose there are such conditions. Indeed, plausibly, it is only because there are conditions under which utterances in poetry count as complying with the conditions and obligations on ‘seriousness’ that we recognize ambiguity at all, either as a permissible exception to the relevant rules, or as the breaking of them. Second, the difficulties here seem to be of the sort that call more directly for the poet’s talents than the philosopher’s tools. For ambiguity can work to clarify meaning, just as word-play can serve to strengthen the binding force of a pronouncement; it is up to poets to achieve this feat when called on to do so; and in achieving this, they show the feat could be accomplished, which is all philosophers could hope to achieve. Word-play and ambiguity can also distend or distort meaning, of course, just as they can cancel the commitments which the relevant utterance seemed to announce. But it is partly because we know how word-play can reinforce a pronouncement that we recognize its capacity to evacuate pronouncements in their delivery. It is in these opposing powers that poets deal, just as it is to the differences between their effects that literary critics draw attention. And what both activities reveal is not only that ambiguity has ‘serious’ as well as ‘non-serious’ uses, but that we can appeal to relevant criteria here, ways of telling when one or the other is operative.

43 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), revised edition (London: Chatto and Windus, 1963), p. 3.


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In short, what conditions poets must meet to count as serious in what they say is a difficult and perhaps controversial matter. But that such conditions exist and can be met are claims we can reasonably endorse. And this is as far as our considerations of Austin can take us, showing how to hold open a possibility that his (c) would have closed off: that poets can be committed and serious in what they say, and that poetic integrity is possible.

6 PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE: YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW rati_446

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Martin Warner Abstract Plato’s rhetorical gesture invoking a ‘quarrel’ between philosophy and poetry points to a deep problem in our conception of rational discourse, often obscured or displaced in the history of philosophy’s relations with imaginative literature, especially with respect to analytic philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. Recent developments have helped focus attention on the overlap between philosophy and literature, which the contemporary retreat from philosophy’s ‘narrative turn’ does little to undermine. Further work in the philosophy of language, the logic of the imagination, and the relations between dialectic and rhetoric promise to throw light on that ancient problem.

I Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, Empty the haunted air and gnomèd mine – Unweave a rainbow. (Keats, Lamia II, ll. 229–37) Keats’s Lamia has not just Newton but the whole tradition of British empirical philosophy since Locke in its sights, the analytical turn of mind for which, as Gilbert Ryle memorably put it, the Pickwick Papers are ‘one big composite predicate’.1 The passage is 1 Gilbert Ryle, ‘Imaginary Objects’, Proceeding of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. XII (1933), p. 39.

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a protest against what has become known as the ‘disenchantment of the world’, brought about by philosophy and the sciences, working hand in glove. Berkeley’s Optics and Newton’s Physics had between them unravelled the colours of the rainbow, the symbol of God’s covenant with mankind, into the perceptual properties of prismatically diffused light – indeed, on Locke’s account, only secondary properties at that. The prime agent of disenchantment in Lamia is, of course, ‘old Apollonius’ who has earlier been characterized by that telling epithet, ‘sophist’ (l. 172). Philosophers, for their part, have been known to be rude about the poets and, more generally, about imaginative literature; insult compounds alleged injury when one remembers David Hume’s urbane remark that poets are ‘liars by profession’, with the added put-down that they nevertheless ‘always endeavour to give an air of truth to their fictions’.2 The Logical Positivists went one better: poets do not lie because they characteristically talk literal nonsense. In such exchanges we seem to have the elements, or at least evidence, of a feud. We have been here before. ‘There is from of old’, remarks Plato’s Socrates, ‘a quarrel between philosophy and poetry’. In the Republic he argues for the banishment of the ‘honeyed Muse in lyric and epic’ from his ideal city; he expresses some unease but regretfully holds to his conclusion, ‘for reason (λ γ ος ) constrained us’ (607a-c). Rather than pursuing those λ γ οι, let us take a less well-worn route and pause for a moment on the alleged ancient quarrel. The first thing one notes, when one stops to think about it, is that all the evidence Socrates alleges seems to come from the poets – all Keats, one might say, and no Hume. Second, that this is a little odd, since while it is not difficult to find examples of philosophers such as Xenophanes (himself of course a poet), Heraclitus and Empedocles criticizing poets like Homer, it is much less easy, Aristophanes’ caricature of Socrates apart, to find examples of poets criticizing philosophers. And, third, not one of the examples Plato adduces has been traced. The first quotation given, where philosophy is apparently imaged as a ‘yapping bitch barking at her master’ seems to echo poetic abuse reported in the Laws (967cd) of Anaxagoras’ attempt to disenchant the heavenly bodies. So construed, it is strikingly reminiscent of William Blake’s later jeer: 2

David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, I. 3. x.

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Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau Mock on, Mock on: ‘tis all in vain! You throw the sand against the wind And the wind blows it back again (Notebook 1803) This would tie in with one of the few extant early examples of relevant poetic criticism, Pindar’s claim that the fruit of wisdom plucked by the ϕυσιολ γοι is ’ατελς (incomplete – in Adam’s gloss, it ‘misses its mark’).3 One notes that it is the ϕυσιολ γοι who are here under attack, the natural philosophers or protoscientists, from whom a generation later Aristotle was to begin to distance himself. The other quotations seem to pick up the familiar images of the logic chopper (before formal logic was invented of course), and the philosopher as the penniless intellectual. As always with a writer as subtle as Plato one should look to context. The invocation of the ancient ‘quarrel’ is as defence against the charge that the Socratic critique of the poets is boorish – lest poetry ‘condemn us for harshness and rusticity’ – and Plato is intimating that it is poetry’s own vilification that lies open to such a charge, while Socrates’ own critique is reluctant, sensitive and nuanced, ‘since we ourselves are very conscious of her spell’. It is nuanced not least in that not all poetry comes under the ban, it is in particular lyric and epic, especially in so far as they are after the model of Homer, conceived as ‘the educator of Hellas’. However, one notes that Homer is here also seen as ‘the most poetic of poets and the first of tragedians’; the universality of the encomium has the effect of minimizing the nuance – and one can be reasonably sure that Plato knew exactly what he was doing. One ought by now to have become suspicious. Penelope Murray roundly remarks that ‘Plato is anxious to establish the antiquity of the quarrel between philosophy and poetry, but one suspects that it was largely of his own making’.4 Martha Nussbaum remarks that ‘before Plato’s time there was no distinction between “philosophical” and “literary” discussion of human practical problems. The whole idea of distinguishing between texts that seri-

3 James Adam, The Republic of Plato, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902), vol. I, note to 457b9. 4 Penelope Murray, Plato on Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), note to 607b.


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ously pursue a search for truth and another group of texts that exist for entertainment would be foreign in this culture’.5 What did exist was a distinction between prose and verse, and on the whole prose was the favoured medium for mathematical, scientific and ethnographical enquiry, but we have noticed already that Xenophanes, whom today we classify as a philosopher, was also a poet (who indeed regarded himself as a competitor with Homer and Hesiod), and Parmenides is best known for his great philosophical poem. What we find is that many of those of that time whom today we dignify with the title of ‘philosopher’ sought to challenge the authority of Homeric and Hesiodic poetry to embody truth, particularly of a religious and ethical kind, and since there was no clear distinction between religious and physical truth, enquiries such as that of Anaxagoras into the physical nature of the heavenly bodies could be seen as atheistic. A splendid purple passage of August Krohn characterizes the poets as ‘immortalising in imperishable creations the traditional faith’, with the philosophers ‘just on account of that faith, condemning those creations’.6 Not all philosophers, in fact, did condemn those creations; both then and later some simply declined to take them literally and instead read them allegorically, a procedure developed by the early Christian Fathers in the interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures, and one which enabled them, with some plausibility, to see the pagan Classical poets as prefiguring the Gospel. However, given certain obvious caveats, Krohn’s aphorism represents a very Platonic thought, and if there is an anticipation here of Nietzsche’s claim that Christianity’s faith in truth deconstructed itself, it is not the only affinity between Plato and Nietzsche of which the latter was so uneasily conscious. So perhaps what we have in the Republic’s invocation of an ancient feud between philosophy and poetry is, properly understood, a rhetorical gesture – and a remarkably persuasive and successful one – opening an incipient divide into a gulf, on Platonic terms; for the reason, the λ γ ος , that ‘constrained us’ is construed philosophically, in a manner open to Aristotelian logical analysis in the generation that followed. The poets are 5 Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 123. 6 August Krohn, Der Platonische Staat (Halle, 1876), p. 261; quoted in Adam, The Republic of Plato, vol. II, note to 607b.

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thereby excluded from the City of Truth. The gesture’s success may in part be measured by the easy recognition with which we greet the sentiments of Keats and Hume with which I started. But what right has Plato to rhetorical gestures? Notoriously, he criticized his oratorical opponents, ironically, as sophists (as those with ungrounded pretensions to being wise) – so successfully indeed that when Keats describes old Apollonius as a ‘sophist’ we know that he is up to no good. However, we should remember not merely that Plato’s Socrates acknowledged the possibility of a ‘noble’ rhetoric under the control of truth and seeking the good of those addressed, analysed in the Phaedrus, but that even with that masterly assault on rhetoric, the Gorgias, Cicero pertinently remarked of Plato that ‘it was when making fun of orators that he himself seemed to me the consummate orator’.7 And this brings us to something very deep in philosophy, too often swept under the carpet and when it emerges all too easily responded to with overreaction – most recently in the excitements over ‘deconstruction’. For Plato’s writings display a vivid sense of the tensions that exist between the ideals of philosophical enquiry and the nature of the language through which such enquiries must be conducted, expressed and stimulated in the minds of others. For Plato’s Socrates, nothing counts as knowledge unless it is established and confirmed through dialectic, and the language of dialectic must contain only terms that are perfect images of realities; further, the relations between these terms – those embedded in the logic of this form of discourse – must precisely mirror those that hold between the elements of reality itself. In Carnap’s terminology, the logical structure of the rectified language must reflect the logical structure of the world. The classic twentiethcentury attempt to encapsulate this vision is of course Wittgenstein’s Tractatus with its picture theory of language. But for Plato, no image is identical with that whose image it is, yet if image and original are inevitably different perhaps the former distorts the latter. And how can we be sure that the rules of language that create ‘logical’ relations between words or propositions are exact formal counterparts of ‘real’ relations between the items that our language seeks to portray? Only dialectic could give us this knowledge, but it is the very language of dialectic that is here in question. One notes that Wittgenstein disavowed his Tractatus. 7

Cicero, De Oratore 1. xi. 47.


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The complexities ramify when we consider the task that Plato assigns in the Republic to the true philosopher, or the role that he himself assumes in writing philosophical works. As Andrew Barker remarks, ‘Even if we concede the possibility of a perfect dialectic, its exponent is not merely to spin for his own delectation a symbolic tapestry of truth; he is to speak to others less enlightened than himself, and guide them to an understanding equal to his own.’8 He must speak, as it were, the language of the Cave, and here image, metaphor, myth and rhetoric may be inevitable. If Plato’s dialogues remain read, it is – at least in part – because they are works of the creative imagination. These are matters with which Plato wrestled throughout his life. But they are also relevant to us. For only a little reflection on them raises the question of whether, ‘in purging language of its cloudy images and forging it into a shining mirror of eternal truth, we may have lost as much as we have gained’.9 If we live as shadows among shadows, perhaps it is this very fact that is reflected in the elusive ambiguities of the language we speak. In the logic of pure dialectic, that of which we currently speak is perhaps strictly unspeakable; perhaps that fear was at the heart of Keats’s lament in Lamia. Through commitment to that logic we may gain access to truth, but we risk losing the power to speak or think of our own world, or even of ourselves. And what if that turns out to be the only reality? It is a question famously pressed by Nietzsche. A potted and highly idiosyncratic account of metaphor and the history of its theorization will help both generalize the point and bring the story up to date. For Aristotle metaphor was at the heart of poetry, effectively its life, and also prominent in rhetoric; it could be used, of course, as catachresis, to enlarge the language (‘to give names to nameless things’10), but also ‘to save the language from being mean and prosaic’11 – to ornament it. This was language as the dress of thought; plain prose or elegant poetry, the same thought in different styles. But he also claimed that ‘it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh’12 – a suggestive but highly ambiguous remark. 8 In Andrew Barker and Martin Warner, The Language of the Cave (Edmonton, Alberta: Academic Printing & Publishing, 1992), p. 3. This account draws on the Introduction to that volume. 9 Ibid. p. 6. 10 Aristotle, Rhetorica 1405a. 11 Aristotle, De Poetica 1458a. 12 Aristotle, Rhetorica 1410b.

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If we now jump to the late Middle Ages and Renaissance in Western Europe we find the rise of the vernaculars as Latin decays, and with it the attempt to carry on serious intellectual discourse in language that has not been disciplined by the scholars – vernaculars which are fluid, imagistic and highly metaphorical, as witness, for example, the polemical use of language in the religious disputes of the time. This is to be found in serious philosophical and scientific discourse too – indeed it flows back even into the work of those writing in Latin. Francis Bacon, for example, imaged the damaging intellectual predispositions of his time as four ‘idols’ (Novum Organum), receiving veneration but without substance – a bit like what Marxism was to call a fetish – of the Tribe, Cave, Marketplace and Theatre; the limits of language I have touched on would relate to idols of the tribe and marketplace. In his work, as elsewhere at the time, argument tended to be couched in imagistic and metaphorical terms. (The Idols of the Cave, indeed, feed into the printer’s device on the title page of his New Atlantis.) In the same period, if you try to paraphrase into literal language almost any passage of Shakespeare it crumbles to dust in your hand. A century later in England all has changed. Newton eschews imagery and metaphor, for Locke they are ‘perfect cheats . . . where truth and knowledge are concerned’,13 and for Pope ‘true wit’ – and imagery and metaphor are among the flowers of wit – is ‘nature to advantage dress’d, / What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d’:14 Aristotle’s saving the language from being ‘mean and prosaic’. Pope in his Essay on Man puts pithily and wittily what had indeed often been thought before. Only in that derivative sense can poets lay claim to residence in the City of Truth. These are surrender terms that a century or so later were stoutly resisted; at the painter Benjamin Haydon’s dinner in 1817, shortly before writing Lamia, Keats (abetted by the essayist Charles Lamb though, intriguingly, with Wordsworth dissenting) proposed the toast: ‘Newton’s health, and confusion to mathematics’. The two cultures – that of the arts, and that of mathematics, logic and the sciences – appear by now to be not only established but feuding. Behind this shift, which can be marked, though with different dates, elsewhere in Europe, lies a deep-seated cultural transfor13 14

Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, III. x. 34. Pope, Essay on Criticism, ll. 297–8.


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mation – which was noticed by T. S. Eliot in his description of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ of the time (though much else in his account is somewhat fanciful, as Sir Frank Kermode has pointed out).15 The uncertainties brought about by the collapse of the old intellectual syntheses, and the demonstration provided by the religious wars that reason, as currently conceived, could not of itself resolve deep seated differences, led to a new search for certainty, and here the favoured model was provided by mathematics and the developing sciences, together with the disciplining of language to fit their requirements. The Royal Society set up a committee for ‘improving the English language’, heavily influenced by the ideal of a new intellectually responsible language of ‘Mathematical plainness’, having transparent syntax and semantics, with one word standing unambiguously for one thing or idea (a reworking of the old Platonic ideal); Leibniz’s work on the syntax for this ‘universal character’, as it was called, played an important part in the development of what we now call predicate calculus.16 But the ideal proved elusive. The conception of its semantics, embodying what Ryle abusively termed the ‘Fido’-Fido principle,17 is unworkable (though curiously a version of it was at the basis of twentieth-century structuralism, which laid it open to the full blast of deconstruction); however, a revised version of such a rectified language did emerge nearly a century ago, with the proposition as the basic semantic unit, the enriched Leibnizian syntax of predicate logic as the mechanism, and the verification principle as the rational criterion for what became called ‘cognitive meaning’ or ‘cognitive content’. On such an austere account Keats’s old Apollonius is unambiguously victorious, and the ‘awful rainbow once in heaven’ finally unweaved. Not all, of course, even in what became known as the ‘analytic’ tradition of philosophy were impressed by this programme, but this was not necessary for them to side with old Apollonius. ‘Odysseus was set ashore at Ithaca while sound asleep’ is a sentence familiar to virtually every undergraduate who has begun to engage 15 See Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957), ch. VIII. 16 See, for example, Jonathan Cohen, ‘On the Project of a Universal Character’, Mind, N.S. LXIII (1954); William and Martha Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), ch. V, sect. 2; Joseph Glanvill, The Vanity of Dogmatizing: the Three Versions, ed. Stephen Medcalf (Hove: The Harvester Press, 1970), Introduction, pp. xxvi–xxxiv. 17 See for example his ‘The Theory of Meaning’, in C. A. Mace (ed.), British Philosophy in the Mid-Century (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957).

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significantly with the grandfather of analytic philosophy, Gottlob Frege. The sentence plainly has a sense but, on Fregean principles, if the name ‘Odysseus’ does not have reference neither does the sentence – that is, it has no truth value. Thus Frege roundly declares that: In hearing an epic poem, . . . apart from the euphony of the language we are interested only in the sense of the sentences and the images and feelings thereby aroused. The question of truth would cause us to abandon aesthetic delight for an attitude of scientific investigation. Hence it is a matter of no concern to us whether the name ‘Odysseus’, for instance, has reference, so long as we accept the poem as a work of art. It is the striving for truth that drives us always to advance from the sense to the reference.18 Here we have what could reasonably be described as the two main features of analytic philosophy’s engagement with imaginative literature during at least the first half of the twentieth century: the use of literature as a field from which examples may be drawn for logical or linguistic analysis, and the placing of this field outside the City of Truth. But although these sorts of engagement remain familiar today, the apparent self-evidence of their priority began to crumble when the advance guard was forced to beat the retreat. For, as we all know, the logical empiricist attempt to purify the language of the tribe eventually collapsed, in part for the old familiar reasons already sketched. The logical atomism it depended on proved incapable of coping with the elusive subtleties of the language we speak, and both Wittgenstein and the ‘ordinary language’ theorists began to point us towards particularity and the sharply contextualized (Blake’s ‘Holiness of Minute Particulars’, perhaps), in place of the grand synoptic vision – Bertrand Russell evocatively termed this transformation, in elegiac mode, ‘The Retreat from Pythagoras’.19 And of course as the second half of the twentieth century dawned, Max Black famously challenged the idea that the 18 Gottlob Frege, ‘On Sense and Reference’, in Peter Geach and Max Black (trs), Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1960), pp. 62–3. 19 The title of the concluding retrospective chapter of his My Philosophical Development (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1959).


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‘cognitive content’ of all metaphors could be encapsulated in literal discourse, using the very term that had once delimited the province of the verification principle to designate what might transcend any truth-conditional analysis.20 Across the Channel the logical model had never had the same sort of ‘old Apollonius’ grip, and the dominance of phenomenology made philosophy in principle hospitable to attention to the particularities of experience and potential experience, not least as bodied forth in imaginative literature. Sartre’s mini-narratives to explicate such phenomena as mauvais fois in his L’Etre et Le Néant are exemplary in this respect. However, Husserl’s fixation on the ‘transcendental-phenomenological reduction’ with its associated ‘eidetic intuition’ led away from this, and although Heidegger claimed to listen to poetic revelations of Being, the poets he attended to were remarkably few in number and, perhaps not surprisingly, those who could be construed as agreeing with himself. Further, the fate that Gilbert Ryle early on feared for him, that he would ‘end either in a self-ruinous Subjectivism or in a windy mysticism’ began to look increasingly plausible.21 The reason is not far to seek. Heidegger distinguished between the ‘exact’ (exakt) thinking of the logicians like Carnap who ridiculed him, and ‘strict’ or ‘essential’ (streng, wesentlich) thinking: ‘ “Exact” thinking is never the strictest thinking, if the essence of strictness lies in the strenuousness with which knowledge keeps in touch with the essential features of what-is.’22 Logic, on this account, represents only one form of thinking, but it provides reasonably stable controls on the attempt to distinguish truth from error; the controls on the preferred ‘strict’ thinking remain elusive. The problem of steering between subjectivism and mysticism which bedevilled Plato appeared to remain unresolved. II This, roughly speaking, was the philosophical context forty years ago when the University of Warwick began to develop its interdis20 Max Black, ‘Metaphor’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, LV (1954–5). Cf. Martin Warner, ‘Black’s Metaphors’, The British Journal of Aesthetics, 13 (1973). 21 Gilbert Ryle, Critical Notice of Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, Mind, N.S. XXXVIII (1929), p. 370. 22 From the 1943 version of the ‘Postscript’ to Martin Heidegger’s 1929 Inaugural Lecture, ‘What is Metaphysics?’ [Was ist Metaphysik?], in his Existence and Being, ed. W. Brock, trs R. F. C. Hull and Alan Crick (London: Vision Press, 1956), p. 387; see also p. 391.

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ciplinary Philosophy and Literature programme. Let us call that ‘Yesterday’. The general assumption among English-speaking philosophers appeared to be that works of imaginative literature, usually construed as fictional narratives, only had a more than illustrative philosophical function in so far as they could play a role in the sorts of phenomenological investigations familiar from Sartre’s writings, and that therefore the study of the relations between philosophy and literature should be seen as a sort of adjunct to so-called ‘Continental Philosophy’. This adjunct notion is now less often encountered, in part because the potentialities of such investigations in the field of ethics have become increasingly widely recognized. Martha Nussbaum, for example, argues that imaginative literature and moral philosophy are interdependent. Works of literature characteristically address themselves, more or less implicitly, to readers’ questions about how one should live which are also the province of philosophy; but ethical understanding involves emotional as well as intellectual activity and gives a certain type of priority to the perception of particular people and situations . . . [which finds] most appropriate expression and statement in certain forms usually considered literary rather than philosophical.23 She argues that this ethical conception is ‘superior in rationality and in the relevant sort of precision’ to alternatives framed in terms of ‘abstract rules’, and hence ‘we must broaden our conception of moral philosophy’ to include appropriate literary texts (the novels of Henry James being well to the fore). There are, indeed, problems with this. One is John Horton’s concern that ‘literature may allow us to experience our emotions “on the cheap”, and ultimately encourage a peculiarly aesthetic deformation of our moral sensibilities’.24 At a different level of analysis, one may question the way literary texts are chosen to subserve Nussbaum’s Aristotelian ethic (in this respect Nussbaum is, in her literary selectivity, eerily reminiscent of Heidegger); it may be that literature cannot be captured by any one ethical 23 Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge. Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. ix; see also pp. 193–4. 24 John Horton, ‘Life, Literature and Ethical Theory’, in John Horton & Andrea T. Baumeister (eds), Literature and the Political Imagination (London & New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 86.


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conception and that it is here that the true tension between philosophy and literature lies (quite possibly a Platonic thought). But what I would point out for present purposes is that in a sense this remains an inflection of that old idea of fictional narrative as an aid to phenomenological enquiry. One should not underestimate the potentialities here. Attention to the implications of imaginatively inhabiting in detail forms of otherness has, for example, played a creative role in feminist thinking – not for nothing was Simone de Beauvoir the companion of Jean-Paul Sartre. The Fregean paradigm is, to some degree, challenged. Nevertheless, on these terms, Plato would have had little difficulty, I suspect, in permitting Henry James, and indeed Jean Rhys, at least resident alien status in his City of Truth. More radically, Stanley Cavell sees philosophical scepticism as a form of that human aspiration to transcend finitude which is also mapped by Romanticism and whose defeat, as Shakespeare shows, can lead to tragedy. On Cavell’s account an adequate grasp of what is wrong with Leontes’ opening question to his son, ‘Art thou my boy?’ in The Winter’s Tale will diagnose the depth of the sceptical predicament and help us to see that criteria may not confer impersonal certainty;25 judgement and acknowledgement may be required in the service of self-transcending regulative ideals which defeat all appeal to established or self-justifying rules but are nevertheless far from irrational. From one point of view such an invocation of Shakespeare may be taken as an instance of the familiar use of thought experiments, employing the detail of a sophisticated dramatic narrative to help avoid thinness and lack of subtlety. But what is of interest for present purposes is the sort of contribution made to this avoidance by the narrative’s specifically literary characteristics, for Cavell is here clearly treating The Winter’s Tale in terms of mimetic canons, and it is in part through its approximation to and transcendence of these canons that the play’s power to change one’s way of seeing the world resides; analogous considerations apply to Cavell’s companion piece, playing Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ off Kant’s account of the noumenal.26 As with Nussbaum, no doubt all sorts of difficulties may be raised with the instances given, and also one may well query whether the notions of ‘judgement’ and ‘acknowl25 Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 76–101. 26 Ibid. pp. 40–65.

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edgement’, as Cavell develops them, are too embedded in the contemporary cultural currents of modernity for them to have the detachment to which philosophy has traditionally aspired. However, what makes his work seminal for exploring the relations between philosophy and literature is the way he takes seriously the categories developed by literary criticism to help us grasp and assess the capacities of imaginative literature (and indeed film) to transform our understanding and sensibility. Taking Cavell and Nussbaum together, such attempted integrations of the intellectual with the emotional in an expanded conception of rationality provides a convenient marker for how far some have come from the days when literary language, like ethical language, was expressive and non-cognitive rather than representational, and only representational language could be assessed for rationality in that it operated according to the principles of classical logic. These are two well-known voices in what might be termed Philosophy & Literature’s ‘Today’. A lesser known, but highly suggestive one, is that of Bernard Harrison, who takes seriously the dimension of language. Harrison aligns literature with Merleau-Ponty’s ‘constitutive language’ which, in contrast to ordinarily informative language, is in a sense ‘occupied solely with itself’; but it is at a second-order level informative, for it makes the workings of our own language visible to us. The language of narrative fiction and poetry, Harrison claims, is ‘constitutive language’ which ‘makes constituted language visible, by displacing its categories and internal relationships’; literature’s ‘mission is not to impart Great Truths but to unhinge and destabilize them’; its language ‘always and intrinsically poses a potential threat to the continued integrity of the self of the reader’.27 Well, perhaps. Certainly one can recognize in this account certain characteristic features of literature in general and poetry in particular. One remembers Mallarmé and Eliot in their concern to ‘purify the dialect of the tribe’ and, going further back, Blake’s concern with the cleansing of the ‘doors of perception’. It is difficult to think of any work of literature that has stood the test of time to become canonical which does not have the power to unsettle and destabilize one’s everyday perceptions. But, and this is the rub, it does so too for those whose everyday

27 Bernard Harrison, Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 52, 11.


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perceptions reflect an easy scepticism as it does for those never awoken from their dogmatic slumbers. Blake’s ‘memorable fancy’, it is worth remembering, maintains that ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite’28 – which is finely balanced. It presupposes that it is proper to credit a particular claim about reality, but the claim in question points to the impossibility of closure. Much the same applies to Mallarmé and Eliot. Harrison’s account of literature in terms of disconfirmation provides a powerful theorization of the impossibility of closure, but apparently at the expense of the positive aspects of the poet’s prophetic voice. Literature certainly appears to have the capacity to destabilize and disconfirm belief, but it has often also been held capable – not least by the poets themselves, Shelley’s ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’ – of a more positive purifying role. If this alleged positive, confirmatory, function can be sustained, Plato’s exclusion of the poets from the City of Truth must be radically rethought – but can it? Which brings me to the fourth and last of the markers, among many possibilities, I will use to characterize what I am calling ‘Today’. In the early 1970s my colleague at Warwick William Righter came out with a remarkably radical manifesto: The modes of argument and imagination are interdependent. There must be varying circumstances in which intentions, moral or otherwise, choices and decisions, have one or another kind of sense. And it is by altering the picture, by setting different terms or conditions, or telling a different kind of ‘story’ that arguments become relevant or irrelevant, have force, look foolish – and even, persuade or fail to persuade. The lowest level may contain several kinds of pictures of states of affairs, or of narrative, which may or may not be extended. And our pleasure or excitement in what we think to be an argument of consequence is often the ingenuity with which some such picture is altered, or the perfection or finesse with which the case is reinvented, the telling example found. Perhaps I am suggesting that even at the minimum

28

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793): ll. 284–5.

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level the imaginative demand is connected with some kind of aesthetic of argument.29 In this adumbration of an aesthetic ‘where argument is contained in the imaginative forms that “act it out” ’, the role of narrative or ‘story’ is seen as part of a more extensive web including such notions as ‘picture’, ‘case’, ‘reinvention’, ‘ingenuity’, ‘telling example’, ‘having force’, ‘relevance’, and even ‘pleasure’ – all under the rubric of ‘imaginative demand’ and in the service of a rhetoric of rational persuasion as appropriate to philosophical argument as to other forms. Such a suggestion puts pressure at exactly the right place on the Fregean contrast of ‘aesthetic delight’ with ‘scientific investigation’, where the latter is conceived in terms of logical analysis, for it encourages us to cast a quizzical eye on the premises and conclusions of the logical operations in terms of which philosophy is supposed to operate. It is hardly news that a major problem with the deductive method in philosophy lies with an argument’s starting point. But there is an analogous problem with Ryle’s proposed alternative that strictly philosophical arguments are of the form reductio ad absurdum.30 The notion of selfevident absurdity is no less problematic than that of a selfevident axiom; it is indeed its mirror image. If the test of absurdity is straight self-contradiction then comparatively few philosophical issues can be resolved by reductio ad absurdum alone (and in any case, what of the creative use of paradox championed by Wittgenstein’s pupil, John Wisdom?).31 Usually a less strict understanding of ‘absurdity’ is involved and then we are in serious danger of petitio, for a good deal of philosophy has revolved around arguments concerning what is or is not absurd. Ryle’s own reply was that we may safely dismiss a proposition if it can be shown to exhibit a ‘category mistake’, but the allocation of propositions to various categories – and the rules governing predication across categories – are themselves deter29 William Righter, ‘Some Notes on “Acting it out” and “Being in it up to the nose” ’ [1974], in David Pole, Aesthetics, Form and Emotion, ed. George Roberts (London: Duckworth, 1983), p. 211. 30 Gilbert Ryle, Philosophical Arguments: An Inaugural Lecture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945); reprinted in his Collected Essays, 1929–1968, vol. 2 of his Collected Papers (London, Hutchinson, 1971). See also his The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949), p. 8. 31 See for example the title paper of his Paradox and Discovery (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1965).


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mined by appeals to what is or is not ‘absurd’,32 thus the whole procedure is open to the charge of circularity. If the reductio ad absurdum model does not provide us with a satisfactory criterion for assessing the cogency of philosophical arguments then Ryle’s sharp distinction between ‘rigour’ and ‘persuasions of conciliatory kinds’ begins to look more than a little myth-eaten; perhaps those persuasions play an essential dialectical, and not merely rhetorical, role in philosophy. But if so, and since on the analytic projection, as Carnap conceded, interpretation ‘is always incomplete’,33 it is hardly surprising that complete analytic purity in philosophy is so rare. Two types of response are open to this recognition. One is to insist that nothing that does not measure up to the rigorous standards of logical deduction can count as philosophy, and hence either to abandon philosophy and that ‘striving for truth’ (to use Frege’s expression) which is its hallmark – perhaps seeking to change the conversation in the manner of Rorty – or else, after Derrida, to use the evidence of endemic ‘metaphor in the text of philosophy’34 to deconstruct it; in that long-running quarrel between philosophy on the one hand and poetry and rhetoric on the other, the latter are ultimately victorious. The other is to recognize that the geometric, deductive, model for philosophy, which lies at the heart of logical analysis, is at best but partial, that important philosophical argument is inevitably to be assessed in part by such criteria as capacity to ‘illuminate experience’ and so on, and thus seek to explore and assess these criteria – integrating them into our overall account of rationality and philosophy’s striving for truth. We should take up, that is, Righter’s ‘aesthetic of argument’.

III So what of tomorrow? To adapt a remark of Michael Dummett, if one specifies in significant detail and with adequate justification 32

Gilbert Ryle, ‘Categories’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, XXXVIII (1937–38). Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World and Pseudoproblems in Philosophy, tr. Rolf A. George, 2nd edn (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), Preface (1961), p. ix. (1st edn of Der logische Aufbau der Welt, Berlin: Weltkreis-Verlag, 1928.) 34 The subtitle to his 1971 essay ‘La mythologie blanche’ (‘White Mythology’), in Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, tr. Alan Bass (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982). 33

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the future of philosophy, then that specification becomes its present. So I shall not attempt that level of detail. Rather, I shall conclude with a caveat and two interconnected suggestions. The caveat is against the idea, current in certain circles, that philosophy and literature are drifting apart again. This arises from the recent fashion for talking about a supposed ‘narrative turn’ in philosophy. Nussbaum, Ricoeur, Taylor, MacIntyre, and others (even Rorty), despite their radically different projects, are lumped together because they all foreground the concept of narrative in theorizing our lived experience. It is noted that some years ago ‘narratology’ became a buzz term in literary circles, and thought that these phenomena have provided a rapprochement between philosophy and literature. The tide appears now to be on the turn. Influential voices such as that of Galen Strawson protest that not every life is a narrative, and that the thought that lived experience should be so construed is ‘a fallacy of our age’.35 With the fading of the fashion for narrativity in philosophy literature’s Trojan Horse is about to be wheeled once more outside the City of Truth. This analysis is, I think, defective. Whatever may be the fate of the use of the category of narrative in philosophy, and it has a good deal more subtlety and potential than is sometimes recognized, narrative has nothing per se to do with literature – consider the narratives you find in police reports to the law courts. Further, most philosophers associated with the ‘narrative turn’ show little interest in or use of the categories developed in narratology or, more broadly, literary criticism. Cavell is one of the very few who pay any attention to the specifically literary dimensions of the texts he explores, and he is at best only very loosely associated with ‘the narrative turn’. Indeed, one of the major weaknesses of most philosophical narrative theorists (excepting Ricoeur) is the indifference, even blankness, they display in the face of the distinctively literary. This is a matter to which I shall return. My two suggestions are in part predictions – a philosopher’s projections – and in part statements of intent. My first goes back to that ‘aesthetic of argument’ I mentioned earlier. Many years ago John Wisdom argued that what he called the ‘case-by-case procedure’ was indispensable in philosophical argument,36 for it is 35 See Galen Strawson ‘A Fallacy of our Age’, Times Literary Supplement (October 15, 2004), and ‘Against Narrativity’, Ratio, XVII (2004). 36 For his most extended treatment see John Wisdom, Proof and Explanation: Virginia Lectures (Lanham MD: University Press of America, 1991).


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required in order to establish the premises of such arguments (or indeed the unacceptability of the terminus of a significant reductio). The procedure – a disciplined form of argument by analogy – has closer affinities with the use of precedent in the law courts than of axioms in mathematics, but it is none the less rational for that. Attitudes, he argued, may be altered by ‘rational persuasion’: This is done by drawing attention rhetorically to the features of what we are talking about, insisting upon how different it is from this, how like to that, passing insensibly from the purely factual through the semi-factual, semi-critical, to the critical predicate at issue. Only this mixture is critical proof and the name of it is rhetoric.37 A few years earlier he had made an exuberant character in one of his philosophical dialogues declare ‘Logic is rhetoric, proof persuasion, and philosophy logic played with especially elastic equations’,38 but he never beat the Rortyesque retreat from proof to conversation with the abandonment of truth as a regulative ideal. Rhetoric, rather, is reconceived as a suitable tool for philosophical self-analysis, and for this to be possible on Wisdom’s terms it is necessary to discriminate rational from nonrational forms of persuasion without simply falling back on the well known procedures of deduction and induction. Here ancient traditions of rhetorical analysis and more modern procedures of hermeneutics and literary criticism, together with analyses of patterns of legal reasoning may all have their part to play, in a manner analogous to that in which the principles, rules and conventions governing the relevance or ‘distinguishability’ of precedents in Common Law jurisdictions play a significant role in facilitating good judgement. But one important dimension is available from recent developments in the study of language by analytic philosophy itself. James Ross, for example, has focussed on the phenomenon of analogy in language, understood as applying to all words; the networks of analogy that allow us to drop stitches, friends, and 37 John Wisdom, ‘Note on the new edition of Professor Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic’, Mind, N.S. LVII (1948), p. 419; reprinted in his Philosophy and Psycho-Analysis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), p. 246. 38 ‘Other Minds IV’, Mind, N.S. L (1941), p. 215; reprinted in his Other Minds (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952), p. 86.

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hints without merely equivocating over the word ‘drop’ put in serious doubt the possibility of constructing a lexicon, with all the ramifications of meaning each word may have, that would fit into a classical truth-conditional theory for a natural language of the sort aimed at in formal semantics;39 the semantics of natural languages, one might say, cannot be kept pragmatics free. It may be that such an account can be integrated with a version of implicature. Unlike implications, which are truth-functional, implicatures are radically context and relevance dependent.40 Weaker implicatures are detached from dependence on speaker’s intention with no sharp cut-off point between assumptions strongly backed by the speaker or writer, and assumptions derived from the utterance but on the hearer’s sole responsibility. In the case of metaphor, ‘in general, the wider the range of potential implicatures and the greater the hearer’s responsibility for constructing them, the . . . more creative the metaphor’.41 Integrating these two approaches might well throw light on the proper workings of Wisdom’s ‘case-by-case procedure’, and provide ways of assessing the philosophical legitimacy of such ‘literary’ elements in philosophical discourse as the metaphor – and, indeed, the aphorism. It might also illuminate the ‘narrative turn’ in philosophy. If such ‘rhetorical’ features may play a legitimate philosophical role, the sharp division between philosophy and literature blurs yet further, and with it the justification for excluding the field of literature from the city of truth. For my second suggestion I’ll go back to my concern with the apparent neglect of the distinctively ‘literary’ among philosophical theorists. To meet the obvious objection I should say something of how I conceive of this term. Following Aristotle, ‘literature’ is traditionally defined in terms of the genres of which it is composed and, although these are notoriously fluid, ostensive definition is possible: literature is a category made up of those genres that ‘students of literature’ usually study – poems, plays, novels and their many generic subdivisions. No doubt there are 39

J. F. Ross, Portraying Analogy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). See the papers collected in H. P. Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989); see especially ‘Logic and Conversation’, originally published in P. Cole and J. L. Morgan (eds), Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3: Speech Acts (New York: Academic Press, 1975). Also David Holdcroft, ‘Speech Acts and Conversation’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 29 (1979). 41 Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 236–7. 40


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many borderline or otherwise problematic cases, but there are also exemplary ones; here too example leads theoretical definition. Nevertheless there are a good many works which one would like to include within even a strict notion of ‘literature’, but which represent genres not ex officio literary: memoirs, biographies and autobiographies, letters, etc. Such forms are, as it were, honorifically literary; they become assimilated to ‘literature’ if they exhibit markedly certain excellences traditionally associated with conventional literary forms. Equally, genres that are closely related to traditional literary forms – as is the philosophical dialogue to the form of drama – may in certain circumstances be worth considering under the heading ‘literary’. Thus the brief for literary criticism – the study of literature – is always an open one: it being one purpose of literary criticism to help us decide which works are sufficiently excellent in the appropriate ways to be so classified. My notion of literature is, therefore, in part evaluative, resisting the reduction of ‘poetry’ to ‘verse’ (let alone ‘text’) or of ‘novel’ to ‘narrative’ (or even ‘extended fictional narrative’). And the excellences to which we point are quite often linguistic ones, sometimes indeed those which distinguish Harrison’s ‘constitutive’ from ‘constituted’ language, such as the apt metaphor from which we may, as Aristotle remarked long ago, ‘best get hold of something fresh’. This bears on a feature of more than a little philosophical writing about literature over the last few decades, that in reading it one has a disturbing sense of encountering Hamlet without the Prince. Too often one looks in vain for serious engagement with the potentialities of, for example, poetry as image, symbol and metre, as distinct from narrative. Serious philosophical discussions of literature in the modern period, though not of course in the longer history of philosophy, is still in its infancy, and it has to a considerable extent been conducted in ways that display a tin ear to the distinctively literary. Plato’s Socrates, in the act of excluding the poets from his City, displays a more sensitive appreciation of their power, for good or ill, than do many of literature’s latter-day defenders. I doubt this can last – nor should it. One of twentieth-century philosophy’s greatest successes has been in developing our understanding of language. Not only with respect to metaphor, but also to nuance and context, philosophy and literature have much to learn from each other. One of the best recent philosophical books on metaphor owes its success in large part to the fact that it is

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prepared to learn, in detail, from Homer and Shakespeare.42 That any adequate analysis of metaphor must be able to engage with and illuminate Shakespeare’s usages seems to be its underlying assumption; it strikes me as not a bad rule for philosophy of language generally. And recent philosophical work on context and implicature may help to illuminate what is at issue not only in literature, but in the elusive ambiguities of the language we speak and write more generally. I mentioned earlier that, while through commitment to the logic of pure dialectic (or, indeed, logical analysis) we might attain a certain truth, we might also risk losing the power to speak or think with authenticity of our own world. I made the point in relation to Plato, but I suspect it was, at bottom, also the point of Heidegger’s insistence on the priority of ‘strict’ over ‘exact’ thinking. The problem in each case is how to provide credible and reliable criteria for judging the proposed alternatives. Perhaps analytical tools sharpened through close attention to the literary may both be of assistance here, and also enable us to grasp more fully how it is that imaginative literature can be, indeed is, a creative force in human understanding – and hence also, as Plato saw very well, a destructive one. Such a project could well see a bringing together of traditional poetic with rhetorical analysis, separated, on and off, since the time of Aristotle, thereby illuminating not only literature but also philosophy and, of course, theology. I conclude with a possibility on which I am at present working. More than half a century ago T. S. Eliot made a proposal that seems to have been neglected (with the odd exception in the ’30s and ’50s and a more recent attack by Jonathan Kertzer)43 ever since. He sought to distinguish between the ‘logic of the imagination’, which relates to the capacity ‘to distinguish between order and chaos in the arrangement of images’ and the ‘logic of concepts’, seeing this distinction as closely related to, though not identical with, that between prose and poetry.44 On such an 42 Roger White, The Structure of Metaphor: The Way the Language of Metaphor Works (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996). 43 See Yvor Winters, ‘The Experimental School in American Thought’, in his Primitivism and Decadence: A Study of American Experimental Poetry (New York: Arrow Editions, 1937); Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (1957), ch. VIII; Jonathan Kertzer, Poetic Argument: Studies in Modern Poetry (Kingston, London, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), chap. 1. 44 T. S. Eliot, ‘Preface’ (1930) to St.-John Perse, Anabasis, tr. T. S. Eliot, 3rd rev. edn (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), pp. 10–11.


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account, one might say, the meaning of concepts is given by their inferential relations, a key assumption for the logical analysis of language, but poetic images (including sound images) may be meaningful and ordered that are conceptually disordered or even meaningless – hence their hospitability to (conceptual) paradox. Eliot adds that ‘a writer, by using . . . exclusively poetic methods, is sometimes able to write poetry in what is called prose’, and further ‘another writer can, by reversing the process, write great prose in verse’. The exploration of such a proposal might throw light on many dark places: on Kierkegaard’s advocacy of ‘indirect communication’ in religion and elsewhere,45 on the role of paradox in philosophy, on the distinction between the ‘awful’ and the ‘common’ rainbow of Keats’s poem and, more generally, on the capacity of imaginative literature to transform the parts sober philosophy cannot reach.46

45 See for example Søren Kierkegaard, Synspunktet for min Forfatter-Virksomhed (1848; published posthumously, Kjøb, 1859), translated by Walter Lowrie as The Point of View for My Work as an Author (London: Oxford University Press, 1939). 46 Earlier versions of some material included above were first published in my ‘Literature, Truth and Logic’, Philosophy, 74 (1999).

INDEX absolute music 25, 47–8, 57, 62 aesthetic properties 58 contrast between the novel and 53 Levinson’s claim about 52 absurdity 126–7 Addison, Joseph 84, 86 aesthetic attitude 1–23 see also comparative aesthetics Agamemnon 31 Alkan, C.-V. 3 allusion 43, 90, 93, 104, 109 ambiguity 96, 106, 110, 117, 132 modifier 98 position and word-order a cause of 97 analogy 129–30 analytic philosophy 112, 120, 127, 129 Anaxagoras 113, 115 aphorism 130 Apollonius 116, 119, 121 appreciation 71–2, 73, 82, 83, 85, 86 aesthetic 6, 47, 48, 49–50, 51, 56 informed by knowledge 5 privileged insider 95 aristocratic privileges 67 Aristophanes 113 Aristotle 5, 9, 90, 100–1, 114, 118, 122, 130, 131, 132 account of tragedy 38 difference between poet and historian 37 logical analysis 115 metaphor at the heart of poetry for 117 plot structures/plans 50–1, 58 Poetics 50, 56 Arnold, Matthew 21, 71, 76, 83 Culture and Anarchy 77 Arthurian legend 31, 32, 44, 45 artistic time 60 Atherton, Carol 83

rati_000

134..140

Atreus, House of 31 Austen, Jane 70 Mansfield Park 12, 13 Pride and Prejudice 12, 23 Austin, J. L. 90–111 aversion 93, 94, 103, 104 professional 95, 96 Babbitt, Milton 86 Bacon, Francis 118 Ballantyne, R. M. 22 Banville, John 21 Barker, Andrew 117 Beardsley, Monroe 41 Beauvoir, Simone de 123 Beethoven, Ludwig van 63 Being 121 Bennett, Tony 71 Berkeley, George 113 best-seller lists 54 Black, Max 120–1 Blake, William 17, 113–14, 120, 124–5 Bloom, Harold 60 bourgeois individualism 3 Bradbury, Malcolm 84 Bradley, A. C. 24–37, 40–1, 42, 45–6 Brooks, Cleanth 40, 41 Budd, Malcolm 30 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 41 Carey, John 17–18 Carlyle, Thomas 76 Past and Present 77 Carnap, Rudolf 116, 121, 127 categories 126–7 Cavell, Stanley 123–4, 128 characters-as-realised 34 charm and profundity 6 Christianity 115 Cicero 116 circularity 127 vicious 38

INDEX

classical music 58, 62 familiar genres 47 marketing of 63 well-known forms 50 cognitive meaning/content 119 Coleridge, Samuel T. 36 Rime of the Ancient Mariner 31, 123 Collingwood, R. G. 102 Collini, Stefan 78 Common Law jurisdictions 129 comparative aesthetics 47–64 Conrad, Joseph 23 content 32, 47, 49, 52, 55, 96–8, 101 cognitive 119, 121 factual 22 propositional 51, 57, 59 thought 56 content-identity; naïve content-reductionism content-identity 24–5, 42 interest-relativity of 35, 36, 37 see also form-content unity/identity context 21, 32, 35–6, 43, 44, 51, 70, 97, 100–3, 105, 114, 131 dramatic 40 implicatures and 130, 132 making words salient in 104 nonextensional 41 philosophical 121–2 quotational 41 conventionalist sulk 27, 38 Coral Island (Ballantyne) 22 Corn Laws (Britain 1800s) 77 Cornhill Magazine 85 culture 44–5 criticism of 65, 76–80, 88 cummings, e. e. 39 Cunningham, Merce 86 dance 6, 86 Davidson, Donald 43 deconstruction 116, 119, 127 deduction 127, 129 major problem with 126 Descartes, René 16 dialectic 28, 116, 127 complex 32 pure 117, 132 relations between rhetoric and 112

135

Doctor Faustus (Marlowe) 36 Dostoevsky, F. M. Brothers Karamazov 2 Crime and Punishment 9, 12 Dummett, Michael 127–8 Eagleton, Terry 70, 73–6, 78 economics 78, 79 educated class 80 education 71, 89 elementary 79 humanist 76 tertiary 88 Education Act (England 1870) 79, 88 eidetic intuition 121 Eliot, T. S. 119, 124, 125, 132–3 The Waste Land 70 Elizabethan travel-literature 87 Elliott, R. K. 16 emotions 15, 122 music and 59 empathy 9, 11, 15 Empedocles 113 empiricism 93–4 Empson, William 39, 66–7, 70, 110 England 81, 118 medieval 67–8 Enlightenment 73, 76 Epicureanism 26, 37 epistemic access 82–3 epistemology 77 ethics 122 exakt thinking 121 exculpation 104 factual errors 8 falsehoods 6–7 fantasy 21 Faust (Goethe) 36 Feldman, Morton 86 feminist critics 75 fictional narratives 47, 57, 61, 122, 123, 124 extended 131 ‘Fido’-Fido principle 119 fine-grainedness 36, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45 First World War 70 folk wisdom 13

136

INDEX

food riots (1842) 77 fool/jester character 36 form-content unity/identity 24, 25–9, 30, 33–9, 40, 41–2, 43, 45, 46 formal structure 47–54, 59 perception of 56, 62, 63 formalism 49, 84 naïve 30, 32, 45 Forster, William 79, 88 Frege, Gottlob 90, 101, 102–3, 104, 120, 123, 126, 127 Functionality Principle 38, 41, 45 Gay, John 87 Goethe, J. W. von 36 Golding, William 22 Gosse, Edmund 79 Greek tragedy 12, 56 Hanslick, Eduard 25 Hardy, Thomas 3, 10–11 Harrison, Bernard 124, 125, 131 Haydon, Benjamin 118 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 23 Heidegger, Martin 121, 122, 132 Heraclitus 113 hermeneutics 129 Herodotus 8, 37 Herrick, Robert 74 Hesiod 115 Hill, Geoffrey 45, 90, 91, 93–4, 105 ‘Merlin’ 44 history 81 Homer 101, 113, 114, 115, 132 Horton, John 122 Hughes, Everett 81 human nature 13–14, 19 profound truths about 8, 11 Hume, David 47, 113, 116 Husserl, Edmund 121 Ibsen, Henrik A Doll’s House 21–2 Hedda Gabler 70 idioms 109 induction 129 ineffability thesis 26–7, 42 inferential relations 132 interest-relativity 24, 35, 36, 37 interpretation 18, 28, 29, 42

focus of 24 not centrally involved with meaning 43 open to challenge or refinement 45 intuition 54, 56 eidetic 121 inverted commas 103, 104, 105 irony 41, 91 Isenberg, Arnold 6, 7, 16, 17, 19 italics 103 James, Henry 122, 123 judgement 123 Kant, Immanuel 25, 123 Kearney, Anthony 83 Keats, John 115, 133 Hyperion 6, 7 Lamia 112–13, 116, 117, 118, 119 Kermode, Sir Frank 119 Kertzer, Jonathan 132 Kierkegaard, Søren 133 Kivy, Peter 24, 25–9, 33, 35, 37, 40, 42, 43 know-how 9 knowledge 3, 15 a posteriori 19 a priori 18, 19 access to special kind of 27 disciplinary 81, 89 empathic 9, 11 experiential 13 how-to-do 9 imaginative 23 non-propositional 1, 9 perceptual 9, 11 practical 9–10, 11, 13 professional 81 propositional 9 specialist 81, 82, 83, 88, 89 Krohn, August 115 Lamarque, Peter 1, 2, 3, 20, 21 Lamb, Charles 118 language constitutive 124, 131 elusive subtleties/ambiguities of 120, 132

INDEX

expressive 124 figurative 72 informative 124 intellectually responsible 119 key assumption for logical analysis of 133 limits of 118 non-cognitive 124 non-standard use of 106 ordinary 48, 49, 120 phenomenon of analogy in 129–30 philosophy of 112, 132 picture theory of 116 polemical use in religious disputes 118 purging of its cloudy images 117 representational 124 specialized 86 see also poetic language Latin 118 Leavis, F. R. 15, 18, 84 Leibniz, G. W. 119 Levinson, Jerrold 52, 53, 57, 62, 63 linguistic analysis 120 linguistics 38, 39, 40, 42, 45, 83, 99, 131 listeners 50, 59, 61 basic 57 casual, surface 53 non-structural 62–3 shallow 63 sophisticated 47 thoughtful 57 see also serious listeners literacy 79 literary criticism 2–3, 18, 20, 36, 65–89, 90, 91, 110, 128, 129 brief always open for 131 categories developed by 124 endless arguments and disputes in 21 truth and falsity role in 6 literary theory 72 literary time 60 Locke, John 112, 113, 118 logic 77, 103, 112, 114, 116, 117, 118, 121, 124 elastic equations 129 predicate 119

137

logical analysis 115, 120, 126, 132, 133 model which lies at the heart of 127 logical atomism 120 Logical Positivists 113 Lord of the Flies (Golding) 22 Lucretius 26, 29, 37 Lukács, Georg 67–8, 70 MacCarthy, Desmond 2, 3 MacIntyre, Alasdair 128 magazine stands 54 Mallarmé, Stéphane 124, 125 Marlowe, Christopher 36 Marxism 118 mathematics 19, 20, 118, 129 Mazeppa (Byron) 41 McEwan, Ian 21 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 124 metaphor 39, 43, 118, 121, 130, 131, 132 endemic 127 potted and highly idiosyncratic account of 117 quarrel between philosophy and 127 Middle Ages 118 Mill, John Stuart 62, 76–7 Political Economy 78 mode-of-realisation 33, 34, 35, 43 moral philosophy 122 morality 77 act-centred/agent-centred 12, 13 Morris, William 76 Mozart, W. A. Jupiter Symphony 62 ‘Prussian Quartets’ 61 Murray, Penelope 114 music 6, 86, 88 see also absolute music; classical music; listeners; symphonic structure musical time 60 mysticism 121 naïve content-reductionism 30, 32, 46 narrative 121, 125, 126, 128, 130 see also fictional narratives

138

INDEX

New Atlantis (Bacon) 118 Newman, John Henry, Cardinal 15 Newton, Isaac 113, 118 Nietzsche, Friedrich 3, 115, 117 no-truth position 3, 6 Non-Conformists 77 non-representational arts 5 novel-reading experience 11, 59, 61 periods between episodes 55 Novum Organum (Bacon) 118 Nussbaum, Martha 114, 122, 123, 124, 128 Olsen, Stein 1, 2, 3, 20, 21 ornamentation 103–5 Paradise Lost (Milton) 31, 32 paradox 126 paraphrase 17, 33, 35, 36, 37, 43, 45 complete or perfect 28 eluding 24 fair 6 heresy of 25 Kivy-style 40, 42 moderate pro-paraphrase claims 29 no-paraphrase claims 26–7 poem has same content as 24 poetry that seems especially resistant to 39 Shakespeare and 118 Parmenides 115 Parnell, Thomas 87 pastoral elegy 44 Pater, Walter 25, 52–3, 79 petitio 126 phenomenology 30, 42, 49, 51, 53, 84, 122, 123 dominance of 121 philology 71, 85 phronesis 9–10 physics 20, 86, 113 Picasso, Pablo 3 Pickwick Papers (Dickens) 112 Pindar 114 Plato 90, 112, 119, 121, 123, 125, 131, 132 Gorgias 116 Laws 113 Phaedrus 116

Republic 100–1, 102, 113, 114, 115–16, 117 poetic language 31, 32, 38–9, 41, 91–9, 101–3, 124 putative features of 41 poetry 15, 76, 131, 132, 133 characteristic features of 124 epistemic status 27 meaning in 24–46 metaphor at the heart of 117 ‘non-seriousness’ of 90–111 quarrel between philosophy and 112, 113, 114, 115, 127 triumph over violent philistinism 21 see also content-identity political economy 77, 78 Pope, Alexander 84, 86 Essay on Man 118 Unfortunate Lady 66, 70 Pound, Ezra 105 precedents 129 predicate calculus 119 predication 126 prodigies 9 professionalisation 78 professions 81 propositions 12, 14–15, 20, 116 a posteriori 16 a priori 16–17 allocation to various categories 126–7 folk wisdom 13 Raine, Craig 21 Raleigh, Sir Walter 8 Ranke, Leopold von 81 rationality 122, 124, 127 readers 60 above-average 59 casual 53 common 86, 88–9 educated class vastly outnumbered by 80 general 83 interrupted 62, 63 non-serious 54, 55 non-specialist 86 rare 61 snobbery of 67

INDEX

sophisticated 59 specialist 89 surface 53 see also serious readers real time 60 reductio ad absurdum 126–7, 129 redundancy 104 religious organisations 79 Renaissance 118 representational arts 1, 3, 6, 8, 20 experience gained from encountering 11 rhetoric 34, 73, 126, 127, 130 metaphor prominent in 117 relations between dialectic and 112 rhetorical analysis 129, 132 rhetorical gesture 112, 115–16 Rhys, Jean 123 Richard Coeur de Lion 68 Richards, I. A. 8, 11 Ricks, Christopher 90, 91, 93 Ricoeur, Paul 128 Righter, William 125, 127 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 87 Robson, W. W. 15 Romanticism 73, 123 Rome 70 Rorty, Richard 128 Ross, James 129–30 Rothko, Mark 86 Royal Society 119 Ruskin, John 76 Russell, Bertrand 120 Ryle, Gilbert 112–13, 119, 121, 126, 127 Said, Edward 71–4, 76 Salinger, J. D. 10 salon music 6 Sartre, Jean-Paul 122, 123 L’Etre et Le Néant 121 savoir 79 Saxons and Normans 67–8 scepticism 123 School Boards 79 scientific theory 69 Scott, Sir Walter 67 Ivanhoe 68, 70 scrutiny 73, 104, 105

139

Searle, John 90 Second Reform Act (England & Wales 1867) 77 self-knowledge 12 semantics 39, 41, 52, 119, 130 serious listeners 53, 54, 56 in-it-for-the-‘story’ 57, 58, 62–3 structural 57, 58, 63 studious 58 serious readers 53, 62 in-it-for-the-story 54–5, 57, 58 structural 56, 57, 58 studious 56, 58 thoughtful 57, 58, 59, 63 Shakespeare, William 118, 132 Hamlet 5, 33–4, 131 Julius Caesar 70 King Lear 8, 36 Macbeth 7 Measure for Measure 12, 13 Twelfth Night 36 Winter’s Tale 123 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 36, 84, 125 To a Skylark 31 Sherry, Vincent 94 Small, Ian 79 social utility 81–2, 83 socialist critics 75 Socrates 113, 114, 116, 131 Sontag, Susan 86 speech acts 95 Spencer, Herbert 6, 76 Stell, Frank 86 Stephen, Leslie 85–7, 88–9 Stolnitz, Jerome 8–9, 11, 12, 13, 20 Stoppard, Tom 34 Strawson, Galen 128 Strawson, P. F. 14, 90 Strindberg, August 21–2 structuralism 119 subject-as-conceived 37 subject-as-realised 33, 34, 35, 37, 43 subjectivism 121 subjectivity 75, 76 substance and form 31, 32 substitutions 41, 42 Swift, Jonathan 86 Gulliver’s Travels 87 symphonic structure 47–64 syntax 39, 119

140 Taylor, Charles 128 time-waster genres 54, 55 tone 98–100 transcendental-phenomenological reduction 121 truth-conditional theory 130 truth-values 6, 7, 15, 16, 120 truths 2, 41, 124 artistic 12, 13, 20 modal 7–8, 20 propositional 12, 14 relevance to aesthetic judgement 16 striving for 120, 127 university departments 78 unwilled attention 4, 5 Utilitarian principles 76 utterances 98, 130 authors not committed to endorsing truth of 7 commitment-apt 107, 108, 109 performative-apt 102, 108 problematic 110

INDEX

serious 97 using language to issue

92

value-judgements 65 verification principle 119, 121 vernaculars 118 Vivas, Elisio 2 voluntary schools 79 Waring, James 86 Warwick University 121–2, 125 willed attention 4, 5 William James Lectures (Harvard 1955) 92 Wisdom, John 126, 128–9, 130 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 120, 126 Tractatus 116 Woolf, Virginia 86 The Common Reader 87–8 Wordsworth, William 17, 40, 76, 118 Xenophanes Zangwill, Nick

113, 115 59

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