Reading for Wonder: Ecology, Ethics, Enchantment

By Glenn Willmott

In a world awash in awesome, sensual technological experiences, wonder has diverse powers, including awakening us to unexpected ecological intimacies and entanglements.  Yet this deeply felt experience—at once cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical—has been dangerously neglected in our cultural education.  In order to cultivate the imaginative empathy and caution this feeling evokes, we need to teach ourselves and others to read for wonder.  This book begins by unfolding the nature and artifice of wonder as a human capacity and as a fabricated experience.  Ranging across poetry, foodstuffs, movies, tropical islands, wonder cabinets, apes, abstract painting, penguins and more, Reading for Wonder offers an anatomy of wonder in transmedia poetics, then explores its ethical power and political risks from early modern times to the present day.  To save ourselves and the teeming life of our planet, indeed to flourish, we must liberate wonder from ideologies of enchantment and disenchantment, understand its workings and their ethical ambivalence, and give it a clear language and voice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Dec 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9783319700403

Book preview

© The Author(s) 2018

Glenn WillmottReading for WonderLiteratures, Cultures, and the Environmenthttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70040-3_1

1. Introduction: Liberating Wonder

Glenn Willmott¹ 

(1)

Department of English, Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength. Rachel Carson , a marine biologist, expressed this wish in Help Your Child to Wonder, an unconventional how-to article for Woman’s Home Companion in 1956 (Carson 1965, 42–3). This was at the height of her celebrity career as a natural history writer, at the very moment she was turning to a more direct conservation politics and the writing of Silent Spring, her 1962 book on pesticides and the industrial degradation of the environment that would help turn environmentalism into a widespread movement. The importance of wonder, and the help we might need to experience it, she continued to think urgent to these politics. Without wonder at nature, she asked, why would we care about it? And if we fail to care, insulated in a solipsistic dream of human power, we undermine ourselves: The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, she said, the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race (Cafaro 2011). When she died in 1964 she was planning to expand the earlier article into her next book, to be called A Sense of Wonder. No doubt environmentalists since Carson have felt the same ethical urgency of wonder: not as mere logicians or moralists dutifully trundling their principles into nonhuman worlds, but as awed nature enthusiasts who know enchantment to be an inspiring, ethical force.¹

Not only does nature at large—the wild and various otherness of the cosmos—both need and inspire our wonder. Philosophers have argued that wonder is a cornerstone, too, in our intellectual openness to and empathic appreciation of human differences; as such, it may even be important to good citizenship.² Jane Bennett has given this ethical argument its broadest expression by arguing that we need to love life in order to care about anything, and that a disenchanted world ranges its forces against such affective attachments (2001, 4). The stakes are set high, then, for how our world understands wonder. But is it, after all, so very hard to find or to cultivate? If Bennett is right, such enchantment is not only all around us in the natural world, but in our manufactured ones as well—including the world of capitalist commodities and their marketing (114, 128). If that is so, then are we bereft of wonder or are we saturated by it? There is little consensus to be found when it comes to the fate or power of modern wonder. Is it everywhere lost or suppressed? Or does it thrive around us, ignored by scholarly treatises? In either case, what good does it do, or what ill? The answers to these questions depend on pinning down what we mean when we talk about wonder. Its volatility and contradictions, indeed its risks, are problems I will explore in subsequent chapters as I give shape to the need to cultivate reading for wonder in literature and life. The design and manufacturing of wonder to be read, not merely happened upon, are the subject of this book.

Elusive Wonder

The need for a wonder that eludes us, the need to produce wonder, is the effect of an experience of disenchantment that is also a historical artefact. Disenchantment names a set of feelings produced by changes in modern society that cannot be dispelled as the mere gloomy projection of an antimodernist imagination. And the culture industry, from high to low, has not been slow to offer re-enchantments. Nowhere is this promise more iconic than in Disney magic. Later in this book, I will distinguish such magic from wonder. Yet Disney movies must have got something right, I think, because they get away with telling the same story over and over again: a legion of dully repetitive, dull-minded cartoon fathers and mothers at first fail to understand their soaring, imaginative, open-hearted cartoon children, then are at last reformed by them. What feels right in all that is simply the persistent, ineradicable difficulty of wonder—not, that is to say, the abject Disney parent who conveniently localizes this difficulty, ready for easy reform, but rather the way this human type keeps popping up again, never any wiser, as do audiences for it young and old, requiring a timeless march of exceptional cartoon children to recall or repair their sense of awe and enchantment. Disney seems to know that we are haunted by this difficulty: a fear of having forgotten or of not having learned yet how to see our world anew, how to reveal in it new fascinations and purposes, and how to make unexpected allies to pursue them. So Disney enchants, and exhorts us to be enchanted. It seems there is no way around it: either we are disenchanted, or we are haunted by a fear of disenchantment, which is not much better.

Literary scholarship seems driven by the same fear of disenchantment and difficulty of wonder. Whether innovative or merely iterative, it never tires of promoting strikingly new perceptions, purposes, and affiliations it discovers in its texts, of claiming to open doors that have been shut from blindness or neglect. In this, we surely do not simply look for bare novelty, or strict social purpose. It goes beyond wanting to be convincing or convinced: almost shamefully, I think, because it is not what we are supposed to be doing—do we not also hope to enchant others, or be enchanted ourselves, with something strangely arresting in words and ideas? So it is that across the culture industries, and perhaps archetypally in tourism, the promise of wonder is today an experience less of spontaneous enchantments than of anticipatory re-enchantments, uniquely modern in temperament. For better or worse, the book you are reading unabashedly shares in these feelings and aims.

When I personally think of wonder, however, I am less likely to recall the last scholarly article I read (or, to satisfy Aristotle, the last tragedy I attended) than the last ice cream I lingered over. The age of calculating capitalist industrialism may have disenchanted me, as Max Weber ’s notorious, darkly spellbinding words proclaim, but it has also made possible, for example, the industrial apotheosis of a food that is almost unthinkably strange and pleasurable: cow’s milk, sometimes chicken eggs, some form of sugar, tormented together until they transform into a unified, soft, smooth solid. The taste is wonderful, and not without a cognitive aura: pleasure with a mix-in of awe. How peculiar that we eat it frozen, like virtually nothing else. In The Emperor of Ice-Cream, a poem he once declared his favorite , Wallace Stevens thought this sublimely artificial, darkly laborious, ephemerally pleasurable food an image of life itself, which is to say, of life’s mortal beauties and powers: The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream (Stevens 1997, 50). In 1922 he could describe ice cream being made by hand for immediate enjoyment; he could not foresee that nearly a hundred years later, ice cream would be mass produced from products we hardly understand, in factories most of us never see, cross vast distances in mobile mechanical freezers, and be stored indefinitely in glowing, rimed recesses in our homes. Its peculiar sovereignty and wonder, along with that of the poem, change and deepen. While ice cream is not normally reflected upon this way, I believe that we can feel it. It is not the same feeling I get from Disney magic , though they are kindred enchantments, both waking me up to my world in an unexpected way, yet both difficult to sustain in that very world. Ice cream, like comics or the personification of animal s , resists being taken seriously by a modern idea of adulthood. These all bear the mark of childish things, of indulgences. So does wonder. Disney , of course, knows that too.

Primitivist Wonder

How is it that wonder has fallen among the lost illusions and unserious intensities of a grown-up world, of a disenchanted maturity that takes on its duties in modern life? This idea of disenchantment has various roots, but in the midst of the Great War, it found its most famous expression in Max Weber’s university address to youth choosing their adult careers. In the world in which they were preparing to take their part, he said, there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play… one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service.³ Such disenchantment risks turning social life into a grim iron cage of rationalized efficiency. When Alice finds herself grown up in Wonderland, it is in a constrictive, blandly domestic room from which there seemed to be no sort of chance of her ever getting out (Carroll 1960, 58–9; see Fig. 1.1). Being trapped there prompts Alice to recall her own disenchantment, even as a child: When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! Wonderland enchants by balefully literalizing a disenchanted growing up, but also by undoing its inevitability. ‘I’m grown up now,’ she added in a sorrowful tone: ‘at least there’s no room to grow up any more here,’ she suddenly asserts, allowing that maturity may take other, unforeseen paths in Wonderland. It is this feeling of re-enchantment rather than enchantment, one unmoored from dependable faiths and forms, to which Alice offers the guidance of a modern child.

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Fig. 1.1

Illustration by John Tenniel from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865

Disenchantment and re-enchantment are flipsides of each other. Rita Felski observes that while Weber sees the world as rationalized in the sense of being robbed of transcendental meaning, he is far from claiming that our engagement with that world is ruled by the iron law of logic, and we are still prone to experiences of enchantment (2008, 59). Do we not, indeed , all the more pursue them? Are we not compelled to invent them? The increasing abstraction of visual art, says Fredric Jameson, proves not only to express the abstraction of daily life into capitalist rationalized functions and values, that is, as the abstraction of a pure experience of aesthetic perception from content and situation (1981, 236–7). For in so doing, modernist art also turns its cage inside out:

It also constitutes a Utopian compensation for everything lost in the process of the development of capitalism—the place of quality in an increasingly quantified world, the place of the archaic and of feeling amid the desacralization of the market system, the place of sheer colour and intensity within the greyness of measurable extension and geometrical abstraction.

Modernist abstraction is both a confined symptom of a disenchanted cultural logic and its liberatory re-enchantment. This emerges from a study of Joseph Conrad’s literary impressionism, in particular the story of a youth, Jim, rather different from Alice yet no less vulnerable to following rabbit holes into unsuspected worlds.

It is tempting to loiter among these modernist children and their successors to see where they take us. But I will only ask why these guides are children—or, more broadly, why modern wonder is infantilized or otherwise thought primitive (Weber’s savage, Jameson’s archaic). This may have a developmental psychology explanation in the association of wonder with novel experiences, since those play such a large role in childhood; and to some extent it must also have roots in Romanticism , which gave us the child as the paradigm for a renewed vision (Vasalou 2015, 88, 113). I would like to sketch out, in addition to these, three core ideological reasons for this primitivism, which have to do with ideas of efficient reason, language, and value: the irrational, the ineffable, and the futile.

Irrational

Wonder is awash in feeling and in aesthetic apprehension. To be wonder struck is to arrest thought, to yield oneself, a kind of immersion . Such feelings are inimical to expectations that critical reason operate autonomously, with objective distance, unswayed by emotion and sensation. True, critical thought and wonder were not always so distinct. Aristotle followed Plato in recognizing wonder as the origin of the pursuit of knowledge, and had no trouble seeing wonder in literature as an experience linking knowledge with empathy.⁴ Yet even Aristotle urged philosophy toward what Mary-Jane Rubenstein describes as the long, progressive eclipse of wonder from reasoning thought that led to modern philosophy’s call to do away with wonder, its comprehensive eradication being a precondition for the certainty, self-mastery, and mastery of others that characterizes the thinker of clear and distinct ideas (2008, 16). Even when philosophers have turned their ratiocinations upon emotions as a topic, wonder has eluded them, not behaving or submitting to their analytic terms and measures (Vasalou 2015, 11–19).

Literary scholars have similarly degraded or evaded wonder, despite what one might think its special pertinence to imaginative arts:

We need only think of a history of feminist critiques of visual pleasure and the male gaze, Marxist analyses of aesthetic ideology and commodity fetishism, the poststructuralist idiom of suspicion and interrogation, New Historicist indictments of power and containment. Critics seek to go behind the scenes, to expose the clay feet of idols or to smash them to pieces, to prove that beautiful images serve as a screen for perfidious political realities. Enchantment, in this sense, is the antithesis and enemy of criticism. (Felski 2008, 56)

One might complain that we have more optimistic goals, but Felski would still be right, because whether we dig for justice or for perfidy in cultural artefacts, we are trained to use the same tools. Thus are the effects of wonder as occluded in the discourses of literary critical thinking as in those of philosophy. Simply, wonder is uncritical: either antithetical or irrelevant to analytic thought. Small surprise, then, that this uncritical faculty will be marked as childlike or savage: ineradicable, primal, perhaps charming, yet undeveloped, unrealistic, and intellectually immature. To find a home for modern wonder, we have gone to images of children and peoples imagined to be irrational.

Ineffable

We might also find wonder childish when its experience resists language. Like a child reminded to use her words, the reader who thinks wow when the Pequod sinks unexpectedly into the Pacific may have a hard time explaining that response. Sophia Vasalou , the philosopher who has immersed herself in the most capacious and unsettled range of ideas and histories of wonder, admits that we may find ourselves stumped for words when we reach out to identify the tissue of judgments and beliefs that form its rational core (2015, 18). Is wonder inarticulate, hence alien to analytic thought? This is indeed what Simon Gikandi felt when he reflected on a literary education steeped in Marxist and semiotic discourses, recently confronted by the critique of disenchantment:

Why did a poetics of wonder and a phenomenology of enchantment powerfully challenge the semantics of literature? For one, they called attention to the ability of works of art to affirm their pure, almost wordless presence; instead of processing the literary experience through the sieve of thought, affective approaches took objects out of the realm of meaning and the conduit of practice…. Having power with no reference to anything but themselves, such objects create what Peter de Bolla called mutism, generating feelings in a state of inarticulacy. (Gikandi 2012, 14)

In the editorial column from which they are drawn, Gikandi’s words do not aim to tar all wonder with a disenchanted brush, but to retrace a personal journey in critical thinking in which its risks come to light. For him, those risks are intellectually regressive. A feeling that wonder’s proximity to mutism is regressive is hardly unique to Gikandi. It belongs to a long history of thinking about persons on the edges of normative society. Both young children and peoples that racism has infantilized have long been heard as mute or inarticulate (the Hollywood Indian’s ugh!), as wordless or as babblers. Hence either kind of primitivism, the exotic or the infantile, can offer a sanctuary for enchantments, literary or otherwise, that are excluded from modern ways of knowing.

Futile

Wonder’s felt distance from rational discourse and resistance to language are entangled with another problem on the terrain of regression: its purposelessness. Martha Nussbaum calls it the least end-directed of emotional states (2001, 53–55). If modernity approves of a productive individual life, pursuing its values and shaping its world, then what can it affirm about an experience with whose essential non-instrumentality—weakly connected to action and unconnected to self-referential goals and plans (Vasalou 2015, 16)—philosophers continue to struggle? Wonder seems to live in a world apart, as in the languid valley in which Auden finds poetry happening, but makes nothing else happen. It is as if wonder has not grown up, has not joined the world of productive maturity. And we revel in this very defiance of efficient and productive action in Alice and in her Wonderland . Indeed, modern literature that is overtly concerned with wonder flourishes either in children’s and youth literature or in fantasy and science fiction genres. Until very recently, the literary institution—its publishing imprints, review networks, and academic usages—has largely segregated these forms of writing from its canon, hence from academic seriousness and productivity. Critical thinking and ironic feeling, which are the uncompromising axes of modern sophistication, are wary of the shamelessly wondrous.

Recovering Wonder

In briefly touching on the experience of wonder in relation to critical thought, language, and ethics, I have tried to illustrate how wonder has—under the spell of a disenchanted modernity—found itself consigned to the outlands of the infantile and the primitive. So wonder needs rescuing. Wait a minute, I hear someone say (perhaps my son, watching the latest Marvel movie), these outlands are only beyond the pale of the serious, of academic value and work ethics, not of culture at large. And culture is much larger. Modern capitalist societies pursue , promote, and embrace an endless variety of escapes from their own iron cages—especially if those escapes provide therapeutic or consumer fuel to push forward their productivity. Work hard, play hard. And wonder, along with much considered childish, is surely thriving and even celebrated. Indeed, the infantilization of American public culture, and of media entertainment culture more widely, today circulates as a familiar meme. This infantilization was first portrayed in the Eloi imagined by H. G. Wells , those childlike, leisured speciations of the human who provided, with the industrious Morlocks, a dystopian formula for the modern split personality—consumer as child/worker as machine—articulated by the Time Traveller, his voice recasting maturity as a nameless, mercurial temperament, the sovereign as that toggles between the two. Hence we circle back to the Disney universe and its vacillating psychodrama of the child within, perpetually suppressed then freed; the child’s wonder and other enchantments, perpetually outgrown then rekindled. Yet if wonder is one of the stock items of entertainment society, it is unlikely to be what Rachel Carson or Luce Irigaray felt we especially needed to cultivate for a more just world.

In order to recover that utopian sense of wonder, I suggest the first step is to view wonder as the entertainment industry does, as a kind of artefact. In the preceding pages, I have held off opening the black box of what wonder is, accepting the fuzzy cluster of meanings it suggests, while exploring its cultural situation today as a kind of regressive enchantment, disconnected from the social and environmental justice programs envisioned for it. But if we want to cultivate wonder, then we must not only inspire wonder in actual pine trees, protons, and persons—in the material world outside the imagined ones of entertainment—we must reveal its production and power in heterodox acts of imagination as well, in our stories, songs, and myriad arts. In Carson’s disenchanted language quoted earlier, artificial means the historical condition of things built without regard to human and ecological welfare. My usage is not so restrictive. Many acts of literature are machines for wonder, and I think we need to understand, admire, and teach how they work as such, as opposed to exposing only ideological right and wrong, conflicted perspectives, or critical questioning. The latter are dead letters without the empathy and modesty to address them to the elusive dignity of our own and other lives. An exploded diagram of the wonder machine as a fabricated experience will help to account for its ethical malleability and its ambiguous association with feelings of care. What moving parts make it up? What parts may be jammed or missing altogether? We need to read into wonder, to expose how we both produce it and curtail its feelings and powers. Not to demystify or disenchant it, but to learn its real magic.

What This Book Sets Out to Do

In the next chapter , Finding Wonder, I will seek a schematic rather than fixed definition of wonder in general, identifying its repertoire of parts and actions, and paying attention to their ambivalences and vulnerabilities. I will consider wonder to be a type of cognitive and emotional event born of both innate capacities and historical conditions. My starting points reach back to Aristotle’s profound, if perplexing, accounts of wonder as conducive to knowledge or to ignorance, to pity or to fear. I will ask: Can wonder happen for any observer, or for any object, and under what conditions? How does wonder combine knowledge and affect? How is wonder contingent upon the experience of time and age? If wonder involves empathy, how would that lead to compassion? How is it that wonder may suspend ethical motivations yet have ethical effects? What is experimental psychology beginning to reveal about the claims for wonder coming from the humanities? What are wonder’s limitations and risks? Why is it right to say we need more of it?

The foregoing problems are about an experience we might recognize when poring over an anthill, reading about beehives, witnessing the fate of Oedipus , or being immersed in Alice’s Wonderland . But anthills and beehives are real and Wonderland is not. Oedipus was perhaps real, but if so, Sophocles’s evocation of him certainly mixes fact with fiction. The truth value of knowledge we gain from wonder is of ambiguous value when wonder is deliberately fabricated and so unable ultimately to escape, when it does not embrace, the ignorance, motives, and prejudices of its authors, time, and place. Ambiguous, too, are its ethical implications. Ancient philosophy acknowledged the revelatory power of wonder, but it also warned of its appropriation for deceit. Therefore the subsequent chapter, Making Wonder, narrows in on the practical question that drives this book: how (or how not) to cultivate wonder by evoking it textually, in imaginary experience. Here I explore the poetics of wonder and its political valences. What have literature and the arts had to say about the crafting of wonder and its formal means? What are the implications of fictive wonder for knowledge and the ethical claims made for it, saturated, as wonder must be, in ideology and invention? How do readers, viewers, or audiences contribute to the making of wonder? Can an ethically indeterminate, fictive wonder be progressive? In short, how do we come back to the ordinary world from Wonderland?

Confronted by these problems, a look back to Aristotle proves remarkably useful. So Making Wonder begins with Aristotle’s discussion of wonder as a prescriptive element in his Poetics, and draws on the account of wonder in Finding Wonder to bridge the gap between Aristotle’s historical context (with his emphasis on tragic drama) and the present, and to extend the account of a poetics of wonder beyond narrative form. Relevant aspects of Aristotelian poetics include mimesis, unity, scale, plot or action, character, reversal, recognition, miasma, hamartia, catharsis, pity, and fear. All of these may usefully be extended beyond Aristotle’s attention to tragedy , in order to see how wonder in other genres and media may be constructed to produce an imagined encounter—directly via a fictive world, or indirectly via a fictive creature—with an unfamiliar or defamiliarized ecology. From this starting point in genre, I will abstract a list of formal elements of wonder as a poetic mode. I will look at how these work in a range of texts in literary and visual media, paying increasing attention to political and ecological implications.

Knowledge, empathy, compassion, repulsion, ethics, ideology, entertainment, temporality, nonhuman nature, human artifice, modernity, justice, poetics… wonder will unravel in many directions, and any attempt to tie its threads into a grand unified theory would be folly. But we may trace how these threads weave together in practice. In the penultimate chapter, Using Wonder, I will look at specific genres and motifs across media as they are rooted in history. This reading is inspired by Aaron Jaffe’s historically inflected study of modern things at large, itself an unprecedented exercise in a scholarly poetics of wonder. My aim is to come closer to understanding the design for wonder as an event. In my discussion of motifs, for example, I divide wonder into two broad categories of experience (responses to wondrous places and to wondrous beings) in order to pick apart the design for wonder as a transformative encounter. In Merian C. Cooper’s 1933 blockbuster King Kong, how are nature and social history—including politics of gender and race—entangled in the making of wonder? Or in Lord Byron’s 1823 verse drama of the mutiny on the Bounty and its utopian aspirations, The Island, how may conservative conditions and revolutionary ambitions for the production of wonder be historically understood? I aim to demonstrate how a responsible reading for wonder must undertake a symptomatic criticism that marks the poetic limits of affect and ideology, while also going beyond such readings in order to learn from the unfinished inferences of worlds—possible ecologies—that poetic wonder affords.

I have said that this book springs from a need to rescue wonder from the degradation and obsolescence to which, respectively, a soberly disenchanted tradition of critique and a modern consumerist structure of feeling have abandoned it. In the case studies of Using Wonder, conditions of historical modernity will make themselves felt, but will not be abstracted in order to question directly—because it is a large question—the relationship between today’s commodity-driven culture industry and wonder. A view of this industry as affording valuable enchantments is asserted in Jane Bennett’s influential work. Because Bennett identifies enchantment with wonder, and because her work is influential in ecocriticism, it will be important in the final chapter, my Conclusion, both to affirm the common vision and aims of this study, and also to look more directly at the experience of enchantment in modern commercial and media culture, ultimately to part ways with her view of it.

I will argue that a liberating poetics of wonder needs to be distinguished from those of magic and awe among the enchantments or re-enchantments of mass-media and post-secular modernity—and that such wonder, pace Bennett, is typically compatible with commodity culture only in a severely truncated form. Disenchantment is a discourse that straddles liberal capitalist culture and its traditions of critique, as these find grounds both in the powerful rationalist economism illuminated by Max Weber and in the vertiginous transcendental homelessness affirmed by Georg Lukács . This double disenchantment has called forth an enduring desire for enchantment, but one more readily expressed in what may be designated awe as opposed to wonder—that is, in the affirmation of a sublime, transcending order that manages ethical uncertainty, provides scripted meaning and purpose, and is equally alluring whether solicited by the light-heartedness of a Disney film, by the dead seriousness of the Islamic State, or by the immersive solipsism of Call of Duty. To struggle free of both of these