What Is Fiction For?: Literary Humanism Restored

By Bernard Harrison

“Harrison’s marriage of philosophy and literary criticism does genuine and novel work.” —Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

How can literature, which consists of nothing more than the description of imaginary events and situations, offer any insight into the human condition? Can mere words illuminate something that we call “reality”?

Bernard Harrison answers these questions in this profoundly original work that seeks to re-enfranchise reality in the realms of art and discourse. In an ambitious account of the relationship between literature and cognition, he seeks to show how literary fiction, by deploying words against a background of imagined circumstances, allows us to focus on the roots, in social practice, of the meanings by which we represent our world and ourselves. Engaging with philosophers and theorists as diverse as Wittgenstein, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, F. R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, and Stanley Fish, and illustrating his ideas through readings of works by Swift, Woolf, Appelfeld, and Dickens, among others, this book presents a systematic defense of humanism in literary studies, and of the study of the humanities more generally, by a distinguished scholar.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 29, 2014
• ISBN: 9780253014122

Book preview

Introduction

Humanistic literary criticism, the tradition shared both by academic critics of the stamp of Lionel Trilling, F. R. Leavis, Northrop Frye, or M. H. Abrams, and by independent writers and literary intellectuals of the caliber of Edmund Wilson, George Orwell, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, or Cynthia Ozick, took it for granted that major creative literature constitutes one of our main resources for critical reflection on the human condition, both individual and cultural. For the past half century that tradition has found itself under sustained attack from a generation of literary theorists whose main sources of inspiration – Jacques Derrida and deconstruction; Michel Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge, a revived quasi-Marxist historicism according to which literature is merely a vehicle of ideology; and many more – have at least this in common: that their central concerns are more philosophical or social-theoretical than literary.

The resulting culture wars have led to our present situation, in which older notions of the literary, literary concerns, literary studies, and the terms literature and literary criticism themselves, taken as naming distinct categories of intellectual and moral endeavor, are in large sections of the academy no longer taken seriously. A purely literary response to these attacks is therefore half defeated before it is launched. What is needed is a systematic philosophical defense of humanism in literary studies, preferably one constructed along lines different from those, already in the marketplace of ideas, that have proved so vulnerable to the attacks of theory.

That is what this book offers. Like much current theory that is hostile to humanism, its arguments originate in an account of the nature and origin of meaning in natural language, but in this case one that is potentially friendly to a humanist conception of literature – namely, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s. The basic moves that set the argument running can be simply stated. Wittgenstein argued that the meaning of words and sentences originates in the roles to which we assign them in the conduct of social practices: language games. To that idea this book adds the further thought that both culture and individual character are, at a deep level, functions of the vast web of social practices, from measurement to marriage customs, from economic structures to the law, that define the content of what F. R Leavis liked to call the human world.

Literary fiction, I propose, works by deploying words against a background of imagined circumstances in such a way as to allow us to focus on the roots in social practice, with all of its inherent ambiguities and stresses, of the meanings through which we are accustomed to represent our world and ourselves. That proposal suggests a mechanism in terms of which to conceive how it might be possible for literature to discharge the function attributed to it by the humanist tradition: of disclosing aspects of the human condition – considered not solely as determined by nature, but as something made, something we create as well as suffer – in such a way as to bring them before the bar of critical scrutiny and self-examination.

The task of putting flesh on this skeletal outline of a how a revived literary humanism might work occupies the bulk of the book. Parts 1 and 2 address the most difficult question – the one raised in the preface – for anyone who wishes to say that imaginative literature is capable of disclosing anything. Fiction, after all, consists of nothing more than the description of imaginary events and situations in words set down at the subjective behest of an author. How can descriptions of imaginary events and people, how can the mere arrangement of some words, however cunningly set together, possibly have the power to illuminate anything worth calling reality? Chapters 1 and 2 develop the destructive potential of this objection for the humanist tradition in literary criticism. Chapter 3 proposes an answer to it along the Wittgensteinian lines sketched above.

So far we have merely some interesting thoughts about the functions of literature from a philosopher – someone who might reasonably be held to stand, professionally, entirely outside the literary-critical tradition he has had the temerity to set out to rescue intellectually. A major figure within that critical tradition, and one who took a dim view of both philosophy in general and Wittgenstein in particular, is F. R. Leavis. Leavis held that philosophy per se was by its nature hostile to the entire enterprise of serious creative literature and that the only honest stance open to the critic was to cast himself, as Leavis did, as an anti-philosopher. Moreover, although some people in the 1950s and ’60s suggested to him that the thought of the later Wittgenstein might provide the basis for a rapprochement, Leavis himself entertained no hopes whatsoever in that direction.

Curiously enough, however, both the general stance and many of the specific explanatory notions, developed from Wittgensteinian hints in chapter 3 though arrived at initially without reference to Leavis, turn out to echo those developed by Leavis himself in two late works that combine the acute textual analysis for which he is mainly known with more general reflections on the nature and functions of literature. Chapters 4 and 5 explore these resonances in detail. They show how elements of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy can be mobilized to provide a detailed and cumulative defense of Leavis’s account of the role of literature in culture and individual life.

These two chapters, in effect, begin the work of drawing the more abstract, philosophical arguments of chapter 3 into confluence with the concrete concerns of writers and literary critics. That work is continued in part 2. Chapter 6 examines more deeply, and with more in the way of literary reference, various elements of the account presented in chapters 3–5. Chapters 7–9 apply that account to the resolution of detailed questions of interpretation and textual analysis in the work of a wide and diverse range of writers, including Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Aharon Appelfeld, Virginia Woolf, and Sholem Aleichem.

Because these chapters were originally conceived as free-standing essays, one or two of them contain thumbnail sketches of the arguments of chapters 3–5. I considered removing these but in the end left them in place, for two reasons. The first is practical. These brief reminders refresh the memory sufficiently to remove the need to look back to part 1, allowing the reader to continue treating each such chapter as an independent unit. Second, each such rehearsal, in adapting the argument to the needs of a new topic, focuses on some new aspect of it in ways that generally make it more than a mere repetition.

Parts 3 and 4 move from questions concerning the relationship of literature to reality to questions about the relationships of literature to readers and critics. Discussion here has been dominated by what Wittgenstein liked to call a picture: an entrenched, a priori account of how things must stand that provides a readymade structural pattern to which all accounts of how things actually do stand must somehow be accommodated, and around which alternative theoretical positions define themselves and associated disputes gravitate.

The picture in question is one that has deep roots in the Romantic movement but was also given wings by influential twentieth-century critics. The basic elements of the picture, not all of which need be present in any particular critical rehearsal or reworking of it, are these: The author is a species of seer, or prophet, whose work expresses that perfect originality, that semidivine power of self-creation, of radical Selbstbildung, that is the prerogative of genius. The author’s vision is darkly shadowed forth in a literary work as the overall meaning the work presents to the informed and understanding reader: a meaning that displays itself as the principle of unity of the work, as what binds it into a single, unified, aesthetic whole. Not every reader, of course, is informed or understanding enough to grasp the sense of this austerely obscure deliverance, and this is where the critic comes in. His job is to make clear, for the benefit of the less gifted, how the work fits together as a unity and thus to elucidate its meaning.

For what it’s worth, this picture of the significance of literature and the task of the critic is badly out of tune with the account of the relationship of literature to reality and its consequent functions in human life, developed with assistance from Wittgenstein and Leavis, in parts 1 and 2. That account works by relating meaning to truth by way of the relationship between sentential signs and human practices in a way that makes it possible to understand how the mere manipulation of meaning against a background of imagined circumstances can possess the power to shine a light upon the practices that are constitutive both of meaning and, in part, of us. It follows that what must interest the critic, in terms of meaning, is not some meaning that the work possesses as a whole, but the plain, literal meanings of its component sentences.

Incompatibility with special views of mine would hardly be a problem, however, were it not that in the hurly-burly of academic debate the Romantic picture has proved not only extremely difficult to defend in any terms acceptable to the present day but also calamitously open to objections, objections that are generally highly plausible and extremely difficult to refute. Such objections, from writers as diverse as Michel Foucault, Frank Kermode, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, or Stanley Fish, not to mention a host of epigones, indeed constitute the bulk of the tide of opinion against which critical humanism over the past half century has found itself struggling.

To throw into disarray a fox hunt in full cry it is enough to shoot its fox. Part 3, Against ‘the Meaning of the Work,’ therefore proposes an account of the functions of criticism that dispenses with the Romantic model by dispensing with its central element: the idea that the work possesses an overall meaning – a meaning with which the unity of the work is bound up, a meaning in which the intentions of the author make themselves manifest, a meaning, finally, which it is the job of the critic to establish.

Against this background, part 4, The Skeptic Side, then revisits some of the more celebrated versions of skepticism that were current in the 1970s and since regarding the objectivity – indeed the fundamental validity as an intellectually viable pursuit – of literary criticism, including those associated with the names of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Stanley Fish.

Many of the issues thrown up by these and other forms of skepticism as to the value of both literature and literary studies arise in connection with the issue of plurality of interpretation. One of the difficulties with the idea that the task of criticism is to establish the meaning of the text is the multiplicity of readings that any reasonably complex text will support. One natural and widely canvassed reaction to plurality of interpretation is to take it as demonstrating the arbitrary nature of critical response. A second, equally natural and equally widely canvassed reaction is to take it as showing the absurdity of the idea that authorial intention does, or could, exert any control over interpretation, and hence of the idea that a literary work does, or could, offer access to the mind or personality of its author. Literary humanism, however, could hardly survive, lacking some level of justified belief both in the objectivity of the critical enterprise (however we construe its goals) and in the ultimate accessibility, behind all the guises of assumed narratorial voice, irony, and every other form of authorial Verfremdungseffekt, of something describable as the outlook of the author.

Part of the business of parts 3 and 4, therefore, is to demonstrate how these minimal requirements of humanism can be compatible with a degree of multiplicity in interpretation that goes far beyond the modest kinds of plurality and ambiguity admitted, say, by the New Critics. That demonstration begins in chapter 10 with the rejection of the idea that interpretation (or hermeneutics) is the central task of criticism. Instead, I argue that the central business of criticism lies in the attempt to ground, by further reference to the text, an initial response that normally takes the form of some basic set of judgments concerning not the (overall) meaning of the text, but rather the bearing of some part or parts of the text on some matter of human concern. In filling out this initial hunch, I draw support from two sources. First there is F. R. Leavis’s thought that the basic form of a critical judgment is This is so, isn’t it? – that is to say, that a critical judgment solicits support for a certain response to a text (or some part of it) while fully anticipating that the response one actually receives from another reader will have the form Yes, but – ! The suggestion implicit in this, that debate is the essential form of the critical enterprise, leads me to my second source of support: the critic and theorist Geoffrey Hartman’s reflections on a possible analogy between literary criticism and the procedures of Halakhic disputation in the evolution of Jewish law (Halakha).

Halakhic disputation proceeds according to recognized principles of interpretation. One of these is that, although a given text may reveal indefinitely many new aspects or bearings when applied to the changing vicissitudes of human life, any such aspect can be said to belong to the text, to have been there in it, awaiting discovery only if it can be shown to be consistent with the plain literal meaning of the words and sentences of the text: their p’shat.

Chapter 12 develops the analogy between Halakhic disputation and literary critical debate in such a way as to offer at least the outline of an account that is capable of squaring the indefinitely extensive fertility of critical responses to a text with the requirement that it be possible to construe literary criticism as an enterprise subject to objective rational constraint. Chapters 13 and 14 then endeavor to put flesh on the bones of this abstract schema by deploying it in the context of two actual, or real life, critical debates concerning, respectively, the interpretation of Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels, and the question of how far Laurence Sterne can be regarded as a paid-up member of the tradition of literary sentimentalism that his work did so much to bring into passing vogue.

These latter two chapters also make some headway with the perhaps even more difficult question of the accessibility to the reader of a real authorial persona. But that last issue continues to dominate the discussion throughout part 4. The book ends with a brief epilogue that – perhaps a little late for some readers – applies the conclusions of parts 2 and 3 to the problem of literary value, or to put that in terms it has very often assumed in recent years, of canon formation: of what is supposed to justify the existence of a so-called canon of works that are supposedly not merely good, but great. With that much of a sketch of what is to come before us, then, let us begin.

PART ONE

Getting Real

Culture . . . seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere.

MATTHEW ARNOLD, Culture and Anarchy

ONE

Humanism and Its Discontents

1. SOME PRESUPPOSITIONS OF LITERARY HUMANISM

The study of literature in universities – humane letters, as it was once quaintly known – has traditionally been held to belong, along with history, and for that matter with philosophy in its most central aspects, to the humanities. That term trades on the common distinction between the natural world, the world of birds and beasts, stone, stars, and the sea, and the human world, the world of politics, religious beliefs, sexual and familial practices, cultural institutions, beliefs, loves, hatreds, hopes, and fears. The former, we tend to think, is the province of the natural sciences; the latter is that of the humanities, including literature.

But that is not quite the end of the matter. The human world, so characterized, is also claimed as the field of study of the social sciences: economics, psychology, social psychology, sociology, and the rest. Hence any serious defense of the humanities as a worthwhile field of inquiry would presumably need to show that humane studies achieve results that the social sciences, for some reason, cannot achieve.

Let us call this, with the mixture of mildly comic pomposity and referential convenience not uncommon in academic philosophy, the Criterion of Independent Contribution (CIC), and formulate it as follows:

If the humanities, including the study of literature, are to be defended as an important part of university studies, then it needs to be shown that they contribute kinds of understanding of the human condition that are different from, and independent of, those contributed by the social sciences.

Can that criterion be met? The immediate problem is to define what is to be meant by understanding. In a scientific age what people are apt to have in mind when they speak of understanding is the kind of understanding offered by a successful scientific explanation. Admittedly, the kinds of explanation purveyed by different sciences are quite disparate, both in nature and quality. No one would claim, for instance, that even the more plausible explanations touted by the social sciences – by economics, for instance, or sociology – offer anything approaching either the mathematical rigor or the degree of observational confirmation displayed by the central parts of the physical sciences. Nevertheless, in common with the physical sciences the social sciences subscribe to two principles that might be deemed indispensable to the conduct of any inquiry claiming to contribute understanding of anything whatsoever, including the human condition: (1) logical rigor and (2) fidelity to the facts. The latter is coupled with the exclusion of subjectivity in all its forms – meaning by subjectivity any personal difference between one observer and another that might make a difference to the account each gives of the same phenomenon – from the processes of observation that establish what the facts, in fact, are.

Can the humanities claim to contribute kinds of understanding that satisfy these demands? History and philosophy alike can reasonably claim to do so. Both historians and philosophers oppose with admirable pertinacity colleagues who allow their personal preferences or ideological commitments to tempt them to play fast and loose with historical sources, or to pass swiftly and persuasively over the gaps in arguments whose essential shoddiness could hardly be disguised from a less indulgent because more impersonal scrutiny.

But what are we to say about the study of literature? The conviction that the study of literature can contribute special kinds of understanding of the human condition, different from those offered either by other components of the humanities or by the social sciences, is commonly defended by appeal to a variety of claims, of which the following are among the most common. The least that can be said in their favor is that they have all, at one time or another, received the considered assent of minds that are not obviously weaker or less distinguished than others of a less literary bent.

Literature can reveal to us profound truths concerning reality (or life, or the human condition or the human world).

Literature is creative in the sense that it is, in some important though not easily definable way, active in the creation or renovation of culture or civilization.

The value of literature, whether as illuminating or as constituting or reconstituting the human world, lies in its relation to language. Literary writing of the highest order directs, upon the language in which our everyday lives are conducted, a scrutiny more searching than is directed by any other form of writing, renewing and renovating the language of the tribe by constantly sharpening and refining our sense of its implications and possibilities.

Literary criticism at its best is an intellectually serious pursuit, involving processes of thought as comparable in logical rigor and productive of results as important as any pursued or achieved in other disciplines.

Imaginative literature of the highest order offers the reader a direct contact – unmediated by the discursive, constative procedures of history, biography, anthropology, sociology, or any study founded upon the painstaking collection of facts – with other, alien cultures; other ages; and other minds. In this sense the humanist believes, or wishes to believe, we are at least potentially, given sufficient scholarship and attention to the difficulties of the text, capable of being addressed by a past writer – Chaucer, Shakespeare, Balzac, Proust – in very much the same way as were his contemporaries, and of receiving from him perhaps more, but at least as much, and the same kind of things, as they received from him. The truth of this claim further entails what might be called the Doctrine of Universal Address: the idea that the potential audience for the great literature of any age of any culture is not limited to the people of that culture or age, but extends, problems of translation apart, to all mankind.

Imaginative literature of the highest order possesses value of a kind solely dependent upon – inhering solely in – its employment of language. Value of this kind is what makes the difference between run-of-the-mill literary writing and great or canonical literature.

Attachment to CIC and to its defense in terms of some or all of these six claims is, I suggest, central to the tradition of humanism in literary studies, that humanistic impulse that, according to James Seaton, has until recently has been central to literary criticism in the West.¹

Characterizing literary humanism in this very general way ignores, of course, the wide differences between humanistic critical movements and individual major critics. It ignores everything that divides, say, New Humanists from New Critics; Christian humanists like C. S. Lewis or T. S. Eliot from those like Trilling, Northrop Frye, Erich Auerbach, Henri Fluchère, Edmund Wilson, or M. H. Abrams, whose focus is cultural and historical rather than religious; or for that matter such major individual voices as F. R. Leavis, Trilling, Eliot, Frye, or Wilson, from one another. Nevertheless, I cannot think of any member of this distinguished, richly dissenting, loquaciously quarrelsome fraternity who would seriously dissent from CIC or from any of the six claims above. No doubt these are claims that are too basic to humanism to permit dissent: claims that constitute a bottom line, a last redoubt, of the humanistic enterprise.

That all of them are presently viewed with profound skepticism by many in the academy is a measure of the depth and seriousness of threat currently faced by an outlook that until recently, as Seaton says, has been central to literary studies. Recently, in this context, means since around 1960. Since then, attacks on literary humanism have come from a wide variety of sources – many, but by no means all, associated with the rather diverse collection of movements and voices loosely assembled under such labels as theory, critical theory, cultural criticism, or postmodernism. These attacks have called into question not only the intellectual credentials of this or that specific claim, including the six listed above, but also the basic intellectual viability of humanism as a general stance in literary studies.

2. THE CASE AGAINST HUMANISM

My intention in this book is to mount a defense of literary humanism that is couched in equally general and fundamental terms. I hope to show, among other things, that CIC and the six aforementioned claims, on a plausible interpretation of some of the main terms in which they are couched, come out not merely as intelligible but as broadly correct.

To any mind whose primary impulses are of sympathy toward kinds of scientific, philosophical, and political skepticism central to our culture, it must appear very difficult to see how any of them could possibly be either. It would seem that a string of apparently powerful a priori arguments, seemingly fatal to the intellectual credentials of the six claims above, offer themselves to any scientifically inclined critical intelligence willing to give the matter five minutes’ consideration. Take, for instance, the opening suggestion that imaginative literature is capable of revealing profound truths concerning the human condition. Only if it affirms truths, it would seem, can a body of writing claim to affirm important or profound ones. But the idea that affirmation is any part of the business of literature has long been contested. Now for the poet, he nothing affirmeth, said Sir Philip Sidney, and therefore never lieth.² More recently, Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen have devoted more than 450 pages to establishing that whatever the purpose of fiction and literature may be, it is not ‘truth telling’ in any straightforward sense.³

There is an obvious sense, of course, in which both Sidney and modern no truth theorists like Lamarque and Olsen are wrong. It is not that imaginative literature contains no indicative statements (no affirmations in Sidney’s antique phrase), nothing, in other words, that could conceivably qualify for truth or falsity. On the contrary, novels, plays, and poems are characteristically stuffed with indicative statements, some of which are true while others are false. The trouble is that the vast bulk of statements found between the covers of works of literature come out true or false not with respect to anything in the real world outside the work, but rather with respect to matters also to be found between its covers. Hamlet, through its characters, has much to say – to affirm – of Gertrude, Claudius, Yorick, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and the rest of the dramatis personae of the play; much also about the condition of the Denmark of the play; but nothing at all about any real person of flesh and blood or the real European state bearing that name.

Someone tender toward CIC and the six claims might protest that this is going altogether too fast and too far. Works of literature, he will urge, may indeed be largely occupied with what are in an obvious sense imaginary worlds. But that is not to say that the imaginary worlds of literature, however varied their nature, have nothing in common with the single real one. On the contrary, if the events of a fiction are to strike a reader as remotely plausible, and its characters as people who might conceivably have existed, its author must possess a comprehensive and penetrating knowledge of the real world that is common to him and his readers and must apply that knowledge in creating the imaginary world of his fiction.

This is sound enough. However, what follows from it is not that a successful fiction must deal in truths concerning the world outside the fiction, but only that it must possess verisimilitude. And verisimilitude is a far weaker condition of adequacy than truth, at least as far as any reasonably robust understanding of the latter term. It does not require that the fiction convey a literally accurate picture of character, life, reality, or the human condition, but merely that it conform to what its potential readers, or the bulk of them, imagine to be the case regarding those things. In short, it need not offer the reader reality itself; it need only offer him the plausible illusion of reality. The French critic Roland Barthes made the point forty years ago in a celebrated and frequently cited remark: Le baromètre de Flaubert ne dit finalement rien d’autre que ceci: je suis le réel.⁴

Barthes’s remark applies with particular force to those occasional cases in which some statement in a work of fiction does depend for its truth or falsity on circumstances in the world outside the fiction. Thus, famously, William Wordsworth buttresses the claim to truth of the opening statement of his poem Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798 – Five years have past; five summers, with the length / Of five long winters! And again I hear / These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs / With a soft inland murmur – with a footnote: The river is not affected by the tides a few miles above Tintern.⁵ Similarly Jules Maigret, Georges Simenon’s fictional detective, frequently goes about his inquiries in locatable, accurately described Parisian quarters and even buildings to the extent that each volume of a recent omnibus edition carries a section of photographs purporting, accurately enough, to depict "l’univers de Maigret.⁶ And there is no doubt, as Barthes suggests, that these extrafictional references do contribute to the reader’s sense that the bounds between the fictional worlds of the poem or the detective story and the everyday world of extra-fictional reality that he himself inhabits have mysteriously collapsed or evaporated. And yet, as Barthes’s title L’effet de réel" also suggests, that impression is no more than an effect. There is no disguising – or to put it more accurately, no way of doing more in this fashion than to disguise – the fact that in entering either the poem or the Maigret novel we leave the common world of everyday reality and enter instead worlds constituted, respectively, by the imaginations of Wordsworth or Simenon.

These admissions hardly seem consistent with the primary presumption of literary humanism: that literature can open our eyes to truths, accessible in no other way, about the human condition. To admit that the vast bulk of statements to be encountered in works of literature depend for their truth or falsity on matters that are internal to the fiction, and that in doing so those few that reach beyond the covers of the fiction contribute only an equally fictive verisimilitude, is surely to admit that reality – the way things stand in the extra-fictional world – has very little power to curb authorial license: to limit, or shape, that is, the author’s power to determine how things are to stand within the boundaries of the fictional world that it is his business to create. But if the objective nature of things as they stand in the extra-fictional world has so little power to influence the content of literature, and presumably even that of great literature, if there is such a thing, then it is very hard to see how literature, in return, can possess very much power to illuminate the nature of extraliterary reality. The most fundamental presumption of literary humanism, the conviction that literature has the power to reveal important insights, unobtainable in other ways, concerning the nature of the human condition, appears to totter.

The same doubts implicitly threaten claim 2. At issue here is the idea, originating in the nineteenth century with Matthew Arnold, but dear to Leavis, Trilling, and many other important twentieth-century critics in the Arnoldian tradition, that literature is creative in the sense of being causally active in the criticism and renovation of culture or, more grandly, of civilization or (a favorite term of Leavis’s) the human world. Arnold distinguished between a Philistinism ruled by ideas of economic advantage and political domination, and culture, the latter bent on seeing things as they are, and on drawing the human race towards a more complete, a more harmonious perfection.⁷ Culture, in Arnold’s terms, sets against what he sees as the Hebraism of the profoundly Protestant England of his day – its preference of earnestness of doing to delicacy and flexibility of thinking – the more active development of our Hellenising instincts, seeking ardently the intelligible law of things, and making a fresh stream of thought play about our stock notions and habits.⁸

Arnold’s main targets in Culture and Anarchy (1963) are political and religious. Nevertheless it seems clear that for him culture included literary culture and that creative literature is one of the sources from which issue the fresh streams of thought that are to play about our ‘stock notions and habits.’ In any case, one cannot open a book like Leavis’s The Living Principle, subtitled "English as a Discipline of Thought (1973), without encountering a direct application to literature of the Arnoldian contrast between culture and philistinism. All writers of major creative works are driven by the need to achieve a fuller and more penetrating consciousness of that to which we belong."⁹ The achievement of that more penetrating consciousness is not a function of emotion or feeling, but of thought: What we have to get recognition for is that major creative writers are concerned with thought, and such recognition entails the realization that the thought is of an essential kind.¹⁰ It is essential, among other reasons, because it acts as a corrective to the collections of practical, that is to say, largely economic and political, stock notions that, for Leavis as for Arnold, stand in need of the counterbalancing influence of culture.

Where there is an educated public the living principle will be a living presence and have some influence. . . . Statesmen of all parties will, in such a civilization, now and then find themselves recognizing that if they continue to talk and act and bureaucratize on the blank assumption that rescuing Britain from its plight and curing its malady is a matter of ensuring a good percentage growth-rate, fair distribution and industrial peace they will most certainly ensure a major human disaster.¹¹

So much for Arnold and Leavis. For that matter, an earlier book of my own defended, by argument and example, the idea that creative literature deploys forms of reflective analysis of human affairs worth dignifying with the name of thought and certainly capable of displaying flaws in plausible flights of theory.¹²

Without further support, however, none of these claims seem capable of resisting the arguments just advanced – arguments all the more persuasive for their simplicity and apparent absence of cultural pretension – for the vicious internality of fictional truth and the subordination, in literary fiction, of truth in any shape or form to the demands of verisimilitude. What they suggest is that, far from representing an attempt, in Leavis’s words, to achieve a fuller and more penetrating consciousness of human reality, creative fiction represents merely an attempt by the author to offer a persuasive reconstruction of life in terms of some combination of his own subjective wishes and preferences and those of the audience he is seeking to reach and influence.

The relative decline of literary humanism over the past three or four decades can be largely accounted for by a corresponding rise of skepticism of this type concerning the cognitive credentials of creative literature. In university departments of literary studies, such skepticism has expressed itself most obviously in the renewed popularity of refined and theoretically elaborated versions of the account of the political functions of high culture, including literary culture, associated in the 1950s and earlier, and in those days almost solely associated, with Marx and the official pro-Soviet Marxism of sections of the intellectual left of that remote era.

Two cultural-cum-political upheavals changed that. The first was a purely intellectual one: the rise of the New Left in the 1960s and after, which brought to the fore the profoundly modified, not to say dissident, Marxism of French writers such as Louis Althusser or Michel Foucault, whose work rapidly achieved a mass following among intellectuals of the Anglophone left. The second, of course, was the dramatic and, on the left at least, largely unanticipated collapse of Soviet Communism in 1991. That led in short order to the more or less complete departure of Marxism from the arena of practical politics, accompanied by the reorganization of intellectual Marxism, in increasingly subtle and rarefied forms, as a phenomenon confined almost exclusively to the university campus, that traditional home of lost causes.

A variety of theoretically elaborated remnants of the robust Marxism of my youth enter into the stance of the majority of literary-critical movements – including, confusingly, both consciously historicist ones, such as feminist, postcolonial, or Foucauldian criticism, and notionally anti- or ahistoricist ones, such as Lacanian or deconstructive criticism – into which high-intellectual Marxism has finally diffused itself. These remnants, however, generally include two of the most important elements of the traditional Marxist theory of culture.

The first is the belief – fatal, if true, to any humanist notion of literature as a culturally creative or redemptive force – that culture per se is simply not causally active: that the motor of political change is not anything individuals may think or feel, but something lying deeper, below the level of conscious apprehension. In Marx’s version of Marxism, that theoretical role is played by economics and the social structures underlying, and making possible, successive systems for the exploitation by one class of the surplus value created by another. The second element is the thought that the primary function of culture, including literary culture, in prerevolutionary societies is to disseminate false but persuasive visions of the human condition whose function is to promote belief in the legitimacy of one or another form of class exploitation.

The power of these two thoughts to dominate current debate on the future of the humanities is by no means limited to critical tendencies that would normally be thought of as having a connection, however slight, with traditional Marxism. One potent source of opposition to critical humanism having little to do, seemingly, with any version of historicism, postmodernism, or theory currently active in literary studies departments is scientism: the belief that only the natural sciences can provide us with anything worth calling knowledge or understanding.

A splendidly illustrative example was provided in 2011 by the British philosopher Gregory Currie in a Commentary piece published in the Times Literary Supplement titled Let’s Pretend and subtitled Literature and the Psychology Lab.¹³ Citing Trilling, Leavis, and Martha Nussbaum as culprits, Currie’s thesis is that literature makes claims about the mind – and in particular about the causality of action on the part of individuals – and that these claims, since they are advanced without reference to scientific studies of mental causality, are both in conflict with and, in terms of evidential support, undercut by the results of experimental psychology. He sees this as having to do with the overriding concern of literature with meaning: meaning is what literature thrives on. But work in experimental psychology, Currie thinks, shows that the real causality of action on the part of individuals often operates at levels not only below that of the refined subtleties of meaning dear to writers and critics, but also below the level of consciousness per se.

It turns out, for example, that mere exposure to the names of your friends primes the goal of helping. There is more of the same. If you’d like to feel better about other people, hold a cup of coffee in your hand; you will probably judge them to have warmer personalities that way.¹⁴

Such results, because they are supported by repeatable experiments, offer real knowledge, Currie argues: real insight into the causality of human action. By contrast, what literature offers is not the acquisition of knowledge, but a pretense of knowledge acquisition.

Kant said that in the realm of the aesthetic, things have merely the appearance of purpose – the form of purposiveness, as he characteristically put it. One way to develop this obscure notion is, as the Cornell philosopher Richard Miller suggests, to think of engagement with a work of art as learning-like, though its goal is not, in fact, learning. The goal is rather to enjoy the exercise of skills and faculties which the learning-like process deploys, a process which, unlike real learning, manages to be both cognitively demanding and secure from defeat by recalcitrant reality.¹⁵

I shall consider later what force attaches to Currie’s arguments and others of similar tendency. For the moment I wish to draw attention to the way they recycle, in yet another new form, the two elements of the Marxist theory of culture I mentioned earlier. The first is the idea that culture (or meaning or consciousness) offers us no grip on the real causality, the true reality, if you prefer, of human affairs. The latter was, for Marx, the province of dialectical materialism. For the postmodern theorists whom Currie seems to despise – and dismisses as showing little interest in what Trilling called ‘academic’ psychology (a label that manages to make the whole project sound hopelessly dreary) – it is the province of Foucauldian epistemology, Lacanian psychology, Derridean deconstruction, or some other body of theory occupying the same putatively privileged foundational role. For Currie, on the other hand, access to reality – that is to say, to real insight into the causes of human behavior – is the province of experimental psychology.

The second is the idea that since it is deprived in this way of any role in cognitive activity – or for Currie, following Miller, reduced to a mere pretense of cognitive activity – literature must serve some other, ulterior purpose. For Marx, as for most postmodern theorists (and, for that matter, for a figure as close to the foundations of Enlightenment modernity as John Locke), that purpose can only be malign: the fabrication and dissemination of illusion of one sort or another. Currie, at least, shares with Roland Barthes the idea that literature is a relatively harmless form of play, dangerous only when we confuse it with the recalcitrant reality confronted by the stern-souled denizens of the psychological laboratory.

My point is that reasoned opposition to critical humanism, to the traditional assumptions encapsulated in CIC and the six claims about the study of literature, extends far beyond the areas of academic discourse governed by postmodern theory, and that it derives much of its force from the recycling of a small number of very simple arguments, whose persuasiveness is a function of that very simplicity. Persuasive as they are, such antiliterary arguments often find lodging in deeply literary minds. The late Cambridge critic Frank Kermode, for instance, is the last man one would expect to find toying either with old-fashioned Marxist criticism or with the brand-new theoretical subtleties of postmodernism. But the above two, ultimately Marxist, patterns of argument – dialectical motifs, as it were – linking Currie’s scientistic antihumanism to the far subtler antihumanism of most current critical theory – can be found cropping up yet again in an essay by Kermode titled Literary Fiction and Reality, which appeared in Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending.¹⁶

Clearly, literature cannot contribute to an Arnoldian renovation of our stock notions about reality unless it is able to represent reality accurately. As Kermode sees it, Literary Fiction and Reality locates a simple but fundamental paradox that disables any form of literary fiction from serving the latter function. Real life – human reality – is contingent: chaotic and formless. Literature by its nature imposes narrative form on a reality that, equally intrinsically, lacks it. There is a kind of crisis in the relation between fiction and reality, the tension or dissonance between paradigmatic form and contingent reality.¹⁷ Narrative form is intrinsic to literary fiction, because it is the foundation of its power to offer consolation for the shabby contingency of real life. But that in itself means the paradox of form versus contingency is a permanent feature of the genre, which has always been threatened from one side from the need to mine contingency, and on the other by the need to console.¹⁸

We find here, once again, precisely the two motifs of antihumanist polemic whose successive metamorphoses we have been pursuing: on the one hand, a reductive argument for identifying creative literature as a source not of insight, but of illusion; on the other, the provision of an explanation, in the form of a more or less discreditable ulterior motive, for the otherwise surprising willingness of readers to acquiesce in the delusions of the text. In Kermode’s case, however, the intellectual content of the argument is provided not by Marxism nor by any of the versions of post-Marxist, psychoanalytic, structuralist, or post-structuralist theory beginning to take shape at the time, but by the Jean-Paul Sartre of La Nausée and L’Être et le Néant. These two early works of Sartre’s enshrine the two central principles that animate the version of existential phenomenology for which he is chiefly famous. The first is that reality, in the sense of the world external to human consciousness, or Dasein, as Sartre calls it (borrowing the term from Martin Heidegger, who meant something rather different by it), has, intrinsically, no meaning for consciousness. The second is that whatever meaning human beings may find in life is always and intrinsically the arbitrary product of some individual will, having no basis or justification in any nature of things outside the individual consciousness by whose mere free choice it comes to exist. To refuse to recognize the absolute autonomy of the individual will in the creation of meaning, by attempting to fabricate some fictitious justification in the nature of the natural world (natural in the sense of external to consciousness) for individual choices that are in fact entirely and absolutely gratuitous, is what Sartre calls bad faith (mauvaise foi). But bad faith cannot be permanently evaded or transcended, since living without it requires the recognition of both the radical meaninglessness of human existence and the factitiousness, the willed arbitrariness, of all our attempts to bestow meaning upon it.

Kermode takes this knot of ideas to capture not merely the reality of the human situation, but also, more specifically, the nature of the relationship between literary fiction and reality.

The world a novel makes (and La Nausée makes) is unlike the world of our common experience because it is created and because it has the potency of a humanly imaginative creation.¹⁹

It sounds good to say that the novelist is free; that, like the young man who asked Sartre whether he should join the Resistance or stay with his mother, he can be told You are free, therefore choose; that is to say, invent. . . . But there is in practice this difference between the young man as Sartre sees him: the young man will always be free in just this sense; whether he stays with his mother or not, his decision will not be relevant to his next decision. But the novelist is not like that; he is more Thomist than Sartrean, and every choice will limit the next. He has to collaborate with his novel: he grows in bad faith.²⁰

How are we to stem the power of literary fiction to delude us into accepting myth for reality? One might have supposed that Kermode’s argument must commit him to the straightforwardly antiliterary response No way! To be fair to him, that is not a line Kermode wishes to take, but the line he does take must seem hardly less dispiriting to anyone committed to the traditional assumptions of literary humanism. It is an answer that begins from the contrary presumptions of La Nausée.

This recognition, that form must not regress into myth, makes La Nausée something of a model of the conflicts in modern theory. How to do justice to a chaotic, viscously contingent reality, and yet redeem it? How to justify the fictive beginnings, crises, ends; the atavism of character, which we cannot prevent from growing, in Yeats’s figure, like ash on a burning stick?²¹

The answer, Kermode suggests, is only by keeping alive in the fiction itself the awareness of its own arbitrariness: its own contingency.

Finally there is no facticity, the novel is non-contingent. Otherwise it would be a babble of unforeshortened dialogue, a random stubbing of cigarettes, a collection of events without concordance. Unlike works which belong wholly to the land of fiction, La Nausée represents a world of which this might be said. Its form has elements of the eidetic, but upon such images are superimposed new images of contingency. Thus the inherited form is made, for a time, at any rate, acceptable to those whose life behind the screen of words has not entirely closed their eyes to the nature of the world. The form of La Nausée is an instructive dissonance between humanity and contingency; it discovers a new way of establishing a concord between the human mind and things as they are.²²

This coda contrives a satisfying close to Kermode’s lecture but leaves pressing questions unanswered. For a start, it ignores something that makes Sartre’s novel virtually unique as a work of fiction: the fact that it can scarcely be understood without a prior understanding of a work of philosophy – L’Être et le Néant – to which it stands in a symbiotic relationship that is so close as to make the two almost a single work. And even if we agree with Kermode that this curious circumstance should in no way impede us from regarding La Nausée as the paradigm of what a work of fiction should be, what is to become of all those books – the protective fictions, as Kermode puts it, "of the salauds and the nineteenth-century novelists" – that fail this austere test?²³ Something in the gorge rises at being asked to treat the bulk of past European and world literature as "the faking of cowards and salauds."²⁴ And, one feels obscurely, that something comes to more than a certain distaste for the tone of high-minded street abuse that Kermode here exhumes from the fetid atmosphere of well-repressed guilt and competitive self-justification that characterized French intellectual polemic in the years immediately following the Second World War.

But suppose we do have to accept Kermode’s doubts as well founded. Cannot something still be done for the humanist by developing the suggestion advanced in claim 3: the suggestion that the power of literature to question and renovate our self-understanding is exercised through its relationship not to the everyday facts of our lives, but to the common language through which alone, at any point in the historical development of culture, people must articulate their sense of what, precisely, the facts of their lives are? Writers and critics, after all, have always held their primary business to lie with the manipulation of words rather than with the representation of things as they are. And the reflections of writers upon their craft are riddled with the further suggestion, as in the following familiar lines of Wallace Stevens, that the mere manipulation of words can change the way things are.

The man bent over his guitar,

A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar.

You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are

Are changed upon the blue guitar."²⁵

Harold Bloom, again, playing the same guitar, shifts with typical agility between Shakespeare’s ability to shape language and the ability of language so shaped to shape us:

It is not an illusion that readers (and playgoers) find more vitality both in Shakespeare’s words and in the characters who speak them than in any other author, perhaps in all other authors put together. Early modern English was shaped by Shakespeare; the Oxford English Dictionary is made in his image. Later modern human beings are still being shaped by Shakespeare, not as Englishmen, or as American women, but in modes increasingly post-national and post-gender.²⁶

And here, finally, is T. S. Eliot, doubting his own ability to pull off the trick Bloom so cheerfully ascribes to the Bard of Avon, and Stevens to the blue guitarist:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years –

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres

Trying to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it.²⁷

Here in three versions we have at least the bones of a humanistic response to the pessimism of Kermode, Currie, and many others concerning the power of literature to accurately represent the existing contents of the world, without the distortions of willful or consoling fantasy and wishful thinking. The thrust of that reply (startling in the parallel it presents to the early remark of Marx’s that recurs as his epitaph in Highgate Cemetery: Philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it) is that the business of creative literature is not to represent the contents of the world as they exist but – merely, it seems, through the manipulation of words, although the manipulation of words seen as a serious and bitterly demanding pursuit – to change them.

At the same time, I can think of at least two telling ripostes to the idea that any very persuasive defense of CIC and the six claims can be mounted in terms of the notion of the manipulation of meaning as, potentially at least, creative. The first queries the humanist’s – Stevens’s, for instance – cavalier attitude to things as they are: one cannot aspire to change things as they are unless one understands them. One cannot claim to understand them unless one can achieve an adequate representation of them, and, as earlier arguments have powerfully suggested, the representations of things as they are offered by creative literature are not to be trusted.

The second antihumanist riposte cuts rather deeper and breaks new ground, ground richly cultivated over the past half century by a variety of antihumanist expeditions into strange seas of French Theory.²⁸ It focuses on the obvious fact that for creative literature the central phenomenon of language, of words – the phenomenon that obsesses both creative writers and critics – is meaning. Meaning, as Gregory Currie observes, is what literature thrives on.²⁹

Currie’s scientistic short way of putting a stop to all that is to deny that meaning, and for that matter consciousness in general, has much to do with the real springs of psychological causality. That argument deserves an answer, and it receives one in chapters 3–5 and subsequently. But it is not, as Currie grants,³⁰ an argument that has figured very largely in the literary-theoretical debates of the past half century. Those debates have mainly focused on a set of problems raised for literary humanism by what I shall call (at the cost, I fear, of more of the neologismcum-shorth and beloved of academic philosophers) the Dual Source Account (DSA) of meaning.

The Dual Source Account holds that meaning must have its source either internally or externally to language. That is to say, the meaning of a linguistic expression EL1 either arises (is what it is) by virtue of a relationship between EL1 and some set of other linguistic expressions ELn . . . ELm, or it arises by virtue of a relationship between it and something altogether external to language. An example of the former sort of relationship would be dictionary definition: the sort of relationship that subsists between, say, the term bachelor and the predicate unmarried man. An instance of the latter might be ostensive definition: the act of explaining the meaning of a term such as red or bird by associating the first with the color of a tomato or the second with the feathered things flying or hopping across the garden.

It is a curious and important fact about the Dual Source Account that versions of it lie at the roots of both the empiricist-cum-analytic tradition of philosophical speculation about language and knowledge, whose modern history begins with Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, and of the Continental tradition, whose history runs by way of G.W.F. Hegel, Nietzsche, and Edmund Husserl, and whose more recent representatives include Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and virtually all the other major figures of postmodern theory. The Dual Source Account is implicit, for instance, in Bertrand Russell’s early distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description, first adequately stated in The Problems of Philosophy (1912). Russell argues, in effect, that we can be said to understand a description only to the extent that the referring expressions in it can be explicated in terms of simpler expressions and ultimately in terms of expressions whose meaning is simply some object or property with which we are or might be acquainted. He formulates as follows the fundamental intuition underlying this argument: "The fundamental principle in the analysis of propositions containing descriptions is this: Every proposition which we can understand must be composed wholly of constituents with which we are acquainted."³¹

This principle, of the centrality of acquaintance to understanding and so to meaning, remained a pivotal position in Russell’s thought. Thirty years later we find him restating it as follows: In later life, when we learn the meaning of a new word, we usually do so through the dictionary, that is to say, by a definition in terms of which we already know the meaning. But since the dictionary defines words by means of other words, there must be some words of which we know the meaning without verbal definition.³²

This latter argument, in its chaste simplicity, initially strikes one as extraordinarily persuasive – indeed, unanswerable. But its conclusion – that there must be some words of which we know the meaning without verbal definition –is volcanic in its consequences for our thinking about language and meaning. It implies that the meaning of a word is something we can come to know without reference to any other element of language and hence by reference only to things altogether outside language. That implies, in turn, that the meaning of at least some words must be capable of being exhibited only and merely by setting the word in association with some sensory object or quality. Russell says as much in his Lectures on Logical Atomism (1918): The word ‘red’ can only be understood through acquaintance with the object [presumably, with something exhibiting that color].³³ But that, in turn, implies that the object thus indicated is the meaning of the word – is, in short, a meaning.

Ludwig Wittgenstein makes this explicit in Proposition 3.203 of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921),³⁴ the work that sprang from his early and close association with Russell: A name means an object. The object is its meaning. If this is right, then we have here an extreme form of what I am calling the Dual Source Account. The most fundamental meanings – those we must understand if we are to understand any linguistic expression – cannot arise internally to language, because they are not linguistic entities at all, but rather the simpler constituents of the world as revealed to our senses: colors, shapes, sensations of hardness or resistance, or whatever. At the most fundamental level, in short, meaning stands altogether outside language. Meaning, it is true, can arise within language, through verbal definition. But verbal definitions must ultimately ground out in terms whose meanings stand outside language and are in no sense linguistic constructs, but rather simple components of reality as we experience it.

Persuasive as this Russellian-cum-Tractarian analysis is, its consequences for any attempt to defend creative writing are devastating. If Russell and the Tractarian Wittgenstein are right in their thinking, language is a device for – correctly or incorrectly – representing the way things stand in the world: things as they are, in the words of Stevens’s shearsman. There are only two types of meaning in language. First, there are meanings external to language – that is to say, the meanings offered to inspection by the simple sensory objects that give sense to the most fundamental or basic expressions of a language merely by being conventionally associated with those expressions. Second, there are meanings internal to language – the sort constituted by definitional elaboration of the