The Reading Experience

Inventing Literature

(This essay was published in American Book Review in 2000, but has never been available online.)

In his book In Plato’s Cave, Alvin Kernan describes a career crisis that he no doubt shared with many other literary scholars of his generation:

The canon of great books, authors and their powerful imaginations, the formal
perfection of the literary text, and the belief that literature was a central pillar of
culture—these foundations of Literature were all crumbling. . .Fine poems and
novels were still being written, but somehow they no longer became Literature.

Kernan’s lament for what in an earlier book he called “the death of literature” has been echoed often enough over the last decade (most loudly perhaps in John M. Ellis’s 1997 book Literature Lost), but the elegiac tone of his remarks suggest a resigned rather than a combative attitude toward the passing of the old order of literary study in which men like himself were entrusted with shoring up the “foundations of Literature.” In Plato’s Cave is Kernan’s attempt to account for his career in academe, but ultimately he is willing to cede the ground to those, by now a majority, who no longer share his assumptions about the status of literature and the role of literary study.

Now that the battle between the defenders of capital-l literature and the partisans of the iconoclastic styles of scholarship identified with what has come to be called cultural studies does indeed seem to be over, the outcome decidedly in favor of the latter, what seems most striking about comments like those just quoted is the clearly implicit association, as if it didn’t need to be stated, between literature broadly conceived as verbal works of art—poems and novels—and the academic study and analysis of literature. All of the features Kernan ascribes to “literature,” such as the unique formal elegance of the literary text, are actually the products of academic theories about literature, meant to foster a certain kind of literary criticism and to facilitate classroom instruction. So accustomed are we now to thinking of literature as the subject identified  by that name in the curricula of various university departments, primarily the English department, that it is almost impossible to use the term as a way of describing specific works outside of that context. And this, of course, applies as much to the currently trendy styles of criticism and scholarship as to the old-fashioned kind of literary scholarship practiced by someone like Alvin Kernan. If anything, the champions of cultural studies are even more dependent on the exclusive right claimed by the academy to the brand name Literature—their work would be almost unintelligible without an academic literary establishment to rebel against in the first place, and the new scholarship, at least that which seeks to historicize and politicize our notions of the literary, would itself hardly be sustainable if the idea of capital-l literature were simply to be abandoned.

Even though Alvin Kernan and other like-minded literature professors were largely unable to separate an appreciation of imaginative writing from the disciplinary imperatives of academic literary study, they nevertheless generally spoke of the qualities they most admired in works of literature as qualities that inhered in the works themselves, had clearly always been considered the salient characteristics of great literature, not as creations of the very discourse these professors had adopted for their own professional purposes. It is true that the urgently serious, at times even ponderous, approach to the “canon of great books” and much of the critical lexicon of the mid-century academic literary establishment were filtered through the writings of such poet-critics as Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and John Crowe Ransom, but by far the most significant development in the practice of literary criticism in the twentieth century was the investment of authority over literary matters in the figure of the academic critic, from such celebrated members of the order as Lionel Trilling, Cleanth Brooks, and Northrop Frye to current critics such as Stanley Fish and Helen Vendler, around whom is still draped some vestige of this authority, however ragged it has become. To the company of so eminent and formidable a group of “scholars” as this, no mere literary journalist or, worse, lowly book reviewer need apply: criticism would no longer be in the hands of the ink-stained wretches, namely writers, but would become almost entirely transformed into the job description of a professional class of literary experts.

As someone who once sought admittance to this class, who still considers it at its best to have embodied an attitude toward literature well worthy of respect and to have  produced a body of scholarly work both present and future readers should continue to find entirely useful, I do not believe that the assumption of such expertise on the part of literature professors was necessarily self-interested or carried out in bad faith. By and large, the institution of literary study as administered from roughly the 1930s to the 1980s was dedicated to admirable goals, even if those goals—broadly speaking, to help provide students with a modicum of a liberal education, more specifically, to advance knowledge about the nature and history of literature and provide instruction to those interested in the formal analysis of literary texts—melded uneasily, if at all, with the overall curriculum of the university, which has always reflected American society’s intensely practical philosophy of education. Like any institution, however, it came to regard its established practices as settled and incontestable (how else to go about studying literature?), and
when doubting Thomases did indeed begin to speak out from within its own ranks, the response from what came to be regarded as the old guard was at first dismissive, later mostly incredulous, and finally simply enraged.

Kernan’s The Death of Literature (1990), comes from the second stage in the academic literary establishment’s response to the new ways of thinking about literature and its place in the academic curriculum. So mystified does he seem in this book by the assault on the literary values that once seemed to need no defense that he really offers none, propounding instead the idea that the era of what he calls “romantic and modernist literature” has simply passed, that literature itself as we have known it for the past 200 years or so has ceased to be relevant. In neither The Death of Literature nor  does Kernan seem able to admit what his analysis and experience clearly show: that Literature is a product of the academic environment in which it has been defined and scrutinized since national literatures became respectable subjects of academic study early in the twentieth century—that professors like himself deserve most of the credit, or the blame, for inventing Literature in the first place.

Thus what drives Alvin Kernan and his generational cohorts crazy is not just that the discipline they helped to build has fallen so easily into the hands of a new breed of scholar who question the integrity of what was built, with furthermore an insufficient appreciation of the ramifications of this development on the part of college administrators or the public at large, but that what may have been their greatest achievement, the  creation of a fascinating cultural artifact out of old books, poems, and play scripts has lost so much of its luster as to be no longer recognizable. Because most of them found their way into the discipline out of a genuine belief in the importance of these texts (In Plato’s Cave succeeds in affirming this impression), their dismay at witnessing a decline in respect for the great books must be taken as sincere, although it is tempting to judge their enmity toward the currently dominant forms of scholarship as largely a case of professional resentment. Their failure to understand their own role in summoning Literature into being at all, however, making it almost inevitable that its exalted status would come to be challenged, is less easy to justify.

A succinct statement of the way capital-l literature was constructed as an essentially academic subject is provided in another book, John M. Ellis’s Literature Lost. Against the “utilitarian” view of education held by many in American society, the professors responded with an alternative, although not incommensurate, view, according to Ellis:

The standard defense of the humanities. . .was that humanistic education
provided all kinds of rewards, but the least important [emphasis mine] was the
enrichment of our leisure through great literature and the arts. The most weighty
arguments were that the humanities enabled us to see ourselves in perspective, to
become more enlightened citizens, and to think more deeply about important
issues in our lives. A society of people educated not just for a vocation but for full
and intelligent participation in a modern democracy would be a far better and
happier society—so ran the argument—and this overriding social usefulness of
humanistic education compensated for its not leading directly to a means of
earning one’s living.

It is hard to imagine that many of the writers who actually left us with what Ellis would accept as “great literature” could have used language like this to describe their own sense of what their work was meant to accomplish. (Especially surprising would be the suggestion that the “enrichment of our leisure” should be at the bottom of our list of expectations of poems, plays, or novels.) Not even Matthew Arnold, perhaps the first great literary critic to postulate the existence of capital-l literature in anything like the terms delineated here by Ellis, could really have envisioned a formal course of literary  study with ambitions quite like these. The extent to which the notion of “great literature” has been transformed into an entire system of interlocking texts is manifestly clear when Ellis further remarks that “[t]he body of enduring literary and philosophical books of the Western tradition is. . .a remarkable set of fascinating struggles with problems and issues. Always prominent is the conflict and competition between the ideas and vision of one writer and those of others, and there is often a high degree of self-criticism.”

John Ellis believes that literature has been “lost” because this system is no longer taken for granted. Unlike Alvin Kernan, who ultimately seems mostly wistful about the dismantling of the system that once sustained him, Ellis is one of those compelled to vent his rage over what has happened. All of the usual suspects—multiculturalists, deconstructionists, feminists, Marxists—are brought forth and denounced for their apostasy, their refusal to acknowledge the supreme authority of Literature, and by the end of the book Ellis has in effect declared that with the overthrow of the traditional Western Literature syllabus, civilization itself is nearing its end. While some of his analyses of current scholarly methods and classroom practices are cogent enough (he is right in claiming that what passes now for literary study in many of the elite colleges and universities is little more than crude political posturing), Ellis is even less able than Kernan to imagine works of literature being read and appreciated outside the academic walls he has helped to put up, much less to think of literature as a still vital activity carried on by living fiction writers, poets, and playwrights. That he finally lays the blame for the perceived affront to the dignity of Literature on affirmative action, both in admissions and faculty hiring, only underscores the impression that for literature professors like John M. Ellis, the “body of enduring literary and philosophical books” properly belongs to a select group of academics teaching a similarly select group of compliant students suitably grateful for the honor.

In arguing that those currently in charge of literary study in American universities have banished, killed, or otherwise discredited literature, however, Kernan, Ellis, and company misleadingly suggest the new literary scholarship no longer accepts the academic concept of capital-l literature and its attendant history. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Literature remains a significant category in scholarly publishing, and most of the books published in this category do little to challenge the legitimacy of the underlying idea—especially not those books that explicitly claim to question the “hegemony” of canonical literature. Take, for example, Janice Radway’s A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (1998). Radway presents her study of what might be called the book club aesthetic as an alternative to the conventional kind of literary analysis that emphasizes “intricacy, subtlety, and complexity.” Radway’s problem with “serious” literature, especially the more formally complex works of modern literature, is their lack of immediate accessibility:

The books that came to me as high culture never seemed to prompt the particular
shudder, the frisson I associated with the books of my childhood, because they
carried with them not mere promise alone, but also a threat, the threat that
somehow I might fail to understand, might fail to recognize their reputed meaning
and inherent worth. I developed, as a consequence, an aloof, somewhat puzzled
relationship to “Literature” and to the ways of reading required and rewarded in
my graduate seminars.

Radway clearly wants us to believe that the sort of book traditionally offered by the Book-of-the-Month Club (the sort that might excite in its reader the “shudder, the frisson”) deserves the same kind of respect as those books associated with “high culture,” but no one reading A Feeling for Books could conclude that its author advocates giving up either the class of books she learned to regard as Literature or the modes of analysis the study of such books gave rise to in the academy. For one thing, it is only in opposition to high-brow notions of literature that the competing notion of the middlebrow that informs Radway’s account of the Book-of-the-Month Club can even be formulated.

Paradoxically, those who most want to topple literature from its high culture pedestal are obliged to keep it fixed there in order to extol the equal value of popular or non-canonical forms of writing. Further, Radway’s chosen critical method could not be more immersed in the conventions of the academic style. Indeed, the dense and jargon-choked middle section of A Feeling for Books (a laborious examination of her subject’s “ideological position”) seems to presume a reader at least as specialized as any unrepentant formalist, and Radway doesn’t really invalidate qualities such as “intricacy, subtlety, and  complexity” as standards by which to appraise some forms of expression. Instead, she simply elevates what seems a question of taste—a preference for poetry and fiction that are more emotionally direct, that provoke the “shudder, the frisson”—to a level of purported theoretical reflection that itself manifests a formidable degree of complexity.

Despite the inability, or unwillingness, of writers like Janice Radway and John Ellis to inquire into their own deep-seated and mutually unexamined assumptions, it is nevertheless certainly true that literature as an academic subject has been radically transformed in most upper-tier colleges and universities, and its survival in something resembling its orthodox form in some lower-rung schools is not likely to save it from eventual obsolescence. As traditionalists like Kernan and Ellis maintain, literature has lost the respect it once enjoyed from those devoted to its study, and it is not likely to regain that respect any time soon. And, as radicals like Radway would have it, capital-l literature has been promulgated with at best an overly reverent solemnity, at worst a kind of smug elitism that made the appearance of A Feeling for Books and similar rebellious efforts wholly predictable. However, while I could agree with the radicals that the institution of literary study came to be enveloped in an atmosphere of pretension and self-satisfaction, their current occupation of the grounds has hardly been an improvement.

Only if one accepts that literature and the academy are linked in some necessary and unavoidable way will one also feel that Literature’s fall from academic grace is quite the catastrophe the traditionalists make it out to be, however, or that its influence had to be counteracted in the name of other causes one values more highly. Once this link is broken, Literature ceases to be, and the forms of writing that have long been held hostage to it—“fine poems and novels”—would then no longer be subject to any of the agendas academic scholars and critics bring to the discipline-based study of capital-l literature. I am convinced that this would be the best possible outcome of the curricular wars, both for the survival of those older works that once formed the core of the academic canon and for the work of living writers, which has generally either been considered unworthy of attention at all or otherwise made the objects of the most politicized, coarsest forms of analysis. Freed from the pomposities and prejudices of the literature professors, perhaps the books that have been drained of interest to all but those who want to believe in Literature can find the audience they still deserve, and, more importantly, perhaps even  small-l literature might continue to be a meaningful term, especially if it were used to describe a continuum of “literary” activity that, if anything, privileged contemporary writers whose work is able to extend and replenish the genres comprising what can truthfully be called an enduring tradition of imaginative writing.

Cutting the ties that have kept literature bound to the academy could in addition have the salutary effect of reviving literary criticism as part of the potential renewal of an authentic literary culture apart from the enervating influence of the academic critics. While some may question whether the United States has ever had, or ever really could have, a literary culture worthy of the designation, certainly the invention of Literature has proved to be at best a synthetic substitute. One could easily conclude from the lively coverage of the literary scene by web-zines like Salon, from the multitude of other literary e-zines publishing book reviews and critical commentary, as well as original creative work, from the proliferation across the country of book discussion groups, that an interest in small-l literature persists among non-academic readers, that were the remaining superstructure supporting academic Literature to collapse entirely from its own dead weight (there are reasons to believe this is happening—see Robert Scholes’s The Rise and Fall of English), a more finely-tuned, less grandiose kind of literary criticism would soon enough emerge from its ruins. Such criticism might even be practiced by many of the would-be critics who currently regard academe as the only plausible option for anyone who takes literature seriously; professional without being professionalized, this sort of criticism would ideally combine an immediacy of response not often to be found in even the best academic criticism with an ability, developed through simple attentiveness, to contextualize and to read closely, as surely any seriously conceived and executed attempt at literary art deserves.

It is certainly possible, of course, that nothing like what I am describing here will ever come to pass. Capital-l literature will continue, in however debased and beleaguereda form, as the self-claimed domain of academic “experts,” and non-academic criticism will remain a scattershot affair, confined to routine book reviews in the usual periodicals, at best to the websites and journals most committed to the informed discussion of new writing. It is even possible that what we now call literature will simply vanish into the virtual ether of cyberspace, recognized only as an artifact of intellectual history, if at all.

Such a fate seems to me almost inevitable, in fact, if those who retain an interest in the possibilities of literature (small-l) hold on to the assumption that the responsibility for ensuring its survival lies with the academy. The folly of this assumption cannot now be more apparent. Fine poems and novels are still being written, and we can only hope they never become Literature.

Breaking the Code

(I recently rediscovered the following essay, written a number of years ago but no longer, as far as I can tell, available online. It still seems relevant, and thus I am reposting it here.)

 

Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate is as thorough a refutation of the premises underlying radical social constructionism as the proponents of a Darwinian-informed view of human culture and behavior could hope for. In his characteristically lucid style and buoyant manner, Pinker convincingly, and one would say definitively, demonstrates the implausibility of the social constructionist’s belief in the all-encompassing effects of environment in the shaping of behavior, a belief inseparable from such essentially metaphysical notions as the “blank slate,” the “noble savage,” and the “ghost in the machine.” And although one could question the degree to which he demonstrates the correspondingly determinative effects of genes, or what Pinker generally refers to as “human nature,” that genetics are determinative of many human characteristics and activities seems ultimately uncontestable.

However, in the chapter on the biological origins of art and the appreciation of art (easily the weakest chapter in The Blank Slate), Pinker comes close to suggesting that art and literature are necessarily restricted to fulfilling biological functions assigned by human nature and that any artists or writers failing to meet the terms of these requirements are thereby derelict in their duties. Pinker’s implicit defense of representational art, tonal music, and traditional narrative is unmistakable, and at times even strident, as if Pinker’s impatience with those who persist in their ignorance of the imperatives of Darwinian selection has finally broken through his usually charitable manner (as revealed in his previous books). It seems a peculiar overreaction to the transgressions of these parties, and it almost invites closer scrutiny. In Pinker’s account, the culprits here are not merely the usual postmodern suspects so frequently identified by critics of contemporary art and literature, but can be traced all the way back to the early modernists: the painters and their “freakish distortions,” the fiction writers, with their “disjointed narration and difficult prose,” the poets who “abandoned clarity,” the “dissonant” composers unable to appreciate rhythm and melody, the whole lot producing nothing but “weird and disturbing art.” Given the public’s presumptive preference for the familiar and comforting, the work of modernists and postmodernists alike is characterized not only as artistic failure but as a kind of moral decadence as well.

This is only a slight exaggeration of the animus Pinker seems to feel toward the unconventional in art and literature. And although one might agree with him that much twentieth-century art—but not only twentieth-century art—represents a rejection of the mass audience’s preference for the recognizable pleasures of the pictorial, the harmonious, or the dramatic, this hardly seems a wholesale rejection of “human nature.” The denial of inveterate human desires and predispositions in social science and public policy surely does have baneful consequences both for intellectual inquiry and for the general welfare, as Pinker spends much of his book demonstrating. It is hard to see, however, how the iconoclasm of modern artists yields similar consequences. As Pinker himself argues, the mass audience manages to find the art it needs anyway, despite the misguided labors of the highbrow artists. Can it really be said that these artists have in any significant way truly endangered the public weal?

Pinker further muddles the case against experimental art by entirely collapsing what ought to be an obvious distinction between artists and writers on the one hand and, on the other, the theorists and scholars in the academy who claim authority over the critical consideration of art and literature. Manifestly, his quarrel is with “postmodern” theory (itself an overly capacious category mixing different and conflicting intellectual approaches) far more than with the works of art often tagged with the postmodern label, scarcely any of which are actually cited by Pinker as examples of the kind of harmful art he has in mind. Pinker is certainly not alone in reflexively associating serious art with the academy; all of the arts, but literature especially, have indeed been firmly affixed to, if not completely subsumed by, the academy and the protocols of academic study, perhaps even to the point that we can no longer think of the arts or humanities as anything but “subjects” taken up by the university.

Nevertheless, one might still presume that individual artists and writers could break convention, reject established methods, even attempt to shake readers or viewers out of complacent habits, all in good faith and without any intention to deny human nature or participate in a political crusade to enforce rigid or radical doctrines. One might even presume that such artists could consider these kinds of efforts to be in the interest of art in a purely aesthetic sense, not because art will thereby “progress” in some dubious and implausible fashion but because art includes as part of its own nature the capacity, if not the imperative, to explore the boundaries of the human imagination. Pinker comes close to suggesting that any art that does not confirm the hypothesis that art originates in other human attributes—adaptations that helped us to navigate and control what Pinker and the evolutionary psychologists he cites like to call our “ancestral environment”—is perforce bad and irresponsible art. But how could this be? Why should otherwise serious and creative works of art or literature be disparaged because they allegedly do not reflect the use of faculties developed to confront conditions our ancestors confronted hundreds of thousands of years ago?

Pinker has elsewhere discussed the fallacy of thinking we cannot in some cases overcome or simply ignore the prescriptions issued to us by our genetic inheritance. Referring specifically to the biological command to bear children, Pinker advises that it is possible for us to metaphorically inform our imperious genes to “go jump in the lake” (How the Mind Works). In her book Homo Aestheticus, Ellen Dissanayake, herself a well-known proponent of a Darwinian approach to art (and cited by Pinker in The Blank Slate), puts it somewhat differently: “Unlike cats and dogs, we are not prisoners of either our aggressive or our sexual drives. Our more complex abilities to remember and foresee, weigh alternatives, imagine, and reflect allow us to think of our long-term interests and choose not to do what our ‘natural’ (or short-term) interests and inclinations might first suggest.” At the very least, it seems worth asking why, if we are capable of redirecting “drives” as powerful as these, we cannot also similarly modify, even ignore, the effects of those biological prompts Pinker considers the ultimate sources of art: “hunger for status,” the “pleasure of experiencing adaptive objects and environments,” as well as “the ability to design artifacts to achieve desired ends.”

This last-named endowment (no doubt itself originating in other genetic expressions) in particular seems an odd sort of feature to emphasize in an analysis that essentially maintains there are limits on what artists and writers should try to achieve. Of course, one could quite plausibly believe some “desired ends” are more desirable than others, but Pinker’s argument all but reduces itself to the proposition that only art appealing to an audience evincing the preferences with which natural selection provided it can really be called art. It is difficult to distinguish here between Pinker’s own taste in art and literature and his need to find a place for “the genes” in all human activities, but it can’t be the case that popularity is the final arbiter of what can be considered art, even if what is popular coincides with the Darwinian account of the provenance of art favored by the evolutionary psychologist—or the psycholinguist (Pinker) sympathetic to this account.

Ultimately, then, Pinker’s underlying argument is that due to a confluence of genetic attributes, not through a simple “art gene” but through a contingent intermeshing in our genetic wiring, human beings are predisposed to take pleasure in symmetry and proportion, harmony and progression, structured drama and linear narrative. Plenty of great art and literature has exhibited these characteristics, without question, but if one takes Pinker’s attitude toward such accomplishments, their greatness would seem to have little to do with the genius or even the mere creativity which they embody but is more a matter of the art lessons written in to our genetic code. It doesn’t finally seem much of an achievement to fashion supposed artworks one couldn’t help but produce anyway—and if not produced by one artist then surely, eventually, by another.

 

It might be possible to embrace an argument like this while also, for example, acknowledging that opinions about such things as “beauty” or “coherence” might differ and that there is room for disagreement about what comes off as compelling in works of art and literature in specific instances. In my view, however, Pinker doesn’t much care to affirm this possibility; he conveys the distinct if cursory impression that successful art can only be so not merely because it taps into the source of possibilities provided by nature but because it carries out the original directives communicated by the genes in the most pristine and ingenuous way. That human artistic abilities might be rechanneled in a modern environment, where those directives have at the least a more muted urgency as instruments of “fitness,” seems an idea not worth considering. Certainly art cannot escape its evolutionary origins; but must it be strictly coterminous with them?

Any plausible philosophy of art must of course start with the biological/genetic foundation of the creative impulse. To this extent Pinker and other writers seeking to relocate the study and criticism of art and literature on more scientifically credible ground are providing a salutary and needed service; as manifestations of the exercise of human imagination, works of art and literature are unavoidably expressions of how the mind works. In some ways, in fact, since acts of the artistic imagination are a kind of deliberate (if not exactly deliberative) synthesis of various of the more immediate functions (Pinker likes to refer to them as “modules”) of the brain, works of art might be seen as particularly illuminating of human mental processes. Similarly, since such processes have evolved in accord with the logic of natural selection, they are undeniably the product of the working out of genetic imperatives.

It might seem that literature in particular—both fiction and poetry—is especially destined to reflect its genetic origins, given that its medium, language, is so obviously an example of a human faculty produced directly by natural selection and deeply rooted in the physical properties of the brain. Further, because the evolved function of language is plainly as a tool of “communication,” literature might be said to be tied more securely to its physiological foundations even than the other arts. And indeed there is little point  in denying that poets and fiction writers begin with a medium whose immediate object is to represent the real world of experience in an orderly and coherent way and, more to the point, as transparently as possible. However, precisely as a consequence of these apparent constraints inherent in the use of language, literature is actually by its very nature an effort to escape the habitual and ingrained assumptions about the status of language that are involved in its ordinary applications.

Both poetry and fiction—the latter increasingly so over the course of its history, as distinctions between the two modes become less significant—are most immediately the deliberate assertion of language as something other than ordinary communication. While language is certainly not always simply a medium of plain speaking (even in everyday usage words are often employed for figurative or expressive effect in a manner that calls attention to the very fact that language can be made to perform in these ways), works of imaginative literature insist on the potential for all words to be parts of an entirely artificial discourse in which language is free to explore the limits of what it is capable of disclosing. One might say that literature makes systematic this ability of language to transcend its innate function and to become in a specified context self-reflexively the “material” for artistic creation.

Most works of literature, at least prior to the twentieth century, call attention to language as a potentially malleable medium (as an instance of what Dissanayake calls “making special”) in a relatively conventionalized way, such that most of us simply accept this somewhat more plastic quality of written language when employed by poets and novelists. Moreover, in many cases such “crafted” writing continues to be taken as a mode of communication, albeit one whose meaning is imparted indirectly and in a stylized manner that marks it off from both speech and other forms of writing (as in most “realistic” or “well-made” narratives). Yet, finally, it is very difficult to see how, once literature is granted this special exemption from carrying out the work assigned to language in its “natural” state, it is plausible to insist that it may go only so far in asserting the purely aesthetic potential of writing but no farther. We have indeed moved substantially toward what Dissanayake calls a “hyperliterate” culture (a designation she does not intend kindly, especially toward the literary-intellectual exemplars of the trait), one in which all of our language-use has become increasingly self-conscious. But is it possible or even desirable that we somehow relinquish this culturally evolved disposition?

Indeed, we would need to relinquish as well the whole enterprise of literary criticism, at least in its modern form, unless we were to agree that any attention to form and style in works of literature is not to be considered. Granting that much current academic literary criticism is ideologically driven in the “postmodern” direction Pinker deplores, such a moralistic content-focused critical approach is arguably more consistent with Pinker’s own preference for readily assimilable art than more “old-fashioned” formalist or rhetorical criticism. One suspects that Pinker objects precisely to the ideology of postmodernism rather than any particular method of critical analysis it might employ, since in fact his consideration of “the arts” shows almost no serious concern for what might legitimately be the function of criticism, if anything implicitly dismissing it as an unnecessary imposition on the immediate response elicited by art in its authentic state. Perhaps those proponents of art-as-biology less inclined to regard criticism as a wholly marginal activity would find compelling instead the model offered by Frederick Turner in his book Natural Classicism: literary criticism as a kind of mutual performance between reader and text, a model that preserves both the organic essence of art and a way to bring a degree of unity and definition to the interpretation of literature.

Like Dissanayake, Turner fears that too much emphasis has been placed on the textuality of literature, in the process allowing us to lose sight of the “ritual” qualities someone sympathetic to the Darwinian/anthropological account of the role of art would predictably enough choose to highlight. Pinker, who finally seems less convinced than either Dissanayake or Turner of the human centrality of art in the first place, does not belabor the anthropological confirmation of the impulse to make art, but his impatience with modern literature seems no less consistent with the charge both Dissanayake and Turner bring against unconventional or aesthetically provocative work of literature without ever quite stating it explicitly: such works fail to remain in their proper place, their authors revealing themselves altogether too willing to engage in too much writing. To use language to create poems and stories that “reflect the perennial and universal qualities of the human species” (Pinker) while conforming to equally “perennial” and formulaic patterns is one thing, these authors seem to agree, but to do so, in part, at least, in order to potentially augment the resources of imagination and of writing itself is, well, unnatural.

“In postmodernist literature,” Pinker sneers, “authors comment on what they are writing while they are writing it.” Putting aside the fact that writers going back at least as far as Shakespeare and Chaucer have committed such an offense, it is to say the least unclear why in itself this strategy (as well as similar self-reflexive gestures in the other arts) should be regarded as an aesthetic outrage. Is it (barely) acceptable for literary critics to reflect on the processes or techniques involved in composing works of literature but required that the author of these works must agree to maintain the illusion that they are never the result of such processes but rather sprang full-born from the brain, or better yet, composed themselves?

It’s taking the principle of “suspension of disbelief” pretty far to insist that all awareness—on the author’s part or the reader’s—of the artifice inherent in all works of literature be suppressed. Not only have indisputably great writers, of whom Pinker would presumably approve, indulged in various forms of “breaking the frame,” but the nature of art and of the “literary” has always been among the subjects these writers have treated, especially the nature of artistic representation as a way of organizing experience. We need only think of Shakespeare’s digressions on theater, the Romantic poets’ incessant lyrical celebrations of art and of poetry itself, Henry James’s stories about artists, or Hawthorne’s stories about creation, artistic and otherwise, to know that this is true. Such recursiveness, one could argue, is not an unnatural imposition on an otherwise unmannered art form, but is inherent in the effort to use language to create literary art in the first place.

 

Quite frankly, one gets the impression in reading Pinker that he doesn’t have much use for either art in general or literature more specifically unless they are taken simply as diversions for the multitudes, a nice way of illustrating how the human mind is equipped to create symmetry and order out of raw experience, but not to be valued beyond that. It’s as if Pinker, and to a lesser degree Dissanayake and Turner, are almost offended at the notion that artists and writers might want to challenge accepted if unexamined assumptions about the function of art, that some of them might even presume to create works manifesting qualities sadly inconsistent with the biologically determined dictates about what proper art will be allowed to do.

This impatience with more adventurous art and writing is even more perplexing if we consider art in other than purely aesthetic terms. All art, perhaps especially literature, is also a means by which the human mind enhances its own ability to have meaningful experiences, to experience experience, as it were. As John Dewey in Art as Experience describes our encounter with art, it is an effort both to approximate the kind of experience the artist or writer went through in creating the work (in order to understand the work itself as thoroughly as possible) and to clarify most intensely the very nature of experience as a human capacity. In a very real sense, an attentive consideration of a work of art in all of its particulars is the act most revealing of what the human mind has evolved to attain: a level of consciousness by which the mind becomes aware of itself and its own operations, is able to understand what it means to undergo an experience and to self-consciously appreciate it. One would think that a psychologist such as Pinker might be interested in this activity, but one might as easily conclude from The Blank Slate that where aesthetic experience is concerned the mind might just as well be a blank slate.

Furthermore, the cumulative effects of such intense acquaintance with works of art and literature can only work to sharpen this ability of the mind to take stock of experience, both the more concentrated awareness provoked in our encounter with art but also our mundane and otherwise less accentuated alertness to the world we live in. In this sense, it represents an amplification of consciousness itself, in effect an aggrandizement of the biologically developed mechanisms that Pinker or Dissanayake seem to insist  are the limits of the human capacity to make and profitably comprehend works of art and literature. Moreover, such an educated familiarity with the particulars of aesthetic experience might even—ideally, in fact, would—perform the additionally useful service of more brightly illuminating the distinction between our experience of works of art—experience that is highly organized and artificially induced—and the very different kind of experience in which we find ourselves occupied in our ordinary, much more disorderly and prosaic reality.

Literature especially ought to provide us with the ability to distinguish adequately between aesthetic arrangement and reality, between fiction and life. Novels, stories, plays, many poems, give a shape and direction to an imagined reality that frequently stands in sharp contrast—either favorably or unfavorably—to reality as we live it. While on the one hand the kind of order to be found in works of literature is an attractive alternative to the disorder of real life, might even be exactly the sort of thing the human mind has evolved to perceive, on the other hand the appeal of such constructed patternings as are made available in literature ought to be regarded with caution, especially when this patterning explicitly presents itself as “story.” The power stories have in seeming to “make sense” of experience (although not necessarily always in a reassuring way) is sufficient to influence us to propose organizing ordinary reality in ways that give it the more consistent shape of fiction. (Most strongly-held ideologies partake of this tendency.)

Taking literature seriously in this context means being alert to the formal organization, narrative and otherwise, that defines it as literature, and equally alert, not merely to the absence of this kind of organization in reality as we know it, but to the incommensurability between the necessary distortions by definition required by literary narrative and the contingent and cumulative nature of the circumstances in which we are irretrievably implicated, between the manifestly make-believe and the unavoidably real. Indeed, the more familiar one becomes with the narrative strategies and aesthetic designs employed in works of literature, the more apparent it becomes when such strategies are used in interpreting the world (inappropriately, as with social constructionism) and to devise schemes that force reality to conform to more convenient and more satisfying stories.

I would contend that the simplistic and passive appreciation of the kind of unexamined storytelling that Pinker valorizes in The Blank Slate only encourages an approach to literature that at best sees it as offering lessons for life, intimations of a better way to arrange things. (Although Pinker himself does not suggest this; he’s clearly more inclined to regard art as mere entertainment.) Rather than understanding literature—all works of the imagination—as a potential tool of consciousness, helping us both to clarify the nature of aesthetic experience and to dispel the illusion that we cast over the rest of our experience, this assumption about what literature can do for us arguably allows  consciousness to become the acquiescent screen on which fanciful stories are projected—another version of the blank slate. I don’t claim that only art and literature help us, in effect, to face reality—certainly science remains the most direct means of coming to terms with the real—but the converse view, that art is an escape from reality, arises primarily from a lack of interest in discovering the potential of art in the first place.

Surely the human mind is not destined to remain undeveloped beyond its adaptation to the ancestral environment, unable to use in new ways those capacities with which it is equipped, incapable of exploring its own possibilities, possibilities that might be at odds with the purely utilitarian functions its primordial environment programmed it to serve. Is self-referential or iconoclastic fiction and poetry to be condemned because it represents an attempt to seek out these possibilities, to examine and interrogate the conventions that, no matter what biological process has influenced their development, are taken to define the very practice of these forms of writing, that supposedly identify them as literary? Such an effort is probably inevitable in almost all artistic endeavors, and might even itself be an unavoidable result of the human impulse to create art and thus just as biologically natural as the prettiest picture or the most compellingly told story. Is it really possible to maintain that artists and writers ought to observe some preconceived instructions as to what their chosen media might be employed to accomplish, solely in order to demonstrate that Stephen Pinker’s insistence that the human brain comes pre-equipped with an artistic paradigm is correct?

Ultimately, where art and literature are concerned, neither side in this version of the nature/nurture argument does much justice to either the demonstrated or the potential reach of human creativity. In this way they are remarkably similar. Both the view that artistic creativity is the sum of different biological functions and the view that it must be socially constructed want to reduce the creation of art to a conjunction of forces working on the artist in ways of which he/she cannot be aware, something that accounts for the complexities of art in a neat and seamless formulation that requires no further debate or needless elaboration. Both views, when considered not as tentative explanations of an otherwise irrepressible human activity but as final and all-encompassing truth, finally have very little to say about what artists and writers really do, although they might provide insight into how difficult it is for a mass audience to appreciate what these artists do. But perhaps if scientists and social scientists didn’t encourage this audience to accept the idea there ought properly to be normative standards for the creation of art, standards based on the most unreflective assumptions it is further encouraged not to question, for the creation of art and the violation of which is not only an offense against the acceptable in art but a violation of the laws of human nature, perhaps both artists and audience would stand a better chance of finding common cause.