Context
All That You Know Not to Be Is Utterly Real, Part I
Curtis White
The lowest common
denominator question in relation to the Great Books debate, asked with
a whining impatience by a mostly nonexistent public (which is to say
the terminally "not interested" public, the severe and profoundly
distracted public), is, "Are the Great Books great or not?" But this,
of course, is a television question. This is what Kathy would have
asked Regis or Oprah asks her adoring audience, wide-eyed with
sincerity. This is, in short, the sort of thing that inquiring minds
want to know. Nonetheless, I for one am happy to answer that, yes, the
great works were and are great, whatever that means, and it means very
little, a good old-fashioned tautology is what it is, just the sort of
tautology that made this country great. But, as we should know,
there is another question that needs to be asked, a question that takes
us beyond tautology. The question is: of what does the greatness of the
great works consist? Hearing this question, you can feel North
America’s inquiring minds go, "Uh-oh," in anticipation that this is the
sort of question that opens the door to just the people they don’t want
to hear from, who also happen to be just the people whose professional
responsibility it is to answer the question: professors. For this is
not only an aesthetic question, it is an epistemological question. How
do we know what we think we know about the beautiful and the great?
Uh-oh, indeed. And yet the question "of what does the greatness
of the great works consist?" is exactly the right question, and if the
deconstructive critical lineage has had no other positive contributions
to make to contemporary thought (and I think it has had many), it has
posed this fundamental aesthetic/epistemological question and fairly
warned, "Do not answer with a tautology, or through vaporous
metaphysics, or the wish fulfillment of ideology." Frankly, there have
not been many responses worthy of the deconstructive challenge,
although there are several that should be available to us (and I’ll
come to that). It is in part because of the vacuum created by the
thoroughness of deconstruction’s critique of aesthetic metaphysics that
those of what Harold Bloom calls the School of Resentment have had the
opportunity to de-aestheticize literary criticism and, worse yet, de
aestheticize our expectations of literary texts. It’s as if we’re being
told, "If you can’t tell me why the aesthetic should matter without
revealing yourself as hopelessly metaphysical or hopelessly Republican,
I sure as hell can tell you why sexism, racism, homophobia and
imperialism matter." The unhappy consequence of this argument, for
those of us who think that art should matter, is the conclusion that
the least important aspect of a work of art is precisely its
artfulness. What matters is that the work should be a good source of
symptoms for the diagnosis of sociopolitical virtue or culpability. So,
I would propose to try, as we all should try, to understand what it is
that makes for the greatness of the great, but before I do so I need to
say a brief something about what the greatness of the great does not
rest on. It does not rest on William Bennett’s assertion that the great
is great because "it is the best that has been thought and said." The
greatness of the great does not and cannot rest on a question-begging
platitude. Certainly the most notable attempt to save an
essentially conservative position from a dependency on platitude has
been the recent work of Harold Bloom, The Western Canon in
particular. Unfortunately, in these works Bloom has taken far less care
than he ought to make important discriminations about the thought of
deconstruction or of feminism or postmodernism. Rather, he lumps them
into one monstrous and threatening whole, just like any Reagan-era
hack, called variously the School of Resentment or simply (when he’s
feeling very mean-spirited, the well-paid champion of right wing
pundits everywhere) cheerleaders. He also strongly implies, just as
Bennett, Dinesh D’Souza, Roger Kimball, George Will, Lynne Cheney, et
al, have done, that we are in a moment of crisis and theorists,
feminists, and multiculturalists are to blame. He also simplifies and
misrepresents crucial ideas, like the Death of the Author, to suit his
own polemical purpose. The point of the critique of the idea of the
Author was never to claim that someone named William Shakespeare didn’t
exist (heaven forfend!) or didn’t write his plays or doesn’t deserve
"credit" for them (may it serve him well). Rather, the concept of the
Death of the Author was a way of showing, what any artist knows, that
the sublimely unified self of Romantic genius was always contaminated
by that which was not-self, a point Bloom himself makes emphatically in
his concept of the "anxiety of influence." Here Bloom joins the
hysterical right wing and does a profound disservice to what is in its
own terms legitimately "great" about the thought of Michel Foucault and
Jacques Derrida in particular. The most disturbing aspect of this is
that, unlike with D’Souza, you suspect that Bloom knows he is
misrepresenting, that he understands more than he allows, as the
colleague and friend of Paul De Man should. (Or are we obliged to
imagine long, painful evenings chez De Man, New Haven, circa 1975, in
which De Man thinks to himself, "This poor son of a bitch really
doesn’t get it!") The presence of a half-digested Derrida is a
persistent problem in much of the canon debate, not only among right
wing ideologues who actually have no useable understanding of Derrida
at all and constitute what we ought to call the School of Stupidity,
but also among more well-meaning and moderate commentators like Eugene
Goodheart who argues that deconstructive criticism "had no other motive
than discovering and eliciting the incoherences of a text" (Does Literary Studies Have a Future?). Anyone
who has taken the trouble to understand Derrida will tell you that this
putative incoherence was the discovery that the possibility for the
Western metaphysics of presence was dependent on its impossibility, an
insight that Derrida shared with Nietzsche, Hegel, and the Buddhist
philosopher of sunyata, Nagarjuna, who wrote that being was emptiness
and that emptiness was empty too. Hegel referred to this idea as the
"identity of identity and nonidentity," which may sound "incoherent"
enough, but is nonetheless an idea with its own legitimate place among
great works. To dismiss it, whether in Derrida’s version, Nagajuna’s or
Hegel’s, as a mere nosing after incoherence is to reveal an
intellectual insufficiency in ourselves, not in the work of philosophy. At
any rate, in Bloom’s less frenzied moments, he does make a good faith
effort to account for the greatness of the great, inadequate though
that argument is from my perspective. I would like to follow his logic
on two principle concepts that form the bedrock of his defense of the
canon: the "anxiety of influence" and the "uncanny." Bloom writes, On the other side, the reader’s side, reading, for Bloom, is the
"proper use of one’s solitude," a "solitude whose final form is one’s
confrontation with one’s mortality." In How to Read and Why, Bloom writes, I find it difficult to see how such a formulation
is much of an improvement over William Bennett’s platitudes. In this
form, literature ought also to appeal to people who like kittens. (What
would Hegel’s reaction be to the contention that the subject needs the
other because it’s lonely!) Over the last thirty-five years there has
never been a moment when I, for one, was not reading one to five books
at a time, and in all that time it has never seemed to me that I read
primarily because I was lonely. I read for the same reason that I
listened to music, because it was interesting, pleasurable and I always
felt I was becoming "larger," or more human, because of it. Of course,
it’s important to say why literature is "interesting," and I will try
to do so, but it is "interesting" to note at this juncture that Bloom’s
aesthetic of loneliness allows very little for art’s "truth" function. There
is also a curious logic afoot in Bloom’s rendering of the interests of
writers in relation to the interests of readers. Writers use their
"originality" to achieve immortality. Does this say something very
pleasant about writers? The fundamental incentive behind their efforts
is the dubious perpetuation of their egos ensconced in the canon? Is
this something we should admire them for? Is it a healthy thing or a
symptom of a cultural psychopathology (fame)? As the veteran of many a
writing seminar, I’ve seen plenty of writerly egos in my time, but it
has never occurred to me that our vainglorious lust for
never-vast-enough recognition was the basis for something we should be
admired for, let alone the basis for the greatness of the authentically
literary. Rather, it uniformly struck me as an ego-delusion, a delusion
that, moreover, helps us very little in understanding the greatness of
the greatest works of art. And on the reader’s side, why is the
reader interested in the uncanny (a.k.a. "originality")? Why is the
uncanny interesting? Okay, writers achieve immortality through
originality, I can follow that, but what exactly does the uncanny offer
readers? A frisson? And how does the leading aesthetic effect
of uncanniness lead the reader, as Bloom claims, to a confrontation
with mortality? Beats me. Harold Bloom is quite right to be
disturbed by the de-aestheticizing of literature produced by literary
criticism on the race-class-gender axis. And he is quite right to claim
that art’s purpose is not the display of social virtues. But his own
proposals for why the aesthetic should count, and especially count for those works in the Western canon, is self-congratulatory, platitudinous, and . . . fusty.
Poems, stories, novels, plays come into being as a response to
prior poems, stories, novels and plays, and that response depends upon
acts of reading and interpretation by the later writers, acts that are
identical with the new works.
Fair enough, but there’s more. This influence of the work of the
past becomes an "agon," a competition, for the writers of the present.
For the would-be canonical writers experience anxiety not only
about their relationship to the talents and the works of the past but
also about their own mortality. Thus, to join the canon means to
compete not only with the past but also with the present in a drive for
the qualified immortality of joining the canon and thereby joining
communal memory.
The principal means through which writers win their agonistic
struggle with the past and win out over the fear of their own mortality
is through "originality," what the reader experiences as the "uncanny."
The uncanny is not a quantifiable quality. As Bloom says, in a
mystifying gesture, "aesthetic value can be recognized or experienced,
but it cannot be conveyed to those who are incapable of grasping its
sensations and perceptions." (Isn’t this a gussied-up version of the
Lovin’ Spoonful’s claim that "I’d like to tell you ‘bout the magic that
can free your soul, but it’s like trying to tell a stranger ‘bout
rock’n’roll"?)
Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates
loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but
because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or
disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the
sorrows of familial and passional life.
Passional?
***
It is striking that Harold Bloom’s notion of the uncanny is not uncanny itself. In fact, it should seem quite familiar to us. The conceptual basis of his defense of the canon is an account of the relationship between tradition and innovation. What is startling is the fact that Bloom makes so little use of the theoretical work that has been done on the role of innovation in the arts. What I would propose to do in the second half of this essay is revisit the thinking of Viktor Shklovsky and Theodor Adorno in order to construct an approach to aesthetics that responds to what Bloom and many others, myself included, see as an impoverished moment in the history of literary criticism. Because, as Adorno in particular liked to point out, art needs criticism (which was really, for him, another word for philosophy) in order to complete the fullness of its social as well as its artistic intentions. (Adorno: "Aesthetic experience is not genuine experience unless it becomes philosophy.")
One of the most conspicuous places in which we can see the work of something like Bloom’s notion of the uncanny is in Shklovsky’s concept of "enstrangement" (in Benjamin Sher’s translation). But with what a difference. Shklovsky shared with Martin Heidegger a concern about human perception and its relationship to what it means to be a full human being. For both, language as the prose-of-life or as referential instrument is insufficient to perception’s human need. Shklovsky wrote, "If we examine the general laws of perception, we see that as it becomes habitual, it also becomes automatic. . . . Automization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war." Both men sought to oppose poetry to prose for the purpose of the return of perception, for the refreshing of the language that captures perception, and ultimately for the clarifying of our very humanity.
Shklovsky wrote, "And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art."
This restoration of those capacities that are most innately human is accomplished through "enstrangement." Enstrangement seeks to emancipate the work from the leaden forms of the past by describing things as if seen for the first time, by telling stories from unusual points of view, or by placing things out of context. Most broadly, enstrangement is at work whenever an image leads us "to a ‘vision’ of this object rather than a mere ‘recognition.’ "
What should be clear from this brief description is that, unlike Harold Bloom’s account, the artistic, social and human motivations for artist and audience are shared and consequential. We are not talking about an agon whose triumph over tradition is its own hollow thrill of victory, but a triumph whose purpose is the generalization for both reader and writer of the aesthetic experience understood as the quintessence of human experience. As for the proponents of criticism on the race-class-gender axis, in their dark night in which "all cows are black," as Hegel put it, Shklovsky’s lesson is simple: the art of enstrangement itself is the most consequential social act. It is what art has to give, without apology, to the social.
Shklovsky also calls forcefully to our attention the importance of "complexity" and "difficulty." Why, one might ask, is the greatness of a work often tied to its complexity? Is it because complexity makes one feel less lonely? Or less mortal? The difference between a simple folk melody or a hymn, and the work of art that a Bach or Beethoven will then make of this tune, is simply that the artwork is vastly more complex. Both the folk tune and the Beethoven sonata ultimately confirm the same laws of tonality and harmonics of the diatonic. The difference is that a Beethoven will test the limits of the diatonic, or work against the expectations of the diatonic for dramatic effect, or even leave that confine for brief and startling moments. We admire Beethoven for this, and hold him to be "great," in part because our culture admires the performance of difficult feats. But we also admire it because it seems to be telling us something both truer and more complete about the world in which we live. It is more adequate to a sophisticated sense of the real than the simple folk tune.
Shklovsky pushes this understanding of complexity by introducing the aesthetic force of "difficulty." We could say that the complex is more difficult because it’s not simple, but Shklovsky would remind us that difficulty is also about the risk of moving outside of the familiar, outside of the diatonic, outside of what Derrida likes to call our "closure." The virtue of the difficult, or what we often call the "experimental," is that it keeps the necessary stability of our "closure" (which we surely need in order to share a common culture and live together in it), but it keeps that closure from becoming something deadening. The problem that art helps us face, and great art helps us face best, is the problem of creating social stability without creating a state of administered conformity. In other words, art helps us to think what it would mean to live together as a whole and yet be fully human as individuals. In art, we speak of this dialectic as the relationship between tradition and innovation. I would agree with Paul Ricoeur in his Ideology and Utopia when he argues that a healthy human culture is one in which both the ideological (with its tendency to confirm what is familiar and acceptable) and the utopic (with its tendency toward metamorphosis or the transgressive) are present and active. The utopic is necessarily always also the "difficult" by virtue of its desire to make the familiar seem strange, and to test "experimentally" the desirability of other possible human worlds.
My point in this partial reprisal of Shklovsky’s thought is to reveal how close Bloom comes, in his notion of the uncanny, to saying something very central to aesthetic experience, while managing at the same time to utterly miss the mark. As Shklovsky helps us to see, it is possible to imagine a more powerful human and, yes, social function for the uncanny (understood as the enstranging force of innovation) than Bloom allows.
