The Reading Experience

In a World Like Ours

In Chapter 1 of Art as Experience, John Dewey writes:

Order cannot but be admirable in a world constantly threatened with disorder--in a world where living creatures can go on living only by taking advantage of whatever order exists about them, incorporating it into themselves. In a world like ours, every living creature that attains sensibility welcomes order with a response of harmonious feeling whenever it finds a congruous order about it.

For only when an organism shares in the ordered relations of its environment does it secure the stability essential to living. And when the participation comes after a phase of disruption and conflict, it bears within itself the germs of a consummation akin to the esthetic.

According to Dewey, our response to the "order" produced by art is rooted in our response to living in a world that is inherently disorderly but that is occasionally punctuated with an "integration with environment and recovery of union." It is this same "integration" that is produced by works of art--they reaffirm our hope that order can be achieved and produce a "harmonious feeling," in this case a feeling that human labor and imagination can momentarily impose order on chaos.

Dewey continues:

. . .Since the artist cares in a peculiar way for the phase of experience in which union is achieved, he does not shun moments of resistance and tension. He rather cultivates them, not for their own sake, but because of their potentialities, bringing to living consciousness an experience that is unified and total. . . .

Dewey is suggesting that artists (good artists, that is) are distinctive in their ability not merely to acknowledge "resistance and tension" (the world's tendency to thwart "harmonious feelings") but to dwell in them, to accept disorder as a necessary accompaniment to the experience of order. The scientist wishes to conceptualize disorder as a problem to be solved, after which "he passes on to another problem using an attained solution only as a stepping stone"; the artist wishes to capture the "rhythm" involved in the movement from disorder to "attained solution" (the work of art), to exemplify in the work what life feels like to the "living creature." Order is not as satisfying if it can't be contrasted with its always-impending dissolution, and the artist inherently calls attention to the fragility of order, aesthetic and otherwise.

Thus art is not just the ultimate product, the finished sculpture, the musical score, the published book, although these are the immediate gateways by which we enter art's domain (and the achieved work to which we return.) Great art also invites reflection on the process by which the product has been realized, order wrested from "flux." This emphasis on process is inherent in the very possibility of human creativity, since

There are two sorts of possible worlds in which esthetic experience would not occur. In a world of mere flux, change would not be cumulative; it would not move toward a close. Stability and rest would have no being. Equally it is true, however, that a world that is finished, ended, would have no trails of suspense and crisis, and would offer no opportunity for resolution. Where everything is already complete, there is no fulfillment. . . .

(See Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning" for a concrete, poetic embodiment of this Deweyan idea. Much of Stevens's work could be taken as an extended reflection on the Deweyan notion of "order" more broadly.)

The emphasis on process is also crucial to Dewey's theory of art as he will develop it in Art as Experience. The "experience" of art includes an awareness of the process by which the work must have taken shape:

Without an act of recreation the object is not perceived as a work of art. The artist selected, simplified, clarified, abridged and condensed according to his interest. The beholder must go through these operations according to his point of view and interest. (Ch. 3, p. 54)

Dewey concludes Chapter 1 with this account of "experience"

Experience in the degree to which it is experience is heightened vitality. Instead of signifying being shut up within one's own private feelings and sensations, it signifies active and alert commerce with the world; at its height it signifies complete interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events. Instead of signifying surrender to caprice and disorder, it affords our sole demonstration of a stability that is not stagnation but is rhythmic and developing. . . .

Experience as Dewey defines it is the irreducible characteristic of life itself, and the most "vital" experience we can have, he will come to claim, is the experience of art.

Art as Experience

Many of my own assumptions about the nature of art and literature (and thus the guiding assumptions behind many of the posts on this blog) are rooted in my reading of the philosopher John Dewey, most particularly his book Art as Experience. Here are the first two paragraphs of that book:

By one of the ironic perversities that often attend the course of affairs, the existence of the works of art upon which formation of an esthetic theory depends has become an obstruction to theory about them. For one reason, these works are products that exist externally and physically. In common conception, the work of art is often identified with the building, book, painting, or statue in its existence apart from human experience. Since the actual work of art is what the product does with and in experience, the result is not favorable to understanding. In addition, the very perfection of some of these products, the prestige they possess because of a long history of unquestioned admiration, creates conventions that get in the way of fresh insight. When an art product once attains classic status, it somehow becomes isolated from the human conditions under which it was brought into being and from the human consequences it engenders in actual life-experience.

When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in experience, a wall is build around them that renders almost opaque their general significance, with which esthetic theory deals. Art is remitted to a separate realm, where it is cut off from that association with the materials and aims of every other form of human effort, undergoing, and achievement. A primary task is thus imposed upon one who undertakes to write upon the philosophy of the fine arts. This task is to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience. Mountain peaks do not float unsupported; they do not even just rest upon the earth. They are the earth in one of its manifest operations. It is the business of those who are concerned with the theory of the earth, geographers and geologists, to make this fact evident in its various implications. The theorist who would deal philosophically with fine art has a like task to accomplish.

Note that Dewey acknowledges art as "refined and intensified forms of experience." It will be his task to "restore continuity" between art as a singular kind of human achievement and "the materials and aims of every other form of human effort." He will neither reduce art to the "materials and aims" of "everyday. . .doings"--as did the Marxist critics of that time (1934)--nor accept the metaphysical exaltation of art to "a separate realm" where the designation "classic" removes all responsibility from works of art (and from their critical champions) to provoke "fresh insight." Art has to live in the present or it doesn't live.

And when Dewey cautions that art must always be attributed to "conditions of origin," he doesn't mean that art merely reflects those origins or that our understanding of its meaning has to be tied to what it meant when those conditions prevailed. As he writes a few paragraphs later, we simply want to remember that art is a human creation, that buildings such as the Parthenon came from "needs that were a demand for the building and that were carried to fulfillment in it"; this is not "an examination such as might be carried on by a sociologist in search for material relevant to his purpose." Dewey ultimately had very little use for history or anthropology as ways of "disciplining" our understanding of human possibility, and this extends to his "theory" of art as well--we should think of the Athenians as like "people in our own homes, and on our own streets." The Athenians are projected into the present as people we would recognize, their art as relevant to us as to them.

In fact, Greek art (and, ultimately, our own art) can survive only by continuing to project itself into the future, as a manifestation of aesthetic accomplishment and possibility:

By common consent, the Parthenon is a great work of art. Yet it has esthetic standing only as the work becomes an experience for a human being.

Too much criticism and interpretation of art, especially traditional art, actually inhibits its ability to become "an experience for a human being." The works themselves become encrusted with tendentious commentary meant to advance one external ideology or another, protect one or another cultural bias, rather than allow viewers/readers/listeners to judge for themselves. A proper Deweyan critic would either seek to help the audience for art have a more satisfying experience of it (in the ways Dewey will discuss later in the book) or otherwise just get out of the way.

To be continued. . .

Connected to a Specific Occasion

Mark Thwaite's interview with John Stubbs, author of the just-published biography of John Donne, Donne: The Reformed Soul, includes this exchange:

MT: You mostly seem to read Donne's poems biographically. But Donne always wore masks and played with the persona of the "I": are you, as a biographer, in danger of a biographically reductive reading of Donne's art?

JS: This is a very important question. The poems are not transparently autobiographical documents. But many of Donne’s poems are explicitly connected to a specific occasion or experience. . .and many more are addressed to a particular person, invoking a specific setting and time. . .The manuscript evidence assembled by Herbert Grierson, Helen Gardner and many later Donneans suggests that some were intended for a fairly wide social audience, while others, especially many of what became his most famous love poems in the “Songs and Sonets”, were of a much more personal nature – kept even from his closest friends. Other texts again have been traditionally associated, since the time of Donne’s earliest readers, with particular moments in his biography. Verbal testimony connected his great poem of farewell and consolation, for example, “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” (with its famous image of the couple as “stiffe twin compasses”) with Donne’s departure for France in 1611. That tradition has become an inescapable part of the poem’s meaning as we receive it now. Similarly, the social and literary contexts to which other Donne texts were attached are crucial to their style: the settings of the poems, in other words, are vitally important to their register. For me the really grave reduction would be to annul or simplify these contexts, especially in what is after all a biography. We would lose all sense of Donne’s art by losing touch with the historical reality he lived and breathed in and worked with, and which much of his language’s peculiar vividness is given over to revealing.

It's hard to imagine any poem, by any poet, that is not "explicitly connected to a specific occasion or experience" What would be an alternative to this--a poem ocassioned by nothing and conceived in a state of numbness? Yet this hopelessly overbroad generalization about the connection between art and life that motivates 600-page biographies of writers and artists is what is usually trotted out as justification for these exercises in voyeurism and speculation. All "occasions" and "experiences" that might plausibly be brought to bear on all poems, stories, and novels in the author's oeuvre are duly "investigated," and any attempt to help readers more fruitfully enjoy and understand the works themselves is more or less abandoned. I don't say that Stubbs has done this in his biography, although Colin Burrow's conclusion that it, too, focuses excessively on "evidence and symptom"--whereby Donne's poems are read back into his life--doesn't give me that much confidence that he hasn't. The very market niche that literary biography now occupies--somewhere between gossip and Freudian literary criticism--demands that writers' work be seen as the reflection of their lives rather than as autonomous works of art.

But Stubbs's claims for the necessity of biographical/historical analysis of Donne's poetry do otherwise seem relatively unexceptional--mostly because they don't really get us that far. It might be interesting to know which of his poems were written for "a fairly wide social audience" and which were of "a more personal nature," but this does very little in helping us understand what the experience of reading these poems is like or what they might still have to offer a 21st century reader. That the "Valediction" might be associated "with Donne’s departure for France in 1611" might be helpful in getting started on the poem, but it hardly does much for our understanding of that poem's figurative intricacy (". . .endure not yet/A breach, but an expansion,/Like gold to aery thinness beat"). Is it really crucial that a reader know this "tradition" in order to make sense of the poem, lest he/she miss this "inescapable part of the poem’s meaning"? It might be true that "the social and literary contexts to which other Donne texts were attached are crucial to their style" and that "the settings of the poems. . .are vitally important to their register," and if Stubbs's book were to show me that this is the case--specifically that it can be seen in the poems themselves--I would be grateful for it. Still, it seems to me a significant overstatement to say that "We would lose all sense of Donne’s art [emphasis mine] by losing touch with the historical reality he lived and breathed in and worked with." If Donne's poems are great art (and I think they are), they are so even if we do lose touch with his "historical reality."

Unfortunately, most literary biographies are written not to accomplish the reasonably modest goals Stubbs seems to set (to remind us that literature isn't written in an historical vacuum) but to appease the kind of interest expressed in this review of a new biography of Isaac Bashevis Singer. Reviewer Elaine Margolin tells us that

In a determined search for Singer's essence, [Florence] Noiville plunges through letters, personal recollections and interviews with Singer's friends, family and publishing colleagues, hoping to channel the young Singer.

Questions beget other questions. What made him so fearful of intimacy? Why was he so often devastatingly sad? What had created his need to distance himself from those who reached out to him, particularly his young son? What spurred his lust for so many women? How had he become such a skeptic about God?

God save us from biographers in search of a writer's "essence." This is only going to give us a tendentious, partial, and misleading account of the subject in question, as the biographer finds out in her "plunge" through the record that the writer had the same personal imperfections as anyone else. (That Singer had such imperfections, as revealed through Noiville's biography, certainly seems to be the "essence" of Margolin's review.)

As to the questions begat from questions: Who cares what made Singer fearful of intimacy? I want to read his stories, not learn about his psychological hangups. What difference does it make that he was "devastatingly sad" now that he's dead? Probably the sadness contributed to the power of his art, but I surely don't need to know about its source in order to appreciate that art.

The last three questions just take us farther from Singer's art, which is presumably the only thing concerning him that most readers now care about (or should care about.) No doubt his personal demons drove him away from his loved ones, but what could we ever know about what "created" them? It's hard to believe Elaine Margolin doesn't already know what "spurred his lust for so many women." Plus ca change. And Singer may or may not have been a "skeptic about God," but what does it accomplish toward our appreciation of what his stories have to tell us about such skepticism--they actually convey a multitude of feelings about God--to speculate about "how he became" a skeptic?

Margolin's review ultimately suggests that this biography will only deflect attention away from Singer's work and encourage readers instead to debate whether I.B. Singer was "a bad man" or not. How much useless time will be spent (in who knows how many more biographies) discussing this thoroughly irrelevant "issue" while Singer's marvelous short stories go unread?

A Safe and Useless Place

Frank Wilson thinks that "artistic experiment" is defined by the amount of "trial and error" involved. He takes the scientific "experiment" to be the model for the use of "experimental" as a classificatory term in the discussion of literature. Scott Esposito more or less accepts Wilson's definition, although he has no problem with "art experiments being praised as ends in themselves," something about which Wilson seems skeptical. Scott also suggests that "unlike in science, we can continually come back to and learn new things from successful literary experiments, or simply admire their beauty."

Actually, we can probably do the same with certain especially compelling scientific experiments, but I think both Scott and Frank are mistaken to view "experiment" in literature as essentially analgous to the way the term is understood in science. Scott is correct in asserting that "a lot of trial and error is involved in the writing of most novels," and for that very reason "trial and error" is not really very helpful in capturing what literary critics/scholars have meant by using "experimental fiction" in describing selected works of fiction, especially fiction written since 1945, "experimental." For the most part, critical commentary on postwar experimental fiction (more broadly "postmodern" fiction) has focused on "experiment" as, in Jerome Klinkowitz's words, the "disruption" of a "conservative stability of form" in literary fiction (Literary Disruptions, 1980). Klinkowitz thought this stability had reigned since the 1920s, but it probably goes back farther than that, to the establishment of realism in the mid/late 19th century--experimentalists such as Joyce and Woolf could be said to have also "disrupted" this stability of form (often characterized as the "well-made story"), although their experiments did not disrupt the assumptions of realism itself, were in fact an extension of these assumptions into what is now called "psychological realism." From this perspective, "trial and error" is not so much the guiding principle of experiment (except insofar as it involves finding appropriate methods of disruption) as is the notion that "stability"--to which scientific experiments always return--is itself not a desirable state where the art of fiction is concerned.

It is true that the term "experimental fiction" is a catch-all term of convenience that doesn't necessarily signal anything very specific about what particular writers might be up to in their efforts to, if not "make it new," then "make it different." Thus Klinkowitz prefers "disruption," while other critics have written about "breaking the sequence" or "the art of excess" or "anti-story." In most cases, however, these critics are really interested in what Ellen Friedman and Miriam Fuchs in Breaking the Sequence simply accept as "innovations in form." Friedman and Fuchs also provide a handy description of the elements of "stability" against which most innovative writers are rebelling: "Plot linearity that implies a story's purposeful forward movement; a single, authoritative storyteller; well-motivated characters interacting in recognizable social patterns; the crucial conflict deterring the protagonist from the ultimate goal; the movement to closure. . . ." Perhaps the most succinct statement of the motivations underlying experimental fiction would be the remarks made by John Hawkes, which I've quoted on this blog before: "I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained."

A critic who did use the term "experimental fiction" straightforwardly was Robert Scholes in his book Fabulation and Metafiction. In the chapter of that book called "The Nature of Experimental Fiction," he writes: "Forms atrophy and lose touch with the vital ideas of fiction. Originality in fiction, rightly understood, is the successful attempt to find new forms that are capable of tapping once again the sources of fictional vitality." Scholes's book popularized the term "metafiction" as a more specific term describing the tendencies in postwar American fiction that made readers think of them as "experimental": "Metafiction. . .attempts to assault or transcend the laws of fiction--an undertaking which can only be achieved from within fictional form." Writers like Gass, Barth, Coover, and Barthleme were "working in that rarefied air of metafiction, trying to climb beyond Beckett and Borges, toward things than no critic--not even a metacritic, if there were such a thing--can discern."

Eventually that air probably became too "rarefied." Many readers came to associate metafiction--and thus "experimental fiction"--as "game-playing," an obsession with "art" over "life." This perception probably informs Frank Wilson's disdain for experiments "as ends in themselves." (Also his disinclination to think of Joyce as an experimenter--Joyce "knew from the start what he was going to do and how he was going to do it" and would never have stooped to mere "experiment.") It may also explain why Christopher Sorrentino, in a comment on Scott Esposito's post, observes that "while I have met a great many novelists ranging in outlook and approach from Ben Marcus to Jonathan Franzen, not a single one of them to my knowledge has ever described his/her work as 'experimental.'" While the writers associated with the Journal of Experimental Fiction would probably be less skittish about the designation than Marcus or Franzen, it probably is now true that many "experimental" writers (putting aside whether Ben Marcus or Jonathan Franzen are actually very innovative in the first place), are uncomfortable with the word as applied to their work. I'd still accept the explanation given by Raymond Federman, who coined the term "surfiction" as an alternative to "metafiction" in identifying his own brand of experimental fiction:

The kind of fiction I am interested in is that fiction which the leaders of the literary establishment (publishers, editors, agents, and reviewers alike)* brush aside because it does not conform to their notions of what fiction should be; that fiction which supposedly has no value (commercially understood) for the common reader. And the easiest way for these people to brush aside that kind of fiction is to label it, quickly and bluntly, as experimental fiction. Everything that does not fall into the category of successful fiction (commericially that is), or what Jean-Paul Sartre once called "nutritious literature," everything that is found "unreadable for our readers". . .is immediately relegated to the domain of experimentation--a safe and useless place. (Surfiction, 1975)

* Including Frank Wilson?