Easier to Talk About

In Exit Ghost, Philip Roth includes a letter putatively written by "Amy Bellette" but, as it turns out, mostly written by her lover, E.I. Lonoff, the perfectionist writer whose portrayal in The Ghost Writer initiated Roth's series of Zuckerman novels. Bellette/Lonoff write:

Hemingway's early stories are set in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, so your cultural journalist goes to the Upper Peninsula and finds out the names of the locals who are said to have been models for the characters in the early stories. Surprise of surprises, they or their descendants feel badly served by Ernest Hemingway. These feelings, unwarranted or childish or downright imaginary as they may be, are taken more seriously than the fiction because they're easier for your cultural journalist to talk about than the fiction.

I was reminded of this passage when reading Brian Boyd's "The Art of Literature and the Science of Literature," not because Boyd himself really finds external issues easier "to talk about than the fiction," certainly not because Boyd values such issues more than "the fiction," but because even in his attempt to retrieve the "art of literature" as the central subject of literary criticism he seemingly can't help but underscore the value of fiction as the gateway to something else.

Boyd correctly observes that

For the last few decades. . .scholars have been reluctant to deal with literature as an art—with the imaginative accomplishment of a work or the imaginative feast of responding to it—as if to do so meant privileging elite capacities and pandering to indulgent inclinations. Many critics have sought to keep literary criticism well away from the literary and instead to arraign literature as largely a product of social oppression, complicit in it or at best offering a resistance already contained.

In order to demonstrate that to ignore the "imaginative accomplishment of a work" is to totally misunderstand the claims that art makes on us, Boyd further correctly observes that "For both artists and audiences, art’s capacity to ensnare attention is crucial" and concludes from this that "attention—engagement in the activity—matters before meaning."

Yet if we normally engage in art simply because it can command our attention, meaning, in academic contexts, elbows its way to the fore, because the propositional nature of meaning makes it so much easier to expound, circulate, regurgitate, or challenge than the fluid dynamics of attention.

Boyd devotes the largest part of his essay to an analysis of the play with "patterns" in Nabokov's Lolita that shows, for Boyd, that "A writer can capture our attention before, in some cases long before, we reach what academic critics would accept as the 'meaning' or 'meanings' of works. The high density of multiple patterns holds our attention and elicits our response—especially through patterns of biological importance, like those surrounding character and event, which arouse attention and emotion and feed powerful, dedicated, evolved information-processing subroutines in the mind."

Boyd's reading of Lolita is impeccable, and I couldn't agree more with his essential insight that attention precedes meaning and that the implications of this for our "appreciation" of literature are profound. Indeed, up to this point Boyd's account of the nature of art and the reception of art is entirely consistent with that given in John Dewey's Art as Experience, a book that stands as the foundation of my own philosophy of art and the claims of which I have tried to integrate with a more purely literary interest in formalist aesthetics (substituting for New Critical notions such as "organic unity" Dewey's emphasis on the unity of experience). Dewey similarly underscores the value of attentiveness and the process by which the reader or the viewer comes to be aware of patterns.

But in my opinion Boyd more or less gives back what he has taken away from those preoccupied with "meaning" in literature, with extracting from literature an analysis that services an extra- or even anti-literary agenda, when he declares that "The pleasure art’s intense play with patterns affords compels our engagement again and again and helps shape our capacity to create and process pattern more swiftly. Perhaps it even helps explain the so-called Flynn effect, the fact—and it seems to be one—that IQs have risen with each of the last few generations. . . ." Dewey would never have "justified" the experience of art by invoking this capacity to "process pattern more swiftly." Dewey's account emphasizes art's capacity to enlarge experience, to make us more appreciative of experience, not its utilitarian potential to speed up our recognition of patterns. Indeed, such speeding-up probably cuts off the full experience of art as Dewey describes it. Art may or may not contribute to a "Flynn effect," but that it might do so is hardly the most important reason to attend to art's patterns in the first place. The attention we pay to art is its own compensation.

Thus I also don't see why Boyd needs to appeal to "science" as a way of invoking the immediacy of art. The Darwinian/biological analysis of art itself brings along its own anti-art baggage, and finally the appeal to Science as the all-encompassing context in which art is to be understood is no more helpful to art than the appeal to History or to Culture. That "works of art should provide ideal controlled replicable experiments for the study of both rapid and gradual pattern recognition in the mind" or that "Literature and other arts have helped extend our command of information patterns" seem to me conclusions that are just as extra-literary in their attempts to use art and literature for that "something else" as the idea that works of art and literature disclose cultural symptoms or that they capture the elusive forces of history. (Or that they reveal the flaws of their creators.) Finally they also seem topics that might be more convenient to talk about than the fiction.

Ultimately the problem may be that Boyd's brief is not so much on behalf of a more profitable way of reading literature as it is an attempt to reintroduce "literature as an art" back into the university curriculum. But "the fluid dynamics of attention," however much they do govern our response to works of art or literature when we are freely encountering them, are not really "replicable" in the college classroom unless you want to spend most of it simply reading a novel, poem, or story and directing your students to be very dynamic in their attention. Teaching literature because it brings out many of the imperatives of human evolution doesn't seem any more faithful to the "imaginative accomplishments" of literature than any of the other methods of literary study that have been tried. It may be that the "indulgent inclinations" really do need to be indulged outside the classroom and elsewhere than in scholarly journals.

Comments

[Daniel]

Why not a call for balance? Ignore neither the art nor the social implications and effects.

[Steven Augustine]

"In Exit Ghost, Philip Roth includes a letter putatively written by "Amy Bellette" but, as it turns out, mostly written by her lover, E.I. Lonoff..."

Only if we take Amy's word for it that Lonoff keeps an open channel between Amy and the grave!

Excellent (and absurdly underrated; it gets richer, and more winkingly clever, every time I read it) choice of books to illustrate your point, though, Dan. "Exit" is *all about* the misinterpretation/misappropriation of texts and lives, along with being an elegy to an era in which art-qua-art was considered a supremely noble cultural value. Skull-stapled Amy and sloshy-diapered Zuck are just the Sancho and Quixote to make a futile last charge in defence of that faded value.

When Boyd writes, "The pleasure art's intense play with patterns affords compels our engagement again and again and helps shape our capacity to create and process pattern more swiftly," I'd *like* to believe that his point is that every text teaches us how, and why, to read it.

The second half of that quoted passage (as you cite it), though, in referencing the Flynn Effect, bursts that little bubble; it's worth noting that Malcolm Gladwell does a good job of refuting the obvious nonsense of an *absolute* pattern of generational I.Q. increase (which would imply that our great-great-grandfathers had all been low-grade morons) here:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2007/12/17/071217crbo_books_gladwell

After reading Boyd's two-volume Nabokov, all those years ago, I immediately placed him, in this tiny mind of mine, second only to Ellmann in the pantheon of Literary Biographers. Still, second he remains, if only because nowhere in his exhaustive studies of "Lolita" have I found even a glancing reference to the nicely-hidden clues indicating that Dolores Haze is the biological daughter of Mr. C. Quilty.

If he's missed that (and I'm happy to be corrected if it turns out that he hasn't), he's missed other things... things beyond Nabokov... stuff about Art in general. He's only human, after all. We all have our blind spots.