Tranquility

In one of his recent posts, Lars at Spurious recalls:

For a long time, the local library would give me old copies of the Times Literary Supplement. For years, I used to read it at night when I could sleep with a mixed fascination. Culture, intellectual life - all this was marvellous. But I was disturbed by the steadiness of its tone and the tranquility of its judgements. So, at least, it seemed to me then. Gradually, I saw in it an old enemy: culture itself, the old culture, whose conservatism was clear when it came to reviewing works of philosophy. My judgement was simplistic, unsubtle, but one day I took hundreds of editions of the TLS to the dump and felt lifted.

What was it I disliked? Simply that a metaphysic was not allowed to lift itself from literature. Or that the approach to literature was in some way obvious, or transparent, and that judgements could be made. But I asked myself - I still ask - whether this is because I lack something, some quality of judgement; that I am not far enough from what I read - and that, perhaps, others like me also lack. But then I also asked - and ask today - whether those who seek from literature a clue as to how to live, how to act, how to experience the contingency of the world, can only ever be too close to what they are compelled to love.

In his typically eloquent way, Lars points here to two different ways by which readers can claim a genuine "love" of literature. One of those, presumably Lars's own, emphasizes literature's potential to provide "clue[s] as to how to live, how to act, how to experience the contingency of the world." The other requires that the reader achieve more distance, an ability to make judgments arrived at in "tranquility."

Although I don't myself aspire to that "steadiness of tone" Lars found stultifying in the TLS (which I would attribute to simple pomposity rather than established, transparently "literary" modes of critical discourse), ultimately I would have to situate myself among those who like to obtain some critical distance on what they read, who are at least as interested in discerning the distinctive aesthetic qualities a given work of literature might possess as in reading for the kind of life lessons Lars enumerates. (This is not always possible, of course, especially on a first reading and of books that clearly seek to provoke a more immediate or visceral response--Celine, let's say, or Burroughs. With these writers, one perhaps hopes to recover the critical distance they have so effectively leveled.) I've never really understood why we would want to turn to poets or novelists for insights on "how to live." What has given them some special dispensation to pronounce on such a topic? Presumably, good writers do have special insight into how to create aesthetically satisfying novels or poems, but counsel about "how to act"? I'd rather regard such writers as artists than as sources of wisdom.

Perhaps Lars means to suggest that individual texts, not the authors, are the objects of his reading desire, although some writers can be more frequently relied on to provide the kind of passionate engagement he values. (And indeed in writers like Blanchot and Handke, on whose work Lars (along with Steve Mitchelmore) has provided the best commentary I've ever read, he has obviously found a steady source of such engagement.) These kinds of texts comprise what Lars thinks of as "literature," or at least literature at is best. Certainly there are writers I have always turned to because I find their work dependably offers a kind of aesthetic pleasure I find appealing--Stanley Elkin, Gilbert Sorrentino, John Barth. And their fiction does provoke in me an immediate response that obliterates any supercilious "distance" I might want to impose--it is often hilariously funny. Still, I take almost as much pleasure in retrospectively scrutinizing these texts in order to more fully understand the formal and stylistic effects they have produced, to appreciate their artistry. Perhaps one could say that this approach to the reading experience helps me learn "how to live" with works of literature themselves, but I just can't say that I'm absorbing any lessons about "how to act" once I've turned the last page.

However, I do agree with Lars that a willing immersion in works of fiction especially can help keep us alert to what he calls the "contingency of the world." Here I would merely quote some things I've said about this issue before. First, from this essay published at Newtopia:

. . .learning to read works of literature unencumbered by anxieties about their secondary rhetorical uses can only over time lead one to share the perspective on human affairs that serious literature itself cumulatively provides.

This cumulative perspective emphasizes contingency, mutability, what in the title of Samuel Johnson's famous poem is identified as "the vanity of human wishes." The academic left is frequently attacked for its "relativism," but in this regard they would actually be well situated to appreciate the worldview expressed collectively by serious works of literature. Although conservatives and traditionalists have always liked to speak of the literary canon as a kind of repository of wisdom and eternal verities, no one who really loves literature would make such a claim for it, or would have developed a love for it in the first place, except to say that the greatest works of literature portray the universal uncertainty of human life and the agelessly unresolved conflicts stirred up by human aspirations. The Iliad and The Odyssey may be stories about courage, fortitude, overcoming destructive emotions, but they are even more about the fluidity and inadvertence of experience, our sense of it as random and unstable, ultimately beyond our control and its meaning beyond our reach.

And from this previous post on TRE:

. . .Works of literature can provoke us into questioning [the status quo] by showing us that there are always alternative versions, that descriptions of reality are only tentative and that a final understanding of the way things are isn't going to be possible. (Art that suggests there can be a final understanding isn't really art.) Literature does this both through its content--the alternative versions we're presented with--and through form--the way in which the perceived world is "reconstructed," to use [Stephen] Dunn's word. Literature in its aesthetic dimension--literally, the "art" by which it is made--displays to us the imagination at work, reminds us that there are effectively no limits to the human imagination.

To me, this is all indeed powerfully subversive. Through art we become aware that the world can always be remade. Art is the enemy of all certainties and settled doctrines. . . .

Comments

[Josh]

I like your final points a lot, Dan. They gesture toward a way that literature is indeed a potential aid to the moral imagination, while eschewing the reductive approach that dooms Nussbaum's Poetic Justice.

[Stephen Schenkenberg]

This reminded me a bit of what Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote in his book "Movies as Politics":

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A playwright friend of mine says there are two ways you can look at plays or movies—as windows or as mirrors—and for some time now, at least since the early Reagan years, mirrors have been the only thing we’re supposed to want. This has a direct bearing on the way films get programmed, exhibited, and promoted, and has an even more insidious effect on the way they’re conceived and made—or not made in many more cases. It affects the independent sector every bit as much as the mainstream, perhaps even more: how else to explain the relatively recent growth of film festivals devoted to films by and about women, blacks, and gays—films whose feminism, blackness, or gayness is automatically assumed to supersede their other qualities? The fact that these mirrors are mainly supposed to be mainly flattering limits the options of filmmakers and audiences even further. (Sometimes, to be sure, the same movie can function as both window and mirror—Menace II Society presumably serves as both a window for middle-class audiences looking at ghetto horrors and as a mirror for certain blacks in ghettos. But in this case it might be argued that both audiences are insulted to some extent by the degrees of sensationalism and violence thought necessary to engage their interest in this subject.…

We’re all being repeatedly assured—not least by the discourse about ‘correct’ representations that surround us—that, regardless of who we are, we all go to movies chiefly in search of role models, positive images of ourselves. (Feminists who might object to my formulation, pointing out that misogyny is given unbridled play in contemporary movies, should consider that they may be considered demographically less important than misogynists.) According to this rule, I should be on the lookout for movies that project positive images of straight, middle-aged, southern-born male Jews—though the only recent example that springs to mind, Driving Miss Daisy, makes me more than slightly ill. Clearly I’m being irresponsible by not living up to my demographic duties, but I’m not inclined to feel apologetic. The truth is, I prefer windows to mirrors.