Digressions&Impressions

On Marías and The Suspicion of Language

Anything is possible. (333)

I believe I've still never mistaken fiction for reality, though have  mixed them together more than once, as everyone does, not only novelists or writers but everyone who has recounted anything since the time we know began, and no one in that known time has done anything  tell and tell, or prepare and ponder a tale, or plot one. Anyone can relate an anecdote about something that happened, and the simple fact of saying it already distorts and twists it, language can't reproduce events and shouldn't attempt to, and that, I imagine, is why during some trials--the trials in movies, anyway, the  ones I know best--the implicated parties are asked to perform a material or physical reconstruction of what happened, repeating the gestures, the movements, the envenomed steps they took...The idea of testimony is also futile...(7-8)

Yet, in these pages I'm going to place myself on the side of those who have sometimes claimed to be telling what really happened or pretended to succeed in doing  so...Unlike those of truly fictional novels, the elements of the story I am now embarking  upon are entirely capricious, determined by chance, merely episodic and cumulative...because in the end no author is guiding them, though I am relating them; they correspond to no blueprint, they are steered by no compass, most of them are external in origin and devoid of intention and therefore have no reason to make any kind of sense or to constitute an argument or plot or answer to some hidden harmony, and no lesson should be extracted from them (nor should any thing be sought from real novels; above all, the novels themselves should not want it)--not even a story with its beginning and suspense and final silence." (9)

The opening pages of Javier Marías (1988) Dark Back of Time (translated in 2001 by Esther Allen) present, in rough outline, two philosophical views on the relationship between language and world and, thereby, truth. On the first perspective, language is incapable of representing the truth (especially events). While these days such thoughts are often associated with post-modernism, the idea was once a common, suspicious perspective on language (recall). It is important to recognize that a suspicion-of-language view is (a) neither self-refuting (as a lot of my lazy friends often insist) (b) nor does it entail skepticism about truth as such (b') because other things -- entities, humans, objects etc. -- are -- as Marías  narrator recognizes at once -- capable of simulating truth to some degree. (In fact, (b') is not the only alternative; some once-famous metaphysicians (b'') locate truth in non-linguistic perfect ideas or perfect forms, etc.) As we learn from Part 3 of Gulliver's Travels, this (b' or, even, b'') is not a very fertile or efficient conception of truth if we wish to do science, or engineer to wage war. But despite much table-pounding, only if we thoughtlessly defer to the authority of science or war, is the suspicion-of-language view refuted.

As an aside, in the novel the human duty not to thoughtlessly defer to the authority of war is presented in a touching retelling of the Christmas truce as an extended meditation on Wilfrid Ewart's The Way of Revelation.

the war lost its control and was disobeyed, and he [Ewart] was there and saw it. To say that it was vanquished would be false and pretentious, but it was sidestepped and even mocked for a moment, and the mockery was maintained even after the hard reminder--or revenge--of all-out warfare (whose primary aim is to exclude and negate whatever it does not enclose or taint)...(156)

Of course, all-out-war is not the only social institution that by enclosing aims to exclude and negate (that vague something that is not enclosed): the institution of property and the practice of (ac)counting function in analogous ways.

Anyway, in addition to appeal to lived experience in which the distorting effects of language are so routine that we better not pay attention to these (if we want to be taken seriously, and other practical consequences), we may also note (with a nod to Deleuze) that it is awkward to insist (often repetitively) that a repetition (as a representing in language inevitably is) somehow is identical to what is represented in the right sort of way, namely, both the representation and that what is represented are stable and undistorted, etc. Even so, it is always a bit tacky, if not an instance of bad faith, to encounter a text that announces the suspicion-of-language-view. For, most texts (including the truly fictional novels) tacitly rely on the norms and conventions that demand from us a foregoing or bracketing of any such superstition.

Of Fleeting Impressions, or an author's frailty

The Circumstance which gives Authors an Advantage above all these great Masters, is this, that they can multiply their Originals; or rather can make Copies of their Works, to what Number they please, which shall be as valuable as the Originals themselves. This gives a great Author something like a Prospect of Eternity, but at the same time deprives him of those other Advantages which Artists meet with. The Artist finds greater Returns in Profit, as the Author in Fame. What an Inestimable Price would a Virgil or a Homer, a Cicero or an Aristotle bear, were their Works like a Statue, a Building, or a Picture, to be confined only in one Place and made the Property of a single Person?--The Spectator, No. 166. Monday, September 10, 1711. Addison.

At a conference, I recently caught Menachem Fisch engrossed in Dror Wahrman's fascinating Mr. Collier's Letter Racks, which Menachem warmly recommended. The passage from Addison is partially quoted on p. 51; Wahrman cuts it off at "Eternity." In context, Wahrman is not interested in the trade-off between profit for unique works and enduring fame that Addison posits (although fleetingness of life, of print, of identity (etc.) is a major theme of the book). Because duplication undermines scarcity -- it even risks effacing property --, it generates too much supply, and lowers what one might call "exchange value." (As Addison recognizes, the intrinsic or use value remains, and may, in fact, be increased because more folk can enjoy the fruits of one's labor.)* Addison imagines counterfactually, "What an Inestimable Price would a Virgil or a Homer, a Cicero or an Aristotle bear, were their Works like a Statue, a Building, or a Picture, to be confined only in one Place and made the Property of a single Person?" Yet, unique properties, which have a huge upside in exchange value, are vulnerable to the destruction wrought by time: statue, buildings, even pictures are fragile--and  even when they survive they may -- despite the necessity of the logicians -- be disassociated from the name that ought to be associated with it.

That is to say, one can be rewarded in money and approbation. If one scribbles in the right sort of medium, one can even hope to rewarded with posthumous applause. Addison's little counterfactual implies, in fact, that the truly talented (Virgil, Homer, Cicero, Aristotle) correctly favor the possibility of extraordinary posthumous fame over extraordinary riches in one's life. As Hume insisted, while subtly correcting Addison's implicit axiology, that there was such a thing as a "most durable, as well as justest fame," and offered as examples:

On Philosophy and Literature with Eleonore Stump

I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you heart of flesh.--Ezekiel 36:26

Interpretations present, suggest, offer, and invite; unlike philosophical arguments, they cannot attempt to compel.--Stump, Wandering in Darkness (27).

After I wrote my post on De Gournay's treatment of Judith's magnanimity, I checked the index to Eleonore Stump's massive Wandering in Darkness (2010). I found no mention of Judith, alas. Of course, it doesn't mean she is not mentioned in the book, which I had been afraid to open. It's not because I fear that Stump has composed a 'succesful theodicy' (37). My reluctance is, in part, autobiographical: after college, I spent two years of traveling, working, and writing (fiction, non-fiction, and a theory of memetics); to my surprise I gravitated toward philosophy. (It was my second major, and I did not measure up well to the very impressive faculty and stellar MA students at Tufts.) I hesitated about doing a PhD in philosophy not just because several of my philosophy teachers were encouraging me to continue with political science (I had some ideas about a game-theoretical approach to multi-party bargaining), but because I worried, in part, that philosophy seemed the wrong place for me; while philosophy seemed increasingly necessary, I also devoured history, novels, and (in smaller doses) poetry.* Joy in reading books seemed a disqualification for a career in professional philosophy. To this day, I sometimes get told by peers, "You're so broad," and I know it is not really, fully intended as a compliment.

While I was hesitating about graduate school, I allowed myself to be reassured that there might be a place for bookish types in philosophy by a wonderful lecture by Eleonore Stump that I was fortunate enough to attend. Even though she clearly had read a lot, she continued to have the respect of my teachers. She seemed wise, insightful, generous, and rigorous. I wanted to be like her! Given that I cherish the role Stump had in my life, I have actually been a bit fearful to do anything that might have her fall from my imaginary pedestal. Fate also facilitated my emotional childishness because when I lived in St. Louis, she was on leave elsewhere. 

Most of all I was reluctant to open Stump's book because I have grown mistrustful of what my fellow professional philosophers do with literature due to our collective, professional intolerance of ambiguity and our abhorrence of multiplicities of meaning. This intolerance and abhorrence infects the scholarly literature on the ontological status of fictional objects as much as it does the (often very subtle) use of fiction in moral psychology.

On Sebald, and Self-Perpetuating Compulsions

Less heroically, but certainly no less correctly, one could also see writing as a continually self-perpetuating compulsive act, evidence that of all individuals afflicted by the disease of thought, the writer is perhaps the most incurable.… How difficult it is in general to bring the machinery of thought to a standstill.…What I found most surprising in the course of these observations is the awful tenacity of those who devote their lives to writing. There seems to be no remedy for the vice of literature; those afflicted persist in the habit despite the fact that there is no longer any pleasure to be derived from it, even at that crucial age when, as Keller remarks, one every day runs the risk of becoming simpleminded and longs for nothing more than to put a halt to the wheels ceaselessly turning in one's head.… Evidently the business of writing is one from whose clutches it is by no means easy to extricate oneself, even when the activity itself has come to seem loathsome or even impossible. From the writer's point of view, there is almost nothing to be said in its defense, so little does it have to offer by way of gratification.--W.G. Sebald, quoted in Troy Jollimore's stimulating review. [HT L.A. Paul]

Alone in my circle of bourgeois scholars, I often find Sebald mildly irritating because he sells an intoxicating mixture of learnedness, nostalgia, and suggestions of depth to be found in imaginative engagement with the details of living --all irresistible to folk like us. I always struggled to express my irritation, but Jollimore helpfully quotes Sebald's preference for "something that is small and self-contained," which is for him "a moral and aesthetic ideal." While I instinctively admire Sebald's aversion against "large-scale things...in architecture or evolutionary leaps," his ideal leaves little room for expansiveness, natural and moral and systematically partakes in the humanistic project of self-domestication (recall). Sebald's moral and aesthetic preferences are a thinly disguised longing for control, even in the face of genuine self-knowledge that such control remains elusive. His is intrinsically a conservative aesthetic that offers a spirited consolation (by withholding ordinary forms of consolation) to those, I fear, that recoil the inevitable excesses in living. Of course, I wouldn't find Sebald irritating if I didn't recognize myself in these longings.

On Distant Reading

The United States is the country of close reading, so I don’t expect this idea to be particularly popular. But the trouble with close reading (in all of its incarnations, from the new criticism to deconstruction) is that it necessarily depends on an extremely small canon. This may have become an unconscious and invisible premiss by now, but it is an iron one nonetheless: you invest so much in individual texts only if you think that very few of them really matter. Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense. And if you want to look beyond the canon (and of course, world literature will do so: it would be absurd if it didn’t!) close reading will not do it. It’s not designed to do it, it’s designed to do the opposite. At bottom, it’s a theological exercise—very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously—whereas what we really need is a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read them. Distant reading: where distance, let me repeat it, is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems. And if, between the very small and the very large, the text itself disappears, well, it is one of those cases when one can justifiably say, Less is more. If we want to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept losing something. We always pay a price for theoretical knowledge: reality is infinitely rich; concepts are abstract, are poor. But it’s precisely this ‘poverty’ that makes it possible to handle them, and therefore to know. This is why less is actually more.--Franco Moretti (2000) "Conjectures On World Literature."

I learned of Moretti's piece through TLS a while ago. Let's grant Moretti that close reading of texts cannot yield theoretical knowledge, if we understand by 'theoretical knowledge,' (a) knowledge of the whole 'literary system' (Moretti's term, not mine). There is, in fact, in the quoted passage a second kind of knowledge: (b) knowledge of concepts. It is unclear why Moretti equates (a) and (b). But, perhaps, all he means is that theoretical knowledge is conceptual knowledge.