The Reading Experience

Moral Chaos

When reading Roger Scruton, one can always be sure that the ideas and sentiments expressed are being offered with utter sincerity. The extent to which he is willing to defend a view of the world and the place of humans in it that seems not simply conservative but thoroughly antique can be astonishing, but he does defend it, seriously and systematically. As a philosopher, Scruton sticks to the most fundamental questions of social and cultural value, in many instances raising questions long assumed satisfactorily answered and renewing conservative objections to the direction taken by much of modern culture.

Those who might rebut Scruton's case against modern art and popular culture are perhaps tempted to simply dismiss his invocations of such seemingly agreeable concepts as "order" and "beauty" as so much opportunistic cant. This would be a mistake, not merely because Scruton makes his arguments in an intellectually honest way but because the role of order or beauty in art ought not be denied outright. Scruton is not wrong to consider "beauty" a relevant consideration in the assessment of art. He is wrong in his conception of beauty as it manifests itself in works of art.

In a recent essay, "Beauty and Desecration," Scruton asserts that "the sacred task of art. . .is to magnify life as it is and to reveal its beauty." Since the era of modernism, however, deliberate ugliness has usurped the place of beauty and "[a]rt increasingly aimed to disturb, subvert, or transgress moral certainties, and it was not beauty but originality—however achieved and at whatever moral cost—that won the prizes."

Note that is the transgression not of aesthetic standards but of "moral certainties" to which Scruton objects. Scruton rightly notes that in the 20th/21st centuries "expression" has become the underpinning of most movements in and commentary on "new" art, but rather than examine the specifically aesthetic flaws in an approach anchored in "expression," Scruton instead recoils from the moral anarchy unleashed by the modern Romantic rebel: "This emphasis on expression was a legacy of the Romantic movement; but now it was joined by the conviction that the artist is outside bourgeois society, defined in opposition to it, so that artistic self-expression is at the same time a transgression of ordinary moral norms."

Scruton uses as an example the widespread habit in productions of opera to alter the staging and the dramatic vision to produce a "modernized" version. He cites a particular production of Mozart's The Abduction From the Seraglio set "in a Berlin brothel, with Selim as pimp and Konstanze one of the prostitutes. Even during the most tender music, copulating couples littered the stage, and every opportunity for violence, with or without a sexual climax, was taken. . .The words and the music speak of love and compassion, but their message is drowned out by the scenes of desecration, murder, and narcissistic sex."

Even if we accept that Scruton's description of the staging of this opera is true to its director's intent--and I would guess that many others in the audience that night did not see it in this way--his outrage is directed at its moral implications. It is "an example of something familiar in every aspect of our contemporary culture. It is not merely that artists, directors, musicians, and others connected with the arts are in flight from beauty. Wherever beauty lies in wait for us, there arises a desire to preempt its appeal, to smother it with scenes of destruction." Scruton manages to connect this sort of "re-visioning" in the high arts to the music video, which "is often devoted to concentrating into the time span of a pop song some startling new account of moral chaos."

Scruton cannot appreciate that the operatic production he attended committed an aesthetic offense, not a moral one. I am quite willing to believe that those responsible for it thought it a clever idea to "set the opera in a Berlin brothel, with Selim as pimp and Konstanze one of the prostitutes," but ultimately this is just an aesthetically vacuous attempt to "update" Mozart, to run roughshod over Mozart's original vision of his opera and establish their own overwhelmingly lame one in its place. It is a practice to be found not only in opera but in theater in general, whereby directors and producers with the aesthetic sensibilities of lizards attempt to keep the great works "relevant." One could, I suppose, call this artistic cluelessness a "moral" problem, but most of what Scruton sees as the unleashing of "moral chaos" is finally just the consequence of the aesthetic incompetence of some those entrused with the job of re-presenting the theatrical art of the past.

I suspect that Scruton does not want to examine the art he despises for its specific aesthetic failings because the very introduction of the "aesthetic" leads for him to the moral decadence he fears. "Beauty" is not to be found in the creations of artists separated from the moral universe to which they must conform:

We can wander through this world, alienated, resentful, full of suspicion and distrust. Or we can find our home here, coming to rest in harmony with others and with ourselves. The experience of beauty guides us along this second path: it tells us that we are at home in the world, that the world is already ordered in our perceptions as a place fit for the lives of beings like us.

In this view, beaty is not even a "creation" of artists. It is a discovery by artists of "harmony," of the "order" that is "already" there "in our perceptions." Artists, such as the great landscape painters, are, if they are to be artists at all, "devoted to moralizing nature and showing the place of human freedom in the scheme of things."

This harmony and order--a moralized nature--is what Scruton means by the "sacred," the capturing of which is the duty of artists. Modern art is engaged in desecration--the inversion of the sacred. In suggesting that human beings are other than "at home in the world" or that the world itself is not always "fit," modern artists mock and undermine the moral order that art should be celebrating and supporting. It is time, according to Scruton, to recover the sacred, "to rediscover the affirmation and the truth to life without which artistic beauty cannot be realized."

Scruton's is an entirely coherent argument if you accept the underlying world view according to which the role of art is to "affirm" the deep, if not always completely visible, truth in "the scheme of things" that manifests itself in beauty. If you believe, however, that the world at times betrays an order that isn't necessarily beneficent, or that as Scruton puts it in his repugnance at another kind of "truthful" art, a human being can be reduced by life to "a lump of suffering flesh made pitiful, helpless, and disgusting," you might find Scruton's "truth" to be partial indeed. You might, in fact, find it a delusion and the idea that a great artist can't redeem "suffering flesh made pitiful" by an act of imagination (or, as Susan Sontag would have it, "will") anything but an affirmation of life.

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.

Pyschological Occurences

In The Logical Structure of the World, Rudolph Carnap attempts to show how a "constructional system" can be built the purpose of which is "to order the objects of all sciences into a system according to their reducibility to one another." Among these "objects" are what Carnap calls "cultural objects" (which include works of art) and "pyschological objects." The former, Carnap maintains, are reducible (for the purposes of this system) to the latter:

The awareness of the aesthetic content of a work of art, for example a marble statue, is indeed not identical with the recognition of the sensible characteristics of the piece of marble, its shape, size, color, and material. But this awareness is not something outside of the perception, since for it no content other than the content of the perception is given; more precisely: this awareness is uniquely determined through what is perceived by the senses. Thus, there exists a unique functional relation between the physical properties of the piece of marble and the aesthetic content of the work of art which is represented in this piece of marble.

To put it another way, the aesthetic experience includes an awareness of the piece of marble in all of its physical attributes, or of a page of text with its words printed in a particular style on paper of a particular color and weight, but it only begins there. "Aesthetic content" requires another step to be fulfilled:

. . .if a physical object is to be formed or transformed in such a way that it becomes a document, a bearer of expression for the cultural object, then this requires an act of creation or transformation on the part of one or several individuals, and thus psychological occurences in which the cultural object comes alive; these psychological occurences are the manifestations of the cultural object.

Although he uses the word "experience" rather than "psychological occurences," and although he is more rooted to the "physical object" than is Carnap in what seems an essentially phenomenological analyis of the experience of art, John Dewey in Art as Experience offers a philosophy of art and the reception of art that at least has a family resemblance to what Carnap is suggesting here. Both Dewey and Carnap avoid attributing metaphysical status to the "beauty" of art (a beauty that is intrinsic to the work) by locating the aesthetic in our apprehension of the work. As Carnap puts it, for the work to become a "bearer of expression," there must be "an act of creation or transformation on the part of one or several individuals." Similarly, Dewey would maintain that these "several individuals" include both artist and audience, as the work is not really complete until the viewer/listener/reader is able to "recreate" it in perception: "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."

Thus aesthetic judgment is unavoidably subjective, requiring the "transformation" Carnap describes, a process that will be bound to the "point of view and interest" of the "beholder," as Dewey has it. Still, the "sensible characteristics" of the work remain what they are, and aesthetic judgment cannot simply be cut loose from the work's sensible properties. Indeed, the more fully one experiences art according to Dewey's account of the process, the more, and the more intensely, those sensible properties will be felt.

It seems to me that both Carnap and Dewey remind us that, although the aesthetic is consummated in the "psychological occurences" experienced by readers or viewers, the sensible charactertistics of works of art and literature cannot be denied or dismissed. Thus, in reading fiction, we should not forget that neither people nor "things" are the subjects of perception. Words are. If, for example, we are reading a realist novel, we are not experiencing "the world" faithfully reproduced at all. We are not even, finally, experiencing a world of the author's creation, whether it's a world meant to be taken as a version of the real world or one the author has imaginatively brought into being. We are experiencing writing, which, through the psychological processes Carnap and Dewey invoke, is "transformed" into a world of characters and their stories. Ultimately a sufficient accumulation of responses by readers in turn transforms the work into a "cultural object." In our haste to describe that realist novel as a convincing "picture" of reality or as something "that takes on the problems of social misery and class conflict," we should not forget that it's neither. As an object of aesthetic experience, it's just writing, skillfully arranged for your act of recreation.

Derrida

Seldom has an important thinker or writer been as thoroughly abused by those who professed to be his admirers than Jacques Derrida. Both his approach and his assumptions were, for a time at least, held up as the "next big thing" in literary theory, but, unfortunately, few who invoked his name really understand his approach or, ultimately, shared his assumptions. These feeders of the English Department publication maw allowed Derrida's name to be associated with all that was foolish and inane in the literary academy in the name of their own careerist ambitions, and when it became clearer and clearer that what Derrida had in mind didn't really fit well with the next next big thing in academic literary study--multiculturalism, cultural studies more broadly--they abandoned him like a snake his old and useless skin.

(Which makes this letter, signed by some of the very people responsible for helping to create the image of Derrida they're now decrying in the New York Times obiturary, disingenuous in the extreme.)

Although Derrida was very important to me when I was still a budding "literary scholar," I have delayed making any remarks upon his death until surveying some of the many other blog discussions the occasion has provoked. And indeed, some of these have produced comments much like those I would make myself.

Trent Walters, for example, emphasizes that Derrida is actually enjoyable to read. He's an adventurous (but disciplined) and often witty writer who only seems "difficult" or "obscure" if you're expecting him to do philosophy in the supposedly more rigorous style of Anglo-American philosophy. Moreover, Derrida actually cared passionately about literature, something his more ideologically rigid followers finally couldn't tolerate, as Leonard Bast astutely points out: "I think that the people who cared most about politics, not literature, realized that Derrida was unnecessary and might even be an obstacle to their goals. Why go through the trouble of decoding him when you could be much more direct and simply rant against literature as an instrument of oppression?" And as In Favor of Thinking further observes: "What the right wing and the general media never seemed to understand, in characterizing all literary theory, and especially deconstruction, as the Evil Force of Chaos about to Destroy the Canon (remember the so-called Culture Wars?), was that in order to really understand Derrida's work, you had to be steeped in the Western literary and philosophical tradition."

Moreover, Derrida's critical method--and the method that could most efficaciously be adopted from his approach--was not all that radical, at least not in the way that too many of his acolytes wanted it to be. As Miriam Burstein quite correctly has it, deconstruction

In its applied American form. . .generally amounted to hyper-intensified close reading, a practice more amenable to discussions of metafiction than to feminism. Language was the big thing, not cultural criticism. Moreover, because it was in so many ways (again, in its applied American form) a souped-up New Criticism, deconstructionism tended to emphasize not the non-canonical but the very canonical indeed.

Derrida's goal was not to subvert the canonical--although neither was it to exalt it--but finally to illuminate a little further how we might actually read it. "Logocentrism" is not the tyranny of Reason, as so many of both Derrida's critics and his defenders would have us believe, but is the tendency to read texts, especially those philosophical and literary works reflexively assumed to be great, as if their authors were simply speaking to us, pronouncing on whatever subject the text is presumed to evoke. This is not even misreading but a refusal to read at all, and Derrida's project was to insist we attend to the text as a text--which might involve examining those elements that might otherwise seem "marginal," not quite the "point" at all. This was not an attempt to interpret a text in some idiosyncratic or inflammatory way--the usual criticism of Derrida was that he claimed a particular work to be "saying" the "opposite" of what it seemed to say--but to point out that in most cases we hadn't even yet begun the process of interpretation at all.

These criticisms of Derrida's work seem to me to behind Spurious's comment that he "avoided taking issue with [Derrida's] work because he was perpetually under attack from Analytic philosophers. This is my weakness: a kind of paranoia prevents me from being able to turn on those philosophers whose work, it seems to me, needs protecting. Whenever I read a book by Derrida I feel as though I have committed a great transgression, as though I had committed a crime (at the university I studied, Hegel was deemed unphilosophical; we were not allowed near Nietzsche, let alone Husserl. At that university we focused for the most part on texts published in the English speaking world over the last twenty years. Nothing older, nothing French or German, nothing ‘Continental’). Among Anglo-American philosophers, Derrida could not be taken seriously because his work slashed right at the heart of the Analytic assumptions about the goals of philosophy and the status of Reason. Younger philosophers like Lars Iyers had good reason to feel protective of their interest in Derrida's work.

But in the United States, Derrida clearly had the greatest influence in departments of literary study. There too, many people felt themselves to be committing "a great transgression" by reading and adapting Derrida to literary criticism and scholarship. The established forms of literary study were presumed to be rigid and authoritarian--"logocentric"--although for the most part they simply were not. If anything, New Criticism privileged an emotional, almost mystical response to literature, and the emphasis on close reading precisely encouraged the kind of open-ended interpretation Derrida championed. But, as LB points out, Derrida's writing was at first taken as some kind of politically liberatory gesture, and so the era of deconstruction and French theory began.

The great damage that was done both to literary study and to Derrida's reputation is perhaps summed up by Timothy Burke, who correctly notes the way in which during this era what came across most loudly was "the cry of all or nothing at all, that if communication could not be perfected, then there was no communication, if texts could not have a correct meaning, they meant everything, anything, nothing in particular." This was not, I hasten to add, what Derrida himself believed, but unfortunately what was most often represented as "Derridean" was indeed this sort of anti-intellectual nonsense (its anti-intellectualism disguised by much obscurantist theory-ese), the result of which, finally, was the complete loss of credibility on the part of academic literary study and, unfortunately, the labeling of Derrida as the obscurantist-in-chief. (I myself tried to use my own dissertation to show how Derrida's work could be used to elucidate actual works of literature, in my case, American metafiction, but very little of this kind of work was really done. Most academic criticism from that period done in the name of Derrida is now almost completely unreadable.)

Those who would like to know what Derrida was really all about should just read his books, particularly the earlier ones and especially Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference, Margins of Philosophy, and Dissemination. The best book about Derrida, bar none, is Christopher Norris's Derrida (1987), which portrays Derrida as the serious student of philosophy and literature--"my most constant interest," he once said, "coming before even my philosophical interest I should say, if this is possible, has been directed toward literature, toward that writing which is called literary"--that he was. Although Derrida had long before his death become passe in academic literature departments, what he has to offer to the appreciation of "that writing which is called literary" has barely begun to be understood.

Making Believe

John Holbo has recently posted two lengthy discussions of the concept of "fiction" as it would be understood using the tools of analytic philosophy. I am by no means well-read enough in analytic philosophy to assess these posts in technical terms, although I do think I know enough to follow along and perhaps make a few comments from a purely literary perspective.

Holbo is responding to a book that analyzes fiction as a "prop" readers use to engage in what this author wants to call "make-believe." Holbo believes that this view is too simplistic, reducing fiction to a device that prompts readers to create mental images, or that works to "prescribe imaginings." Holbo thinks that this simplistic view is especially infelicitous in describing our reading of novels, which do not provoke these kinds of "imaginings" in the same way that other, more explict games of make-believe do. As Holbo points out, reading a novel is not like playing with toy trucks.

It seems to me that Holbo is trying to say that works of literature have effects on us that cannot easily be accounted for by philosophical analysis. The words in a novel work differently than words in other contexts:

Now with regard to novels there is certainly at least a little something to the idea that, in at least some cases, there is at least something inessential about the prop, i.e. all the words - because the story is the thing, and any given story can be narrated any number of different ways. But indifference to the specifics of the narrative, i.e. all the words, is really not a standard attitude. You don't have to be much of a critic to care how a given story is told, i.e. to care about the prop itself, as well as what the prop makes us imagine (if it does make us imagine.)

I think this is exactly right, although, again, I couldn't provide an argument of my own that would satisfy most analytic philosophers. Part of the problem with approaching fiction from the vantage point of philosophy is that it excludes certain considerations that would otherwise help to explain what we in fact do enounter in reading fiction or poetry. (Although of course if these considerations were taken into account, the result would be literary criticism and not philosophy.) For example, I would argue that the novel, the literary category of "fiction" more generally, has developed less as a reaction among writers to the requirements of "story" per se than as a sequential reaction to what previous writers have done within the tradition of the novel or the short story as it is passed along from one cohort to the next. Sometimes this means thinking through the implications of narrative itself, sometimes ignoring story in order to concentrate on style or "stream of consciousness" or something else. In other words, most writers are at least as interested in what they can do with language itself as what they can do through telling stories.

A related problem is the need to collapse poetry and fiction (as Holbo does in an earlier post) into a single category of "imaginative" writing in which the arrangement of words works differently than in non-literary writing--it is less propositional, less laden with "information," etc., a difference that invokes the specific analysis of such writing as "fiction" in the first place. What is gained by looking at these modes through this fairly narrow philosophical lens (which is not at all neglible) is balanced by the loss of those other features of poetry and fiction that have appeal to us for other than their roles in the game of fiction-making or make-believe.

Perhaps the most significant drawback to considering "fiction" as more or less identical with "story" is identified by Holbo himself:

. . .The more paradigmatically story-like the representational content of a work, the more comfortable we are classing it as a work of fiction.

One exception: experimental literary works that strive to undermine narrative and story conventions – i.e. that willfully lack beginnings, middles and ends, characters, so forth – are usually quite easily classified as fiction (unless they seem to be turning into poems.) I take this ease of classification to be the result of a sort of grandfather-clause. Or maybe an Oedipus-like father-clause: if you are trying so hard to overthrow story, you must be story, ergo fiction. (A bit of a puzzle.)

I don't think this really is a puzzle. These kinds of experimental "fictions" are, in my view, precisely trying to undermine the reflexive association of fiction with story, although perhaps not completely enough that we would want to categorize it as something other than fiction. To this extent, "fiction" becomes simply a literary identifying mark, an acknowledgment of the tradition of prose writing from which it emerges, but no longer very helpfully describes what a work so designated does in terms of storytelling alone. But perhaps at this point as well such a work no longer lends itself very usefully to the kind of analysis a philosopher might want to do of the more ordinary understanding of the term.