Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection 9783030730604, 9783030730611

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Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection Edited by Garry Hagberg

Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection

Garry Hagberg Editor

Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection

Editor Garry Hagberg Department of Philosophy Bard College Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-73060-4 ISBN 978-3-030-73061-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73061-1

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Miljko/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Introduction: Philosophical Thinking in a Fictional World

Imagined contexts can be a source of knowledge, a source of conceptual clarification, and a source of insight. Literature can thus provide both an occasion for, and the constitutive material of, philosophical reflection. Philosophical thinking is undertaken, after all, in words, and the heightened sensitivity to the exact usages of our words—particularly philosophically central words such as truth, reality, perception, knowledge, verification, certainty, illusion, understanding, falsehood— can bring a clarity and a refreshed sense of the life that our words take on in fully-described contexts of usage. And in these imagined contexts we can also see more acutely and deeply into the meaning of words about words—metaphor and figurative tropes, verbal coherence, intelligibility, implication, sense, reference, and indeed the word “meaning” itself. Moving from a philosophical issue into a literary world in which the central concepts of that issue are in play can enrich our comprehension of those concepts and, in the strongest cases, substantively change the way we see them. And with that change, we will see the philosophical problem itself differently as well.

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It was the great American pragmatist, C. S. Peirce, who claimed that the full meaning of a concept will be the full range of uses of the word naming that concept (again, “truth,” “understanding,” “meaning,” etc.) across the history of its evolution in language. Of course, Peirce’s view implies that no one person can fully comprehend that full meaning in any one moment—we are always in what Wittgenstein (himself influenced by Peirce through the intermediary of Frank Ramsey) called the stream of life and not beside or above it. Fictional worlds can show us, with a descriptive fullness and exactitude that is not always available to philosophy alone, stations along the way of the long-arc progress of those concepts. But about that fullness, that exactitude: this is not the kind of exactitude that would boil down (or attempt to) a broad range of variegated usages into a single, unitary essence or formula that would be present in every case (such as the classical case of knowledge being analyzed down to justified true belief ). Rather, literature can afford the kind of capacious and expanded vision that is the result of the patient and perspicacious assemblage of a range, an interconnected network, of cases that employ the concept or concepts at the heart of the philosophical question at hand. And each literary case, with inflected content that is distinctive to its fictional world, its context, will bring into view interestingly complicating details that together powerfully resist oversimplified reduction. Multiple aspects of the given concept will emerge in prominence differently as the imagined literary case calls these concepts into play. That kind of exactitude is not earned easily—one might think here of the kind of exactitude that J. L. Austin’s work offers—and it is a kind of exactitude that is non-reductive, non-boiled-down. It is a kind of exactitude that embraces fullness of description rather than seeing that fullness as a problem unto itself. So the chapters brought together here pursue conceptual precision and fullness of that kind; individually, they explore the ways that philosophical thinking has been undertaken within literary worlds from the ancient world up to the present, while collectively, they show that the literary imagination is not separate from the world, but rather is interwoven throughout it. The first part of this volume, initiating the discussion, thus focuses on some ways that novels can be, in their way, philosophical or hold

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philosophical content; how fictional narratives can, if initially counterintuitively, provide material from which truth can be mined; and more generally how philosophy and literature intertwine in a way that can make them allies in the human search for knowledge and understanding. The second part explores some of the ways in which literature and its fictional worlds may provide lenses through which we can see the real world; some ways in which we are aided by fiction to order, to structure, to make sense of, fact; and some ways in which life as we live it can, in a distinctive sense, aspire to the condition of literature. With the work of the first two parts behind us, the third part then goes on to investigate some of the ways in which literary texts can show, often in intricate and compelling detail, what philosophy says. And as we see here, the relation between saying and showing as it emerges in this context does not reduce a literary text to mere illustration; on the contrary, it is more a matter of creative interaction, where it can be the literary texts that show, with the previously unavailable richness just discussed above, what the words of philosophy mean. Lastly, in the fourth part, we encounter some of the ways in which fictional worlds can give us a vision of the past, and how we might derive wisdom—here, knowledge as well as self-knowledge— from those imaginative re-visitations. The work presented here strives to clarify what it is, what it means, to be given an occasion, a conceptual environment, to think philosophically in literary worlds. Part I, Philosophical Thought and Literary Interpretation: Interwoven Themes, begins with Michael H. Mitias advancing the thesis that if literary novels can be philosophical—and as this entire volume shows, they can—they should be classified as a distinctive literary genre. The defense of this thesis is based on the following propositions. First, the presence of aesthetic quality in an artifact is what makes it art. The unity of these qualities, which emerges in the aesthetic experience, is for Mitias what transforms something into an aesthetic object. Second, a novel is a literary work inasmuch as it embodies aesthetic qualities. And Mitias argues that the dominant aesthetic quality in a literary novel is what makes it a type. Third, he observes that it is possible for an aesthetic quality to be philosophical: on his view, a novel is philosophical inasmuch as “philosophicalness” exists in it as a dominant aesthetic

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quality. Accordingly, this chapter offers reasons for suggesting that the philosophical novel could and should be classified as a genre. In Chapter 2, David Gorman begins by observing that narrative theorists find themselves haunted by the association of fictional narrative with falsehood. The hypothesis of this chapter is that a better strategy would be to frankly admit that falsehood is an identifying property of fictional narrative, and then to treat this as an opening for analysis rather than something requiring an apology. Gorman follows this with an attempt to unravel the nexus between the concepts of fiction, lying, and narrative that then leads his discussion into a characterization of the linguistic activity of assertion, which casts light on a variety of topics, including the still mostly unexplored question of inference outside of purely nonfictional contexts. Taken together, we see that these themes illuminate some of the intricate intertwinings of philosophical thought and literary interpretation. In Chapter 3, Lauren Kopajtic begins by asking what might Adam Smith have learned from Jane Austen and other novelists of his moment? This chapter finds and examines a serious problem at the center of Adam Smith’s moral psychology, stemming from an unacknowledged tension between (1) the effort of the spectator to sympathize with the feelings of the agent and (2) that of the agent to moderate her feelings. The agent’s efforts will result in her opacity to spectators, blocking their attempts to read her emotions. Kopajtic argues that we can resolve this tension by looking to developments in eighteenth-century literature, as perfected in the hands of Jane Austen. Investigating two techniques, focalization and free indirect style, Kopajtic shows that the problems for spectatorship diminish when we see that good Smithian spectators are savvy readers. In Chapter 4, José Luis Fernández asks if philosophy and literature are allies or enemies in Jorge Luis Borges’s fictions. Fernández argues that Borges can satisfy membership in the allies camp because his fictions provide precisely the imaginative scenarios that the allies believe are so necessary to this coalition. However, because his stories question philosophy’s hold on reality, they can also seem to fall into the enemies camp by countervailing any claim philosophy has on reality and truth. But ultimately, Fernández shows that Borges forges an alliance between

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philosophy and literature for reasons not traditionally accepted by those in either the allies or enemies camps. Initiating Part II, Life Through the Lens of Literature in Chapter 5, James Nikopoulos asks: Why are some metaphors profound and others profoundly misleading? Why do we praise them in poetry and purge them from science (or at least try to do so)? Nikopoulos explores the reading habits that condition how we understand metaphorical statements. And Italo Calvino’s 1979 metafiction, If on a winter’s night a traveller, guides his exploration of the subtle ways truth and make-believe can coincide when we read the world like a book and experience a book like an honest-to-goodness world of its own. Leonid Bilmes, in Chapter 6, begins by observing that Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiographical novel The Gift is formally expressive of an implicit—and not always acknowledged—metaphoricity that he finds to be inherent in narrative form. The chapter investigates the special way that Nabokov’s novel, through its switching between third and first person modes of narration, enacts a vicarious grasp of the conception of narrative identity, as described by both Ricoeur and Bakhtin, that entails a plotted articulation of sameness to otherness, or self as though other. Nabokov’s novel shows us the past self coming into life through the animating detour of metaphorical self-identification, when it is represented “as if ” an independent character story—yet one shaped by the narrating self. And it thus shows how it is that we can better see ourselves in and through the lens of literature. Stewart Justman begins Chapter 7 by noting that the reader of Freud’s classic study of “Dora” is invited to perceive Freud himself through the lens of literature—specifically, as the equal of Sherlock Holmes, master of observation and inference. With Dora, Justman observes, Freud conducts himself in a magisterial, knowing manner reminiscent of the legendary detective, just as he affirms his conclusions, one after another, with Holmesian flourishes of certainty. But the Holmes stories belong to romance, built as they are of well-established conventions including the use of disguises and the proof of identity. The exaggerated certainty at work in Freud’s study of Dora plays on that of Holmes in the first instance; but Holmes’s certainty in turn rests on the romance tradition, going back to the scenes in the Odyssey in which the disguised hero

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proves his identity unmistakably to those who despaired of ever seeing him alive. Justman thus shows that the Dora case yields a cautionary conclusion: Freud’s attempt to play Sherlock Holmes to Dora’s psyche yields only the pretense of certainty because Holmesian methods do not apply outside their context in what Conan Doyle called “the fairy kingdom of romance,” and because Dora’s case does not lend itself to dazzling exhibitions of analytical mastery. In Chapter 8 Katie Fry asks: Was Oscar Wilde a proto-transhumanist? The enthusiasm Wilde expresses in some of his most well-known essays for overcoming human limitations via artificial means aligns directly with transhumanist aims, but Fry shows that a careful reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray suggests that he may have been more wary than celebratory of the quest for eternal youth and radical self-determination prized by aestheticism and transhumanism alike. This chapter draws on Martha Nussbaum’s notion of “external transcendence”—the aspiration to vanquish human limitations and become godlike—to examine Wilde’s critical portrayal of Dorian’s desire to transcend the limits of the human body by becoming a work of art. Initiating Part III, Philosophical Saying, Literary Showing, in Chapter 9 Charles Nussbaum observes that the moral focus of Wuthering Heights has proved elusive. His chapter argues that there is a moral focus to be found, and that the application of a Nietzschean axiological framework is of assistance in finding it. Nussbaum notes that Nietzsche cannot have influenced Emily Brontë, so any claim of influence must rely on the existence of a common cause or influence. And since Brontë displayed a strong affinity for the German language and the German culture of her time, and since Nietzsche revered Goethe, Goethe is the most plausible common-cause candidate. Here we see that viewing Brontë’s novel through a Nietzschean lens both locates and sharpens its moral focus, while clarifying the novel’s substantial philosophical content and how that content is shown. Katherine Elkins begins Chapter 10 by observing that Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” both depicts and critiques well-known philosophical articulations of the sublime. Focusing on the complex nature of conscious, embodied experience, Wordsworth is seen here to depict what Elkins calls the literary sublime, which stresses temporal understanding

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and multiple perspectives over unity and transcendence. Building on recent scholarship as well as the publication of the unfinished “The Sublime & the Beautiful,” Elkins’ chapter argues that Wordsworth valorizes this literary sublime over earlier philosophical sublimes. A literary sublime offers the potential to connect us both to nature and to each other in ways that preserve the unique and qualitative nature of everyday human experience. In Chapter 11, Garry Hagberg argues that Henry James’s character in The Ambassadors, Lambert Strether, is unto himself an instructive and powerful example of pragmatism, the philosophical movement of classical American philosophy initiated by Henry’s brother William and their friend and William’s philosophical compatriot, Charles Sanders Peirce; this is also a philosophical approach, broadly speaking, that one sees in Wittgenstein on language, mind, and knowledge. Sent by Mrs. Newsome from Boston to extricate her son Chad from what she regards as a dubious romantic entanglement in Paris and bring him back to what she presumes unreflectively to be the bounds of respectability of her experientially cloistered world, Strether finds more in Paris than he expected. Slowly but inexorably expanding and then finally breaking the bounds of Newsome’s conventional world, Strether acquires the experience, the broadened outlook, and the imaginative sophistication that together allow him to develop his own moral voice, his own autonomous judgment, his own cultivated sensibility. In looking for Chad, he finds himself. But James shows, in the characteristic exquisite detail that occasions literary-ethical reflection of a special kind, that in finding himself and cultivating his autonomy he gains the insight that allows him—for the first time—to genuinely understand others and himself in a way free of the veils of conventional expectation. James gives us here a tale in which a character moves from one conceptual world to another, where that move, that inner progress, shows both how self-knowledgeand otherknowledge intertwine and how such progress is essentially pragmatic in nature. As in so much of James, the case of Strether shows so richly and concretely what philosophy says perhaps more abstractly. Moving into Part IV, Seeing the Past , Inheriting Tragedy’s Wisdom, in Chapter 12 Rizwan Saeed Ahmed and Akhtar Aziz begin by noting that Postmodernism, being an offspring of Modernism, may be carrying

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many genes of Modernism—but there have been lots of mutations to give it a unique (and as they say, at times weird) personality of its own. Their chapter juxtaposes the sense of the past of two modernists, T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, and two postmodernists, Samuel Beckett and Graham Swift, to understand one such mutation. The modernists’ acute sense of the past is shaped by their belief in the notion of historical continuity. Despite their consciousness of the withdrawing nature of the past, they revive it through their art. Conversely, the postmodernists have a diminishing sense of the past and see a rupture between the past and the present. Oblivion and amnesia seem to act as characters in their texts. Thus we see here that literature can offer multiple philosophies of history, different ways of seeing and relating to the past. In Chapter 13 Robert Baker observes that most Axial Age paths of wisdom are idealist: they teach that a deepened inwardness, an inwardness shaped by its relationship to an ultimate reality, can animate an altered way of inhabiting the ordinary world, inspiring one to be more generous toward others and to respond with poise and compassion to suffering. But in addition Baker observes that tragedy, while also an Axial Age innovation, is decisively different from other Axial Age paths. For tragedy is realist: it does away with our illusions, with the idealized stories we tell about ourselves, reminding us of the reductions and failures to which we are so vulnerable. Yet tragedy is not only about suffering but also about the ways in which we cope with and learn through suffering. Does tragedy, in this respect, tilt back toward spiritual idealism? This chapter takes up this question through a reading of King Lear . The tragic heroes of this play, Lear and Gloucester, though in the end destroyed, come to see and feel more deeply than they had seen and felt before they were stripped of everything. In their passage through suffering they change. The play presents a story of tragic ruin while at the same time exploring an existential concern as old as Aeschylus and the major Jewish prophets: a concern with the transformation of heart and vision in the dark of suffering. Baker shows that in this way the play helps us to understand the dialectical relationship between spiritual idealism and tragic wisdom: a relationship as relevant today as it was in the ancient world and the early modern world.

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Closing Part IV, in Chapter 14 Charlie Gustafson-Barrett investigates Hamlet’s particular tragedy, and how he is both the paragon of and antidote for the tragic human condition, which, Gustafson-Barrett argues, is rooted in the distinction between action and reflection. Not only does their diremption tacitly undergird the reciprocity between Hamlet ’s unfolding narrative structure and the psychological unfolding of its title character, but it becomes the explicit focus in Act III, with the double use of “conscience” as a moral and rational principle, and the creation of the self-conscious artistic space—that is, the stage. In sharp and narrow focus, the play thereby explores the incompatibility of self-knowledge with the self in action. And in a broader perspective, it shows how literature informs and inflects our philosophical thinking about who and what we are. Garry Hagberg

Contents

Part I

Philosophical Thought and Literary Interpretation: Interwoven Themes

1

The Possibility of the Philosophical Novel as a Genre Michael H. Mitias

2

Narrative and the Value of Falsehood: An Approach to Fiction David Gorman

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Learning to Read: A Problem for Adam Smith and a Solution from Jane Austen Lauren Kopajtic

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Philosophy and Literature in Jorge Luis Borges: ¿Aliados o Enemigos? José Luis Fernández

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Contents

Part II

Life Through the Lens of Literature

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Metaphors We Live, Worlds We Read James Nikopoulos

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Oneself as Character: Emplotment, Memory and Metaphor in Ricoeur, Bakhtin and Nabokov’s The Gift Leonid Bilmes

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Sherlockismus: Freud and the Romance of Detection Stewart Justman

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Extrahuman Transcendence in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray Katie Fry

Part III 9

A Nietzschean Wuthering Heights? Charles Nussbaum

Searching for Chad, He Found Himself: Peirce, Wittgenstein, Pragmatism, and the Case of Lambert Strether in Henry James’s The Ambassadors Garry Hagberg

Part IV

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Seeing the Past, Inheriting Tragedy’s Wisdom

12 The Passing Away of the Past: The Transmutation of Modernism into Postmodernism Rizwan Saeed Ahmed and Akhtar Aziz 13

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Philosophical Saying, Literary Showing

10 Wordsworth’s Literary Sublime Katherine Elkins 11

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Spiritual Idealism and Tragic Wisdom: An Essay on King Lear Robert Baker

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Contents

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Sense and Conscience: Hunting for Certainty in Hamlet Charlie Gustafson-Barrett

Index

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Notes on Contributors

Rizwan Saeed Ahmed is an English language poet. He has published several poems in reputable international journals and books of poetry. He is the coauthor of the anthology Poetic Palpitations from Pakistan: A Lyrical Document of Protest Against a Society (2014). He has worked for Pakistan Academy of Letters as a translator for a couple of years. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in literature at the English Department of International Islamic University (IIU), Islamabad. He has been serving as a lecturer in English in the Department of Higher Education, Azad Kashmir for the last 13 years. His main academic interests include modernist and postmodernist literature, Pakistan literature in English, literary theory, and philosophy of time. Dr. Akhtar Aziz is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at International Islamic University Islamabad, Pakistan. He has been teaching literature and language for more than 25 years and is currently serving as the Head of the Center of Excellence for Modern Languages at IIUI. He has taught at various universities in Islamabad, Pakistan. His main areas of interest are discourse analysis, pragmatics, literary theory, and comparative literature.

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Robert Baker is the author of The Extravagant: Crossings of Modern Poetry and Modern Philosophy (2005) and In Dark Again in Wonder: The Poetry of René Char and George Oppen (2012), both with the University of Notre Dame Press. His translation of René Char’s The Word as Archipelago appeared with Omnidawn in 2012. He is professor of English at the University of Montana. Leonid Bilmes is Visiting Lecturer at the HSE University’s School of Foreign Languages in Moscow. His writing on contemporary literature and philosophy has appeared in Textual Practice, Los Angeles Review of Books, 3:AM Magazine, and other literary journals. He has previously taught at Queen Mary University of London and is currently completing his first book on memory, ekphrasis, and intermediality in Marcel Proust and after, with the working title, Prose Pictures after Proust: Ekphrasis, Memory, Narrative. Katherine Elkins is the NEH Distinguished Teaching Associate Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at Kenyon College. Her work focuses on the role of memory and emotion in the embodied structure of experience, with the long conversation between philosophy and literature, and most recently, with the ways in which computational approaches can help us understand language and creativity. Recently published works include essays on Plato, Kafka, and the AI, GPT-3. She is currently finishing a book on the shape of stories for Cambridge University Press and an edited volume on philosophical approaches to Proust with Oxford University Press. José Luis Fernández obtained his Ph.D. in philosophy at Temple University in May 2019, where he wrote a dissertation on the proleptic aspect of Kant’s philosophy of history. Dr. Fernández currently teaches in the philosophy department at Fairfield University and has published philosophical essays on aesthetics, ethics, existentialism, literature, sociality, and history. Katie Fry received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Toronto in 2017. Her research focuses primarily on the tensions between pagan, Christian, and secular motifs in nineteenthand twentieth-century literature. She has published articles on W. G.

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Sebald, Václav Havel, and Alain Badiou, and her translations of novels by Laury Leite and Verónica Ormachea have been published by Lazy Publisher (Gainesville, Florida). She currently teaches in the School of Communication and Literary Studies at Sheridan College. David Gorman is Associate Professor of English at Northern Illinois University. His primary area of research is the history and theory of literary study. He has published in various formats on these topics, including essays, reviews, bibliographies, translations, and entries in reference works. His work has appeared in Poetics Today, Modern Literature Quarterly, and Style (of which journal he is former editor). He coedited the Norton Critical edition of Aristotle’s Poetics (2018). Charlie Gustafson-Barrett is a tutor at St. John’s College, Santa Fe. She received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Tulane University. Her areas of expertise include ancient philosophy, history of philosophy, aesthetics, and philosophy and literature. She has published on Plato in The Review of Metaphysics and is currently working on a book manuscript that concerns the idea of authenticity in ancient, enlightenment, existentialist, and American thought. Garry Hagberg is the James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Bard College and has also held a Chair in the School of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. Author of numerous papers at the intersection of aesthetics and the philosophy of language, his books include Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge; Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory; and Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness. He is editor of Art and Ethical Criticism and Fictional Characters, Real Problems: The Search for Ethical Content in Literature as well as his most recent edited volumes from Palgrave, Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Understanding; Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding; Narrative and Self-Understanding; and Fictional Worlds and the Moral Imagination. Co-editor of A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature and Editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature, Hagberg’s newest

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book is on the contribution literary experience makes to the formation of self and sensibility, Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood . Stewart Justman formerly the director of the Humanities program at the University of Montana, writes on literature and medicine. Among his books are The Springs of Liberty: The Satiric Tradition and Freedom of Speech (Northwestern University Press, 1999); Seeds of Mortality: The Public and Private Worlds of Cancer (Ivan R. Dee, 2003); and The Nocebo Effect: Overdiagnosis and Its Costs (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)— each an exercise of constructive skepticism. Against the spirit of the times, Stewart Justman once undertook to teach a course without making a single accusation. He is married, with two children. Lauren Kopajtic is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. She specializes in moral philosophy and literature in the long eighteenth century, with a focus on the intersections of emotion, emotion regulation, and moral education. Her work has appeared in Hume Studies, The Journal of Scottish Philosophy, and The Adam Smith Review. Michael H. Mitias is a retired Professor of Philosophy at Millsaps College, Jackson, Mississippi. His main interest is the theory of values with special emphasis on Aesthetics. In addition to many articles, he edited and wrote several books in this area of philosophy. He has written several philosophical novels: Love Letters (Hamilton, 2009), Seeking God (Wipf & Stock, 1012), Justice Under the Ax of the Absurd (Austin Macauley, 2017), Tears of Love (Austin Macauley, 2018), The Philosopher and the Devil (Olympia, 2018), The Philosopher Converses with God (Wipf & Stock, 2019), The Transformative Power of Love (Wipf & Stock, 2020), and Death, Family, and Love (Wipf & Stock, 2020). James Nikopoulos is Associate Professor in the department of Languages, Linguistics, and Literature at Nazarbayev University. He is the author of The Stability of Laughter: The Problem of Joy in Modernist Literature (Routledge, 2019).

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Charles Nussbaum is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is the author of The Musical Representation: Meaning, Ontology, and Emotion (2007, MIT Press) and Understanding Pornographic Fiction: Sex, Violence, and Self-Deception (2015, Palgrave Macmillan). He has also published articles in aesthetics and the philosophy of mind and on the philosophy of Kant.

List of Figures

Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.3

The Nietzschean Value Inversion The Nietzschean Square of Value Opposition Placement of Characters on the Square of Value Opposition

218 218 220

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Part I Philosophical Thought and Literary Interpretation: Interwoven Themes

1 The Possibility of the Philosophical Novel as a Genre Michael H. Mitias

Introduction The proposition I shall elucidate and defend in this paper is that, as a literary work of art, the philosophical novel should be treated as a genre; accordingly, it should stand on par with genres such as romantic, adventure, mystery, or picaresque novels, primarily because it has the basic elements and features which make it a type. As a genre, the philosophical novel is distinguished as a novel genre by its theme. The central focus of this theme is a philosophical question, issue, insight, idea, value, or problem. In this context, theme functions as a principium individionis— that is, as a criterion on the basis of which we distinguish a certain type as a genre. We cannot underestimate the importance of this criterion, as the theme the novelist chooses for her novel determines, to a large extent, M. H. Mitias (B) Jackson, MS, USA

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73061-1_1

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its essential character, or type. This theme functions as a basis for organizing the plot; it is, moreover, the source of its unity and the type of qualities that emerge in the experience of the novel as a literary work of art. Let us grant for the sake of discussion that the philosophical novel is a type in virtue of its theme; how does it contain and communicate its philosophical content? That is, how does this content reach the reader? Again, what kind of experience does the reader have of the philosophical novel? If the novel is philosophical, its experience should also be philosophical—so what makes this experience philosophical? I raise these questions for three main reasons. First, the mere presence of philosophical content as a dominant theme, in the form of a discursive text, conversation, or analysis, in a novel does not necessarily make it philosophical; on the contrary, this kind of presence may deprive it of its literary core because the literary work of art is an expressive, not a discursive work. But if the novel is a literary work, it should express its philosophical identity the way a work of art does. The philosophical content should be an ingredient of its literary being. A novel can be literary without necessarily being philosophical, but a philosophical novel cannot be philosophical without being literature. As philosophy, the novel’s philosophical content is only the differentiae of the novel qua literature. I experience the romantic character of a romantic novel not because a character pronounces a statement such as “I love you,” because she expounds a theory of love, or because she praises its benefits but in and through the action the lovers perform—that is, in and through the totality of the actions that make up the thread of the novel. We should make a distinction between thinking the idea of love and experiencing it as a mode of meaning in a concrete situation or behavior. Second, if we say that the mere presence of philosophical content as a dominant theme in a novel is what makes it philosophical, we necessarily undercut the possibility of having an aesthetic, or literary, experience of it. A novel is, as I shall explain in detail later, a literary work of art in inasmuch as it possesses aesthetic qualities. The unity of these qualities is what is generally recognized by aestheticians as the “aesthetic object.”1 These qualities are the reason for being of the novel as a literary work

1 The Possibility of the Philosophical Novel as a Genre

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of art. We do not read a literary novel simply because it is an interesting story; because it is a source of psychological, scientific, or historical knowledge; or because we need to kill some time (although we can certainly read it for such purposes), but in order to have an aesthetic experience of it. As a literary work, the novel comes to life in the process of reading it; its aesthetic dimension emerges through this process. This dimension is not, as I shall explain, given as a ready-made reality; it is creatively constructed in the activity of reading the novel aesthetically. However, saying that the mere presence of some philosophical content in it is what makes a novel philosophical is tantamount to saying that its literary dimension is given as a ready-made reality. Yet, as I have just pointed out, the literary dimension of the novel is not given as a ready-made reality but as a potentiality for realization in the aesthetic experience. The point which deserves special emphasis here is that if we say that the mere presence of philosophical content is what makes the novel philosophical, we reduce the experience to a purely philosophical one—but the novel is a literary, not a philosophical, work. Third, the presence of philosophical content in a novel may enrich it aesthetically, intellectually, and in some other respects, but this kind of presence does not necessarily make it philosophical. A large number of major literary novels in the western tradition raise significant philosophical questions, include illuminating philosophical conversations, and enhance our awareness of the importance of philosophical reflection in certain situations in our lives, but hardly any serious critic would view them as philosophical novels. Similarly, the mere presence of religious, scientific, or political content in a novel does not necessarily make the book religious, scientific, or political in character, even though such content may exist as a basic ingredient in the work. As an aspect, “philosophical-ness” (which henceforth will be written without the hyphen)—that is, the philosophy-making aspect of a novel—cannot be reduced to the mere presence of some philosophical content in a literary novel but should be treated as a feature that permeates and shines through the work as an organic unitary quality in the process of reading it aesthetically. The locus of philosophicalness is the literary experience. The aesthetic, as such, is the aim of the artist in the process of creating the artwork and of the reader in the

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process of reading the novel aesthetically. Accordingly, we should make a distinction between (1) philosophicalness that emerges in the aesthetic experience and (2) the mere presence of a certain philosophical content in a work. The first is the essential aesthetic quality of the work, one that permeates and shines through the totality of the aesthetic object in the aesthetic experience; the second is a conceptual, discursive content. The first emerges in the course of the aesthetic experience; the second is given as an ingredient in the structure of the novel as a story. The first is received by the intellect while the second is apprehended by the imagination; the first is thought in the medium of concepts, while the second is intuited in the medium of feeling. Thus, a philosophical novel may or may not contain discursively given philosophical content. In some cases, the presence of such content may enhance the depth and power of the novel, while in others it may detract from this. This is based on the assumption that the explication, illumination, and elucidation of the philosophical, as such, is not restricted to the articulation and communication of concepts but extends to the different forms of symbolic or artistic expression. But what is philosophicalness, or the philosophical? Under what conditions can a literary novel be classified as a philosophical type, or as genre? I aver that an answer to this question is not easy to give because philosophers have frequently differed on the aims, nature, and method of philosophy. I do not exaggerate in saying that the history of philosophy from its inception to the present, especially during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, is an amazing mosaic of complexity, diversity, disagreements, conflicts, and kaleidoscopic views and achievements. And yet, in spite of this colorful mosaic, philosophers view themselves as philosophers and their work as philosophical. What makes their work philosophical? As I shall presently explain, an answer to this question is an indispensable condition for an adequate understanding of what makes a philosophical novel as a genre. A second indispensable condition is an adequate analysis of the aspect that makes a novel a literary work of art, primarily because the locus of philosophicalness is its literariness. Accordingly, an adequate analysis of what makes a novel literary and what makes an idea, text, or question philosophical—and, consequently, what makes

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a literary novel philosophical—will provide a reasonable answer to the question of why we should treat the philosophical novel as a genre.

Philosophicalness What makes an activity or a proposition philosophical? Like the scientist, the philosopher is a seeker of knowledge. Well, what sort of object, or types of reality, does she endeavor to know? If the realm of nature is the object of scientific inquiry, what is the realm of philosophical inquiry? Does anything exist besides, or other than, the realm of nature? Yes! Philosophers are not in agreement on the identity of the aim and object of philosophical inquiry, but I believe that, with a few exceptions such as materialism and some schools of analytic philosophy, the majority of philosophers would say that the realm of philosophical inquiry is the realm of human values or meaning . The scientist seeks to know the objects which make up the scheme of nature; the philosopher seeks to know the meaning of these objects. The realm of human values is the realm of meaning; meaning is realized value. When we say that something is valuable, we mean that it is meaningful; we also mean that the experience of that something is meaningful: satisfying or satisfactory. Moreover, the philosopher seeks to know the meaning that underlies the existence of the universe, including the meaning of human life and destiny. When I speak of human values, I mean, first, truth and its derivatives in science, philosophy, religion, history, economics, government, and the other disciplines of knowledge; second, beauty in nature, human beings, and art and its derivatives such as splendor, grandeur, elegance, tragedy, comedy, joy, and horror; third, goodness and its derivatives such as love, generosity, courage, justice, and honesty. We treat truth, beauty, and goodness as values not merely because people desire them, for they may desire them selfishly or expediently, but because they are essential needs, because they are indispensable to human be-ing: we cannot be the human beings we are, and should be, if we do not meet these needs. Some philosophers have characterized these qualities as intrinsic, in the sense that they are valuable in themselves, because we seek them for their

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own sake, because their value inheres in them and nowhere else, but I tend to think that they acquire this aspect primarily because they are responses to essential needs inherent in human nature. Values do not fall from heaven; they are human creations. Neither the philosopher, the theologian, nor the politician legislates values, although each may play a significant role in clarifying their meaning, interpreting them, or examining the existential conditions under which they can be realized in the lives of human beings. They originate from the bosom of human experience in the course of social and cultural progress. However, inasmuch as they are human creations, they exist as ideals, and as ideals, they are schemas, general plans for particular actions and types of action. They grow in their meaning, depth, and richness. Their growth is always a response to the growth of human needs. The task of the philosopher is to know their nature and limits, and the extent to which they can be realized in the life of a given society. Now, if the object of study in philosophy is the realm of human values, what method should the philosopher employ in their study? It would seem that, because this realm is not made up of physical facts, sensory observation cannot, at least not directly, be used in the study of this realm. I say “not directly” for two reasons: first, because their study is impossible without an understanding of the structure and dynamics of human nature, and second, because the field in which human nature is studied is the history of human civilization. Accordingly, although the realm of values is generically different from the realm of nature, and therefore cannot be reduced to material terms, it cannot be studied apart from an understanding of the material conditions of human life. Let us grant that the realm of values is generically different from the realm of nature, my critic might now ask: What makes an activity, an idea, or a theory of value philosophical? An answer to this question should begin with an analysis of the method the philosopher employs in her study of this realm. What is this method? But first, what is the ontological status of human values, or, what is their mode of existence? We cannot inquire into the nature of any object if we do not know where and how it exists. For example, the chair on which I am now sitting is a physical object. I can point to it and I or any other person can identify it in a certain way primarily because it exists in a particular space during

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a stretch of time. In other words, we know this chair exists by sensory observation. This type of observation is the basis of its identification as a particular object. Let us now ask, what is the mode of existence of a value such as justice? We can readily say that it is not a part of the furniture of the natural realm. We see people walking in the street and trees growing in the garden, but we do not see justice walking in the street or growing in the garden! Yet if it is not a part of the realm of nature, it should be a part of the world of the human mind. As such, it exists as an idea; and as a type of idea, it exists as an ideal ; and as an ideal, it exists, as I have just indicated, as a schema or a plan of action—that is, it exists as a possibility for realization as a type of action, whether individually or socially. However, although this type of ideal exists in the mind, it does not exist as a purely subjective, idiosyncratic, or fictitious reality but as a general, intersubjective, communicable, and objectively verifiable reality. Now, by what method does the philosopher study this and similar values? What is involved in this study? This method consists of three basic elements: analysis, evaluation, and argument or demonstration. Regardless of whether it is a metaphysical, moral, aesthetic, religious, or political proposition; a theory; or a point of view in any sphere of human values, the philosopher employs these three intellectual tools in the study of the nature and conditions under which a value can be realized in action. Let us, for example, ask: What is the nature of justice? In answering this question, the philosopher proceeds from the assumptions that: (1) this value originates as a response to an essential need in human nature; and (2) it cannot be understood apart from the way it is applied in the course of the history of human civilization. Thus, in studying this value, the philosopher reflects on the dynamics of this need and the way it is understood and applied by the different societies of the world. Like the scientist, the philosopher’s aim is to establish the truth of a certain proposition or theory on the nature of a value such as friendship; and like the scientist, who focuses her attention on the essence of the object of knowledge, the philosopher focuses her attention on the essence of a certain value. However, unlike the realm of nature, which is given as a ready-made reality, the realm of values is not given as a ready-made reality but as a potentiality, as a reality in continual need of interpretation and conceptual articulation—not only

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because the meaning of values changes from one society to another but also because it changes within the same society from one historical period to another. This is why the study of the realm of values is to some extent problematic. We encounter this feature in the different philosophical disciplines: metaphysics, which examines the meaning of the universe; ethics, which examines the meaning happiness; aesthetics, which examines the meaning of beauty; political philosophy, which examines the meaning of justice; and so forth. This feature is inherent in the structure of value primarily because it is a schema—that is, a potentiality for infinite possible realizations. It is extremely difficult for the philosopher to capture or articulate the spectrum of these possibilities in one interpretation or grasp. Understanding the nature of a value always depends on developing an understanding of the continual growth and development of the different sciences, arts, technologies, and cosmologies, as well as the newly emerging cultural, educational, economic, and social conditions of society. Penetrating the structure of this spectrum is an unusually intricate, deep, and vast undertaking. It increases in its intricacy, depth, and vastness particularly because values are enmeshed in individual and social situations and because they frequently conflict with each other. Consider the value of love. Can you imagine the infinite types and ways of loving human beings at the individual and institutional levels? Can you imagine the multitude of theories, definitions, and interpretations of this value by philosophers, social scientists, and theologians? Consider, too, the value of justice. Can you imagine all the definitions, treatises, and legal and ethical codes of justice created by philosophers and legislators? Finally, consider Plato’s attempt to define this value in the Republic and how, soon after completing the first chapter, he found it necessary to discuss other values in education, ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, art, god, immortality, and related questions! The greatness of a philosophical work lies in its capacity to disclose the wealth of the possible realizations that are hidden in the womb of value as a potentiality. And yet, despite the indeterminacy, intricacy, fluidity, and problematic character of values, one of the essential features which distinguishes philosophical thought as a type of knowledge and method is insight. The philosopher may not be able to produce finally tested propositions in some cases, but she can, in and through her theories, communicate

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insight or a glimmer of understanding into the nature of a given value. Philosophy can, at least, show a value’s complexity and suggest ways of discovering the conditions under which it can be understood or realized. No one metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic, or political theory or view contains a final answer to the question of the meaning of the universe, of human life, of beauty, or of the good society, but each certainly contains a wealth of understanding of these and other types of value questions. However, the question which interests the philosopher is not how a certain conception of a value such as justice comes into being in this or that society or culture, although such an inquiry is vitally important to her study, but what conception is the most appropriate response to the essential need for justice. An adequate conception should take into consideration the dynamics of this need and the logical conditions under which it can be understood and realized, given certain social, political, cultural, educational, and technological conditions. In arriving at such a conception, the philosopher relies on two basic types of knowledge. The first comes from natural science, e.g., physics, biology, and chemistry; the second comes from social sciences, e.g., psychology, sociology, economics, and history. Reflecting on these two types of knowledge is the ultimate source of the philosopher’s interpretation or view of the nature of human values. For example, the metaphysician always advances her view of the ultimate meaning or purpose of the universe on the basis of the most recent theories in physics, geology, and cosmology; the ethicist advances her view of the good life on the basis of the most recent theories of human nature in the social sciences; the aesthetician advances her view of the nature of art on the basis of the most recent developments in mathematics, physics, zoology, linguistics, and technology. Clearly, it is difficult for the philosopher to examine the nature of values without a genuine grasp of the significance and implications of the most recent discoveries in the different sciences. As we can see, the basis of philosophical reflection on the nature of values is knowledge, and the aim of this reflection is also knowledge. The first type of knowledge, which comes from the sciences, is founded in sensory observation. This type of observation is the source of this knowledge and the basis of its verification. This aspect is why we can say that the sensory is the stuff of scientific-ness. However, philosophical

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knowledge is founded in thought; it is derived from reflection, specifically reflection on the different types of scientific knowledge, and it is verified by a rigorous methodology involving logical analysis, evaluation, and argumentation. This is why we can reasonably say that thought is the stuff of philosophicalness, and the aim of this thought is to understand, to be enlightened, to have insight. Like the scientist who aims at the essence of material objects and verifies the validity of her knowledge in the medium of sensory observation, the philosopher aims at the essence of values and verifies the validity of her knowledge in the medium of thought. The method of arriving at knowledge in both areas determines the nature of the kind of thinking done in them.

Literariness A “novel” is a “story,” but not every story is a novel. I am quite aware that a large number of people, including some art critics, frequently use the two terms interchangeably. It is not my purpose here to question or criticize this practice. I simply wish to emphasize that by “novel,” I mean a literary work of art which stands on par with the major artistic forms. Like every art form, the novel is differentiated by virtue of its medium, viz., the word. Unlike painting, whose medium is lines and colors; music, whose medium is sound; or dance, whose medium is motion, the medium of literature comprises a certain type of linguistic structure, for example, prose or poetry. But literature is a vast and diverse artistic domain. It embraces arts such as drama, biography, poetry, or novel. Each of these art forms is viewed as a class or genre. For example, poetry includes genres such as epic, pastoral, heroic, or lyric poetry; the novel includes genres such as mystery, romantic, fantasy, or adventure fiction. A general survey of the different types of literary novel will show that the “philosophical novel” is not treated by the majority of critics as a genre. The main thesis of this paper, as stated earlier, is that it should be treated as a genre. This proposition implies that the philosophical novel is (1) a literary work of art and (2) a philosophical work of art. The line of reasoning that underlies my thesis is that if the philosophical novel is a literary work of art—if it is philosophical the way a romantic or a

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mystery novel are romantic and mystery novels—it should follow that if a novel is literary and philosophical—that is, if philosophicalness is its defining characteristic as a literary work of art—then it should be treated as a genre. In what follows, I shall elucidate and defend the claim that a novel can be philosophical and that if it can be philosophical, it should be classified as a genre. In discussing this thesis, I shall focus my attention on two questions: What makes a novel a literary work of art? What makes a novel qua art philosophical? I shall discuss the first question in this section and the second in the following section.

What Makes a Novel a Literary Work of Art? My quest in raising this question is a quest for literariness—the aspect, or factor, whose presence in a novel makes it a literary work of art. This aspect, I submit, is art, or artistic-ness—the aspect whose presence in any artifact makes, or transforms, it into a work of art. A novel is a literary work of art inasmuch as it is art. Accordingly, a novel is an anecdote, or an account of a series of happenings or events that revolve around a theme. The theme can be love, war, hate, justice, faith, or any interesting subject. When I read a story, I wish to know what happens, always what happens, next. My interest in the story focuses on the plot as the vehicle that underlies the development of the theme, on the extent to which it is pleasant, appealing, exciting, or dramatic. The basis of this interest is the kind of plot the author has woven in the process of writing the story. The plot is, moreover, the basis of my evaluation of its beauty, mediocrity, or ugliness. But the novel is more than a story; on the contrary, the plot is only its vehicle or backbone. Its identity as a novel is qualitatively different from its identity as a story. What is this quality, or identity? To my mind, it is the same identity which makes any artifact an artwork. This is based on the generally recognized assumption that in literature, the art-making aspect is the literary-making aspect. What is this art-making aspect? The principle of artistic distinction is possession of aesthetic qualities: an artifact is art inasmuch as it possesses aesthetic qualities. These qualities do not exist in the work as ready-made qualities, or as sensory or

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conceptual realities, the way sentences, scenes, actions, or characters are given but as potentialities inherent in its form. By “aesthetic qualities” I mean qualities such as enigma, mystery, irony, horror, sadness, joy, terror, comedy, tragedy, splendor, or grandeur. They emerge in the aesthetic experience and they do not exist outside this experience. Their unity in the given artwork constitutes what I shall call “significant form.” The presence of this form in the work is what makes it art and its realization in the experience of the work is what makes the experience aesthetic. Consequently, its presence in a novel is what makes it a literary work of art, and its presence in the experience is what makes it a literary or aesthetic experience. The point I should stress here is that “the aesthetic” is the defining character of “the literary.” Now, let me explain and defend this thesis in some detail. Like the table, the car, or the telephone, the artwork is an artifact—a purposefully made object. However, not every artifact is an artwork. For example, the chair on which I am now sitting is an artifact, but it is not an artwork, although it may be considered one if an artist like Marcel Duchamp were to place it in a museum under conditions specified by what is generally known as “the art world.” Accordingly, we should ask: What makes an object an artwork? Broadly speaking, we can say that possession of aesthetic qualities by an artifact is what makes it an artwork. The unity of these qualities, which is produced by the artist—for example, Vermeer’s Kitchen Maid , which hangs on the wall in a museum, or a performance of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King in a theater—is called “significant form” by a large number of aestheticians.2 In the artistic process, the artist does not create her medium; rather, she uses it in the creation of the work—she forms it in a certain way. Put differently, she imposes a certain form on it. The form she creates is significant inasmuch as it is a meaningful form. But what about this type of form that makes it meaningful? If I am to answer this question in one word, I can say importance. “Importance” is a basic category; it denotes a primordial experience of something that matters to us. We usually refer to this quality by the term “value.” Any object, event, or relation is valuable insofar as it is important—that is, inasmuch as it is significant, worthwhile, or meaningful. The concept of importance is

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not defined in terms of other concepts but in terms of the basic features of the kind of experience it creates. The experience of aesthetic qualities in an artwork, a natural object, or a human being is what makes it meaningful. We deem the aesthetic as such valuable, and we appreciate an object that possesses such qualities mainly because its experience is meaningful or valuable. The concept of meaning is a correlate to the concept of value because, ontologically speaking, the experience of meaning is always an experience of realized value. For example, a piece of music is an organization of sounds, but not every organization of sounds is necessarily music. Ordinary speech is an organization of sounds and so is the wind, but neither is music, even though many people enjoy the sound of the wind or of a particular spoken language. However, when sounds are organized, i.e., formed, in a certain way so as to produce a Vales Triste the way Sibelius did, it becomes music. This type of organization, which is a type of language, acts on us in a certain way, so that when we listen to it aesthetically, we feel the sadness it embodies as a quality inherent in that specific organization of sounds. I characterize a musical form as a kind of language primarily because it is a purposeful organization of sounds, and it is purposeful because it embodies and communicates a certain type of meaning. Every purpose we pursue signifies a value, and every value we realize is a realization of meaning. The type of meaning we enjoy depends on the type of purpose we pursue. Let us not forget that, like the other types of symbolic forms, language is a symbolic form. It differs from them by the fact that the meaning it communicates is conceptual in nature. Any symbolic form, and consequently any symbolic form in the fine arts, is a kind of eidetic language. The painter thinks in terms of pictorial images, the sculptor in terms of plastic images, the dancer in terms of dynamic images, the movie maker in terms of moving images, the novelist in terms of imaginary images, the dramatist in terms of active images, and so forth. But regardless of this difference, the content of their expression and communication is a type of meaning, something we deem important. As a kind of image, the artwork is a perceptual object. It takes a trained ear, eye, or imagination to penetrate the aesthetic dimension of the artwork and comprehend the meaning implicit in its form, and it takes a very

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refined ear, eye, or imagination to penetrate the aesthetic dimension of masterworks and comprehend the wealth of meaning inherent in their form. Now, when I say that the aesthetic quality of sadness inheres in the music, I mean that it does not exist in it as a ready-made reality the way the sounds exist as physical events, and it is not identical to any of these sounds, but exists in the unique way the sounds are organized as a potentiality awaiting realization in the musical experience; it exists in the dynamic interrelatedness of these sounds. The quality of sadness emerges from this dynamic interrelatedness as the sounds weave their way in the development of the musical performance. Similarly, the quality of tragedy which inheres in Jean Anouilh’s Antigone is not given to the reader as a ready-made reality when we read the play as a story. How many students in a World Literature or Existentialism class treat this literary work as a story without noticing the gravity of the moral conflict and the dramatic depth that lie hidden in its aesthetic dimension? Again, how many readers of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot glide over the story without noticing that Prince Myshkin is a metaphor that stands for every value and action Jesus stood for during the last three years of his life as a preacher? Do we need a direct reference to know, or see, that he is a Jesus figure? Does this type of figure not inhere in the web of scenes, characters, actions, and events that makes up the fabric of the novel? But my critic may wonder: How does this figure inhere in this web? That is, how does it communicate or reveal that Prince Myshkin is a Jesus figure without saying or declaring it explicitly? The point I should here underscore is that the main character in a philosophical novel (sometimes more than one character and sometimes a situation) is a metaphor that implies, signifies, or communicates a comparison with a figure that is not directly given to the reader as an analogue of the comparison; it is inferred from the kind of action that makes up the structure of the novel. What is given is the thematic conditions that are necessary for constructing the analogue. The implied character is embedded in the novel as an aesthetic object; as such, he exists as a potentiality in the novel as a significant form. The character exists as the implied world of the analogue, which is not only different from but also richer than the world of the given character. The idiot

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that comes to life when I read Dostoevsky’s The Idiot as a literary work is not a simpleton or a mentally retarded human being who blundered his way into the intricate web of Russian society in the middle of the nineteenth century but a Jesus figure who pays a visit to Russian society the way Jesus paid a visit to the Jewish society about two thousand years ago. He was viewed, used, and abused the way the historical Jesus was viewed, used, and abused, that is, the way a truly loving human being is viewed, used, and abused in a society that carried the banner of love but was mired in a puddle of spiritual poverty and selfishness and was ready and willing to oppress the real Jesus once more rather than abandon their way of life. Can the reader emerge from reading this novel without asking the truly philosophical question—of whether true love is possible—and without seeing that it is hard, if not impossible, to lead a loving way of life in this world? Could Dostoevsky have disclosed this truth as vividly, as forcefully, and as luminously directly in a philosophical essay? Dostoevsky did not communicate this truth discursively; he enabled us to see it, feel it, and to comprehend it in the fullness of its reality. Well, the artist can say what ordinary people cannot, or do not desire to, say explicitly or directly in ordinary life. Is this why we sometimes secretly identify ourselves with this or that character or find ourselves in this or that situation in the novel? But how can the novelist say something without “speaking” or directly expressing it? How can she veil what she wishes to say in such a way that only the reader can lift off that veil in the process of reading the novel aesthetically, or as a literary work? I believe that the ability of the artist to say without speaking, or to communicate what she wishes to say under a veil, is the secret of creative vision. If artistic activity is a matter of forming the medium in a certain way, if form is the vehicle of communicating a particular content of meaning, it should follow that the kind of meaning the artist intends to communicate must be amenable to embodiment, or expression, in a certain form. The uniqueness and structure of this meaning to a large extent determines the kind of form the artist creates. Herein lies the magic of the creative genius. Any attempt to shed rational light on this magic should take into consideration (1) the extent to which the artist understands the depth of human nature, namely, its essential needs and dynamics, because without this kind of understanding, she cannot

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master the needed skill in communicating the meaning it desires; and (2) the extent to which she is the master of the medium or able to subjugate it to the will of the creative vision that steers her process of artistic creation. The relation between the artist and the medium is always dialogical. On the one hand, the kind of form the artist seeks to create depends on her knowledge of the formation possibilities of the medium. Discovering these possibilities is a challenge, perhaps the greatest challenge of the creative act. On the other hand, the medium offers itself as a willing and cooperative partner in this act; it offers itself as an open book the artist can read and explore. Do the words that exist in the back of the novelist’s mind not advance and offer themselves as willing partners when she is trying to construct the right sentence, metaphor, image, or figure of speech? Does the right word not sometimes jump to the fore of the mind at the right time primarily because it is the right word? And can such a word resist this jump when it is lured by the seductive power of the imagination? Can the imagination seduce the word if it does not desire it?

The Aesthetic Object as a World of Meaning If possession of significant form is what makes an artifact a work of art, if this form exists in the work as a potentiality and steps into the realm of reality in the aesthetic experience, then it should follow that its realization in the aesthetic experience transforms the artwork into an aesthetic object. The Idiot that sits next to me on the nightstand is not, as a story, a work of art because it can be read for a psychological, sociological, historical, religious, or historical purpose, not to mention the fact that it can be used as a commodity for sale or as a decorative piece on some shelf or as a means for killing time. Insofar as it is the written text in that volume, it is a potentiality for being an aesthetic object. The artwork becomes an aesthetic object in the aesthetic experience; it is the object of aesthetic appreciation and literary criticism. It reveals its true nature as art through this kind of experience. This object does not exist the way ordinary objects exist, as an experience is a subjective event. However,

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a careful examination of this event will readily show that it does not merely exist in the aesthetic experience but constitutes the very structure and being of the experience. The Idiot becomes identical with the aesthetic experience when we read it. Can we be aware of anything except the world of the novel when we give it the totality of our attention? Do we not stop being observers and become participants in its action as it unfolds in our imagination in the course of reading it? Do we not frequently identify ourselves with this or that character or find ourselves in this or that scene or situation? This is why the aesthetic object does not exist as something external to the mind nor in it. For example, how can we penetrate the world of The Idiot if we do not read the novel Dostoevsky wrote? And how can we penetrate and live in this world, albeit for a short time, if it does not become actual in our personal experience? Again, how can the art critic evaluate the novel if she does not penetrate its inner world—if she does not penetrate the web of its significant form? Now, what do we mean when we characterize the aesthetic object as a world of meaning ? First, what do we mean by “world”? “World” is used differently in different types of discourse. For example, we speak of the world of ideas, the mind, culture, science, or religion, and we speak of “worldview”—for example, the worldview of a certain culture, religion, ideology, philosopher, or artist. The concept of world is the concept of a whole composed of parts, in which the parts are integral to the whole. When we speak of the worldview of a certain culture, for example, we mean the unity of its beliefs, values, traditions, customs, rites, practices, and norms.3 But what do we mean when we characterize the aesthetic object as a world? We mean that it is a complex, diverse, and inexhaustible dimension of meaning. As I explained earlier, the realm of meaning is the realm of human values—of what we deem important in our lives. We can say that beauty, goodness, and truth and their derivatives are important; that questions of life, death, and love are important; and that any goal that aims at individual and social progress is important. The world of meaning an artwork embodies can be small, big, rich, poor, interesting, simple, or intricate. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is monumental if compared to a medieval ballad; Tolstoy’s War and Peace is grand compared to Trollope’s The Warden; Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling is majestic compared to Millet’s Haystack. But regardless of their

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depth, intricacy, richness, or beauty, they are worlds of meaning primarily because they are dimensions of being—spiritual being. My critic would now ask, but is this world real? The tree I now see through the window of my room is real because it occupies a certain place during a stretch of time; its reality is objective. It is definable. But the aesthetic object qua world of meaning is not a definable object, and its reality is not objective. Accordingly, if it is real, in what sense is it real? Put differently, what is its ontological status? Let me at once say that the aesthetic object is founded in two poles: the artwork as a significant form and the subject that realizes it in her aesthetic experience. Thus, it should exist in the medium of this type of experience. But although it exists in the experience of the subject, it is not “subjective” in character but rather exists as an objectively given structure or integrity. Let me explain this claim. The aesthetic experience is not a confused manifold of mental states— emotions, feelings, moods, ideas, images—produced in the perception of the artwork as a significant form, nor is it a kind of Damascene mosaic that exhibits a certain clarity of details and order, but a personal realization of the aesthetic possibilities inherent in the artwork as a significant form. The way these details interact with each other, their vitality or faintness, and the role they play in the unfolding of the aesthetic experience may vary from one person to another and from one aesthetic perception to another. However, regardless of how much they may vary, the kind and the general pattern of these states remain, in principle, constant because they are actuated by a basic and objectively given structure—that of the significant form—the realization of which in the aesthetic process transforms the artwork into an aesthetic object. The aesthetic experience is the realization of the aesthetic qualities inherent in the significant form. Accordingly, the structure of the experience replicates the structure of the significant form; but this form is, to a reasonable extent, an objective structure. By “structure” I mean the schema, or skeleton, that underlies the formal organization of any artwork, be it physical or mental. The stuff of this structure is the multitude of the aesthetic qualities that are expressed, or embodied, in the significant form, and they are embodied not merely in the different elements of the material medium—lines, colors, sounds, words, scenes, sounds, action,

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characters—but also in the way these elements are organized, or in the dynamic relations that exist between them. However, my critic may object, if the aesthetic object exists in the aesthetic experience, do we not reduce it to a completely subjective and necessarily idiosyncratic reality? Otherwise, how can we explain the generally recognized fact that different people experience the same artwork differently? Again, if it exists in the experience of the perceiver, do we not undercut the possibility of an objective standard of evaluation and criticism? The answer to these questions is no. From the fact that the aesthetic object exists in the mind in the process of aesthetic perception, it does not necessarily follow that it exists at the idiosyncratic authority, or whim, of the mind that perceives it, just as from the fact that scientific ideas exist in the mind of the person who thinks them, it does not necessarily follow that they exist at the idiosyncratic authority, or whim, of the mind that thinks them, mainly because, as in science, the structure of the significant form, which is given as an objective reality, is the basis of the aesthetic experience. The structure of this experience is, in principle, determined by that of the significant form, which is subject to public inspection the way the scientific object is. Can we justify the possibility of art criticism as a recognized practice, and can we justify the continual appeal of the major works of art, if we do not assume the validity of this claim?

Philosophical Novel as a Genre If the creation and communication of meaning is what makes an activity, a text, or a work philosophical ; if the expression and communication of meaning in a symbolic form is what makes an artifact art; and consequently, if significant form is what makes a novel a literary work of art, what makes a literary novel a philosophical novel ? Can a literary novel be philosophical? If so, how? A number of art critics and aestheticians view novels such as Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Proust’s Remembrance, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Melville’s Moby Dick, or Mann’s The Magic Mountain as philosophical. .4.

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The logic which underpins the possibility of the philosophical novel is, I submit, the same logic that underlies the possibility of the literary novel. But this logic, which seems clear and effective in explaining the possibility of literary novel genres such as romantic, mystery, or fantasy, does not seem to be as clear and effective in explaining the possibility of the philosophical novel. Accordingly, it is crucially important to spotlight this logic and show how it can be the basis of justifying the possibility of the philosophical novel. Let me emphasize once more that the mere presence of philosophical ideas, conversations, theories, reveries, or even characters in the of philosophers who express certain views on the nature of the world or human life in a novel does not necessarily make it philosophical, just as the mere presence of scientific, religious, or ideological ideas, views, or conversations in a novel does not necessarily make it scientific, religious, or ideological, just as wearing a Pakistani, Kuwaiti, or Russian dress does not necessarily make one a Pakistani, Kuwaiti, or Russian individual. A person may give brilliant philosophical lectures, write books on philosophical questions and views, and decorate her speech with philosophical gems of wisdom without necessarily being philosophical . We should make a distinction between wearing a philosophical garment, or having philosophical ideas or views, and being philosophical. We know whether a person is philosophical by the way she acts and interacts with her social and natural environment—that is, by the way she realizes herself as a human individual in the world, not by what she feels or says about herself, and certainly not by the way she pretends to be. She is philosophical only so far as her behavior radiates philosophicalness. How, then, does a literary novel radiate philosophicalness? The method we should employ in answering this question is the same method we employed in answering the question of what makes an artifact art. We can argue, as I did in the previous discussion, that possession of significant form, or an aesthetic object, is what makes a literary work a literary work of art. But then, how does a literary work of art possess its aesthetic object? As I have already explained in some detail, this object does not belong to the literary work as a perceptual aspect or as a ready-made reality in the work the artist creates but rather

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in the way she forms it.4 The aesthetic object inheres in this very wayness. This inherence is what makes the work expressive; it is also what endows it with the power of communication. Aesthetic qualities such as the tragic, the demonic, the holy, the terrible, the joyful, the hopeful, the enchanting, and other types of sensory, intellectual, and psychological qualities constitute the essential structure of the aesthetic object, but this object is not exactly identical to these qualities. Unlike the work the artist produces and is given as a ready-made reality, the aesthetic object is an inexhaustible possibility of realization. Its domain is deeper, richer, and more meaningful than the domain of the given work. Accordingly, if philosophicalness is what makes a literary novel philosophical, it should inhere in the significant form which makes it literary. In other words, it should exist in it the way the aesthetic object inheres in it. The point which deserves special emphasis here is that the reader of the philosophical novel does not receive its philosophical content conceptually or discursively but intuitively—by seeing it with the eye of her mind. And she can do this because she is not only a receiver in the aesthetic experience, and because she is not only a participant in it, but also because she is its creator: the philosophicalness of the novel steps into the realm of reality via the imagination of the reader in the same way it is created by the imagination of the artist qua significant form. Just as the reader of the romantic novel experiences the power, glory, tragedy, triumph, or delight of love in the course of reading it, the reader of the philosophical novel experiences the meaning of the philosophical issue or view embodied in the significant form of the novel. We should always remember that philosophical thought originates from pre-reflective, intuitive activity, from a fundamental intuition of the nature or a dimension of meaning. This type of intuition is the birthplace of philosophical concepts, theories, or systems. As I indicated in the first two parts of this paper, the aspect which makes this kind of activity philosophical is that it aims at the essential nature of a dimension of meaning. Now it is time to ask more directly how the philosophical novel embodies its philosophicalness. Such a novel may, or may not, contain conceptual philosophical content, but what makes it philosophical is the extent to which philosophicalness is seen, intuited, and apprehended as a realized quality. The novel expresses and communicates this quality the

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same way it expresses and communicates its aesthetic-ness. It inheres in its significant form the way this form inheres in the artwork the artist created via the artistic process. Thus, just as the significant form exists in the artwork as a potentiality, philosophicalness inheres in the significant form as a potentiality. This assertion implies that it emerges in the aesthetic experience the way every aesthetic quality, including the aesthetic object, emerges, but with an added feature: philosophicalness constitutes the essential structure of this object. This constitution is what makes a literary novel philosophical. The reader does not recognize, or think it, as a conceptual content, as a description, or even as a result of logical argument in the medium of a conversation or a text, but feels, sees, and apprehends it as a given concrete aesthetic event. For example, the fundamental philosophical question which permeates Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych is the question of the meaning of human life, and the answer he gives and which shines through the novel as an organic unity of action is that a meaningful life is an authentic life, and an authentic life is the kind of life that originates from an innocent, pure, loving heart. Similarly, the fundamental philosophical question that permeates Dostoevsky’s The Idiot is the question of unconditional love, the kind embodied in the figure of Prince Myshkin. Dostoevsky does not say what true human love is; he shows us what it is, and he shows us what it is by the kind of actions Myshkin performs from the beginning of the novel to its end. Insofar as philosophicalness inheres in the significant form of the literary novel, its ontic locus is the plot, the way the scenes, action, characters, and subject matter of the novel are woven into a story. Plot is the skeleton of the novel and the basis of its aesthetic dimension. We can now ask still more directly: How does a philosophical plot express its philosophicalness? Simply put, a story is an arrangement of incidents. The focus of these incidents is the action of the main characters and the social and natural scenes in which it takes place. A narrative, or a story, is about what certain human beings do and, more concretely, the types of action they perform in the course of the narrative. We know a character by what she does. Accordingly, we know the type of character she is not by what she thinks, feels, or says about herself, but by the type of action she performs in her personal, social, and professional

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life. For example, we know the type of character embodied by Sophocles’ Oedipus by the way he acted as husband, soldier, father, citizen, warrior, and leader. We do not arrive at our knowledge of his character simply by reading the play as a story. Although we read the description of the events of the play in and through concepts, reading it aesthetically is eidetic, not conceptual or merely descriptive. The content of the reading is not a scientific or philosophic description of the king but a portrayal of his character. We read this character the way we read particular individuals in our practical lives. This character rises in the aesthetic experience as a man-in-action. Here we see this man in the fullness of his being; we see how the inner dynamics of his action—namely, thinking, feeling, and willing—are realized in his action. This is based on the assumption that an experience, qua experience, does not have an inner and outer dimension; it is a luminous presence. In this type of reading, the actions are transformed into imaginative events. We intuit them directly without the aid of concepts or images; on the contrary, the character becomes a luminous image! We see Oedipus and the kind of man he is in the events which make up the thread of the narrative; we interact with him as a real person, because he exists in the imagination as a living being, and he so exists because the imaginative event in which he exists during the experience is a living, human event. This is based on the assumption, discussed earlier, that in the aesthetic experience, the sensuous in the plastic, temporal, and literary arts becomes an integral element of the aesthetic object. Thus, read as a story, Oedipus the King is not a tragedy—but read as a literary work art, it is. The tragic aspect of the play emerges in the aesthetic experience as a dynamic, living aspect of a living event, and it does not emerge as a mental or conceptual entity attached to the experience but as a shining presence! It is important to emphasize at this point that the kind of plot the novelist chooses for her novel should be appropriate for the type of question, problem, or dimension of meaning she intends to communicate. The plot of a mystery novel is, to a large extent, different from that of a romantic, horror, or fantasy novel, although romance, horror, or fantasy may be elements of its plot. There are no rules for choosing a plot, mainly because the creative imagination does not recognize such rules; it creates

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them, and in doing so it generates a style, a trend, or a school in artistic expression. The history of literature contains an amazing mosaic of tragic and other types of plots. What matters in the case of the philosophical novel is the kind of narrative that enables the artist to communicate a philosophical insight, attitude, vision, or understanding of a basic dimension of meaning. But my critic might now step in with an objection. In a romantic, horror, or mystery novel, for example, the focus is on action primarily because these genres are founded in action or in relationships, but philosophy is essentially an activity of the mind. How can a plot be philosophical? It can be! The capacity of a plot to be philosophical is, in principle, similar to its capacity to be romantic, horrifying, or mysterious. Just as the tragic quality in Oedipus the King is embedded in its characters and the kind of actions that make up the structure of the play, the philosophical aspect of a novel is embodied in the action of a character or characters. The philosophical character or situation radiates philosophicalness the way Oedipus the king radiates tragic-ness or the way Prince Myshkin radiates love. We read the quality in the character eidetically, even in a philosophical text or conversation, if the novel happens to contain such texts or conversations. I intuit and comprehend philosophicalness in the process of creating the events and characters of the novel in my imagination; I see it in them the way I see the beauty of a character or a landscape. This kind of experience is not mediated by any concepts, arguments, analogies, or images. In it I become one with the experience. Although for a short time, I take a break from the course of ordinary life and live the tragic aspect of Oedipus’ life primarily because I am one with him in the medium of the aesthetic experience. It is extremely difficult for a serious reader of a literary novel to remain unmoved or unchanged after she reads works such as Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov or Melville’s Moby Dick. If the novelist aims first and foremost at the truth of a dimension of meaning of the world and human life, if this aim points to a human being committed to a life of growth and development, if reading the work necessarily involves creating the meaning and, in creating it, the reader lives it, how can she remain silent after reading such novels? Is there not a profound desire in human nature to seek the meaning of human life and live according to it? Is there not

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an impulse in us to be what we should be—that is, to be authentic? Again, do we not aim at the truth in the different spheres of our lives: family, friendship, marriage, business, work? Do we not frown upon liars and respect honest human beings? Do we not stop reading a book if we suddenly discover that it does not aim at the truth? Now, if novels are literary inasmuch as they embody aesthetic qualities; if they are romantic, mystery, horror, or fantasy novels inasmuch as their dominant aesthetic quality is romantic, mystery, horror, or fantasy in nature, and as such literary genres; if, like the philosophical work, the artwork is an expression and communication of the truth of a dimension of meaning of the world and human life; and finally, if philosophicalness can be embodied as a dominant aesthetic quality in a novel, as the preceding discussion in its entirety has shown, it should follow that novels that embody philosophicalness as a dominant aesthetic quality such as Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, Melville’s Moby Dick, Proust’s Remembrance, Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, or Mann’s The Magic Mountain can be viewed as a genre.

Notes 1. See, for example, Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973; Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973; Michael H. Mitias, What Makes an Experience Aesthetic? Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988. 2. The idea of significant form was first introduced by Clive Bell in 1913 in his well-known book, Art, and became a basic principle of explanation in the majority of aesthetic theories in the twentieth and twenty first centuries, See, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, 1973; What Makes an Experience Aesthetic ? And more recently, Nick Zangwill, Aesthetic Creation, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Music and Aesthetic Reality, London: Routledge, 2015. 3. See, Alan Goldman, Philosophy and the Novel , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016; Vincent Descombe, Proust: Philosophy of the Novel , translated by Catherine C. Macksey, Stanford: Sandford

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University Press, 1992; Burton Porter, Philosophy Through Fiction and Film, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2004; James Ryerson, “The Philosophical Novel,” New York Times Saturday Book Reviews, January 20, 2011. 4. See, The Literary Work of Art; What Makes an Experience Aesthetic ?

Bibliography Bailey, John, Tolstoy and the Novel , London: Macmillan, 1975. Bell, Clive, Art, Capricorn Books, 1958. Bersani, Leo, Marcel Proust: The Functions of Art and Life, London: Macmillan, 1965. Descombes, Vincent, Proust: Philosophy of the Novel , translated by Catherine C. Macksey, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. Beardsley, Monroe, Aesthetics, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1981. Derrida, Jacques, The Truth of Painting, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Dewey, John, Art as Experience, New York: Capricorn Books, 1958. Dufrenne, Mikel, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Ficillon, Henri, The Life of Forms, translated by C. B. Hogan and G. Kubles, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942. Gaut, Berys and Lopes, Dominic MacIver, The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, New York: Routledge, 2000. Girard, Rene, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, translated by Yvonne Freccero, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961. Goldman, Alan H., Philosophy and the Novel , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Gooding-William, Robert, “Literary Fiction as Philosophy: The Case of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra,” Journal of Philosophy, 83(11): 667–675, 1980. Heidegger, Martin, The Origin of the Work of Art, The Essence of Truth in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, translated by John Sallis and A. Hofstadter, New York: Routledge, 1993. Hospers, John, Meaning and Truth, Hamden: Archon Books, 1964.

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Ingarden, Roman, The Literary Work of Art, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Jones, Peter, Philosophy and the Novel , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Kierman, Matthew, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, Hoboken: Blackwell, 2006. Kuczynska, Alicja, “Art as a Philosophy,” Dialogue and Universalism, 28(1): 103–114, 2018. Landy, Joshua, Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Mitias, Michael H., What Makes an Experience Aesthetic ?; Aesthetic Quality and Aesthetic Experience, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988. Porter, Burton, Philosophy Through Fiction and Film, Upper Saddle River: Pearson Prentice-Hall, 2004. Reyerson, James, “The Philosophical Novel,” New York Times Sunday Book Review, January 20, 2011. Smith, Barry, “Ingarden and Meinong on the Logic of Fiction,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 41(1/2): 93–105, 1980.

2 Narrative and the Value of Falsehood: An Approach to Fiction David Gorman

∗ ∗ ∗ Defenders of poetry and of literature generally have been particularly worried by the charge that literature, and specifically fiction, is a species of falsehood. They worry that, if we simply concede that there is an association between literary fiction and falsehood, it will in effect demote literary compositions to the status of second-class utterance, at best, or of positively suspect behavior, at worst. The reasoning here is that since false statements cannot convey knowledge, literary fiction, if categorized as false, becomes cognitively useless and (because false statements are made by liars) ethically questionable. Apologists for literature have adopted a strategy of downplaying the association between fiction and falsehood by arguing that literary D. Gorman (B) Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73061-1_2

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discourse aims at a different kind of truth from the garden variety of linguistic truth that contrasts with falsity. Although there have been various candidates for this higher aim of literary discourse, they all involve the attribution of a certain generality to the subject-matter, including the universal, the normal, the plausible, or the typical; or, in recent times, phenomenal experience, possible worlds, or cognitive schemata. Except perhaps tangentially, I will not be concerned in what follows with what might be called the higher-truth strategy for dealing with the problem of literature and falsehood. I will simply point out that it has not worked: the issue persists. This strategy amounts to an attempt to change the subject, but no matter how sublime the sort of generality attributed to literary discourse, it cannot permanently distract anyone from recognizing the homely fact that we identify compositions as fictional if they include or entail at least some statements (or as I will say subsequently, assertions) that, judged by what they literally say about specific things, are indeed false. That is how we identify a narrative, for example, as fictional; but it is also what makes us suspect a lie.

1 Our initial problem therefore concerns the relation between the notions of narrative, fiction, and lying. But why is there a problem here at all? Presumably because these notions seem related, somehow; but the question of exactly how has produced all the confusion that comes with conflicting claims and what I want to call conversation-stopping theses, in which discussion of an issue screeches to a halt the moment some nostrum or other comforting phrase is intoned, such as (in this case) “the poet never affirms,” or “willing suspension of disbelief.” I will return to this. Meanwhile, with the intent of striking out on a fresh path, I suggest that lying, narrative, and fiction have something in common: they are all linguistic activities. And if we focus on the linguistic aspect of these phenomena, we notice that there is a point of intersection: lying, narrative, and fiction are not so much different activities, as ways we can

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classify one kind of action, namely, assertion. By starting from a consideration of this linguistic action we might then see how far we can go toward resolving our problem. Explaining the concept of assertion requires the concepts of truth and falsity—in the sense that there simply is no way to say what an assertion is without mentioning these semantic values, as I will call them. Gottlob Frege long ago drew the key distinction between an assertion’s sense (Sinn) and its force (Kraft ).1 As to Sinn, an assertion has content— which we might follow Frege in calling a thought (Gedanke)—which has the property of being true or false: a thought is a unit of content that can be assessed for its semantic value, of truth or falsity.2 As to Kraft, we must distinguish between the fact that the content of an assertion has a semantic value (which is what makes it potentially assertible), and the action a language-user takes in affirming the truth of that thought, which is what she does when she asserts it: this is the force of the action. This analysis of assertion may seem unduly technical, though we will draw upon it subsequently. But it is only common sense to observe that assertion is central to linguistic activity in general, and to factual discourse in particular. Recognizing this does not commit us to the vulgar error of maintaining that it is the only kind of verbal activity that matters. We can recognize many kinds of linguistic action besides asserting: asking, requesting, commanding, wishing, and so on.3 All we need to agree on for the moment is the idea that, among these types of action, assertion has an important place. Indeed, a complete piece of factual discourse must include assertions, and finished utterances or works composed in the factual register always consist primarily of assertions. It is what we expect of factual discourse. (Proof of this, if any is needed, is provided by the present essay, and for that matter any other essay, which consists mainly of a series of statements.) Say that the result of this very brief digression into the philosophy of language is correct so far; where does it put us? A thought—that is, a potentially assertible content—has a semantic value, truth or falsity. It is equally assertible, for instance, that 2 + 2 = 4, and that 2 + 2 = 5; or that Königsberg is located in Germany, as well as that it is located in Russia. What it is to make an assertion is not merely to express something true or false, but to stake a public claim that a thought has

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one particular semantic value, that of being true. In other words, assertions aim to say something true. That is their distinctive characteristic (which is why, to return to a point already made, the concept of assertion cannot be adequately characterized without appeal to the concept of truth: they are interdependent). Assertions do not, of course, need to be true; nothing guarantees that any assertion that I might make is true or false—though an enormous amount of ingenuity has been expended in the quest to find some way to certify the truthfulness of some set of assertions. Leaving aside philosophical, theological, moral, and scientific concerns about guaranteed truths, we can still draw two illuminating conclusions about assertion. First, if I am to understand any assertion, I have to start from the assumption that it is aimed at expressing a truth; there is no other way of making sense of this action. Second, there is no activity parallel to assertion, aimed instead at falsity or at some other semantic value; assertion is, so to speak, the only language-game in town—the only game of its type, anyway.4 No doubt this seems a very superficial characterization of assertion, as if it involved nothing more than a set of conventions. What about our beliefs, desires, intentions, and other mind-internal states? Can’t the activity of asserting, thus described, be manipulated? Certainly it can: that is the point I have been leading up to. Here I will highlight a crucial idea only touched upon previously. I described making an assertion as staking “a public claim that a thought has [the semantic value of ] being true.” The publicity of assertion is essential. In making an assertion, I am only claiming to express a truth: by doing so, I am ostensibly letting you know about a belief I hold. But of course I can exploit this convention, for deceptive purposes. I can assert something that I believe to be false, and hope in that way to pass it off as true; my purpose in doing this may be limited to deceiving you about my own beliefs, or I may want to go further and make some impact on your beliefs. Indeed, given the nature of the convention, the latter is the usual result: if I assert something, I am overtly claiming that a certain thought (Gedanke, in Frege’s terms) is true, and your standard reaction will be to add it to your own stock of beliefs. The language-game in which assertion constitutes the fundamental move is that of conveying information. That is why asserting is such a basic linguistic action. As noted previously, to define assertion as

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aimed at affirming the truth of a thought is not to require of any particular assertion that it actually be true. People tell you things all the time that you judge false. The convention that enables you to do this creates the expectation that, when someone makes an assertion, she means to inform you about something, as well as a further expectation that, in the normal case, she will succeed. In this way assertion is an activity subject to norms. What needs to be accounted for is the case of an assertion that fails to meet its overt (because conventional) goal of being true. We have two ways of explaining false assertions. By far the most common is what I might call the epistemic explanation: presented with a false statement, you usually conclude that there is some problem with the belief-set of the speaker. (Or, on a more sophisticated account, you may prefer to hold that there is some dissimilarity between your belief-set and the speaker’s, since you realize that it may be you who holds the false belief, or that both you and the speaker may hold different false beliefs.) In short, people are frequently in error. But in the exceptional case, you may decide that there is deceptive intent involved. To account for a false assertion as a lie is not merely an epistemic but an ethical response. Lying is necessarily the exceptional case because the language-game of assertion would break down if its conventions were frequently or systematically flouted. There would be much more to say about this if this were an essay in the philosophy of language, but since it is not, I will move on. In this preliminary description of linguistic activity, nothing has yet been said about fiction. And for the purposes of the preliminary conclusion I want to offer, nothing needs to be. All that is required, not only to characterize lying, but to explain why it ever succeeds, is the notion of assertion understood in the admittedly rough-and-ready way outlined so far, which amounts to a description of factual discourse (which I have also called the language-game of information-giving). Lying is a way of trying to exploit the convention of assertion. A lie succeeds, when it does, by having the requisite sense and force to pass as being aimed at saying something true.5 In short, lies depend on passing as factual discourse. As such, they belong to a different linguistic register than fiction. And now, because we have some sort of account of nonfictional discourse, we are in a position to offer at least an initial characterization of fiction: if lying

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is deceptive falsehood, fiction is nondeceptive falsehood . This amounts to little more than a slogan, but I hope to use it as the starting point for developing an account sufficient to characterize the status of fictional discourse.6

2 So, fiction and lying have this in common: they both somehow involve falsehood. But they differ in this way: lying involves deception, fiction does not. While defining fiction as nondeceptive falsehood suffices to distinguish fictionality conclusively from lying, it falls short of articulating the conditions a piece of discourse must fulfill to justify calling it fictional. Let us begin with a list—an open-ended list—of assertions, which I introduce with an express warning that they are false, to forestall the possibility that anyone might be deceived by them. 2 + 2 = 5. Königsberg is located in Germany. Pemberley is the ancestral home of Darcy family. David Gorman completely understands the concept of fiction. [Etc.] Clearly, this set of assertions does not amount to a piece of fiction, much less a fictional narrative; and the set could be extended indefinitely without turning it into fictional discourse. Evidently, something more is needed. Now consider this series of assertions. Once there was a beautiful princess who lived in a castle by the sea. An evil enchanter desired her. And so one night he sent a dragon to steal her away from her castle. All of the guards on the castle walls were asleep, except for one. [Etc.]

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Here we also have a set of four nondeceptively false assertions with, again, more to follow. But it recognizably constitutes fictional narrative. Why? The obvious difference is that the assertions in the second set seem connected. They provide a basis for their audience to build up a picture, by keeping track of the persons and other items identified by the names and descriptions used, developing a sense of the setting, taking an interest in what befalls the represented entities, learning how to understand their actions and other behavior, and so forth and so on. If this seems obvious, it is only because that is exactly what we do with nonfictional assertions that form a narrative. We treat them as potentially conveying information, as being uttered with the force (the Kraft, in Frege’s term) of assertion—of expressing something true. Further, we expect the piece of information conveyed by each assertion (its Sinn) to contribute to a structured whole, delineating a comprehensible situation. If we reject an assertion in a nonfiction narrative as false, for whatever reason, we disregard it; we do not add its content to our beliefs. This indicates a less obvious difference between the two sets of false assertions. In themselves, false assertions are cognitively inert. If there were nothing more to fiction than falsity, fiction would have no significant content. We could not understand a fictional narrative, or differentiate one piece of fiction from another. And yet manifestly we can do such things. Therefore it must be that we understand the statements in fictional discourse not merely as assertive in form, but in significance. We understand them in the only way that assertions can be understood: as if they were potentially true. Otherwise we could not treat them as if they conveyed substantial information. Of course, this information has no value outside the fiction. As readers learn bits and pieces about Jay Gatsby’s life, for instance, they build up a sense of who Gatsby really is—that is, “really” in Scott Fitzgerald’s novel. This framed information makes no difference to our knowledge of the world beyond the novel, where there is no real Gatsby. We might call it nonce information, pertinent within the story, but with no claim to categorical—that is, nonfictional—validity. In other words, within the situation presented by a fictional narrative, there is a kind of truth, without which the sentences constituting the narrative would lack assertive force. This

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we might call circumscribed truth, since it grounds the semantics for narratives concerning the fictional situation or world.7 What holds for circumscribed or nonce truth must hold for the other semantic value as well, and we can distinguish these values from uncircumscribed truth and falsity by marking them with asterisks (as *truth and *falsity). And we can do the same for the linguistic actions that we assess for these values (*assertions). In nonfictional discourse, a basic activity is making assertions, understood as aimed at truth but always with the potential to turn out false; not only is it inadequate to say that fictional discourse operates in some entirely different way, but highly misleading, because the very possibility of (intelligible) fictional discourse requires the possibility of making *assertions, understood as aimed at *truth but always with the potential to turn out *false. To develop this, we would need to apply it to more sophisticated cases than the fairytale I started telling. Not all fictional narratives simply consist of a string of assertions. For an excellent illustration of this, you might review the opening pages of Pride and Prejudice. After the famous first sentence, the narrator asserts very little at all; but she contrives to convey a great deal of (nonce) information about the Bennet sisters, the entailment of Longbourn, and the arrival of Mr. Bingley in the neighborhood. With cases like this in mind, as part of this account of fiction I propose that the basis of a comprehensible fictional narrative must consist of a set of *assertions, whether made overtly, or directly implied or presupposed (as in the Austen example). Perhaps the account of fiction I have sketched so far is all wrong. I would at least claim for it the virtue of being a constructive account—an attempt to explain what fictional discourse is rather than a deflection of criticism of it by claiming that there is some way that it should not be conceived. It has always surprised me that so little work has been done by theorists of narrative or of literature on what seems like a concept so basic to what they study. Discussions of fiction often terminate with one of two purely negative conclusions, one owing to Philip Sidney and the other to S. T. Coleridge. Both are very familiar from being quoted so often; but it may be worthwhile reflecting on them. “Now for the poet,” states Sidney in the Defense of Poesie, “he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.”8 If we gloss this—as many have—as

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saying that the fiction-maker does not assert anything, it has the considerable attraction of providing the simplest way possible to disarm the traditional cognitive and moral objections to fictional discourse that I mentioned at the start. It does so at a very high price, however. In the first place, although Sidney holds that “the poet never maketh any circles about your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true what he writes,” this usually appears to be exactly what the fiction-maker, or indeed any poet, is doing. If the following are not assertions, how do we recognize that? Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. O Rose thou art sick.

In the second place, if the expressions in fiction are not assertions, what are they? How are they to be understood? We need to be able to account for the fact that we can understand fictional narratives and other kinds of (call it) imaginative discourse. A merely negative comment, though handy for blowing off hostile complaints, cannot serve this purpose. Following these remarks, Sidney offers suggestions that exemplify what I have called the traditional approach of describing fictional discourse as consisting of implicit generalizations. Yet aside from the fact that Sidney tosses these suggestions out with a courtly insouciance, they do not sit well with what for me is the most important comment he adds, highlighting the nondeceptive falsehood of fictionality: so think I none so simple would say that Æsop lied in the tales of his beasts; for who thinks that Æsop writ it for actually true were well worthy to have his name chronicled among the beasts he writeth of. What child is there that, coming to a play, and seeing Thebes written in great letters upon an old door, doth believe that it is Thebes?

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In contrast to the traditional strategy of accounting for fiction in terms of what I have called higher truths, my approach begins by frankly recognizing the falsehood of fictional discourse rather than trying to distract (ourselves and) others from this essential feature of it. Another theoretical gambit concerning fiction that regularly stuns narrative theorists into silence is the well-known phrase used by Coleridge, in chapter 14 of his Biographia Literaria, when he speaks of the approach that he and Wordsworth took in composing the Lyrical Ballads: it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.9

Coleridge’s formulation complements that of the Defense of Poesie in being focused on how the audience of fiction should respond, where Sidney’s topic is the author’s attitude toward his fiction. Yet both are essentially negative formulations: Sidney claims that the fiction-maker lacks intent to deceive, or otherwise lead people into error, Coleridge that readers of fiction are in no danger of being deceived in this way. The attraction of Coleridge’s formulation is tolerably clear. But the effect has been to distract theorists from unpacking his phrase, and it badly needs unpacking. By confining himself to the enigmatic negative remark that, whatever else they do, the members of the audience of a fictional narrative do not disbelieve it, Coleridge appears to intimate that belief and disbelief are just not the appropriate terms for describing how we ought to respond to fiction (and thus keep “poetic faith” with it). If we are crass or prosaic enough to attempt to extrapolate something like a doctrine from these oracular hints, it looks as if two modes are proposed for understanding discourse—specifically, given our present orientation, assertions. In one mode, our response to an assertion would be to decide either to believe it or disbelieve it: this would be the default response, so to speak, in the context of factual discourse. In the other mode, the default is

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switched off: we merely entertain or contemplate the thought expressed, without ascribing truth or falsity to it. As with the slogan taken from Sidney, too many theorists have been content to stop thinking about fictional discourse at this point, taking this for the last word on the topic. The trouble is, there is no such alternate mode: as already pointed out, to understand a fictional narrative, audiences must engage in intellectual activity, by treating the assertions made or directly implied in the narrative in a way parallel to nonfictional assertions, tracking the references made and the inferences drawn, so as to familiarize themselves with the fictional situation and to follow the story. This does not amount to giving full credence to the narrative, as one would if it were nonfiction; but to the extent that understanding a fictional narrative requires compiling a body of information, the temporary, the “circumscribed” (i.e., composition-relative) belief that audiences accord a fictional narrative resembles belief in a very clear way. If this were an essay on the semantics of literature overall, this would be the point at which to emphasize that this kind of nonce belief is basic to comprehending metaphor, irony, and nonliteral discourse in addition to nonfictional discourse. But since the semantics of narrative is a big enough challenge, I will move on, noting only that in responding to the slogans of Coleridge and Sidney with a constructive account of *assertion, whatever else it has accomplished, has left the practice of lying far behind. Literary fiction is not a form of lying.

3 Though fictional narration (consisting on my hypothesis of *assertions) differs entirely from lying, lying can certainly be incorporated into fictional narratives. The account of fiction I am sketching would instantly stand refuted if it ruled out the feasibility of deceptive *assertions. Not only can characters in a fictional work lie to each other, but narrators can lie to narratees. Everyone who studies literature can cite any number of such cases. For that matter, error as well as deception can occur in fiction: authors are not omniscient, and can make mistakes.10 And plots frequently turn on information characters do not have about

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a situation, or mistakes they have made in interpreting it. What we can say about deceptive or simply erroneous passages in fiction is that the *assertions constituting them (whether stated, presupposed, or entailed) are *false. This explains the need for the legal disclaimer in commercial fiction that some or all of what happens in the narrative may coincidentally be true. This should not be possible if fiction consisted of assertions with the semantic value of falsity. But the same sentence that can be *true, taken as an *assertion, can also be taken as an assertion, and true. The complexity of the narrative situation of fiction has yet to be fully explored. In nonfiction narrative, the narrator is the author: one person is making the assertions that constitutes it. We have fiction the moment we can distinguish between the author and the narrator of the work: why is this? The question is not just, why do we distinguish them? but, how is that possible? On the theory under consideration, it is because the author is making assertions, and the narrator is making *assertions. As the author of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen not only realizes that what she is writing is false, but expects her readers will too. Like Philip Sidney’s child in the theater undeceived by the board marked “Thebes,” Austen’s readers must grasp that, following a convention of nondeceptiveness, she is setting out an entirely imaginary body of information through false assertion. But her narrator is doing no such thing: the information her narrator *asserts is generally authentic, in that it conveys the nonce information necessary not simply to understanding but to actively becoming involved in the fictional situation. As an alternate to the device of asterisks, let me try this form of expression: as narrator, the voice recounting the story is telling it for true but, as the author, Austen is telling it for false.11 This generalization in no way precludes some of the assertions the narrator makes from being false within the situation (or if you insist, the world) of the novel. The famous opening line is a perfect example of this: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” If we take the author to be speaking, this remark is recognizably false, spoken with ironic purpose. If put in the narrator’s mouth, it comes across as equally ironic—but not because the speaker is trying to mislead us about the situation at Longbourn; rather in order to measure the distance between

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the characters, who would fervently endorse its *truth, and the narrator, who does not accept its universality, and thus holds it *false.

4 An area in the theory of narrative that remains to be explored concerns inference, and specifically the question of whether (and, if so, how) we can draw valid inferences in fictional contexts. Students of narrative might be inclined to dismiss this as a purely technical question, of interest only to logicians. But they would be mistaken: the critical reading of any fictional narrative depends on—I want to say, consists of—making inferences about it, and interpretive debates about works of fiction inevitably turn on how readers should draw conclusions from what they read. When nonfictional discourse provides the context of discussion, our intuitive sense of how to proceed has been greatly enhanced by studies in argument and practical inference carried out not only (and not even primarily) by logicians, but by rhetoricians, pedagogical theorists, and of course practitioners in every discipline, since disciplines of inquiry depend upon—where (again) they do not simply consist of—reasoned debate beginning with readings. But if as a result we feel that we know how to proceed with rational discussion, that sense of orientation pertains to nonfictional contexts. Since I am only hoping to indicate a line of research here, I will confine myself to deductive inference, as being the clearest, best worked-out case.12 Inference involves assertions, in that a deduction, for instance, consists of taking a set of assertions as premises from which another assertion is derived as a conclusion.13 The reason why an inference must consist of assertions is that premises and conclusions must have truth-values, so that it is possible to characterize valid inference as the way in which a true conclusion necessarily follows from true premises. That is to say, valid inferences have the characteristic of being truth-preserving. The case with inference is the same as that of assertion, previously remarked: there is no parallel phenomenon involving falsity rather than truth. Just as there is no linguistic action aimed at affirming a false thought, there is no pattern of deriving conclusions from premises that would be falsity-preserving.

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But now say that we are dealing with a context of discourse that, instead of assertions, consists of *assertions. Does our intuitive grasp of inference, much less our theoretical understanding of it, still hold good in fictional discourse? Though I do not know how to answer these questions, I am sure that they are worth pursuing. Here are one or two preliminary thoughts for anyone who might be interested in exploring this area. Again, Austen’s fiction provides a useful starting point, not because inferential patterns can be found in it (they can be found in all comprehensible discourse), but because her narratives highlight these patterns by presenting reasoning as one activity among others in which many of the characters routinely engage. In Pride and Prejudice, after exhibiting some attachment to Jane Bennet, Mr. Bingley leaves the neighborhood and breaks off contact with her. This suggests to Jane and others that he has lost his regard for her. Her sister Lizzie however draws the correct inference, following to something like this pattern. — Mr. Bingley could not so easily give up his attachment to a woman like Jane. — To break off contact in the way that he has must be due to someone’s influence. — Mr. Darcy is the only person with that kind of influence on Bingley. — Therefore: Darcy has influenced Bingley to break contact with Jane. Obviously, this is a completely informal way of laying out the inference involved, but I do not think more is needed to make the point that, although it seems fair to describe this as a valid inference, from true premises to a true conclusion, doing so would be inappropriate. Because they involve imaginary characters in a fictional situation, none of the assertions serving as premises or conclusion is true. And yet, as discussed previously, it feels equally inappropriate to dismiss them as cognitively empty or morally suspect, in the way that we would if we were supposed to take Austen’s narrative as a work of nonfiction. We could do justice to

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both these intuitions by using the suggested device of treating the assertions ostensibly made as aiming, not at the semantic value of truth, but at *truth, a value restricted to the conceptual space of a fictional situation. Then the correct way to set out Lizzie’s ostensible inference would be this. — *Mr. Bingley could not so easily give up his attachment to a woman like Jane. — *To break off contact in the way that he has must be due to someone’s influence. — *Mr. Darcy is the only person with that kind of influence on Bingley. — *Therefore: Darcy has influenced Bingley to break contact with Jane. Our sense of the validity of this inference concerning nonexistent people and imaginary situations can be justified by saying that it is *truth-preserving. There would not be much need to explore the question of inference in fictional contexts if the pertinent inferences only ever involved either assertions or *assertions. The puzzle concerns mixed situations, where some of the premises are *assertions that arise within the fictional situation of the narrative, and others are assertions concerning the work, its author, the historical background, and so on. Of course this description fits most if not all critical discussion of fiction. The examples just given concern the simplest possible cases, amounting to a parallel drawn between the possibility of valid inference from premise to conclusion in a nonfictional situation and the same possibility in a fictional situation, in which the set conclusion and the set of premises consist of *assertions. Schematically, using “>” to represent the possibility of valid inference, the answer is yes to the question, If [Premises] > [Conclusion] then do [*Premises] > [*Conclusion]? To move to a slightly less simple case, however, suppose that the premises include a mixture of assertions and *assertions; can anything be validly inferred from that? My guess is that parallelism breaks down here. Valid nonce inference (i.e., inference within the fiction) should be possible from a mixed set of premises: [Premises, *Premises] > [*Conclusion]. Not so for nonfictional inference: [Premises, *Premises] > [Conclusion]

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would be invalid. This is only a guess that needs to be substantiated but, if it is right, it already tells us something interesting about the fiction/nonfiction distinction. And of course there are many further cases of inference in both fictional and mixed contexts to be considered. I predict that this matter will become central to narrative theory. Whatever happens, though, we cannot say that we completely understand the concept of fiction until we know how to answer questions like these.14

Notes 1. Gottlob Frege, “Thought” (1918), translated by Peter Geach and R. W. Stoothhof in The Frege Reader, edited by Michael Beaney (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 325–45. 2. Here I use falsity as a technical term for the semantic value of an assertion other than truth, leaving falsehood for nontechnical use. To anticipate an objection: nothing prevents us from recognizing other semantic values; but aside from being the simplest case, employing a two-valued semantics reflects the way people ordinarily talk about assertions. 3. I call these linguistic actions rather than speech acts because they belong to a different level of analysis: if you say that I am skating toward thin ice, I could not recognize this as a warning (a speech act) unless I first understood it as an assertion (a linguistic action). If such matters do not get the attention they deserve in this essay, it is because I am trying to avoid too much entanglement in the philosophy of language. 4. Whatever else they are, non-assertive linguistic actions such as questioning, commanding, and the rest differ from assertions in not being assessible for semantic value. 5. This comment obviously fails to do any justice to the fascinating phenomenology of lying—again, though, I am not attempting more than a rough-and-ready description of the semantics of factual discourse, in order to provide coordinates for locating fictional narrative.

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6. I have not wanted to enlarge my proposal on fiction with comparisons to the ideas offered by Dorrit Cohn, Käte Hamburger, Peter Lamarque, John Searle, Kendall Walton, and many others. For compact overviews of the literature, with bibliographic indications, see David Gorman, “Fiction, Theories Of,” in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman et al. (New York: Routledge, 2005). pp. 163–67; and Jean-Marie Schaeffer, “Fictional vs. Factual Narration,” in The Living Handbook of Narratology, edited by Peter Hühn et al. (Hamburg: Hamburg University) [WEB]. 7. Precisely because uncircumscribed truth has to do with the world (the actual, one-and-only world) I try to use the phrase “fictional situation” in preference to “fictional world,” though this idiom proves hard to avoid. 8. Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, edited by Forrest G. Robinson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), p. 57. 9. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Major Works, edited by H. J. Jackson (Oxford University Press, 1985). p. 314. 10. There is always the potential for argument here: if Shakespeare located Bohemia on a seacoast, was he simply misinformed, or was he joking? Every case does not need to be settled, however, to leave room for the possibility that authors can make booboos. 11. I once classified the split between the author and the narrator as a “signpost” of fiction—that is, as a mere indicator rather than a guarantee of the fictionality of a piece of discourse (Gorman, “Fiction,” p. 167). I now believe that I was mistaken: author/narrator distinguishability is constitutive of fiction. 12. John Heintz attempted a preliminary reconnaissance here which, so far as I know, has had no sequel: “Reference and Inference in Fiction,” Poetics 8, no. 1 (1979): 85–99. In a much-cited essay first published in 1978, David Lewis starts with the same general approach, which however quickly became submerged under the logical exotica of possible worlds, which remain obscure to me: “Truth in Fiction,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 261–75.

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13. Again, this is only a rough way of putting things: a more precise account would begin by specifying that the set of premises might consist of any number of assertions, including one, or even none. 14. For further elaboration of the theoretical framework of my remarks here, see David Gorman, “Ideology in Light of the Theory of Meaning,” in Language, Ideology, and the Human: New Interventions, edited by Sanja Bahun and Dušan Radunovic (Farnsworth, UK: Ashgate Press, 2012), pp. 59–74.

3 Learning to Read: A Problem for Adam Smith and a Solution from Jane Austen Lauren Kopajtic

Introduction In the final pages of his Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), Adam Smith claims that “the desire of being believed, the desire of persuading, of leading and directing other people, seems to be one of the strongest of all our natural desires” (VII.iv.25).1 He connects this desire to the value of “frankness and openness,” both of which “conciliate confidence.” And he contrasts the qualities of frankness and openness with “reserve and concealment,” which “call forth diffidence.” “We are afraid,” Smith adds, “to follow the man who is going we do not know where” (VII.iv.28). Reserve and concealment are qualities that disappoint and rebuff curious spectators. In his strongest remark, Smith claims that the person of reserve “wraps himself up in impenetrable obscurity … [and builds] a L. Kopajtic (B) Fordham University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73061-1_3

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wall about his breast. We run forward to get within it, with all the eagerness of harmless curiosity; and feel ourselves all at once pushed back with the rudest and most offensive violence” (VII.iv.28). Appearing where they do, in the closing pages of TMS, these remarks have occasioned little scholarly commentary, but they should give us serious pause. Smith is suggesting that the reserved person obstructs the efforts of spectators (VII.iv.28). This is a significant offense because Smith’s sympathy-based sentimentalist philosophy requires that spectators be able to read and interpret the situations of agents, discerning with an adequate degree of accuracy what they are feeling and why they are feeling what they feel. But just how different is the reserved person from the self-commanded person, who receives so much praise throughout TMS? And if self-command is like reserve, won’t it too block spectatorship? This chapter finds and examines a serious tension at the center of Smith’s moral psychology. Specifically, if self-command is like reserve, then the two basic “efforts” in Smith’s moral psychology—the effort of the spectator to sympathetically enter into the feelings of the agent, and the effort of the agent to moderate his feelings—will be in tension (I.i.5.1). While the spectator is trying to sympathetically imagine the agent’s situation and enter into his feelings, the agent will be trying to alter what he appears to feel by controlling the expressions of those emotions. This tension leads to a problem—it looks like the agent will thus block and mislead the efforts of the spectator, turning a sympathetic interaction which is supposed to be harmonious and mutually pleasing into something adversarial. Given that most passions require some moderation before the spectator can sympathize with them, it is thus difficult to see how spectators could develop into “impartial and well-informed ” observers of most situations (VII.ii.1.49, emphasis added). These problems only arise if Smithian self-command is like reserve and showing this is the task of the first part of this chapter. After situating and examining the difficulties of Smithian spectatorship, in the second part, I take some steps toward resolving them. I first emphasize a crucial but easily missed feature of Smith’s moral psychology, that Smith’s model spectators are skilled readers of the people around them. I then consider

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how Smith’s moral psychology might have been informed by literary techniques and forms, specifically, eighteenth-century developments in the novel. I focus on Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, both because this novel distills and perfects the relevant developments in literary form, and because it is concerned with the same phenomenon found in Smith— the difficulties of spectatorship in a social world governed by norms of propriety that demand the regular concealment of feeling.2 Turning to Austen reveals resources that help us to resolve, at least partially, the problems for spectatorship. I draw out two important techniques, focalization and free indirect style , showing how they enable and encourage spectatorial work and thus contribute to the development of skilled readers. I conclude by returning to Smith, revealing how he is introducing subtle refinements to his descriptions of character, refinements informed by the eighteenth-century developments in literary form that reached their full bloom in Austen’s novels.

Spectatorship and Self-Command in Smith’s Moral Psychology In order to show how the problems outlined in the introduction arise for Smith, we must engage with some of the key elements of his moral psychology. I will begin with a discussion of spectatorship and the sympathetic interaction and then turn to Smith’s characterization of selfcommand. I will establish that self-command seems indistinguishable from reserve on Smith’s view, showing that even the highest and most exemplary form of self-command involves effortful control of emotional expression. I will then draw out, in detail, the problems sketched above. Smith is a sentimentalist moral philosopher who holds that sentiment is the foundation for morality and that the standard of propriety for all feelings3 is the approval of a well-informed and impartial spectator. Moral sentiments, the sentiments that serve as the basis for moral judgments, are produced through the sympathetic interaction between an agent and an impartial and well-informed spectator. The sympathetic interaction is made possible by the capacity for sympathy. According to Smith, sympathy is the experience of a “fellow-feeling with any passion

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whatever,” produced by the spectator’s effort to imaginatively enter into the situation of the agent (I.i.1.5). Smith describes this effort as follows, [T]he spectator must, first of all, endeavor, as much as he can, to put himself in the situation of the other, and to bring home to himself every little circumstance of distress which can possibly occur to the sufferer. He must adopt the whole case of his companion with all its minutest incidents; and strive to render as perfect as possible, that imaginary change of situation upon which his sympathy is founded. (I.i.4.6)

Upon this effort of imaginative transposition, the spectator will feel a “sympathetic emotion” (I.i.3.1), which is what the agent “should be” feeling, given the situation they are in (I.i.1.4). But the spectator will also compare what the agent should be feeling with what the agent appears to be feeling, which Smith calls their “original passion” (I.i.3.1). This comparison results in a further feeling, a feeling of approval, if the two are in harmony, or disapproval if they are not. This final feeling is what is properly called a moral sentiment. Smith uses two evaluative terms to describe good spectatorship—good spectators are impartial to everyone involved in the situation, and they are well-informed about the situation (e.g. VII.ii.1.49). My focus is on the second of these two criteria, the standard of good information. How does the spectator gather this information, and what would count as meeting this standard? Smith’s discussion of an important limitation on our access to the feelings of others helps to answer this question. Smith writes, As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, they never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us in any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. (I.i.1.2)

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Smith acknowledges that we are limited in our ability to sympathetically imagine the minds and feelings of other people, and he suggests that in order to imagine our way into the minds of others, we need to have enough material (“impressions of our own senses”) to recreate a plausible version of what they feel.4 The spectator will be starting from her own perspective, limited to using her own senses and imagination as she tries to gather information about the agent’s situation and imaginatively change her situation to that of the agent. As Smith says in the passage quoted above, this will involve “adopt[ing] the whole case” of the agent and “bring[ing] home every little circumstance” of the feeling in question (I.i.4.6). This focus on the situation of the agent is one of Smith’s important refinements to sympathy. For Smith, the situation of the agent comprises the set of factors which cause him to feel as he feels, and which would explain why he feels as he feels. Such factors could include his immediate environment, his relationships with others involved in the situation, his beliefs, intentions, and emotions, his personality and character traits, and so on. This focus on situation means that, for Smith, sympathy is not merely the result of a contagion of feeling. A spectator does not simply “catch” joy upon seeing an agent’s smiling face—she may automatically feel something upon observing that expression, but she will also attempt to imaginatively reconstruct the circumstances of the agent’s smiling face. Gathering information about the agent’s situation is thus crucial to good spectatorship because it enables the imaginative transposition required for sympathizing. Focusing on the spectator’s side of the sympathetic interaction, as described in the early pages of TMS, we find a social world populated with curious, caring, and careful observers. Spectators are described as wanting to sympathize with agents, as striving to be sensitive to agents’ particular situations, and as aiming at understanding and mutual sympathy (I.i.2). Later in TMS, Smith stresses that the work of good spectatorship is that of a lifetime. Good information about the sentiments and opinions of other people is achieved through the “slow, gradual, and progressive” work of making “observations upon the character and conduct both of [oneself ] and of other people” (VI.iii.25). Smith is aware, of course, that actual people will struggle to meet the

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standard of good spectatorship most of the time—being distracted, preoccupied, or biased (I.i.3.4)—but he claims that the sentiments of the well-informed and impartial spectator are nonetheless the “precise and distinct measure by which [the] fitness or propriety of affection can be ascertained or judged of ” (VII.ii.1.49). The sentiments of the wellinformed and impartial spectator set the standard for propriety in all feelings and affections. This depiction of spectatorship becomes more complicated when we examine the agent’s side of the sympathetic interaction. According to Smith, we are thrown into the world of sympathy and spectatorship at a young age, and we soon learn that others will not feel for our own passions and interests as we do (III.3.22). Because of this, and because agents want the sympathy and approval of spectators, Smith says, agents must regulate their feelings, bringing them to the level into which an impartial spectator could enter. Smith describes the effort of the agent as follows: The [spectator’s] thought of their own safety, the thought that they themselves are not really the sufferers, continually intrudes itself upon them; and though it does not hinder them from conceiving a passion somewhat analogous to what is felt by the sufferer, hinders them from conceiving any thing that approaches to the same degree of violence. The person principally concerned is sensible of this, and at the same time passionately desires a more complete sympathy. … But he can only hope to obtain this by lowering his passion to that pitch, in which the spectators are capable of going along with him. (I.i.4.7)

The effort of self-command , as described here, is that of moderating one’s emotions so that they harmonize with the anticipated sentiments of the spectator.5 On Smith’s account, self-command is the task of the agent who seeks sympathy, and it is an effort impressed upon most of us most of the time. This demand for consistent self-command is explained by the difficulty that spectators have in sympathizing with most types of passions. Smith sorts the passions into five main classes: bodily passions (e.g. hunger, pain, etc.), peculiar passions, or passions that derive from a peculiar turn of an agent’s imagination (e.g. romantic love), selfish passions (e.g. grief and

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joy upon private misfortune or fortune), unsocial passions (e.g. hatred and resentment), and social passions (e.g. generosity, kindness). Smith argues that spectators find it very difficult to sympathize with the originally felt degrees of the selfish passions, and that they cannot sympathize with most degrees of the bodily or the peculiar passions because all three classes are too close to the agent’s own interests and too difficult for someone else to imagine their way into. Spectators find it difficult to sympathize with the unsocial passions because they are so distressing and because the spectator’s sympathy is often divided between the person feeling hatred and the person hated. Only the social passions tend to be easy for spectators to immediately sympathize with, such that an agent could likely immediately express their original passion without some attempt at self-command. But in all other cases, the desire for the spectator’s sympathy will lead the agent to modify her original passion.6 As described thus far, self-command involves moderating one’s feelings so that they would be approved of by the well-informed and impartial spectator. But what does this effort of self-command look like in action? And, to return to the question raised in the introduction, is self-command like reserve? To answer these questions, I want to examine a series of vignettes from Smith’s discussion of how we learn to command our feelings (III.3.21– 25). Smith begins by drawing the character of “the weakest man” while he suffers a personal misfortune (III.3.23). At first, this person is calmed by the presence of a spectator, being “immediately impressed,” in an almost “mechanical[]” way, with the view that this spectator would take of his miserable situation (III.3.23). But very quickly his own partial view returns and he “abandons himself, as before, to sighs and tears and lamentations; and endeavours, like a child who has not yet gone to school, to produce some sort of harmony between his own grief and the compassion of the spectator, not by moderating the former, but by importunately calling upon the latter” (III.3.23). The weakest man cannot impose restraint on his passions and so he importunes the spectator to carry the burden of the sympathetic interaction. The next portrait Smith paints is of the “man of a little more firmness,” who tries more intentionally to keep the view that the spectator would take of his situation in sight. Smith writes,

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In most cases he avoids mentioning his own misfortune… He endeavours to entertain [his company], in his usual way, upon indifferent subjects, or, if he feels himself strong enough to venture to mention his misfortune, he endeavours to talk of it as, he thinks, they are capable of talking of it, and even to feel it no further than they are capable of feeling it. If he has not, however, been well inured to the hard discipline of self-command, he soon grows weary of this restraint. A long visit fatigues him; and, towards the end of it, he is constantly in danger of doing, what he never fails to do the moment it is over, of abandoning himself to all the weakness of excessive sorrow. (III.3.24)

Again, Smith is describing someone who is suffering from a private misfortune, and he describes the temporarily successful self-command of this person as amounting to avoiding the subject of his excessive sorrow. In comparison with these two previous characters, the third character, the “man of real constancy and firmness,” maintains composure and command in all situations: The man of real constancy and firmness, the wise and just man who has been thoroughly bred in the great school of self-command … maintains this control of his passive feelings upon all occasions; and whether in solitude or in society, wears nearly the same countenance, and is affected very nearly in the same manner. In success and in disappointment, in prosperity and in adversity, before friends and before enemies, he has often been under the necessity of supporting this manhood … He has been in the constant practice, and, indeed, under the constant necessity, of modelling, or of endeavouring to model, not only his outward conduct and behaviour, but, as much as he can, even his inward sentiments and feelings, according to those of this awful and respectable judge. He does not merely affect the sentiments of the impartial spectator. He really adopts them. (III.3.25, emphases added)

This portrait provides an instructive depiction of near-perfect selfcommand. This figure maintains control of his feelings at all times and wears “nearly the same countenance” in all situations. He is not unfeeling or insensible, but he strives, with a great deal of success, to act and feel only as an impartial spectator would, and he models his outward conduct and behavior entirely upon the impartial spectator.

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These three portraits reveal that while virtuous self-command aims at the actual alteration of feeling—bringing the exterior expression in line with the interior feeling—developing or “work-in-progress” selfcommand almost always takes the form of concealing or feigning feeling.7 The “weakest man” cannot keep up the appearance of anything but what he actually feels, and he expresses his distress without restraint or alteration. The “man of a little more firmness” is trying to keep his company from seeing the distress he feels as he struggles to bring that distress down from its improper level. But his mask is in constant danger of slipping, and when it does, the feelings he expresses will be excessive and improper. The “man of real constancy and firmness” wears the same countenance at all times. But Smith writes that this character models “not only his outward conduct and behaviour, but, as much as he can, even his inward sentiments and feelings” after the impartial spectator’s, suggesting with that contrastive phrasing that even at this high level of self-command, much of this person’s effort is focused on controlling the expressions of feeling (III.3.25, emphasis added). Indeed, it is the weakest man who is the most open about what he feels; both the man of middling firmness and the man of real firmness are hiding or feigning their feelings. Smithian self-command thus seems to involve concealment and perhaps also dissimulation, but Smith does not seem concerned that this amounts to hypocrisy or blameworthy deception.8 Nor does he seem concerned that his exemplar of self-command seems to be indistinguishable from the cold and reserved character he criticizes elsewhere. As we saw above, Smith describes the person of “reserve and concealment” as someone who “disappoint[s] the curiosity” of spectators, cautiously keeping his opinions and sentiments a secret (VII.iv.28). And in his discussion of the influence of custom on the moral sentiments, Smith associates “civilized nations” with sympathy, free expression of emotion, frankness, openness, and sincerity, while “savage and barbarous nations” are characterized by reserve, concealment of emotion, insensibility, falsehood, and deception (V.2.8–11). Smith’s explanation of these differences is that the living conditions of each kind of nation are different enough that the levels of propriety for the various emotions are different. In the

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conditions of poverty, danger, and insecurity, which is how Smith characterizes “barbarous and savage nations,” a person “expects no sympathy from those about him” (V.2.9). It is too difficult to feel for others when one’s own misery “pinches” so severely (V.2.9). Expecting no sympathy from the spectator, the “savage” must exert an extreme degree of selfcommand, completely hiding his passions from all onlookers. Smith writes, “His passions, how furious and violent soever, are never permitted to disturb the serenity of his countenance or the composure of his conduct and behavior” (V.2.9).9 We might well be reminded of Smith’s description of the “man of real constancy and firmness,” who always “wears nearly the same countenance” (III.3.25). Smith’s description of the self-commanded “savage” is ambivalent.10 He seems to admire the “heroic and unconquerable firmness” and the “magnanimity and self-command” which is so strong as to be “almost beyond the conception of Europeans” (V.2.9–10). But he also links this extreme self-command to deception, writing that “barbarians … being obliged to smother and conceal the appearance of every passion, necessarily acquire the habits of falsehood and deception” (V.2.11). Selfcommand, requiring the concealment of feeling, tends toward falsehood and deception. These remarks about self-command occur in Smith’s discussion of the influence of custom on our moral sentiments, and the extreme nature of the self-command found in “savage” nations is explained by the conditions of life in those nations. But Smith is describing the varying forms of universal propensities and capacities of human nature. In impoverished and insecure situations, self-command over-develops, leaving no room for openness and expression, and the vulnerability that comes along with these. But even in conditions of abundance and ease, self-command will involve concealing feeling. This is because self-command is the effort of moderating one’s emotions so as to achieve the sympathy of a well-informed and impartial spectator. And even in the easiest and most open societies spectators will find some passions difficult to sympathize with. In Smith’s three vignettes of selfcommand, the men in question are all clearly of “humane and polished nations,” and they are all clearly trying to hide an emotion that the impartial spectator would not be able to enter into.

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Let’s bring the spectator back into our discussion. When we considered the work of spectatorship above we found that good spectators were curious, caring, and careful. A good spectator tries to imaginatively recreate an agent’s situation, gathering information about that situation in her attempt to change her situation and feel as the agent does. As she does this work, she will feel a sympathetic emotion, which is the feeling the agent should be feeling given the situation he is in. But she will also compare the sympathetic emotion she feels with the agent’s original passion. Without this comparison there can be no moral sentiment—the moral sentiment is a separate sentiment felt upon the comparison of the sympathetic emotion and the original passion.11 Access to the original passion of the agent is thus crucial at two stages in the spectator’s imaginative work: It is an important piece of information about the agent’s overall situation, and it is necessary for the comparative work required for the experience of a moral sentiment. This is where we see the problem sketched in the introduction starkly—while the spectator is trying to read the situation for this information, the agent is trying to alter or hide this information by controlling his expressions of emotion. Either the spectator ends up sympathizing with a feigned emotion, resulting in a false moral sentiment, or the spectator has to somehow pry away the mask of self-command, interfering with the agent’s efforts.12 This tension between the efforts of the spectator and the agent generates a problem. First, as we saw above, most passions require some moderation before the spectator can sympathize with them, even in “humane and polished nations.” Thus, some self-command will be required most of the time. Given this state of affairs, it is difficult to see how spectators could develop into well-informed observers of most situations. Smith writes that the work of refining one’s sense of propriety is “slow, gradual, and progressive,” and he admits that the accuracy, justness, and exactitude of this sense will vary “according to the delicacy and acuteness of that sensibility with which those observations were made, and according to the care and attention employed in making them” (VI.iii.25). But this takes no notice of the fact that those whom one is observing will be regularly concealing and feigning their feelings. Good spectatorship seems threatened by widespread observational inaccuracy. Furthermore, Smith assumes that we can distinguish effortful

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self-command from mere indifference, insensibility, indolence, or apathy, but he does not acknowledge that the self-commanded person will be making this work difficult for us.13 To use the example from Smith’s discussion of the self-commanded “savage,” how could a spectator tell the difference between the person who is effortfully controlling their emotions and presenting the “countenance of serenity,” and the person who is genuinely unruffled and presenting the same countenance? It is difficult to see how spectators could learn to distinguish self-masking traits, like self-command, from other, non-virtuous traits.14 At this point, a reader might be worried that I am overstating the tension between the efforts of the spectator and agent and the problem that arises from this tension. Smithian spectators are not limited to just the agent’s expressions of emotion as they gather information about the agent’s situation—they have the entire situation to read and interpret. Put another way, while the emotions of others might not be transparent to spectators, their situations should be, and that should provide enough information to avoid these worries.15 I agree that the Smithian spectator will be reading the entire situation of the agent and not just their expressions of emotion. But a spectator who can read a situation, controlling for the agent’s possible dissimulation, is already savvy and skilled, and given the obfuscating and falsifying efforts of self-commanded agents, it is not clear how anyone would ever attain such skill. As Charles Griswold writes, “[interpreting a situation] requires … a discursive description of the situation, as well as a potentially complicated appraisal of what the salient features are … The ‘situation’ does not consist simply in a set of facts; it will include, for any spectator however impartial, a judgement of what the relevant facts are, of their causal relations, of how they did or might have seemed to an actor at the time and why” (2010, 68–69, emphasis in original). Furthermore, as Griswold adds, “it may well be not simply a question of the spectator looking at the scene, adjusting the eye of the mind, and sympathetically getting the full picture, so much as listening to the actor’s suasive narrative, and then comparing it to his or her own interpretation” (2010, 70).16 Griswold is describing how the spectator’s interpretive work is

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already highly complex, and I have argued that there’s a further complication—the demand for self-command means that agents will be not only trying to persuade, but will be dissembling in order to better persuade. Smith is not sanguine about the difficulties of spectatorship, but he fails to sufficiently acknowledge the deep problems with assuming that we will be able to imaginatively and accurately grasp the emotions of others. Put another way, while Smith admits, on the first page of TMS, that we cannot assume that the other will be transparent to us, he fails to sufficiently address just how much opacity spectators will be faced with, and he fails to acknowledge that the ethical demands built into his moral psychology will contribute to producing that opacity. So, how can Smith plausibly account for how sensitive, discerning and well-informed spectators develop in a world where the demand for selfcommand requires agents to regularly conceal and feign their feelings? I think there are resources in Smith to respond to this question, but seeing them will require seeing something about Smith’s descriptive and rhetorical techniques.

Literature and Learning to Read I have argued that there is a tension between the efforts of the spectator and the agent in Smith’s moral psychology, and that this tension generates problems for Smith’s account of how spectators develop into well-informed observers of human character and conduct. I now contend that Smith can ameliorate this problem by accepting that one of the important ways in which spectators develop their spectatorial skills is by developing their skills as readers of other people. As Griswold has argued, the emphasis on vision and ocular metaphors throughout TMS too readily suggests that the spectator will simply see the situation of the agent, as she sees a scene through a window (2010, 67–68).17 But as our close examination of the tension between the efforts of the agent and spectator has revealed, agents will rarely be transparently open to spectators, and discerning what they are feeling will require savvy interpretation of complex clues. The central question of this chapter thus

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shifts from a question about spectatorship to a question about readership: What does good reading of other people look like, and how might it be developed? In order to address these questions, I turn to developments in eighteenth-century literature and to their perfection in the hands of Austen. First, a comment on spectatorship and training. For Smith, and for any moralist conceiving of moral education as the development of virtuous character traits, moral education will not be achieved through indoctrination or the internalization of a set of rules. And because Smith is a sentimentalist, moral education will involve, especially, developing one’s sympathetic imagination and one’s ability to occupy the perspective of the well-informed and impartial spectator. Moral education thus involves training or practice and it requires venues for that training. Smith’s account of the development of spectatorship emphasizes real-world, quotidian, and often public interactions—the child on the schoolyard, the man on the street, and the person in the company of strangers (III.3.22, I.i.3.4, I.i.4.9). But my contention is that such venues will not be sufficient for the development of well-informed spectators who can read agents engaged in concealing their emotions and moderating their expressions. Special sites, special perspectives, and special tools are required. But what kind of tools and how are they supposed to work? What is needed is a training ground for spectatorial work, a place for the wouldbe skilled spectator to engage in the advanced tactics of the exemplary spectator, including perspective-switching and sympathetic identification with complex characters. Fortunately, the novel, especially as it was developing in the second half of the eighteenth century (while Smith was revising and re-writing TMS), provides an especially effective site for such training. And in the remainder of this chapter, I will show that there is good reason to think that Smith would have accepted that one way of becoming a good spectator is through engagement with imaginative and narrative depictions of other people.18 As an initial piece of support for this reading, we can take a cue from an addition Smith made to the 1790 edition of TMS. Smith writes, “The poets and romance writers, who best paint the refinements and delicacies of love and friendship, and of all the other private and

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domestic affections, Racine and Voltaire; Richardson, Maurivaux [sic], and Riccoboni; are in such cases, much better instructors than Zeno, Chrysippus, or Epictetus” (III.3.14). Smith’s claim is that these authors instructively illustrate relationships of love and friendship as well as the “private and domestic affections,” like “parental tenderness” and “filial piety,” which Smith describes on the previous page (III.3.13).19 It is not clear from this remark how literature has this instructive function, but I suggest that Smith’s mention of three mid-eighteenth-century prose writers—Samuel Richardson, Pierre de Marivaux, and Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni—can provide us with clues that will lead us to Austen and her techniques. While much might be said about the three prose writers Smith mentions, I will pull out three well-established and shared features of their works which are relevant to our discussion here. First, all three writers produced narratives detailing, at great length and with minute attention, the inner lives and feelings of their subjects. Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–1748), Marivaux’s unfinished La Vie de Marianne (1731– 1741) and Riccoboni’s Lettres de Milady Juliette Catesby (1759), to take just three examples, are all studies of human feeling, largely as revealed in intimate familial and romantic relationships. The subjects of these novels meditate extensively on the nuances of their own hearts, and they investigate the motives and affections of the people around them. Second, all three writers employ literary forms that purport to convey authentic emotions in an immediate way—that is, they purport to convey the sentiments of an individual as experienced by that individual, often (implausibly) at the moment of experience.20 All three employ the epistolary form (in different degrees of development), telling a narrative through a series of private letters to and from specific individuals. Third, and most importantly for our purposes, all three writers contributed to the development of stylistic techniques designed to facilitate sympathetic identification with the subjects of their narratives. This was in part accomplished through the presence of the first two features, for a “more convincing presentation of the inner lives of … characters and of the complexities of their relationships,” allowed for a closer sympathetic identification with those characters (Watt, 200–201). But, at least in the case of Richardson, a case can be made, as Joe Bray does, for a more direct

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contribution. Bray holds that Richardson’s epistolary style in Familiar Letters (1741) and Clarissa “move[s] beyond the model of a standard letter” into free indirect style through the omission of speech tags and the integration of direct speech into narrative “without any attributing clause.”21 Eliding the framing device of the letter or the memoir, either through the use of free indirect style, or through other focalizing techniques, enables the reader to slide more seamlessly into the thoughts and feelings of the subject. Taking together these three features of the novels of Richardson, Marivaux, and Riccoboni (features that are of course shared by other writers not explicitly mentioned by Smith), we can see that the novel, in the form that would have been familiar to Smith, was in part concerned with rendering the inner life of another person accessible to the reader.22 Furthermore, through the stylistic devices designed to convey that inner life in an immediate and apparently unmediated form, these novels could activate the spectatorial apparatus of the reader, bringing them to sympathize with the characters depicted.23 In order to see how this works more clearly, let’s work through an example. As Barbara Benedict and others have argued, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility is a novel that manages to distill many of the themes and concerns of the eighteenth-century sentimentalist novel, while also developing in a masterful way the techniques more or less incipiently present in earlier novels.24 Given that this novel also shares the concerns we have been focusing on in TMS—the balance of feeling and self-command and the difficulties faced by spectators when the agents around them are concealing and feigning their emotions—it provides an apt example for our purposes.25 Elinor Dashwood is one of two heroines in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, along with her sister, Marianne. When we meet Elinor at the start of the novel, we learn that “Elinor … possessed a strength of understanding, and coolness of judgment, which qualified her, though only nineteen, to be the counsellor of her mother … She had an excellent heart;—her disposition was affectionate, and her feelings were strong; but she knew how to govern them” (SS 7).26 Elinor’s self-command is contrasted with the frequently excessive sensibility of her sister, Marianne, and their mother, Mrs. Dashwood. But in the first volume of the novel, our sense of the value of Elinor’s self-command is tempered

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by Marianne’s frequent comments on that quality and by Marianne’s own ardent and impulsive example. Marianne rightly notices that selfcommand frequently requires one to conceal and feign their feelings, and such pretense is anathema to her: “Marianne abhorred all concealment where no real disgrace could attend unreserve; and to aim at the restraint of sentiments which were not in themselves illaudable, appeared to her not merely an unnecessary effort, but a disgraceful subjection of reason to common-place and mistaken notions” (SS 63–64). To Marianne, selfcommand almost always involves the “disgraceful” and deceitful restraint of one’s feelings for the sake of “common-place and mistaken” ideas of propriety and decorum. In the early chapters of Sense and Sensibility, we see the two sisters on opposite sides of the question of whether one should command one’s emotions when doing so requires concealment and dissimulation. As the plot unfolds, this question becomes more complicated. At the end of the first volume, Elinor and Marianne are thrown into regular meetings with the Steele sisters, and with little warning, Elinor is pressed into Lucy Steele’s confidence, only to learn that Lucy has been secretly engaged for several years to Elinor’s own supposed beloved, Edward Ferrars. This initial conversation between Elinor and Lucy is painful to read, and we repeatedly see Elinor struggling with astonishment and disbelief as Lucy reveals her history, but maintaining her composure nonetheless (SS 152– 155). Lucy’s undesired information forces Elinor’s self-command into an even higher gear. The promise to keep Lucy’s information a secret, combined with Elinor’s general disposition for self-command and caution, leads her to regularly feign indifference and composure, and to screen her feelings from others.27 Through her efforts at concealing her feelings, Elinor convinces her own mother and sister that she is unaffected by the loss of Edward to Lucy, and it is not until the very end of the novel, when Edward is free again to marry Elinor, that they realize her efforts. In a poignant moment, we watch as Mrs. Dashwood finally realizes how Elinor has suffered:

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She now found that she had erred in relying on Elinor’s representation of herself … She found that she had been misled by the careful, the considerate attention of her daughter, to think the attachment, which once she had so well understood, much slighter in reality, than she had been wont to believe, or than it was now proved to be. She feared that under this persuasion she had been unjust, inattentive, nay, almost unkind, to her Elinor; that Marianne’s affliction, because more acknowledged, more immediately before her, had too much engrossed her tenderness, and led her away to forget that in Elinor she might have a daughter suffering almost as much, certainly with less self-provocation, and greater fortitude. (SS 402–403)

Mrs. Dashwood’s thoughts in this moment help us to see how the selfcommanded person blocks and misleads her spectators. Even a spectator like Mrs. Dashwood, with an ardent heart and extensive information about the agent, may fail to discern the feelings and efforts of the highly self-commanded person. This is because the self-commanded person represents herself as feeling less than she does. How she feels and how she appears to feel come apart because of her very efforts.28 But notice that as readers we see more than Mrs. Dashwood, Marianne, or any other character in Elinor’s world could see. Compared with Austen’s characterization of a different reserved character—Jane Fairfax in Emma, for example—the reader is not blocked from understanding Elinor by the reserve she presents to others, nor is the reader led to see her as suspiciously concealing some desirable information.29 Instead, Austen gives the reader what we might call a bi-focal view of self-command. We see Elinor’s composure of face and voice as presented to Lucy Steele while we sympathize with the shock and astonishment that Elinor is feeling; we watch Elinor’s easy manner with her family while knowing of the efforts she has made to command her disappointment about Lucy’s unwelcome information. In Austen’s depiction of Elinor Dashwood, we are afforded a much fuller understanding of another person than we can expect to gather from mere observation of behavior. This fuller understanding of the self-commanded person is accomplished in part through Austen’s use of focalized narrative, positioning the reader so that they share Elinor’s perspective, and also through Austen’s use of free indirect style, which seamlessly merges character and narrator and then moves them apart.

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Focalization and free indirect style help the reader to inhabit a perspective other than her own, potentially enabling her to sympathize with and understand sentiments and opinions other than her own.30 To see more concretely how focalization and free indirect discourse enable spectatorial work, let’s take an example from early in Sense and Sensibility. Edward is visiting the Dashwood women and he arrives wearing a new ring, into which a lock of hair is set. Marianne immediately comments on this ring, speculating that the hair must belong to Fanny, Edward’s sister, even though it appears to be of too light a shade. Edward responds with embarrassment, glances at Elinor, and confirms that it is Fanny’s hair. Austen then takes us inside Elinor’s mind as she reacts to the exchange: Elinor had met his eye, and looked conscious likewise. That the hair was her own, she instantaneously felt as well satisfied as Marianne; the only difference in their conclusions was, that what Marianne considered as a free gift from her sister, Elinor was conscious must have been procured by some theft or contrivance unknown to herself. She was not in a humour, however, to regard it as an affront, and affecting to take no notice of what passed, by instantly talking of something else, she internally resolved henceforward to catch every opportunity of eyeing the hair and of satisfying herself, beyond all doubt, that it was exactly the shade of her own. (SS 114)

When we read this we are, of course, as much in the dark about the former possessor of the lock of hair as are Marianne and Elinor. Through focalization and free indirect discourse, though, we are brought to make the same inference that Elinor does—that Edward somehow acquired a lock of Elinor’s hair and set it into a ring. And we are encouraged to feel as Elinor does about this information—hopeful and excited. Of course, the hair is not Elinor’s but Lucy Steele’s, and upon rereading this passage with the full set of facts in mind, it is striking how quickly Elinor jumps to the conclusion that “it was exactly the shade of her own,” despite the very compelling fact that she does not know how Edward could have gotten it. Elinor is misled by wishful thinking, and the reader is misled with Elinor, so when Lucy reveals that it is her hair, we are astonished and mortified with Elinor. Focalization and free

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indirect discourse engage the reader’s spectatorial apparatus, bringing the reader to switch perspectives, to read for cues and information, to sympathize with one or more of the persons involved, and to feel sentimental reactions to the construed situation. Austen’s depiction of Elinor Dashwood affords the reader privileged access to another mind. This alone would provide a special venue for spectatorial work, allowing the reader to be exceedingly well-informed about someone else and therefore to make accurate and precise judgments about them. But Austen’s use of focalization and free indirect discourse accomplish further special work, bringing the reader through the movements of spectatorship. These techniques can be used to produce the work of good spectatorship, but they can also be used to produce flawed spectatorship. When we are brought to make a mistake with Elinor, and then to confront that mistake, we learn that even an excellent judge like Elinor is fallible, and perhaps also that we, with our apparently privileged perspective, can be fallible too. Of course, this requires a careful reader who is willing to re-read, but so does Smithian spectatorship. How might these literary techniques and resources ameliorate the problem that we found in Smith? Given that self-commanded people will be concealing their feelings and their efforts of self-command, Smith owes us an account of how anyone could develop into a skilled spectator. Using the example of Austen and other eighteenth-century novels, I have tried to show that engagement with a specific kind of literature—literature that activates the reader’s spectatorial apparatus—should be part of the Smithian spectator’s training and development. To conclude, I want to return to Smith to see how much of this might be already in his account of spectatorship, and to consider how far this account gets us. Returning to Smith’s three vignettes of self-command after this extended tour through Austen’s masterful illustrations of character reveals just how illustrative Smith’s own prose can be. As he unfolds the character of each of these figures, Smith moves between descriptions of their behavior and conduct as it would look to an outside observer and descriptions of their feelings and thoughts. Indeed, TMS abounds with such bi-focal illustrations of outward behavior and inward emotion. In a

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passage from early in TMS, Smith writes that we “are disgusted with that clamorous grief, which, without any delicacy, calls upon our compassion with sighs and tears and importunate lamentations. But we reverence that reserved, that silent and majestic sorrow, which discovers itself only in the swelling of the eyes, in the quivering of the lips and cheeks, and in the distant, but affecting, coldness of the whole behavior” (I.i.5.3). In this passage, Smith, like Austen, is giving us a bi-focal view of this instance of self-command, allowing us to see both the mask of reserve and the feeling beneath. He implies that a “silent and majestic sorrow” can be “discover[ed]” in certain tells of the countenance—swelling eyes, quivering lips and cheeks, cold behavior. It is because we can see both the efforts and effects of self-command and know the feeling that is being commanded that we regard this figure with “respectful attention” (I.i.5.3). But this bi-focal view is given to us by Smith, and we are directed explicitly to the minute expressions and told what they mean. Smith does not dwell on the characters he describes, and so his technique cannot produce the same insight and understanding that Austen’s does, but he does describe those characters with care and sensitivity. Throughout Smith’s TMS, argumentative and philosophical prose is leavened with vivid sketches of different characters—from the man stung by his guilty conscience (III.2.9), to the “poor man’s son” who is cursed with ambition (IV.1.8), to the “savage” who faces his enemies with “serenity” and “composure” (V.2.9).31 These illustrations bring to life both the outer appearance and conduct of the character and the sentiments and thoughts that animate him. And it is these illustrations, and those we can find in literature, that help ameliorate the philosophical problem with which we have been concerned. In a world where concealment of feeling is not only unavoidable but also morally and socially demanded of us, our task as spectators is to observe as widely as we can the character and conduct of others. With traits like self-command, our observations “in the field” will likely not be sufficient because of the self-masking quality of this trait. But if we supplement our fieldwork with sustained engagement with narrative and imaginative illustrations of other minds and other characters, we may become more discerning spectators. But I do not want to overstate this point. The problem facing Smith’s moral psychology is a deep one. The minds of others are not transparent

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to us, and we will always be interpreting their character and conduct from situated and imperfect starting points. Literature can provide a controlled space where we can practice our spectatorial skills from a special standpoint, with artificially good information, with the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them, and with the ability to re-read with a fuller sense of the situation in mind. But this practice and training will not be simply transferable to the public, real-world settings for spectatorship. I will be a poor spectator of my self-controlled and prudent sister, for example, if I assume that reading Sense and Sensibility will give me immediate insight into what her inner life is like. A better lesson to draw from my engagement with that novel is that I might fail to understand my much-loved sister because there are certain things that she cannot share with me. Perhaps I learn the lesson that Marianne and Mrs. Dashwood learn—that the self-commanded person may not reveal herself to me—and I learn to be cautious in my judgments of coldness and suspicious reserve.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have articulated and explored the problem of how sensitive, discerning, and well-informed spectators can develop in a world where the demand for self-command requires agents to regularly conceal and feign their feelings. Bringing Smith and Austen into dialogue on this problem reveals a way out. Spectators may indeed be faced with the challenge of discerning traits like self-command, but there are resources available to assist that work (although not to make it easy). We can train our spectatorial skills through engagement with complex, psychologically rich literature, like Austen’s novels. Indeed, as I have shown, Smith seems to be importing the techniques of the novelist into his own philosophical prose. Techniques like focalization and free indirect discourse allow an author, whether of a philosophical or a literary text, to lay open to a reader the workings of a trait that tries to resist and redirect interpretation. They help us to see the mask worn by the self-commanded person while also feeling the emotion that seethes beneath that mask.32

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Notes 1. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Smith are to Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, eds. D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie (Liberty Fund, 1982), abbreviated as TMS. Throughout this chapter, I cite TMS in the manner recommended by the Adam Smith Review, referring to part, section, chapter, and paragraph. 2. Why Austen? I partly address this question below, but a full discussion would require much more space than I have here. Briefly, while it has not been decisively shown to what extent Austen directly knew of the philosophical writings of Smith, several scholars have argued for her familiarity with Hume and Smith as well other British moralists. For further arguments connecting Austen’s thought to that of Hume, Smith, and British Enlightenment thinkers in general, see: Christel Fricke, “The Challenges of Pride and Prejudice: Adam Smith and Jane Austen on Moral Education,” Revue internationale de philosophie, 269 (2014), 343–372; Rae Greiner, Sympathetic Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); Hina Nazar, Enlightened Sentiments: Judgment and Autonomy in the Age of Sensibility (Fordham University Press, 2012); Charles R. Pigden, “A ‘Sensible Knave’? Hume, Jane Austen and Mr Elliot,” Intellectual History Review, 22:3 (2012), 465–480; Karen Valihora, Austen’s Oughts: Judgment after Locke and Shaftesbury (University of Delaware Press, 2010); E.M. Dadlez, Mirrors to One Another: Emotion and Value in Jane Austen and David Hume (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); Peter Knox-Shaw, Jane Austen and the Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 2004); Elsie B. Michie, “Austen’s Powers: Engaging with Adam Smith in Debates About Wealth and Virtue,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 34:1 (2000), 5– 27; Kenneth L. Moler, Jane Austen’s Art of Allusion (University of Nebraska Press, 1968), and “The Bennet Girls and Adam Smith on Vanity and Pride,” Philological Quarterly, 46 (1967), 567–569. 3. I use the term “feeling” throughout this chapter as the broadest term for affective states. Smith does not offer a careful delineation of this class, moving between terms like “feeling,” “passion,” “affect,” and “sentiment” without differentiation.

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4. See Samuel Fleischacker, Being Me Being You: Adam Smith and Empathy (University of Chicago Press, 2019), 17–19 for a critical discussion of Smith’s argument here, which is fairly obviously meant to target David Hume’s account of sympathy in A Treatise of Human Nature. Fleischacker claims that this is “a bad argument” (16), stemming from Smith’s holding “a private access model of the mind” (17). See also Fleischacker, “Sympathy in Hume and Smith: A Contrast, Critique, and Reconstruction,” in Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl , edited by C. Fricke and D. Føllesdal, (Frankfurt: Ontos, 2012), 273–312. This earlier paper recognizes a version of the problem I am exploring here, noticing that Smith’s claim that the spectator compares their “sympathetic emotion” with the “original passion” of the agent requires that we can get some idea of the “original passion” of the agent from their expressions. I discuss this issue below. 5. As I argue elsewhere, Smithian self-command is a sentimental as opposed to a rational effort, which involves the agent taking up the perspective of a well-informed and impartial spectator on her own original passions, feeling a sympathetic emotion and a moral sentiment in response, and then using that moral sentiment (approval or disapproval) as a guide in altering her original passion. See Lauren Kopajtic, “Adam Smith’s Sentimentalist Conception of Self-Command,” Adam Smith Review, 12 (2020), 7–27. 6. Smith’s discussion of the level of propriety for each of these passions is focused on the level of proper expression. In his opening remarks he classifies passions into two groups, “passions which it is indecent to express very strongly,” and those “which the strongest expressions are upon many occasions extremely graceful” (I.ii.intro.2). The subsequent discussion continues this focus on the effects of the expressions of passion on spectators. At one level, this is unsurprising—what else have spectators to go on when assessing what agents are feeling? But on another level, as I will show below, this is problematic if it means that agents can secure the sympathy of the spectator by merely controlling the expressions of their emotions. 7. These scenes of self-command suggest that controlling the expressions of feeling is a way of controlling feeling itself. Elsewhere Smith

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9.

10.

11. 12.

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suggests that the company of strangers who feel no partiality towards you can have the effect of helping you to become more tranquil by making you “assume” the appearance of tranquility (I.i.4.9–10). Smith discusses the difference between hypocrisy and permissible dissimulation at III.5.1 and again at VI.iii.12. The crucial difference is in the motives for each. The hypocrite or blameworthy dissembler seeks to put on a false face because of a “selfish intention” or a special need for self-preservation. The permissible dissembler does so in order to achieve the sympathy of an impartial spectator. Smith’s discussion of the ways in which the “savage” is selfcommanded (V.2.9–11) is an extraordinary example of the descriptive techniques I will be discussing below. While telling the reader that the “savage” reveals absolutely no feeling, even to his closest neighbors and family members, Smith also narrates the furious and extreme degrees of feeling hiding beneath the countenance of serenity. See Martha Nussbaum, “The ‘Morality of Pity’: Sophocles’ Philoctetes,” in Rethinking Tragedy, edited by Rita Felski (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 148–169. See Smith’s footnote to I.iii.1.9, added in the second edition. Another option is that spectators end up sympathizing with feigned emotions, but that agents are sincerely striving to feel the emotion they are presenting, and that in that attempt actually come to feel the proper emotion. Spectators would thus be proleptically sympathizing with the agent or sympathizing with the agent’s better self. I do not have the space here to explore this possibility, and this is not the way Smith himself describes the sympathetic interaction, but it may be a promising way of reimagining Smithian spectatorship so as to avoid the problems I have found. See Fleischacker (2019), 34–41 for an interpretation of Smith that comes close to the possibility I have sketched here. And see Fleischacker (2012), 295–296 for a similar description of this problem of access to the “original passion” of the agent. See I.i.5 for Smith’s discussion of the difference between virtue, which involves the exertions of self-command, and “mere propriety,” which does not. See also VI.iii, where Smith repeatedly emphasizes

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that the exertions of self-command add a “dazzle” or “lustre” to an agent’s actions. If it is possible for the spectator to tell the virtuous action from the merely proper, then it must be possible for the spectator to tell when self-command is present. See Wendy Anne Lee, Failures of Feeling: Insensibility and the Novel (Stanford University Press, 2019) for an excellent and wider treatment of this problem. 14. Other traits that mask their own efforts include (potentially): strength of mind, modesty, humility, and composure. I explore some of these virtues, focusing on humility, in Lauren Kopajtic, “The Eyes of Others: Hume and Smith on Humility and Qualities of Reserve,” in Humility: A History, edited by Justin Steinberg (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 15. Another resource is one’s own experience with concealing and commanding feeling. I know what it is like to conceal a feeling or to command a feeling, and I know that I can do so without other people picking up on what I am doing, so I infer that other people might be doing the same without my being aware that they are. This will not help the problem very much. This inference opens up the spectator’s suite of interpretive possibilities, it does not help to decide an interpretation. Knowing that the agent I am observing might be concealing or feigning her feelings only serves to render my imaginative reconstruction of her situation less stable and determinate. This piece of information turns everyone into a potential dissembler. I thank Chris Florio for pressing me to further consider this possibility. 16. Griswold’s comparison of Smith and Rousseau in several places has been extremely helpful to me in thinking through the tension between spectatorship and self-command in Smith. See Charles L. Griswold, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Adam Smith: A Philosophical Encounter (Routledge, 2018); “Being and Appearing: Selffalsification, Exchange and Freedom in Rousseau and Adam Smith,” in Adam Smith and Rousseau: Ethics, Politics, Economics, edited by Maria Pia Paganelli, Denis C. Rasmussen, and Craig Smith (Edinburgh University Press, 2018); and “Smith and Rousseau in Dialogue: Sympathy, Pitié, Spectatorship and Narrative,” in The Philosophy of Adam Smith, Volume 5 of the Adam Smith Review,

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edited by Vivienne Brown and Samuel Fleischacker (2010), 59– 84. For further discussion of Smithian sympathy and narrative, see also Stephanie Degooyer, “‘The Eyes of Other People’: Adam Smith’s Triangular Sympathy and the Sentimental Novel,” ELH , 85:3 (2018), 669–690. 17. See also Fleischacker (2019), 15 and 45–46, and Martha Nussbaum “Steerforth’s Arm: Love and the Moral Point of View,” in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1990), 339 for similar points about spectatorship and readership. 18. My argument is thus connected to the question of the moral importance of literature, but I am not offering a general claim about how reading literature will make you a better person. My claim is that, in the context of Smith’s moral philosophy, reading certain kinds of literature may help you to become a more skilled Smithian spectator. I am also not claiming that fictional literature alone is capable of contributing to this development. Other art forms (theater and dramatic arts especially come to mind) may provide similarly helpful training-grounds, but I cannot discuss these possibilities here. See Candace Vogler, “The Moral of the Story,” Critical Inquiry, 34 (2007), 5–35 for a compelling set of concerns about the (mis-)uses of literature by moral philosophers, and see Peter Goldie, “How We Think of Others’ Emotions,” Mind & Language, 14:4 (1999), 394– 423, especially 417–418, for an excellent overview of the skills and capabilities required for imagining and understanding the emotions of others. 19. Smith’s discussion of the character sketch tradition at VII.iv.3–6 also focuses on the instructive potential of description and illustration. And Smith’s comments on the effects of narrative in the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J.C. Bryce (Liberty Fund, 1983) also suggest that he found novels and romances to be potentially instructive, although primarily entertaining (see Lectures 15–20 especially). Further exploration of how Smith might have understood the instructive potential of literature is needed, as is an examination of the specific authors he references. For further discussion of Smith’s rhetoric and his engagement with literature,

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see Colin Heydt, “‘A Delicate and Accurate Pencil’: Adam Smith, Description, and Philosophy as Moral Education,” in New Essays on Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy, edited by Wade L. Robison and David B. Suits (RIT Press, 2012), 211–227; Valihora (2010); Griswold (2010) and Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, 1999); Neven Leddy, “Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy in the Context of Eighteenth-Century French Fiction,” The Adam Smith Review, 4 (2009), 158–180; and Deidre Dawson, “Is Sympathy so Surprising? Adam Smith and the French Fictions of Sympathy,” Eighteenth Century Life, 15 (1991), 47–62. For comprehensive discussion of the reciprocal influence of philosophy and literature in the eighteenth-century, especially in Scotland and England, see John Mullan, Sentiment and Sensibility: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 1988); and John Dwyer, Virtuous Discourse: Sensibility and Community in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland (John Donald Publishers, 1987). 20. This pretense of the sentimental, epistolary novel has been welldocumented and much discussed. For a classic treatment, see Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (University of California Press, 1959), 192–196. 21. I am not claiming that Richardson, Marivaux, or Riccoboni consciously conceived of themselves as developing such techniques, merely that their shared interest in minute depictions of the interior lives of their subjects, combined with an attempt to draw on the reader’s sympathy, place them in the camp of novelists who were working to render the mind and heart of the other more transparent and accessible. See Joe Bray, “Letters,” in Samuel Richardson in Context, edited by Peter Sabor and Betty A. Schellenberg (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 163–170, at 164–166. I thank Arden Hegele for this reference and for her helpful discussion of these points. 22. See Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton University Press, 1978) for a classic treatment of this topic.

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23. Greiner (2012) provides a recent discussion of how the novel (her focus is on the nineteenth-century novel) works with and through the reader’s sympathetic capabilities. I have some reservations about Greiner’s use of Smith’s moral psychology throughout her book, but I agree with her general claim. 24. See Barbara Benedict, Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction 1745–1800 (AMS Press, 1994), 196–214. 25. I focus on Austen for several reasons: First, as mentioned in note 2 above, she was a near contemporary of Smith’s and may have been familiar with his writings and ideas, at least in a diffuse form; second, Austen is widely considered to be the first master of free indirect style in the English literary tradition, and so provides the clearest, most compelling, and closest (to Smith) examples of the techniques I am focusing on; and third, her novels are well-known in the present day and so make her an easier novelist to use than, say, Riccoboni. 26. Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, ed. Edward Copeland, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen, gen. ed. Janet Todd (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Hereafter, references to Sense and Sensibility will be abbreviated as (SS). 27. See Tony Tanner, Jane Austen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Jenny Davidson, Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen (Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Patricia Spacks, Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self (University of Chicago Press, 2003) for further discussion of Elinor’s self-command as verging on hypocrisy, dissimulation, and other forms of deception. 28. If this degree of secrecy and concealment is possible in a virtuous person like Elinor, consider what is possible for a committed deceiver like Mr. Eliot of Austen’s Persuasion, or Lovelace of Richardson’s Clarissa. At one point, Lovelace brags to his correspondent that Clarissa would never “discover some emotion” in him to clue her in to his plans, for it “lay deeper than her eye could reach, though it had been a sunbeam” [Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady, ed. Angus Ross (Penguin Books, 2004), 472].

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29. Jane Fairfax, like Elinor, is keeping a secret throughout most of the novel, and she, like Elinor, is a master at controlling her emotions. But we see Jane almost entirely from the perspective of Emma Woodhouse and other characters who find her to be cold and reserved. Without the interior view afforded through techniques like focalization and free indirect discourse, we can only see Jane, with Emma, as “disgustingly, … suspiciously reserved.” See, e.g., Jane Austen, Emma, eds. Richard Cronin and Dorothy McMillan, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen, gen. ed. Janet Todd (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 178–181, 218–219, 311–312. 30. There is a vast amount of literature on Austen’s narrative techniques and I cannot engage with it here. For an entry into the literature, see Jane Spencer, “Narrative Technique: Austen and Her Contemporaries,” in A Companion to Jane Austen, edited by Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 185–194. 31. I do not want to overstate the centrality of these illustrations in Smith’s TMS. As Griswold has argued, the overwhelmingly theoretical and analytical discursive style of TMS “tends to occlude” the narratival and illustrative dimensions (2010, 73). 32. I am grateful to the Society of Fellows and the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University for support while this chapter was written. And I am grateful to Daniel Moerner, Matt Leisinger, Sean Greenberg, and Kathy Lubey for invitations that enabled me to develop the chapter. It has benefitted greatly from conversation with audiences at several different workshops: the SEMPY series at Yale, the NY/NJ Workshop in Early Modern Philosophy, the Scientia workshop at UC Irvine, the Virtue Ethics and Moral Psychology working group in NYC, and the Columbia Faculty Seminar in Eighteenth-Century European Culture. I am especially grateful to Lanier Anderson, Stephen Darwall, Chris Florio, Eileen Gillooly, Robert Gooding-Williams, Sean Greenberg, Arden Hegele, Wendy Anne Lee, Reinhold Martin, Justin Steinberg, and several anonymous referees for their pointed questions and helpful suggestions.

4 Philosophy and Literature in Jorge Luis Borges: ¿Aliados o Enemigos? José Luis Fernández

Allies or Enemies? Philosophy and literature figure prominently in Jorge Luis Borges’s fictions, but his understanding of their relationship ushers in important questions. How does Borges view the interaction between philosophy and literature? Are philosophy and literature allies or enemies in Borges’s fictions? Or is the age-old clash between philosophers and literary authors just another narcissism of minor differences wherein the perceived masters and fools are equally eloquent and empty in their overestimation of arguments and stories to give purchase to claims of truth?1 Certainly, there are thinkers who view the relationship between philosophy and literature as productive and useful. Martha Nussbaum argues that fiction provides an opportunity for select authors to serve as allies J. L. Fernández (B) Fairfield University, Connecticut, CT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73061-1_4

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to philosophers through artful portraits of philosophical problems.2 The central tenet of Nussbaum’s claim is that some forms of literature have an instructive capacity to provide readers imaginative scenarios for salient features of traditional philosophical writing. In a similar spirit, Arthur Danto asserts that literature is, inter alia, a kind of “mirror” which is capable of leading readers toward a reflective transfiguration of selfconsciousness.3 Stanley Cavell states that concerns over philosophical skepticism led him to be “pushed to pieces of literature to find the problem of the other,”4 specifically looking to the works of William Shakespeare for an attempt to overcome this puzzle. Frank B. Farrell maintains that “the space of literature” clears the way toward the fulfilment of a life well-lived, as well as promoting a human duty to preserve this meaningful means for the sake of future generations.5 And, more recently, Philip Kitcher identifies Thomas Mann as “a contributor to philosophical discussions” and treats Death in Venice as a philosophical exploration in its own right, subsequently pointing out a grade of “philosophical involvement” which can confer the status of philosophy on certain works of literature.6 As their own work demonstrates, Nussbaum, Danto, Cavell, Farrell, and Kitcher see the relationship between philosophy and literature, and between philosophers and literary authors, as united in guiding readers to greater awareness and understanding. In this fashion, philosophy and literature lead to an indicium of truth, a sign, a discovery, no matter whether the relationship is by some turns supplementary, and by other turns complimentary. In some cases, the disparity between philosophy and literature is methodological and stylistic, but not essential: Style can serve to communicate substance as well as accident. As put by Hans Georg Gadamer, “The difference between a literary work of art and any other text is not so fundamental” and “literature is the place where art and science merge.”7 However, while Gadamer finds junctional overlap in literature between what C. P. Snow called the “two cultures,”8 insofar as this polymathic union is potentially propaedeutic, he also states that art and science have different cognitive loci and “claims to truth.” Philosophy, affirmed in the ancient and modern world as the queen of, if not also the science of, all the sciences, has employed stringent law-like criteria to determine the truth-value of its statements, as well as the use of “immanent

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critique” so as to circumvent the Scylla of dogmatism and the Charybdis of relativism, only to continue navigating through several Siren systems of truth.9 No less beguiling and contentious is trying to determine the truth-value of a proposition in a work of fiction, leading some, like Bertrand Russell, to argue that every proposition in Hamlet is false10 —et sequitur, that fiction is a form of anti-truth. The anti-truth argument against fiction relies on a contrast that is drawn between philosophy and literature. Philosophy, the argument goes, aims to advance our understanding of truth, of reality, of ourselves, and is valued accordingly. Philosophers traditionally put forward theses, premises, and arguments; writing more à la lettre than in belles lettres. A philosophy that fails to state precise theses or which argues poorly in support of them is subsequently devalued. In contrast to the aims for which philosophy is read, literature is read, and subsequently valued, for reasons that seem innumerably different (e.g., fanciful diversions, emotional arousal, cathartic feelings, imaginative counterfactuals, etc.).11 Literature is thus set apart from philosophy by the anti-truth camp, which does not believe that literature needs to appeal to any notion of truth in order to derive value.12 Borges’s notions of truth in fiction, as well as in philosophy, locate value in an antinomial character, what he refers to as “comic truth,” which is a kind of creative stimulant owed to an astonishing capacity “to tolerate cyclical and contradictory representations.”13 Under this view, truth in fiction and philosophy is an artform that requires techn¯e without telos, unless the final end which serves as truth culminates in paradox, which is neither truth nor end. Floyd Merrell writes about Borges’s art of truth by stating that he “creates by positing the equivalent of deductive hypostats while promising no truths; in fact, he customarily proceeds to demolish supposed truths,”14 and with regard to these unsupported hypostatic ideas Clive Griffin states that Borges does not so much compose his stories “as vehicles for philosophical ideas,”15 rather than appropriating such ideas as a terminus a quo for his fictions; two views which seem to place Borges outside of Nussbaum’s allies camp. Seen in this light, philosophy is just what Martin Heidegger called Bestand ,16 a raw material or resource for arbitrary use, in this case

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writerly. However, Marina Martín argues that Borges’s innovative infusion of philosophy into his essays and fictions, citing, for example, George Berkeley’s and David Hume’s opposing dialectic in “A New Refutation of Time” and “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” is not so much appropriation as it is the performance of apologetics. With regard to Borges’s defense of this dialectic, Martín finds that in the latter, “Humor and imagination mix together in this story to unfold the metaphysical problems involved in idealism,”17 which seems to place Borges back in the powerful allies camp. Framed within this contesting backdrop, I believe that Borges is uniquely situated as an author in the study of the relation between philosophy and literature. The reason for this is that he is a writer devoted to philosophy at a level bordering on monastic devotion. However, Borges also seems to oppose Plato’s preference for “one who is willing to engage in discussion in order to look for truth, rather than someone who plays at contradiction for sport,”18 by constructing his fictions as maieutic labyrinths to help deliver a sense of astonishment by agitating determinate ideas of truth and reality. Moreover, the labor for this Daedalian19 gift seems to be suffered for the pleasure of a peculiar pair of recipients, namely, for a writer and reader who delight in the delivery of newborn uncertainty more than in the birth of reality. Plato famously bifurcated the world into reality and appearance, the definite and indefinite, the immutable and mutable—and placed the mimetic image of literature in the lowest rung of reality while extolling philosophy (dialectic ) as both the capstone and object of reality, for the unchangeable Form of the Good is nothing but the object of philosophical knowledge which sheds light on all our visions of other Forms.20 However, perhaps knowing better than any other reader to abide by the Lawrencean dictum to “trust the tale and not the teller,”21 Borges is able to see straight through Plato’s mythopoetic authorization of philosophy via the lie in words (logois psuedos) because words, whether used in literature or philosophy, victimize writers and readers alike as irremediable true lies (alethos psuedos). The upshot is that philosophy cannot stand on its own if supported only by technical arguments because it seems to need the rarefied myths and stories Plato called “useful fictions,”22 and

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Borges admiringly remarks of this skillful, constitutive blend that “Plato could do both” (Heaney, et al., p. 75).23 Shlomy Mualem notes how “Borges’ ‘philosophical fiction’ and Plato’s ‘intellectual dramas’ are perhaps the most intricate records in Western history of attempts to artfully interweave mythos and logos.”24 Plato is commonly interpreted as spinning stories into his arguments, which implies a qualitative distinction until one sees, as Heidegger did,25 and as I imagine did also Borges, that the opposition of mythos and logos is a but a clever and revolutionary artifice. For Borges, Plato is as much thinker as dreamer (CON , p. 160), as much a philosopher as a mythmaker, moving from using mythos for the sake of logos to, conversely, using logos for the sake of mythos, as he expressed in his panegyric passage on “Immortality” of the literary license Plato used in the Phaedo to tell of Socrates’s final moments.26 Plato’s Republic also sets out to construct an Ideal city by having Socrates use stories and arguments via first-person narration. In his inimitable way, Borges also creates a world in Ideas using first-person narration in his story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” but without the realist subterfuge, for while Tlön, like Plato’s Ideal city, is also supported by metaphysics, “metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy.”27 Plato’s Kallipolis and Borges’s Tlön are equally fantastical and unlikely ever to see the light of day. The ultimate Socratic ironization of philosophy is that it requires lies, stories, those mimetic and unreal constituents of language which, much like the series of dreamers in “The Circular Ruins,” are ontologically impoverished and thus constitutionally incapable of imparting reality, but rather only other unrealities.28 And even the mature Plato admits in the Seventh Letter that written language is a destitute means to kindle the advent of reality and truth (341c). Here one might argue that a great deal of Borges’s literary work is hostile to philosophy for the reason famously given by Ana María Barrenechea, namely, that he is a writer “pledged to destroy reality.”29 That Borges’s auctorial aims differ from traditional philosophical writing is well documented. This is one reason why Bruno Bosteels has ascribed the term of “antiphilosopher” to Borges.30 We can see how this appellation might refer, given that Borges’s fictions often challenge the conviction with which traditional philosophers have expounded their ideas

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of truth and reality. However, is Borges “pledged” to destroy anything certain or real? Moreover, given his unconventional interpretation of philosophy, is he rather a pro-philosopher? Consequently, the thesis I should like to defend is that Borges can satisfy and dissatisfy the allies camp because (i) while his fictions make use of a great many theses in the history of philosophy, they can be understood as allied with philosophy by providing the imaginative scenarios that Nussbaum believes are so necessary to this coalition; however, (ii) because his stories question philosophy’s hold on reality, they can also seem to fall into the enemies camp by countervailing any claim philosophy has on truth; although, (iii) ultimately, the manner in which Borges forges an enduring alliance between philosophy and literature will be for reasons not traditionally accepted by those in either the allies or enemies camps.

A Dialectic of Perplexity Philosophy, wrote Plato31 and Aristotle,32 begins in wonder, puzzlement, and perplexity (thaumazein), not in certainty, which is its presumptive goal. Borges’s fictions accept the premise of the antecedent without any conviction of arriving at the consequent aim. Order, certainty, and invariance make not only for a dull world, but also lead to the disuse and eventual atrophy of the imagination in “the motionless and terrible museum of the Platonic archetypes.”33 Chaos, uncertainty, and variance propel philosophy and literature forward, thereby motivating continuous creation and deliberation. Philosophy may well be born in wonder, but its activity dies in certainty, a moribund entelechy that can be suspended if held in a recursive state of wonder-begetting-more-wonder which can keep one philosophizing in a warren of aporias that are so beguiling as to not ever desire to leave. For example, in a revealing interview published in 1977, Borges states: I suppose philosophy springs from our perplexity. If you read my works, my sketches, whatever they are, you find that there is a very obvious

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symbol of perplexity to be found all the time, and that is the maze. A maze and amazement go together, no?34

Borges’s wordplay in this passage is a clever subversion of Plato and Aristotle, and deserves brief commentary. For Borges, a maze (a symbol of perplexity) is doubly poietic: It is created and creative, by the writer for the reader, resulting in amazement: a maze ment, the added suffix to “a maze” (Latin-mentum) confers a production, in this case, the making of stories from which to offer perplexities for the sake of engaging in the activity of philosophy. Both Plato and Aristotle view poiesis as necessarily tied to mimesis, for nothing springs forth ex nihilo and thus must be modeled upon some action, image, or idea. I imagine Borges would agree with this view about the craft of making because he converts ideas from the history of philosophy into images to construct his stories: a poieses using puzzling mimeses. For example, as conveyed in “The Garden of Forking Paths,” instead of writing a Bildungsroman, in which a narrator or character develops greater levels of self-knowledge, Borges composes a novel of puzzlement (Verwirrungsroman), a narrative that keeps his characters circulating within loops of uncertainties, a style described by James Irby as, “a constant dialectic of contradictory dualities.”35 Heidegger wrote that “philosophers are the thinkers par excellence,”36 but for Borges, they are a puzzled lot. While this might be viewed negatively by those who seek to find literary allies for philosophies offering signs of reality, it comports with Borges’s view of how philosophy thrives on doubt and uncertainty. Indeed, in the manner of the dialectical games of Tlön, specifically, through the method of negation, Borges views all of philosophy as persisting through the power of the negative,“[W]hen somebody refutes somebody else in philosophy, he’s carrying on the argument” (Dennis Dutton, et al., p. 337), rather than ending it. For Borges, refutation does not eliminate a philosophical position, but rather keeps the activity of philosophy flowing forward. Jon Stewart makes the point that in the story “Funes the Memorious,” Borges “alludes to Locke, and when we examine this allusion carefully we can see that he uses Locke’s criticism of nominalism as his starting point here.”37 Hence, refutations, criticisms, and negations all help to propel a continuing dialectic

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of perplexities, which can serve as fresh entrances into, and enduring alliances with, philosophy. Subsequently, when a reader first enters into the “visible unrealities” (irrealidades visibles)38 of Borges’s stories, she is, in all likelihood sublimely both puzzled and delighted by her encounter. David Foster Wallace writes that it is Borges’s fascination with metaphysics that gives his “stories their mythic, precognitive quality (all cultures’ earliest, most vital metaphysics is mythopoetic), which quality in turn helps explain how they can be at once so abstract and so moving.”39 These sentiments were shared by Michel Foucault, who, in The Order of Things, reports his reaction to the categorial plenitude of “a certain Chinese encyclopedia”: “That passage from Borges kept me laughing a long time, though not without a certain uneasiness that I found hard to shake off.”40 The reasons for this abrupt, yet satisfying, mystification with the typical Borges tale are legion, but can be attributed to the suffusion of philosophical rompecabezas (puzzles) into his stories, which are surprisingly alluring because they frustrate certain complacencies of traditional literary and conceptual categories. Yet for all of the uncanny elements in Borges’s stories, still do they seem reassuringly familiar because, as aptly conveyed by Paul de Man, “all have a similar point of departure, a similar structure, a similar climax, and a similar outcome; the inner cogency that links these four moments together constitutes Borges’s distinctive style.”41 Moreover, Borges’s stories are unusually brief, indeed, sometimes unexpectedly so, and narrative emphasis seems to be placed upon whimsical excursions, which frustrates the primacy of traditional Aristotelian plots. To give just two illustrations of this seeming fancy: in the wonderful, though wickedly named, portrait of thug-life “Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities,” the profluence of the story’s terminal conclusion is halted by the appearance of “a common alley cat, blissfully ignorant of death, was pacing, a bit perplexedly, about the body” of the story’s slain protagonist.42 Daniel Balderston has provided an instructive juxtaposition between Herbert Ashbury’s and Borges’s portraits of Eastman.43 Whereas Ashbury employs a diegetic technique to narrate the story from within so as to drive the plot forward to the close of Eastman’s death, Borges uses a mimetic mode of storytelling to render

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Eastman’s ignominious end from a point outside the text in order to have the reader linger in the irony of a menacing brute who in life relished the company of pedigreed cats, is in death approached by a vulgar street cat, his Doppel -animal. In the former, time is followed linearly to the end; in the latter, time is suspended by a doubly suggestive metaphor pertaining to the character and to the plot. Similarly, in the dream-like story “The South,” Borges again halts the progression of plot to digress on how a huge black tavern cat goes about experiencing its life ex tempore, living, as he puts it, “in the eternity of the instant,”44 which, like Eastman’s animal totem being “blissfully ignorant of death,” is another insertion of a lingering metaphor in a story where the lines of demarcation that would subtend fiction and reality, as well as the narrative past, present, and future are very much distorted. Through the two examples above—one, with the purveyor of iniquities lying prostate in pallor mortis; the other, before the white-knuckle moments of Dahlmann’s knife fight—we can view the point of these digressions finding value in the symbolic sense of the cats’ living outside of time as a self-referencing metaphor for how the digressions themselves are placed outside of the forward flow of the plot by an author who seems to be stabbing at the heart of profluence by including these scenes around violent deaths. Thus it is via textual encounters like these, and they are ubiquitous in Borges’s works, that the reader enters a maze that entangles her at a story’s every point, which is to say at no single point. And it is in this sense, as an invitation to wander around in wonder, that allows ideal readers like Errol Morris to enter the corridors of perplexity: I first read [“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”] in the early 1970s, in the New Directions paperback edition of Labyrinths. I talked about it at length with my then girlfriend, the artist Sherrie Levine. The story deeply affected both of us, and it is arguable that it became a basis for some of her subsequent artistic work. Among other themes, the question of authorship.45

Morris, a filmmaker of genuine philosophical enthusiasm, finds in Borges, who he considers “A genius among geniuses” (Morris, p. 177),

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a clearer exposition of what he takes to be Thomas Kuhn’s confused theory of paradigmatic incommensurability, “Kuhn resembles an addled version of Borges—without the irony, without the humor, without the playfulness” (Morris, p. 33). That Borges’s illusory fictions serve as plainer elucidations than that of the Princeton philosopher of science, whose writing style in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has been described as “snappy…engaging…a page turner….engrossing” as well as being “easily comprehended by even the most non-science oriented social scientist,”46 is clearly an abusive bit of irony by Morris. However, one can find less acerbic portraits of Borges’s association with philosophers in, for example, William Gass’s appraisal of the alliance between Borges and Ludwig Wittgenstein: If, as Wittgenstein thought, “philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language,” then Borges’s prose, at least, performs a precisely similar function …. It is not the subject of these compulsions, however, but the manner in which they are produced, that matters, and makes Borges an ally of Wittgenstein.47

Such a harmonious coalition stresses the poietic partnerships that are possible between literary authors and philosophers, its resulting impressions, and the amazement that binds allies; particularly, as Gass puts it: “Thus the effect of Borges’ work is suspicion and skepticism” (Gass, p. 129).

Allies, of a Kind Students of Borges’s stories will note that while he is not a philosopher,48 he deals aesthetically with philosophy by drawing from its fecund spring of ideas: I have used the philosophers’ ideas for my own private literary purposes….I have no personal system of philosophy. I never intend to do that. I am merely a man of letters. The same way, for example, that Dante used theology for the purpose of poetry, or Milton used theology, why shouldn’t I use philosophy, especially idealistic philosophy, for the

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purposes of writing a tale, a story? I suppose that is allowable, no? (Dennis Dutton, et al., p. 339)

As we have seen, Borges’s fictions often serve as sites of delightful disruption, and in stark contrast to writers of the Realist tradition, he uses philosophy to set his works on the expressly unsteady edge of accepted systems of knowledge and reality. However, philosophy is not the only medium where from Borges uses ideas, which can be seen ranging over to the paradoxical practice of mathematicians providing rigorous proofs of inconsistent truths, which is captured in Floyd Merrell’s attempt to “map connecting lines between Borges’s work…and certain aspects of twentieth-century mathematics, logic, and physics” (Merrell, p. xiv). Among some of the relations Merrell investigates are the affinities between Borges’s “The Circular Ruins” and Alfred North Whitehead’s spatio-temporal concerns with “simple location”; Borges’s “The House of Asturian” and “The God’s Script” with Georg Cantor’s theory of infinite sets; and Borges’s antipodal stories “The Zahir” and “The Aleph” and certain parallels to Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. In all of these stories, Borges is not only seen as using certain mathematical ideas in his fictions, but also, recalling a criterion for allied membership, as providing striking narratives to stimulate what Daniel Dennett calls “intuition pumps”49 to vividly illustrate astounding mathematical innovations. In The Mind’s I , Dennett writes appreciatively that, “Borges draws our attention to different ways of thinking about oneself,” 50 which is not limited to philosophical notions of the self, but applies no less to new ways of thinking about mathematics. N. Katherine Hayles provides an example of how the paradoxical model of Cantor’s set theory can be thought about as mirrored in Borges writing: Also possible are literary texts that try to re-create the continuum within the text. This immediately involves the author in paradoxes of selfreferentiality, for the enabling premise that the text is part of the whole also implies that the whole can be contained within the part, leading to the infinite regress of a part containing a whole within which is contained the part.51

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Hayles also writes that Borges is attracted to the interconnectedness and self-referentiality of field concepts, “because its discontinuities reveal that everything, including itself, is no more than a game” (Hayles, p. 138). Her allusion to a self-referential game is suggestive of mathematical Formalism, whose guiding idea is that mathematics is not a body of propositions representing an idealized realm of reality, but rather is like a self-contained game or set of rules, without harboring any ontological commitments to objects in reality. In a provocative and suggestive passage, Hayles describes Borges’s writerly strategies in a way that seems to reflect that of mathematical Formalism: This complex strategy (which may not appear in its entirety in any given story) has the effect of dissolving the relation of the story to reality, so that the story becomes an autonomous object existing independently of any reality. The final step is to suggest that our world, like the fiction, is a self-contained entity whose connection with reality is problematic or nonexistent. (Hayles, p. 143)

Borges’s stories, like mathematical algorithms, are not weighed down by any perceived correspondence to reality, but are rather free of such encumbrances. Can Borges’s writing be seen as allied with Formalism? Consider Alan Weir’s description of game Formalism: The game formalist sticks with the view that mathematical utterances have no meaning; or at any rate the terms occurring therein do not pick out objects and properties and the utterances cannot be used to state facts. Rather mathematics is a calculus in which ‘empty’ symbol strings are transformed according to fixed rules. [Johannes] Thomae puts it this way: For the formalist, arithmetic is a game with signs which are called empty. That means that they have no other content (in the calculating game) than they are assigned by their behaviour with respect to certain rules of combination (rules of the game).52

Subsequently, game Formalists view mathematics as linguistic characters which can be manipulated within the confines of a game, as one

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of many possible games, which is arbitrary and unrestricted. As Cantor himself famously avers, “the essence of mathematics lies in its freedom,” which means, as Morris Klein explicates, “that mathematics is distinguished from other fields by its freedom to create its own concepts without regard to transient reality.”53 In other words, mathematics, like certain notions of philosophy and literature, is a discipline that can be read as independent of physical reality, and whose freedom is delimited only by the creative imagination of the human mind to produce what Mary Leng calls useful fictions: “Mathematical hypotheses, on my view, are best thought of not as truths by convention (for they do not have the status of truths), but rather, as conventionally adopted useful fictions.”54 Useful fictions are not only found in mathematics, but also used in philosophy. We have already seen their place within Plato’s philosophy (Republic, 384cd) and have also noted how Borges is often read as employing a dialectic of Skepticism and Idealism in his fictions to question the essential features of external reality. Within these philosophies, the justifications given for Archimedean points of objective knowledge are also called to task as being mere fictions, which can be subsumed under the category of what Berkeley called “a fiction of our own brain”: Upon the common principles of philosophers, we are not assured of the existence of things from their being perceived. And we are taught to distinguish their real nature from that which falls under our senses. Hence arises skepticism and paradoxes. It is not enough, that we see and feel, that we taste and smell a thing; its true nature, its absolute external entity, is still concealed. For, though it be a fiction of our own brain, we have made it inaccessible to all our faculties.55

Borges, who was introduced to Berkeley by his father at the age of ten (Heaney, et al., p. 75), finds enduring themes in the bishop’s Idealism and Immaterialism, views which posit that one cannot conceive of an object or a sensible quality as existing unperceived: “Berkeley maintains that matter is a series of perceptions and that these perceptions are inconceivable without a consciousness that perceives them.”56 Borges also alludes to Berkeley’s most famous thesis, “Esse rerum est percipi: perception is the being of things: objects only exist in so far as they are noticed: on this

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genial platitude rests and rises the illustrious edifice which is Berkeley’s system”57 ; which prompts Gene H. Bell-Villada to remark correctly that: Bishop Berkeley’s absolute idealism, which holds that physical matter does not exist and that the universe is nothing more than a projection of our minds, is seldom taken seriously by philosophers today other than as a means of eliciting discussion. Berkeley’s hypothesis and his defense thereof is a classic sophistry in that it accepts no arguments from outside its own thought-provoking parti pris. Because of its very outrageousness, however, absolute idealism can engender similarly extravagant, farfetched, and thought-provoking corollaries.58

Following Bell-Villada, we can begin to see, recalling Nussbaum, how Borges can serve as an “ally” of Berkeley’s Idealism within the provocative scope of his literary constructs. For not only does Borges artfully frame Berkeley’s philosophy in his writings, but also such philosophies of esse rerum est percipi are entirely appropriate to fiction insofar as the “world” which fiction creates is ideally perceived by the reader, and in this perception there is nothing material whatsoever that lies beyond the fictional world. Here I might add that Borges shares with Paul de Man the view that “fiction asserts, by its very existence, its separation from empirical reality.”59 Indeed, this allied adoption of Berkeley into Borges’s work produces a radical move insofar as, pace Realism, one’s perception of fictional worlds need not be viewed as representations of sensory reality and that the order which is projected onto reality is nothing more than a confirmation bias that wants to find, as put by Donald Shaw, “a rigorously orderly world more acceptable than our own.”60 This is a key point to note, for it raises the question of whether there is a tension between reality and the words used to express it. If Borges’s alliance with Berkeley has any bearing, then there would also appear to be an unbridgeable gap between reality and language. Is reality in any sense verbal? Sketched within Borges’s writings is an answer that lends support for the Berkeleyan position against a materialist semantics, for Berkeley argued that the words a physical realist uses to describe external realities “have no stable essence in the nature of things,”61 which is espoused by Borges’s declaration in his essay “Quevedo,” “I shall not say that

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[language] is a transcription of reality, for reality is not verbal,”62 as well as in his thoughtful caveat in “Avatars of the Tortoise”: “It is hazardous to think that a coordination of words (philosophies are nothing else) can have much resemblance to the universe” (AT , p. 114). But what of these coordinated words and how do they add to the dialectic of perplexity that Borges finds so valuable in his alliance with philosophy?

The Philosophy of Not-As-If Several commentators note that the idealistic philosophy from which Borges draws posits our knowledge of things heuristically, that is, in the manner of as-if the things we perceive and conceive are real, for such things are merely analogous to images or pictures which we produce in order for us to have interaction with the external world.63 Borges’s readers will also note that while these ideas provide amusing provocations for his literary imagination, his commitment to believing that they produce substantive claims or systematic accounts of reality remains skeptical: “Perhaps no systems are attainable, but the search for a system is very interesting” (Dennis Dutton, et al., p. 339). The philosophy of as-if is posited most famously by Immanuel Kant in its analogical sense, i.e., in the mode of a leading “as if ” something is real or true, without ascribing any reality or truth to the thing itself, for example, as used in his aesthetic and teleological theory of “purposiveness without a purpose” (Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck) and his use of a “guiding thread” (Leitfaden) in his historical essays.64 Borges takes up the topic of guiding threads or leading clues in his poem “El hilo de la fábula” (The Thread of the Fable): The guiding thread is lost; the labyrinth is lost as well. Now we do not even know if what surrounds us is a labyrinth, a secret cosmos, or a haphazard chaos. Our beautiful duty is to imagine that there is a labyrinth and a guiding thread. We will never come upon the guiding thread; perhaps we find it and we lose it in an act of faith, in a rhythm, in dreams, in the words that are called philosophy or in pure and simple happiness.65

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This passage is striking for how it seems to employ the trope of asif , most notably in the poem’s call to imagine that there is a thread to lead our way toward grasping reality. However, the most salient feature of the poem is that even the as-if , the imaginary thread spun by so many philosophers, along with the objective reality toward which we are being directed, is itself lost to those very same coordination of “words that are called philosophy.” Not only does Borges cast doubt on the objective reality of the world, thereby positing the fictionality of the real, but I believe that he is also making, as seen in “The Thread of the Fable,” a bolder claim: The reality of the world is questionable, and so is our guide to pretending that it is—“We will never come upon the guiding thread”—thus our guiding threads, our leading clues, our asifs, are also lost to us. In other words, the fable, the as-if , pace what Hans Vaihinger, building on William of Ockham’s early engagement with ficta 66 and Kant’s innovative use of the regulative basis of transcendental ideas as useful heuristische Fiktionen,67 himself called “analogical fictions” (Vaihinger, pp. 25–32), is a misleading escort. Silvia G. Dapía points out Vaihinger’s view that “only what is perceived is true,” although maintaining that fictions “can work as if true, even though false and recognized as false.”68 Such fictions are recognized as false because we create them out of practical need, which is expressed by Vaihinger via his quotation from Kant’s unpublished 1791 Über die Fortschritte der Metaphysik: “Practically we create these objects ourselves, according as we consider the Idea of them to be helpful to the purpose of our pure reason…[In reality, however,] these ideas have been arbitrarily created by us” (Vaihinger, p. 304). For Vaihinger, the philosophy of as-if is meant to help lead the procedure “for finding our way about more easily in the world” (Vaihinger, p. 15). Christine De Lailhacar writes that “Heuristics implies the legitimacy of an als ob (as if ) philosophy, which comes close to fiction.”69 However, in contradistinction to Vaihinger, who treats the als ob as consciously false presuppositions that nevertheless can prove utile and fruitful, I should like to add that Borges extends such analogical fictions in a double move that denies any legitimacy to this heuristic procedure—(i) not only to things and objects that are but fictive shadows, but also, more startlingly, (ii) to the fiction that we have reliable capacities to perceive, and thus know, such fictions as

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well. How can perception serve as heuristically useful if the subjective apparatuses of perceiving and conceiving are constitutionally unreliable? Dapía points out how in addition to Vaihinger, Borges drew admiringly from Fritz Mauthner’s critique of language (Dapía, p. 7), which casts additional doubt on how much faith we ought to accord to the guiding threads of empiricism and rationalism: Mauthner coins the term “Zufallssinne” (contingent senses) to condense his conviction “that there are definitely forces at work in the real world that will never be able to generate sense impressions in us” (Beiträge 1: 360). Furthermore, since our reason rests on our sensations, Mauthner speaks of “Zufallsvernunft” (contingent reason), too (Beiträge 2: 689). Indeed Mauthner arrives at the conclusion that our access to reality is limited or restricted in two ways. On the one hand, as we have already pointed out, our sense apparatus selects certain aspects of the world while discarding others (Beiträge 1: 330- 31). On the other hand, our concepts also hinder our access to reality.70

Given these doubts, uncertainties, and the contingencies of sense and reason, we can begin to understand how Borges takes any confirmation or refutation of the reality or unreality of objects and subjects to be but a procedural stratagem.71 The descriptive use of language, whether received from the senses or reason, will never be sufficient to describe reality, which is a problem not only for offering an objective take on reality, but also for any kind of Archimedean standpoint for subjectivity. Dapía is again insightful in her remark that: Borges, who has already accepted Berkeley’s claim that the external world is constructed out of our sense-experiences, now accepts Hume’s claim that “there is not, behind the face, a secret self-governing our acts or receiving our impressions” and concludes: “We are only the series of those imaginary acts and those errant impressions” (Dapía, p. 84).

Here we note how Hume’s refutation of Berkeley inspires Borges to erect the scaffolds of Skepticism and Idealism that will serve to “support” the world of Tlön. The contributions of Berkeley and Hume, the latter of which is famously attributed by Kant as interrupting his “dogmatic

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slumber,”72 have the opposite effect on Borges, producing a Morphean usher to, A world of evanescent impressions; a world without matter or spirit, neither objective nor subjective; a world without the ideal architecture of space; a world made of time, of the absolute uniform time of the Principia; an inexhaustible labyrinth, a chaos, a dream—the almost complete disintegration that David Hume reached. (NRT , p. 321)

Here it might again be claimed with Marina Martín that: By not taking sufficiently into account the weakness of human reason and the narrow limits to which it is confined, we end up bordering and even finally diving into the realm of fiction, or as Hume himself puts it “[w]e are got into fairyland”…This type of observation matches Borges’ position and spirit quite well.73

If our interaction with the world takes its lead from an as-if guiding thread, then the escorting hands of Idealism and Skepticism lead us into the dreamlike world of “as-if there is an as-if ,” or as Borges puts it, “Idealism holds that there was a dreaming, a perceiving, but not a dreamer nor even a dream” (NRT , pp. 329–30). The philosophy of as-if is supposed to get us started toward a discovery of truth, all of which now amounts to a fiction of the fiction charged with helping us discover external reality—thus, Borges seems to employ not a philosophy of as-if , but rather, as stated above, one of as-if there is an as-if , or perhaps one of not-as-if we have any justification to conceive, experience, feel, or know anything at all with regard to fact or fiction. We see this, for example, in Borges’s use of this astonishing device in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” to describe the proliferating imposition of fictive systems in a world where no real systems exist: One might well deduce, therefore, that on Tlön there are no sciences—or even any “systems of thought.” The paradoxical truth is that systems of thought do exist, almost countless numbers of them. Philosophies are much like the nouns of the northern hemisphere; the fact that every philosophy is by definition a dialectical game, a Philosophie des Als Ob,

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has allowed them to proliferate. There are systems upon systems that are incredible but possessed of a pleasing architecture or a certain agreeable sensationalism. The metaphysicians of Tlön seek not truth, or even plausibility—they seek to amaze, astound. (TU , p. 74)

For Borges, a philosophy of as-if is but one fictional system adrift in rising seas of fictional systems. In spite of its fictionality, Vaihinger’s philosophy of as-if is supposed to lead the way; however, as noted in “The Thread of the Fable” and “A New Refutation of Time,” Borges writes that not only can the world be conceived as but one of many fictions, but also that our imaginary destinal guides, our leading “threads,” our heuristic fictions, are fictive constructs as well. And while this might seem against philosophy’s aim to offer a way into grasping truth and reality, and while it might also run counter to the coalition between philosophy and literature to jointly offer truths, Borges is not so much an antiphilosopher as he is pro-philosophical because the proliferation of systems as-if there are systems of as-if is what keeps the dialectic of perplexity, i.e., the philosophy he values so much, moving forward. Consequently, it is indeed in this dialectic of perplexity that we can detect Borges’s highest admiration of philosophy and its capacity to contribute to a meaningful life: I think that people who have no philosophy live a poor kind of life, no? People who are too sure about reality and about themselves….I think that philosophy may give the world a kind of haziness, but that haziness is all to the good. (CON , p. 156)

Valued more for its mystifications than its clarifications, Borges professes Socratic humility in stating, “If I am rich in anything, it is perplexities, not in certainties” (CON , p. vii)74 ; “I am neither a thinker nor a moralist, but simply a man of letters who turns his own perplexities and that respected system of perplexities we call philosophy into the forms of literature”75 ; and “What is a history of philosophy, but a history of…perplexities…. I merely wish to share those perplexities with you.”76 And in this amazing dialectical sense, rich in perplexities, circulating refutations in eternal loops of recurring astonishments, philosophy

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and literature, and philosophers and literary authors, are, for Borges, indeed more allies than enemies.

Notes 1. See 607b-d of Plato, Republic in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John Cooper and trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997) for the ancient derogatories. 2. Martha C. Nussbaum, “Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism,” Philosophy and Literature, Vol. 22, No. 2 (October 1998), p. 349: “I claim that Henry James is a powerful ally of Aristotle, and one whom Aristotle badly needs if he is to convince us of his claims.” 3. Arthur Danto, “Philosophy as/and/of Literature,” in Literature and the Question of Philosophy, ed. Anthony J. Cascardi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 22. 4. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 476; as well as Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays by Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 5. Frank B. Farrell, Why Does Literature Matter? (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), p. 24. 6. Philip Kitcher, Deaths in Venice: The Cases of Gustav von Aschenbach (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), pp. 19–20. 7. Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method , trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2006 [1975]), pp. 155–156. 8. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 9. E.g., inter alia, coherence, deflationary, and pragmatic theories. In a reply to John McDowell’s charge in Mind and World that he has deliberately plugged his ears to correspondence theories of truth, Richard Rorty writes in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 151, that it was McDowell who was irresistibly “seduced by an empiricist siren song”

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12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

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in which the realist notion of truth is drawn to correspondence between our judgments, propositions, and reality. Bertrand Russell, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 294. See Richard Eldridge, Life, Literature, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 1–26, for an insightful overview of the many ways literature can be read and enjoyed. A helpful explication of the pro-truth/anti-truth lines of argument is in Peter Lamarque’s chapter on “Literature and Truth,” in The Opacity of Narrative (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), pp. 121–139. Seamus Heaney, Richard Kearney, and Jorge Luis Borges, “Borges and the World of Fiction: An Interview with Jorge Luis Borges,” The Crane Bag, Vol. 6, No. 2, Latin-American Issue (1982), pp. 71–78: p. 74. Floyd Merrell, Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics, and the New Physics (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1991), p. xi. Clive Griffin, “Philosophy and Fiction,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges, ed. Edwin Williamson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 6. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), esp. pp. 17–27. Marina Martín, “Borges, the Apologist for Idealism,” Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Boston, MA, 10–15 August 1998. https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Lati/LatiMart.htm. Accessed 21 August 2018. Plato, Republic in Plato: Complete Works, 539c. Plato’s Socrates proudly claimed his family’s lineage back to Daedalus, architect of the famed labyrinth. See Plato, Alcibiades in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 121a. Plato, Republic in Plato: Complete Works, 508e. “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.” D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, eds. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth

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22. 23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

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Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 14. Plato, Republic in Plato: Complete Works, 382cd. See also Borges in Richard Burgin (ed.), Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (New York: Souvenir Press, 1973), p. 160. Henceforth, CON . Shlomy Mualem, Borges and Plato: A Game With Shifting Mirrors (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2012), p. 13. Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 10: “mythos and logos are not, as our current historians of philosophy claim, placed into opposition by philosophy as such; on the contrary, the early Greek thinkers…are precisely the ones to use mythos and logos in the same sense. Mythos and logos become separated and opposed only at the point where neither mythos nor logos can keep to its original nature. In Plato’s work, this separation has already taken place.” See also, Mualem, Borges and Plato, pp. 19–49. Borges, “Immortality,” in Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Elliot Weinberger (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 484–485. Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 74. Henceforth, TU . I argue for this conclusion by offering a nonfoundational reading of this classic story in José Luis Fernández, “Borges and the Third Man: Toward an Interpretation of ‘Unánime Noche’ in “The Circular Ruins,” Borges, Language and Reality: The Transcendence of the Word , ed. Alfonso J. García-Osuna (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 15–32. Ana María Barrenechea, Borges, the Labyrinth Maker, ed. and trans. Roger Lima (New York: New York University Press, 1965), p. 144. Bruno Bosteels, “Borges as Antiphilosopher,” in Thinking With Borges, eds. William Egginton and David E. Johnson (Aurora, CO: The Davies Group, 2009), pp. 37–47. See also Bosteels, “Radical Antiphilosophy,” Filozofski vestnik, Vol. XXIX, No. 2 (2008), p. 160.

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31. Plato, Theaetetus in Plato: Complete Works: “For this is an experience which is characteristic of a philosopher, this wondering: this is where philosophy begins and nowhere else” (155c-d). 32. Aristotle, Metaphysics in The Basic Works of Aristotle: “For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and first began to philosophize” (912b10-15). 33. Borges, “A History of Eternity,” in Selected Non-Fictions, p. 126. 34. Dennis Dutton, Michael Palencia-Roth, and Lawrence I. Berkove, “….Merely a Man of Letters: An Interview with Jorge Luis Borges,” Philosophy and Literature, Vol.1, No. 3 (Fall 1977), pp. 337–341: p. 339. 35. James E. Irby, “The Structure of the Stories of Jorge Luis Borges.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1962, p. 47. 36. Martin Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking, pp. 4–5. 37. Jon Stewart, “Borges’ Refutation of Nominalism in ‘Funes el memorioso,’” Variaciones Borges, Vol. 2 (1996), pp. 68–86: p. 71. 38. Borges uses “visible unrealities” to mean the incorporation of philosophical tropes into literature. See, e.g., Borges, “Avatars of the Tortoise,” Other Inquisitions 1937–1952, trans. Ruth L. C. Simms (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000 [1964]), p. 114: “Art— always—requires visible unrealities.” Henceforth, AT . 39. David Foster Wallace, “Borges on the Couch,” New York Times Book Review (November 7, 2004). 40. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. xvii. 41. Paul de Man, “A Modern Master (1964),” in Critical Writings 1953– 1978, ed. Lindsey Waters (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 125. Originally published in the New York Review of Books, November 19, 1964. 42. Borges, “Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities,” in Collected Fictions, p. 30. 43. Daniel Balderston, “Borges and The Gangs of New York,” Variaciones Borges, Vol. 16 (2003), pp. 27–33. 44. Borges, “The South,” in Collected Fictions, p. 176. Borges’s reading and use of Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy is well known in the literature. This passage stands out to me for its resonance with

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Schopenhauer’s view that, “The Animal is the embodiment of the present …. It is just this complete absorption in the present moment, peculiar to animals, which so much to the pleasure we derive from our domestic pets.” See Arthur Schopenhauer, “Additional Remarks on the Doctrine of the Suffering of the World,” in Parerga and Paralipomena, Vol. 2, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), §153, p. 296. Errol Morris, The Ashtray: (Or the Man Who Denied Reality) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), p. 34–35. Adam Timmons, “Why Was Kuhn’s Structure More Successful than Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge?,” HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Fall 2013), pp. 306–317: p. 309. William H. Gass, “Imaginary Borges and His Books,” in Fiction and Figures of Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), pp. 128–129. Originally published as “Imaginary Borges,” in New York Review of Books, November 12, 1969. Jean de Milleret, Entretiens avec Jorge Luis Borges (Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1967), p. 116: “You want to make me into a philosopher and thinker; but the fact is that I repudiate all systematic thought because it always tends to deceive one.” Quoted from Merrell, Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics, and the New Physics, p. 245, n. 1. Daniel C. Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), p. 5. Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 457. Dennett makes great use of Borges’s writing throughout the text to frame thought experiments about selfhood. Jon Stewart, “Idealism in Two Stories from The Book of Sand,” Variaciones Borges , Vol. 7 (1999), p. 50, notes that “while some, indeed perhaps most, readers see [Borges’] stories merely as examples of a fiction of fantasy, others see them as thought experiments based on philosophical premises.” N. Katherine Hayles, The Cosmic Web: Scientific Field Models and Literary Strategies in the Twentieth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 24.

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52. Weir, Alan, “Formalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2015 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/ent ries/formalism-mathematics/. 53. Morris Klein, Mathematical Thinking from Ancient to Modern Times: Volume 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 1131. 54. Mary Leng, Mathematics and Reality (Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 261. For the utility of the Fictionalist account, see also Hartry Field, Science Without Numbers: A Defense of Nominalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 55. George Berkeley, Three Dialogues in Principles of Human Knowledge and Thee Dialogues, ed. Howard Robinson, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 103. 56. Borges, “Immortality,” in Selected Non-Fictions, p. 486. 57. Ronald J. Christ’s citation from Borges’ early book of essays Inquisiciones (Buenos Aires, 1925) in The Narrow Act: Borges’ Art of Allusion (New York: NYU Press, 1969), p. 19. 58. Gene H. Bell-Villada, Borges and His Fiction: A Guide to His Mind and Art (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), p. 37. 59. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), p. 17. 60. Donald L. Shaw, Borges’ Narrative Strategy (Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1992), p. 164. 61. George Berkeley, An Essay on Motion in Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. by Desmond M. Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), §67. 62. Borges, “Quevedo,” in Other Inquisitions 1937–1952, p. 40. 63. For a considered study of the use of analogical devices to be used when talking about knowledge of a reality which reason cannot attain, see Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of As-If , trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952 [1924]). Commentators who have written on Borges’s use of this heuristic fiction are, among others: Carter Wheelock, The Mythmaker: A Study of Motif and Symbol in the Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1961), pp. 21–26; Floyd Merrell,

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68. 69.

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Unthinking Thinking: Jorge Luis Borges, Mathematics, and the New Physics, pp. 16–19, 25–28; Alejandro Riberi, “Tlön and the Philosophy of ‘As If ’,” Variaciones Borges 15 (2003), pp. 207–220, also published in Fictions as Cognitive Artefacts. The Case of Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ (Auckland: Magnolia Press, 2007); David E. Johnson, Kant’s Dog: On Borges, Philosophy, and the Time of Translation (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), pp. 15–17; Silvia Dapía, Jorge Luis Borges, Post-Analytic Philosophy, and Representation (New York: Routledge, 2016), pp. 6–8, and, most recently, Kwame Anthony Appiah, As If: Idealization and Ideals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), p. 107. See, respectively, Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), §§10–17, and Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Perspective in Pauline Kleingeld (ed.), Toward Perpetual Peace, and Other Essays on Politics, Peace, and History, trans. David L. Colclasure (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 8: pp. 17–18. Jorge Luis Borges, “El hilo de la fábula,” in Los conjurados (Madrid: Alianza, 1985), p. 61. The English translation is from Bosteels, “Borges as Antiphilosopher,” in Thinking With Borges, p. 41. I.e., with the fictum theory of concepts. See William of Ockham, Ordinatio, d. II, q. VIII in Philosophical Writings: A Selection, trans. O. F. M. Philotheus Boehner (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1964), pp. 44–46. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), A771/B779. Silvia G. Dapía, Jorge Luis Borges, Post-Analytic Philosophy, and Representation (New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 6. Christine De Lailhacar, “The Mirror and the Encyclopedia: Borgesian Codes in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose,” in Borges and His Successors: The Borgesian Impact on Literature and the Arts, ed. Edna Aizenberg (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), p. 163.

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70. Silvia Dapía, “The Metaphor of Translation: Borges and Mauthner’s Critique of Language,” Variaciones Borges, Vol. 21 (2006), pp. 23– 85: p. 27. 71. See, e.g., Jorge Luis Borges, “A New Refutation of Time,” in Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 317. Henceforth, NRT . 72. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. Gary Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 4: p. 260. 73. Marina Martín, “Borges Via the Dialectics of Berkeley and Hume,” Variaciones Borges, Vol. 9 (2000), pp. 147–162: p. 157. 74. Cf. Plato, Meno in Plato: Complete Works. Note Socrates’ response to Meno about his constant promulgation of perplexity: “for I perplex others, not because I am clear, but because I am utterly perplexed myself ” (80c). 75. See Borges’s “Foreword,” in Christ, The Narrow Act: Borges’ Art of Allusion, p. ix. 76. Jorge Luis Borges, This Craft of Verse: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1967–1968 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 2.

Part II Life Through the Lens of Literature

5 Metaphors We Live, Worlds We Read James Nikopoulos

At stake in the study of metaphor is the status of truth in linguistic communication. To what extent do metaphorical statements reflect an interpretative accuracy about the world, even when factual accuracy is precluded? Should we assume, as Donald Davidson has argued, that with metaphor ‘ordinary meaning in the context of use is odd enough to prompt us to disregard the question of literal truth’?1 These same questions lie at the heart of fictionality. In the words of Jerome Bruner, ‘The sequence of [a story’s] sentences, rather than the truth or falsity of any of those sentences, is what determines its overall configuration or plot’. Narratives, once again according to Bruner, ‘resist logical procedures for establishing what they mean … They must, as we say, be interpreted ’.2 J. Nikopoulos (B) Nazarbayev University, Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73061-1_5

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Which is why both metaphor and fiction have been said to pose the same basic threat. From Plato’s condemnation of poets to many a moralist’s warnings about a novel’s charms, part of what has made fiction relevant to culture has always been the danger it poses to its culture.3 Metaphor, meanwhile, has gone from an accoutrement of poetic discourse to an organizational principle of cognition. As a result, specialists have begun to caution against undue metaphorical language, particularly in the behavioral and cognitive sciences, where scholars often rely on predicates of human agency to describe biological mechanisms. As has been argued, metaphorical language often hints at a host of inaccurate and unintended implications.4 The threat then, posed as much by fiction as by metaphor, is one of influence. Since an analogy’s juxtapositions may disregard norms of linguistic use and a made-up story’s plot often disregards norms of behavior, it does seem that metaphor and fiction construct their own versions of truth. Each only nominally takes reality into account. Does either, though, succeed at reframing our view of the world? I propose to address this question via a single metaphorical concept within one particular context: the metaphor of THE MIND INTERACTING WITH THE WORLD as A PERSON READING FICTION, as present in Italo Calvino’s 1979 novel If on a winter’s night a traveler. Why this example?—because metaphors for cognition are regularly criticized for misrepresenting the workings of the brain and misleading us in our interpretations regarding the basic biological starting point of human experience. Why Calvino’s novel?—because it is structured around this single overarching metaphorical concept. If on a winter’s night a traveler presents cognition as a metaphor for reading and reading as the precondition for plot, i.e., as the process by which a character affects the world and is affected by the world enough for events to acquire relevance. Nothing happens in this novel until someone starts to read. Everything happens because this someone continues to read. A protagonist—known only as the ‘Reader’—purchases a book. A printing error sends this Reader back to the bookstore and, eventually, into the midst of an international adventure involving counterfeit publishers and secret police, jaded editors and disgruntled academics. As the adventure develops, the

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Reader encounters the novels he believes he has been searching for. If on a winter’s night a traveler alternates between numbered chapters detailing its protagonist’s escapades and the incipits of the novels the Reader has pinned his hopes on. We get to read what Calvino’s Reader reads. As this Reader wends his way through one text after another he comes to realize that the experiences of these fictional stories have begun to resemble the real story he has suddenly become a protagonist in: ‘The novel to be read is [being] superimposed by a possible novel to be lived’.5 But the Reader does not merely realize his adventures have begun to resemble an adventure story. His adventures begin as a reader reading this very adventure story—‘You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler ’. So runs the novel’s famous opening line. The text’s direct address—the ‘You’ simultaneously referring to the fictional Reader and the book’s real reader—blurs the distinction between character and audience, and thus, between real reading (the real reader reading this book) and fictionalized reading (the fictional Reader reading the incipits of fictional books). What the Reader reads, though, is manifold, not merely the first pages of ten separate novels. The ‘world’s intentions’, a man’s ‘private thought’, and a lover’s body are all ‘read’ by Calvino’s protagonist.6 Calvino’s real life audiences, therefore, are reading about someone who is reading both literally (the fictionalized Reader reading fictional books) and metaphorically (the protagonist’s ‘readings’ of other characters’s thoughts and bodies). As a result, the text’s direct address blurs the distinction between literal and metaphorical reading, as much as it does between real-world and fictional reading. In other words, the very premise of Calvino’s novel—its metafictional structure, a plot line interspersed with the incipits of other novels—blurs the boundaries that circumscribe conventional reading practices. And this is surprising. Because for all its experimentalism, for all its toying with the clichés of how we consume fiction, If on a winter’s night a traveler can also seem quite black-and-white. We see this in the way Calvino will juxtapose two ways of reading which could not be more stereotypically antagonistic to each other—informational and immersive reading. The former is a data-gathering affair that seeks to extract facts, tease out

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a message, or produce a definitive interpretation. The latter is imaginative reading, immersion within a possible world. In Calvino’s novel, each mode of textual consumption has its avatar. Lotaria is the incarnation of informational reading. She ‘wants to know the author’s position with regards to Trends of Contemporary Thought and Problems That Demand a Solution’.7 Lotaria’s way of engaging with texts is the jaded byproduct of a society that has turned storytelling into a business and the business of storytelling into an object of scholarship. Lotaria’s sister Ludmila represents immersive reading. She asks stories to carry her away to another world. If her form of reading produces interpretations, they are interpretations predicated on the ability and willingness to get lost in a fictional universe. Whereas for Lotaria arriving at a judgment is the only reason to read the book in the first place, for Ludmila any interpretations are of secondary importance. Referred to intermittently as ‘the Other Reader’ and the female Reader (‘Lettrice’), Ludmila is the story’s ideal. As the protagonist’s love interest, she becomes the reason why the Reader attempts to get to the bottom of the counterfeit translations and mis-bound volumes, an ideal ‘Other Reader’ for the novel he has begun to live. Meanwhile, the shady figures of the novel’s conspiracy story look upon Ludmila’s reading habits as an ideal of lost innocence. ‘How many years has it been since I could abandon myself to a book written by another’, asks Silas Flannery, the frustrated writer at the center of the conspiracy, as he spies on Ludmila from his balcony.8 Unlike her sister, Ludmila ‘like[s] to read, really to read’. It is ‘her way of living in the world, filled with interest in what the world can give her’.9 In other words, an ideal mode of engaging with a story becomes a metaphor for an ideal mode of interacting with the world. On the surface then, Ludmila’s and Lotaria’s opposing forms of reading correspond to the two modes of interpretation the novel’s metafictional elements blur. Informational reading and literal interpretation emphasize a text’s referential capacity, its ability to relate to the outside world. Immersive reading and metaphorical interpretation emphasize a text’s constitutive capacity, its ability to immerse audiences within a world that resembles their own. What we have then is a novel about the desire to read novels, whose protagonist is driven to know a woman because of

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how she reads novels, within a story structured by two opposing poles of how one should read novels. If Ludmila represents one ideal and Lotaria its counter, the Reader is the mean. His reading teeters between a need to extract information from a book—à la Lotaria—and the desire to envelope himself within a book’s storyworld—the way Ludmila does. Most of the reading depicted in Calvino’s novel is the Reader’s; most of the metaphorical implications of reading come through via his experiences as an audience for literary fiction. We read the books the Reader is reading as we read descriptions of the experience his reading should elicit. It is an embodied, sensory, and inference-producing experience—i.e., a very mind-like procedure. ‘This bar … could seem dim and misty’, runs the narrator of the first novel the Reader cracks open, ‘whereas it could also be steeped in light’.10 Calvino narrates the experience of the Reader’s reading by bringing together the words being read with a description of the ways those words could be interpreted. Calvino’s descriptions balance the potential for a single story to produce diametrically different impressions with the way one’s individual and cultural expectations influence this potential—‘steeped in light’ as much as ‘dim and misty’. After all, this place which could be dim or well lit happens to be a train station bar, and one cannot read about train station bars without activating what one already associates with train station bars. Just a page earlier Calvino’s description evokes an ‘odor of smoke’—if for no other reason than because there are certain things ‘a novel that talks about trains and stations cannot help conveying’.11 Reading is depicted as an inference-making process which elicits a circumscribed set of potential interpretations. Calvino’s protagonist takes information given and compares it to information retrieved in order to reach conclusions based on a partial tableau. As the second of the Reader’s novels says, ‘characters take on form gradually in the accumulation of minute details and precise movements, but also of remarks, shreds of conversation’.12 Characters take on form in this way, in fiction as in real life. Or at least this is what If on a winter’s night a traveler implies, particularly with its love story. The Reader falls for the Other Reader soon into the plot, even if he has barely interacted with her. In order to form a fuller picture of this mysterious person, the Reader must glean

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shreds of information from indirect interactions: He visits Ludmila’s house; he peruses her things. ‘What can they reveal to you about what she is really like?’ asks the narrator.13 Perhaps not much: ‘We live in a uniform civilization, within well-defined cultural models … [the items in Ludmila’s home] have been chosen among a certain number of given possibilities’.14 Nonetheless, our hero cannot help snooping around, in Ludmila’s library, in her kitchen. Eventually ‘the objects no longer seem to be there by chance, they assume meaning as elements of a discourse, like a memory composed of signals and emblems’.15 This is how Calvino elaborates his metaphor, by describing reading as a contingent, full-bodied experience and human interaction as an elaborate form of reading. ‘Ludmila, now you are being read’, runs the opening of the consummation scene: Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds … all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being.16

The effect of this extended metaphor is not to limit cognition and perception by coercing them into our more limited associations for consuming stories. In this novel, the World-as-a-Book/Mind-as-a-Reader metaphor does not limit cognition so much as explode reading. Calvino’s novel depicts his Reader’s interactions with the novels he is reading, not as the cerebral perception of a representation of the world, but as an embodied interaction with the physicality of the world: ‘An odor of frying wafts at the opening of the page’; ‘a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph’.17 An immaterial story does more than represent material life. In these lines which describe the Reader’s experience reading two of the novels he has retrieved, the physical medium of storytelling—the pages and paragraphs of a book—is physically affected by that immaterial story—lines obscured by odors and smoke. ‘The novel you are reading wants to present to you a corporeal world’, says Calvino’s narrator, ‘thick, detailed’.18 Conventionally, stories depict the corporeal nature of processing stories by giving us characters who laugh and cry at other stories; i.e.,

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who respond to immaterial plots with full-bodied emotional reactions. In Calvino’s fictional universe, things are different. Here, the disembodied story effects change, not just in another human being (a character), but in itself (the book in which it is printed). The book takes on the responsiveness of the world, communicating to an individual, simultaneously affected by that individual. The Reader is not a passive receiver of information from a textual world that remains immune to his influence; he is a participant within an interactive process. Notice that we are not talking about readers constructing meanings through their interpretations. Calvino’s metaphor is not focused on conclusions so much as on processes. Hence why If on a winter’s night a traveler consistently references the limits imposed upon a reader’s inference-making abilities, instead of stressing the conclusions reached by those abilities. A train station could seem dim or well lit, but it must still seem like a train station. A lover’s body may only be a ‘poor alphabet’ but there is a ‘physical objectivity’ to it which cannot be denied.19 The information we retrieve from texts is restricted by what can be corroborated by other readers. In a similar way, the experiences we create by projecting, metaphorically, the implications of a fictional world onto the real one, are restricted by the literal statements with which a text circumscribes our immersion into stories. The interactive nature of the reading process precludes total liberty; in Calvino’s universe, reading is as accountable to the world as the world is to reading. If on a winter’s night a traveler sets up two poles of interpretation and reading—literal and figurative, informational and immersive. It gives us two characters who represent these two extremes of understanding text. And it implicates these extremes in our understanding, not just of text, but of the world more broadly. It does all this by connecting its audience’s reading to its protagonist’s, and by connecting its protagonist’s reading of text to his means of interacting with the world. And in the process of doing this, it cannot help muddying the distinctions that have guided us through its plot and its protagonist through his adventures. Because in the end, the two extremes of interpreting text and making sense of the world, which Lotaria and Ludmila represent, fail to capture the reality of how the Reader interprets his own texts. What these two modes of reading succeed at doing, and remarkably well in fact, is leading

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on Calvino’s protagonist. Ludmila’s ideals immerse the Reader within a world of adventure and romance. She is the reason he involves himself in the adventure. Who she is, which the novel defines primarily by her mode of reading, makes the adventures worthwhile. At the same time, the Reader would not have arrived at the doorstep of this world had he not taken up some of the investigative procedures that define Lotaria’s mode of reading. Lotaria invites our Reader to the university seminar where a book is physically torn apart, sections of it distributed to various working groups which use its dismembered pages to prove independent points. Meanwhile, the protagonist is reading through the opening bits of ten separate novels in order to find his way to a woman he desires. Soon into If on a winter’s night a traveler, it becomes clear that the Reader is reading for clues. He seeks to immerse himself within a story, sure, but no longer in a fictional one. He is seeking to take part in Ludmila’s story, which in the end is what implicates him in the ‘real’ story of the novel’s plot. In being accountable to the world as much as the world is to it, no extreme form of reading can be sustained. As a metaphor for how we make sense of the world, reading takes on the status of a liminal process—neither irretrievably immersive nor detachedly analytical, always a bit of both. Lotaria’s and Ludmila’s modes of reading function like two poles between which Calvino’s protagonist is constantly sliding back and forth. As ideals worth striving for and threats worth defending against, Ludmila’s and Lotaria’s modes of interpreting texts become representative of more than individual preference. It is not just that Ludmila’s reading habits represent her personality and Lotaria’s habits her own. Each set of habits inscribes a broader tendency among all readers to believe that there are ways one should interpret fiction (not to mention life). Lotaria’s and Ludmila’s modes of reading become representative of the ways our theories influence our habits, and our habits inform our theories. Another way of putting this is that in Calvino’s novel reading is both a practice and a proclivity (there is even a character who has trained himself not to read anymore).20 Because it is also a proclivity, reading is not just something we do, and not just something we enjoy doing or do not enjoy doing; it is something we cannot help but do, and therefore, forget that

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there are various ways to do it (that character who no longer reads had to train himself not to do so, and with much effort too).21 ‘This world’, says Calvino in his 1983 lecture, ‘The Written and the Unwritten World’, presents itself to my eyes—at least for the most part—already conquered, colonized by words … We live in a world where everything has already been read before we even begin to exist.22

How we read something as inconsequential as a novel must therefore relate to how we interact with a world ‘colonized’ by the same set of words that form our fictions. ‘The habit of reading over the centuries has transformed Homo sapiens into Homo legens’, says Calvino, ‘but this Homo legens is not necessarily wiser than before’.23 The threats and promises of Lotaria’s and Ludmila’s reading habits therefore apply to everyday interaction as much as to artistic spectatorship. Which is to say, how easily Calvino’s Reader succumbs to one way or another of experiencing novels implies how susceptible he is to one way or another of experiencing the world. This is the implication of the novel’s World-as-a-Book/Mind-as-a-Reader metaphor—that how we read our inconsequential fictions affects how we read our more consequential ones. Notice how perfectly these questions relate to the study of metaphor?—to the threat metaphor poses of unduly influencing how we conceptualize something, all because a poetic turn-of-phrase has come to seem more natural than it should?—to the promise metaphor makes, of allowing us to make some sense of what makes so little sense? Notice how perfectly these questions relate to the particular metaphor that structures Calvino’s novel. Conventionally, researchers assume that we apply agentive and spatial metaphors to the stuff of thought, because we do not understand the mind very well. The brain ‘predicts’; it ‘chunks’ bodies of information and ‘detects meaning in recursive sentences’.24 Restating the mind’s mysteries with the language of better understood activities allows us to make these mysteries more intelligible. The World-as-a-Book/Mind-asa-Reader metaphor perhaps seems more apropos today than ever before, considering how much of the current conception of cognition takes

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for granted that the mind relies on metaphorical concepts and narrative structures.25 There are negative and positive ways to take this. The positive one is that, in being so receptive to metaphorical meaning and in applying metaphorical concepts so effortlessly, our minds utilize metaphors to facilitate inference-production and interpersonal communication. The negative take assumes that a mind’s proclivities can be as problematic as a Cartesian’s bodily perception, masking the reality of the world and deluding us into assuming greater understanding than we should. Both the positive and the negative interpretation of metaphor relate to fictionality, i.e., to the distinctions we attribute to our understanding of what separates the make-believe from the real. If a metaphor ‘implies or suggests or introduces or calls to mind a (possible) game of makebelieve’, as Kendall L. Walton has argued, then metaphor, just like ‘games of make-believe’ may ‘enable us to go on in new ways’—a means for exploring previously unconsidered ramifications.26 However, makebelieve can also trace too many ramifications, to speak of things as though there were more purpose behind them than an agent-less plot-less universe could ever boast. In ‘The Written and the Unwritten World’, Calvino says that his goal for Palomar, the novel he published after If on a winter’s night a traveler, was to write in such a way that ‘description becomes story, all-the-while remaining description’.27 I find this a useful way of thinking about his depiction of the reading experience in his earlier fiction too, as well as of thinking about the promises and perils of metaphor and fictionality more broadly. When a scientist proclaims that the brain ‘predicts’, just as when a character like Macbeth declaims that tomorrow ‘Creeps in this petty pace’, we take both statements to be directly applicable to the context— we take one statement to say something ‘true’ about a scientist’s arguments and the other statement to say something ‘true’ about Macbeth’s fictional situation.28 We contextualize each of these truths within the separate but interrelated worlds of the text’s context and our own real life one. If we recognize either statement as metaphorical, we accept an element of hyperbole. This prompts us to project the statement’s

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significance to something more than itself, i.e., to consider this significance applicable to other contexts. In this way does metaphor approach the quality of a story while remaining a description (while remaining answerable to the truth criteria of the outside world). What do I mean by this? Like fiction, metaphor advertises its artifice. One does not read something metaphorically unless one recognizes it as being metaphorical— Davidson refers to this as a ‘built-in aesthetic feature’.29 In projecting artifice, metaphor asks audiences to loosen their standards of reference— ‘to disregard the question of literal truth’, to use Davidson’s words. Unlike with fiction, though, metaphorical truth is far less answerable to internal standards. Metaphor is not like a story in the way Bruner says. The organization of the metaphorical statement does not grant it truth or falsity to the extent that a fiction’s own aesthetics can make it seem true or false. Which is why, whether as a predicate in a scientist’s discourse (a brain ‘predicting’) or a recurring conceit in a larger story (as in Calvino’s novel), a metaphor’s truthfulness cannot help referencing the standards of a world outside of itself. It ‘describes’ even as it proclaims itself to be in the process of ‘becoming’ a story. Of course, one could make similar claims about fiction. A story’s criteria for truth—which is to say, for relevance to the outside world— may derive from its own internal structure, its own aesthetic qualities, but these qualities do not emerge from a vacuum. Everyone who has ever called a story not-believable, even while understanding that the film or novel is not necessarily supposed to be believed, understands that the standards which we apply to fiction are simultaneously aesthetic and descriptive—the artwork needs to work by the standards of the artwork; the artwork’s internal standards still need to be applicable in some way or other to the standards of the outside world. The difference between metaphor and fiction is one of degree. Metaphors tend towards providing audiences with information rather than immersing them within a scenario merely to a greater degree than does fiction. Partly, this is because what we think of as fiction is usually a large scale representation which may intersperse factual elements, but which, even when it does, nonetheless maintains the status of a world of its own. Once fact has entered into fiction enough, such that the

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fiction’s believability no longer seems independent of its references to reality, we go from having a fiction to having fictional elements, the way much nonfiction boasts of distorted memories and novelistic manipulation. Metaphor can come to resemble a fictional element within a work of nonfiction. Or it can resemble a particular form of fictional element within a larger fiction, the way Calvino’s World-as-a-Book/Mind-as-aReader metaphor figures within his novel. In both cases, the brevity of the metaphor keeps it from seeming more immersive than informative. Metaphorical statements cannot encompass the entirety of a possible world the way a fictional story can. What they can do is concentrate the possibility of a possible world into a bite-sized chunk—description becoming story but remaining description, which is to say, not achieving full fictionality. A metaphor’s brevity prompts us to reference external standards to a greater degree than stories do. This is why I believe metaphorical statements often seem truthful in a way that more seamlessly integrates into everyday discourse (I for one never thought that in using the phrase ‘invest my time’ I was being metaphorical, not until theorists attempted to convince me so).30 Part of this has to do with habit, sure, but a lot of it I think derives from the way metaphor distills fictionality into the brevity of description, all the while leaving itself obvious enough to be recognized as a fiction, if, that is, something occasions someone to notice its fictionality. In other words, immersion and information-gathering , both, are ideals of long form storytelling, whether fictional or not. And immersion and information-gathering are, likewise, the two aspects of narrative that metaphor brings together in the most succinct way human language has thus far devised. Because it advertises its aesthetic features, metaphor fixes significance into form, to a much greater degree than statements we take literally. These aesthetic features imply the potential to be immersive like fiction. But because of its brevity, metaphor cannot achieve immersion to the level of a fiction. If fiction plunges us into a world of make believe, metaphor merely dips our toes in one. In this sense is metaphorical interpretation a liminal process. It slides along a scale between one extreme of interpretation and another. Expressions so commonplace as to no longer seem metaphorical ask to be interpreted more literally than an analogy that has not entered into

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everyday conversation. Something like, ‘the brain predicts’ seems to be disseminating information much more than something like ‘tomorrow creeps’. The former seems to be calling for an informative reading practice, while the latter seems to be demanding a more immersive mode of reading. But neither statement makes much sense if we read it with an aim either to extract information from it or to immerse oneself within an aesthetic experience. Read ‘the brain predicts’ for too much information, and the statement becomes overly literal—a brain-shaped homunculus forecasting the future based on some deep, personal insight. Read ‘tomorrow creeps’ too immersively, and it becomes far too figurative to still prove relevant to Macbeth—as though an anthropomorphized being known as ‘Tomorrow’ were the hero of its own, distinct story. In other words, read metaphor too much like Lotaria or Ludmila would, and its significance to its particular discourse alters, often radically. A metaphor’s relevance to its context—a predictive brain’s relevance to a scientific paper as much as a creeping tomorrow’s relevance to a story about a murderous Thane—hinges on the different degrees of literal and figurative interpretation its context calls for in the moment of the metaphor’s appearance.31 Because, in the end, literal interpretation is not the same thing as informative reading, and immersive reading need not imply metaphorical interpretation. One could immerse oneself in a story which requires little-to-no figurative interpretation; one could extract information from a poem composed of one long metaphor (as my students all-too-often do). What metaphorical statements do is demonstrate the extent to which we undertake literal and figurative modes of interpretation as a result of what we expect from a discourse. Metaphor demonstrates this so well because its brevity makes its artifice seem more informative than a story, while its artifice makes its information seem more contingent than clear-cut nonfiction. Read metaphor too categorically, and it loses its ability to be both surprising as well as expected, to provide a glimpse of a possible world as well as be a bridge to our own. For another of metaphor’s hallmarks, which connects it to fiction, is its ability to seem novel, even when it is anything but. According to Davidson, the very fictionality of metaphor equates with its potential to be original: ‘What we call the element of

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novelty or surprise is a built-in aesthetic feature we can experience again and again, like the surprise in Haydn’s Symphony no. 94, or a familiar deceptive cadence’.32 Davidson’s comparison makes this argument seem like common sense. Metaphors can be like miniature artworks, and as everyone understands, artworks often produce novel experiences even after the umpteenth encounter. But the comparison between art and metaphor is also counterintuitive. When we sit down to a symphony or crack open a novel, we set aside our concerns in order to focus on a potentially extraordinary experience. We set aside one world in order to immerse ourselves within another. Preoccupied? Hungry? Uncomfortable? Any of these distractions will diminish an artwork’s potential to immerse you in its cadences, as every artist understands: ‘Let the world around you fade’, says Calvino’s narrator, as the Reader sits down to his first book, ‘Find the most comfortable position’.33 Otherwise, dear Reader, how else do you hope to encounter ‘true newness’?34 The potential for art to elicit immersive experience diminishes the more our everyday world intrudes. In order for reading to stand a chance at immersing us in its world, we have to set aside our own, at least to a certain extent. Metaphor does not ask this of us, because its brevity automatically contextualizes it within a larger world, whether fictional or not. Metaphor does not become a full-fledged fiction; it functions as a fictional element within a larger discourse. Its aesthetic feature does not ask us to loosen our standards of reference to the point that the metaphorical statement takes on the fullness of a world unto its own. What the aesthetic feature does is redirect our standards of reference away from what the metaphor means as an individual utterance and towards what it might mean as a form of utterance. Which is another way of saying that a metaphorical statement may draw our attention to itself as a type rather than as a token of a discourse. In admitting its artifice, metaphor fixes a token’s significance into a type’s potential. The metaphorical statement takes on the flexibility of a type—a form which is more than one specific iteration (more than its token), even if defined in part by this specific iteration. The verb ‘predict’ is a type that can be incorporated into an infinite variety of tokens. It can even be made to perform the extra-literal duties that a

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statement like ‘the brain predicts’ asks of it. The tokens with which we are familiar, and which a community assumes are possible, define the potential of the type such that a type is always more than any single token. With metaphor, though, the hyperbole, fictionality, or built-in aesthetic feature—however one wants to define the metaphor’s calling attention to the figurative nature of its statement—emphasizes a statement’s indebtedness to form. To the extent that the specific statement no longer seems as much an iteration of types as the creation of types, or at the very least a re-definition of types. Something similar happens with fiction. Stories often acquire the flexibility of a type, which is to say, a flexibility of significance. As Bruner puts it, fiction resists meaning —significance taking itself as fact—and instead requires interpretation—significance aspiring to fact. Within the possible world of a fiction, significance seems to require negotiation, not merely acceptance. What is the difference then between a metaphor’s typeness and a fiction’s? After all, a story can be interpreted in all its particularity, such that it becomes an inimitable token. Or, it can be interpreted much more generically, such that it takes on the status of a repeatable type, the way the Odyssey is both a unique masterwork and a template for other traveler narratives. There is no difference. There is only a different norm for how we read each. The more one reads the Odyssey for information—à la Lotaria— the more one emphasizes its qualities as a type. Homer’s characters get abstracted, his plot line essentialized, to the point that Odysseus becomes a representative of a type of hero and his adventures begin to stand in for other similar adventures. We are reading in order to extract information, which is to say, in order to take something specific and categorize it so as to make it useful for later reasoning. Meanwhile, the more a reader immerses herself within the world of Homer’s epic, the more that epic’s particulars come to the fore and the less these particulars seem capable of abstraction, of being subsumed into a category; the more unique the storyworld becomes. We process metaphorical language similarly. The more our attention is drawn to a metaphor’s artifice, the more unique it seems—even if it is not unique. The less our attention is drawn to this artifice, which is to say,

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the more our attention is drawn to the context of the metaphor rather than to the metaphorical statement, the more likely we are to read it for clues than experience it as art. The previous sentences should be proof of this. Attention cannot be ‘drawn’ to anything, not literally. And yet, who is reading this line for an immersive experience? (Though perhaps it now seems much more immersive than it did before, now that I have drawn your attention to it.)35 Once again, the major difference between fiction and metaphor is duration, along with cultural expectations. The brevity of metaphor more often provokes informational reading, because the metaphorical statement directs our attention towards a context, of which the metaphor is a part. Whereas the duration of fiction, along with our understanding of it as a genre of storytelling, more easily provokes immersive reading. Lyric poetry stands a better chance at being immersive than metaphor because we consider it a genre, even if it can be as brief as a single metaphor. If we call something a story or a poem—i.e., an independent category of aesthetic production—we more readily set aside our world for the sake of possibly entering into another one. We expect the story to reference other contexts, sure, but not just to reference them. We also expect the story to direct our attention towards a context of its own making. Expectation conditions experience, and we expect more from that which gives us more, usually. I am not claiming that length guarantees greater immersion. I am arguing that a longer work of art requires our attention for greater stretches of time, thereby giving it more opportunity to grasp and hold an audience. Of course, there are a zillion-and-one exceptions. A pop song can be more immersive than a symphony, a haiku more engaging than War and Peace. A longer work can grab audiences and then lose them, precisely because of how long it is. Immersion is conditioned by an infinite variety of factors, including personal taste, cultural associations, and the specifics of one’s circumstances in the moment. Whether you are hungry, sad, uncomfortable, or just got elbowed by someone in the crowd contributes to the experience. And this is common sense. I am merely applying the logic of this common sense to metaphor and its relationship to fictionality. So then what? Am I re-arguing a fictionalist account of metaphor? Yes. I am. But not just because of what constitutes a metaphor and

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what constitutes fiction. But because of what constitutes our expectations for linguistic art versus poetic language. All reading slides along a scale between informational reading on one end and immersive reading on the other. Reading metaphors and fiction is no different. But metaphor and fiction, by virtue of their drawing attention to themselves as metaphors and works of art, also draw attention to our capacity to read differently— to the fact that reading is not mere information processing. Nor is it an escape from reality. It is somewhere always in between, always sliding away from one ideal of reading or another, depending on context and audience. ‘If a book truly interests me’, says an unnamed voice Calvino’s Reader encounters at the library, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent.36

Is this then where Lotaria’s and Ludmila’s modes of experiencing fiction coincide? In an image of reading which is so fully immersive as to draw one’s attention back into the world itself? Notice the contradiction—that the most fully encapsulating escape from the world could conceivably draw someone even further into the world from which this new, plausible, but wholly fictional world emerged in the first place. All interpretations of textual language are conditioned by the reading habits we assume that bit of text necessitates. This is what Calvino’s metaphor demonstrates, that our expectations for how we should read something determine how useful that something will be, as well as how relevant that usefulness will prove to our own momentary necessities. If a metaphor highlights certain associations and obscures certain others—if a brain ‘predicting’ or a tomorrow ‘creeping’ makes the world seem more willful than it is—it is not because metaphorical language is willfully misleading. It is because we have shifted the emphasis of our reading, and in the process, reconsidered a metaphorical statement’s relevance to its discourse. We have begun to read a scientist like Ludmila might and a poet like Lotaria does. And in the process, we have reconfigured the relevance of hyperbole to a genre’s relationship to truth.

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The reality of metaphor is the reality of fiction, which is the reality of everyday interaction. All are fully immersive and ineluctably deductive. Both Lotaria’s and Ludmila’s readings apply equally well to how we read stories and analogies as well as people and places. Just think, all this time I have been using Calvino’s novel to make larger philosophical claims— a very Lotaria-like procedure. But I never would have noticed anything about his novel worth using had it not immersed me within its world. Likewise, I might never have found myself immersed in this metafictional whodunit, had I not begun to notice the many ways a book like this can be used by someone seeking answers to nonfictional questions.

Notes 1. Donald Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, Critical Inquiry 5.1 (1978): 42. 2. Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 44, 60. 3. For a canonical discussion of Plato’s condemnations, see Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). For an introduction to the novel’s perceived immorality, see Marthe Robert, Origins of the Novel , trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (London: Harvester, 1980). For an example from nonWestern culture, see Jack Goody, ‘From Oral to Written: An Anthropological Breakthrough in Storytelling’, in Franco Moretti (ed.), The Novel. Volume 1. History, Geography, and Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 3–36. 4. For recent examples, see Jerome Kagan, Five Constraints on Predicting Behavior (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017); Ariane Castellane and Cédric Paternotte, ‘Knowledge Transfer without Knowledge? The Case of Agentive Metaphors in Biology’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science xxx (2018): 1–10. For a canonical debate, see Maxwell Bennett et al., Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 5. Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, trans. William Weaver (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), 31.

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

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Ibid., 59, 98, 150. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 165. Ibid., 69. Ibid., 12. My emphasis. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 137. Ibid. Ibid., 139. Ibid., 150–151. Ibid., 33, 10. Ibid., 40. Ibid., 151. ‘I’ve become so accustomed to not reading’, says this character, ‘that I don’t even read what appears before my eyes’. Ibid., 46–47. ‘It’s not easy’, says the non-Reader, ‘they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us’. Ibid., 47. Italo Calvino, Saggi, 1945–1985, vol. 2, ed. Mario Barenghi (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori, 2007), 1869. All translations from this source are mine. Ibid. Kagan, Five Constraints on Predicting Behavior, 142. For example: ‘Metaphors and image schema, the way our brain relies on narrative structures, the dynamic ability of the brain to blend old and new schemas, and the unparalleled creativity of the brain are all part of the approaches of the cognitive social science and humanities to social interaction…’—Ib Bondebjerg, ‘The Creative Mind: Cognition, Society and Culture’, Palgrave Communications 3 (2017): 1. Likewise: ‘We can talk about … ways of reasoning whereby analogies, metaphors, stories, and emotions play an important role, owing to the narrative, emotive, and metaphoric properties of reason’.— Stefán Snævarr, Metaphors, Narratives, Emotions. Their Interplay and Impact (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 2.

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26. Kendall L. Walton, ‘Metaphor and Prop-Oriented Make-Believe’, European Journal of Philosophy 1.1 (1993): 46, 53. 27. Calvino, Saggi, 1873. 28. William Shakespeare, Macbeth 5.5.18–19, in Shakespeare MIT , created by Jeremy Hylton (published online 1993) http://sha kespeare.mit.edu/macbeth/macbeth.5.5.html accessed 10 December 2018. 29. Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, 38. 30. See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 31. That one metaphor comes from a scientific paper and the other from a play is irrelevant. What matters is where in the text the metaphor appears and how this metaphor relates to the rest of the discourse. 32. Davidson, ‘What Metaphors Mean’, 38. 33. Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, 3. 34. Ibid., 7. 35. So much scholarship conceptualizes metaphorical statements as oneoff events, as though the way we read a metaphor for the first time is the way we will always read that or other similar metaphors. Nothing better disproves this than cognitive metaphor theory, which attempts to show that metaphorical concepts are so ingrained in our language that we revert to them unthinkingly, all the time. And yet, once this scholarship has alerted us to this fact, it is hard to take it for granted. As I said earlier, I never considered ‘invest my time’ metaphorical in the least, and now I do. 36. Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveler, 248.

6 Oneself as Character: Emplotment, Memory and Metaphor in Ricoeur, Bakhtin and Nabokov’s The Gift Leonid Bilmes

Can one, or at least could one ever, begin to write without taking oneself for another? —Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, p. 99 I put myself in the hero’s place, I captivate myself through my own narration. —Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability, p. 154

In his ludic autobiography, Roland Barthes includes two photographs of himself: one, taken in 1942, shows him as a young man, and another, from 1970, is closer to the time of writing. Barthes reflects: “But I never looked like that!”—How do you know? Who is the “you” you might or might not look like? Where do you find it—by which L. Bilmes (B) School of Foreign Languages‚ Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73061-1_6

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morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image: you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens (I am interested in seeing my eyes only when they look at you): even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of images.1

Barthes here expresses the uncanny estrangement one often experiences when contemplating photographs of one’s younger self. This occurs when one recognizes that one is no longer the same person that one was, while acknowledging that this stranger is, after all, “me.” Barthes uses the word “image” to emphasize that contemplation of one’s past is always an act of mediated approximation; even when gazing upon the trace of oneself left on celluloid, the one who is remembering knows that such an image can only be a standing-in-for one’s past self. Other common instances when we might speak of an “image” of our past self are recollection, and, more to the purposes of this discussion, selfnarration. In autobiographical narratives, the narrated self becomes a narrativized image of the past self, and this chapter argues that narrative form performs a mediating function between the narrating and narrated selves, a function very close to that of metaphor. It reads Vladimir Nabokov’s The Gift as being particularly attuned to this metaphorical dimension of narrative self-representation, and I want to suggest that this novel formally enacts Paul Ricoeur’s and Mikhail Bakhtin’s related conceptions of identity as being caught up in the tenor-vehicle journey of metaphor, acted out by narrative form.2 While neither Ricoeur nor Bakhtin spell out the implicit importance of metaphor to their own conceptions of narratively informed self-understanding, Nabokov’s novel allows its reader to experience this importance in both its form and content.3 The Gift essentially answers the question posed by its own form: What happens when we write about ourselves in the third person? More precisely: What does the very possibility of performing this kind of self-externalization, within the borders of a narrative text, tell us about literature’s contribution to the shaping of a sense of self? Lorna Martens

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makes the following pertinent observation regarding third-person narration in autobiography: “Authors who choose the third person to tell their own stories are attracted by the implicit distance from the character.”4 Drawing on Bakhtin’s account of autobiographical authorship and Ricoeur’s unpacking of the meanings contained in the phrase “oneself as another,” I suggest that it is this implicit distance between oneself as narrator and oneself as character that is made explicit in Nabokov’s novel, as his narrator switches modes, from third person to first person and back again. By having the narrator continually switch narrative point of view, The Gift can be said to be eliciting the metaphoricity inherent within the narrative act, in the sense that the narrated, third-person self becomes figured as an emplotted construct: a discursively represented image that acts as both foil and sustenance for the tenor of the narrating-I. In their foundational study, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, Caryl Emerson and Gary Saul Morson observe: “When we tell the story of our own lives autobiographically, what speaks in us most often is not direct experience or memory but a narrator with an imagined other ’s values and intonations.”5 From this perspective, the more fitting pronoun of self-narrativized life is not “I” but “she/he.”6 In writing autobiography, to write as mimetically as possible about one’s past, one writes a kind of biography about that “other” who is no longer present: one writes about oneself as if about another. Let us now consider how such a narrator could be made to speak in us, whenever we would become biographers of the lives of our departed selves.

I The acknowledgment of having to tussle with images standing-for the past is as old as philosophy itself. As a representative example, Aristotle provides the following account of what it means to have an image of something: “one must conceive the image in us to be something in its own right and to be of another thing. In so far, then, as it is something in its own right, it is an object of contemplation or an image. But in so

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far as it is of another thing, it is a sort of copy and a reminder.”7 Contemplating an image of one’s past self is, necessarily, contemplating “a sort of copy”: personal identity is a perennial effort of approximation, and it relies on the predicate that the image one has of oneself is a more or less faithful (in the sense that one can vouch for it) copy.8 A metaphorical shade is already discernible in the process of recollection (anamnesis), as one quests after images of oneself in the past. That is to say, the concurrent recognition that one is both the carrier of one’s identity (this image refers to me) and yet distinct from one’s past self (this is only an image, not I myself ) mirrors the structural relation of metaphorical reference. Since the remembering self is never identical to the remembered self, the relation between the remembering and the remembered selves becomes very close to that of self and other; the image of one’s past self is, then, what calls out for metaphor’s cognitive leap to be made. Ricoeur’s reflections on the nature of the historical understanding might make this claim more explicit, when he suggests that, “our relation to the reality of the past has to pass successively through the filters of the Same, the Other and the Analogous.”9 In the context of personal identity, it is precisely the image of the self that functions as the “Analogous” in, firstly, recollection, and subsequently in self-narrativization. Ricoeur continues: “The past is indeed what, in the first place, has to be re-enacted in the mode of identity, but it is no less true, for all that, that it is also what is absent from all our constructions. The Analogous, precisely, is what retains in itself the force of re-enactment and of taking a distance, to the extent that being-as is both to be and not to be” (RM , p. 155).10 The notion of the “Analogous” of oneself is, in other words, a metaphorical approximation, articulated by the narrative (con)figuration of oneself. A narrated image of oneself claims in one breath both that it is and is not oneself: it is so, for recounted memory, yet it is not so, for phenomenological becoming. Ted Cohen, in Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor, helps us further in recognizing the metaphoricity inherent in self-mediation, when he suggests that thinking of oneself as another (for instance, whenever one strives to empathize with another person or even with a fictional character in a novel) is a cognitive operation that is very close to our ability to grasp metaphorical reference. Cohen argues: “the creation,

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expression and comprehension of metaphors must involve speaking and thinking of one thing as another. I am persuaded that understanding one another involves thinking of oneself as another, and thus the talent for doing this must be related to the talent for thinking of one thing as another; and it may be the same talent, differently deployed .”11 This kind of empathetic identification is, however, not restricted to identifying with other people and fictional characters. It is also necessary for self -identification that occurs whenever one is thinking of oneself in the future—whenever, as Cohen puts it, “[I am] imagining myself to be the me-in-the-future, and that person, a future me, is not the current me” (p. 68). I wish to extend Cohen’s point here and suggest that this is equally true of identification with one’s past self. Of course, when conceiving of my future self, I am projecting an undecided image— the future “me” is only a possibility and does not yet exist. On the other hand, whenever I am remembering my past, the image of myself is already “located” somewhere in my memory. Yet, in order to identify with my past self it is insufficient merely to recall an image of it; I need to also imagine myself as I then was, how I then felt, even who I then was, and, I suggest, this imagined identification is fully realized only in acts of self-narrativization. (I use the verb “imagine” to underwrite the “as-it-were” character of this kind of self-identification.) In other words, to identify with my past self it is insufficient merely to remember; I must also make a story leap into the consciousness of my past self and attempt to apprehend the world as though I were again present in his consciousness, and seeing the world through his eyes. Cohen, in fact, says this much implicitly: “I regard [the] act of imagination, too, as the grasping of a metaphor. Identifying oneself with another is a special case of metaphorical identification, and identifying oneself with oneself-differently-situated is, thus, a special special case” (p. 68).12 The importance of the narrative imagination in supplementing memory is something that Nabokov certainly appreciated, and his writing may be viewed as a singular enactment of this creative process. For Nabokov—and especially so in his most autobiographical novel The Gift —the past self becomes a character in the story narrated by the present self, as the present self seeks to restore consciousness to a departed

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self that needs the catalyst of imaginative narration to be stirred back to life, from its resting place in memory.13 Before turning to Nabokov’s text, however, it will be useful to examine the philosophical understanding of “narrative identity,” a conception that involves, as I have been suggesting, thinking identity via the metaphorical articulation of self to oneself-as-though-another. In order to do so, we may now turn to Ricoeur’s surgery of selfhood: Oneself as Another. Ricoeur explains his suggestive title as follows: A kind of otherness that is not (or not merely) the result of comparison is suggested by our title, otherness of a kind that can be constitutive of selfhood as such. “Oneself as Another” suggests from the outset that the selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other, that instead one passes into the other … To “as” I should like to attach a strong meaning, not only that of comparison (oneself similar to another) but indeed that of an implication (oneself inasmuch as being other).14

Ricoeur’s contention that otherness is somehow constitutive of self is best illustrated by what happens in self-narration, for it is then that one’s present self metaphorizes (although Ricoeur himself does not use this verb) one’s past self as another. According to Ricoeur, philosophical debate about selfhood always wrestles with two related notions of identity: idem identity and ipse identity (OA, pp. 115–125). Idem identity refers to sameness, when a subject or object retains its identity by remaining the same in time. A toaster remains a toaster, and my body remains my body, despite the decay that ultimately befalls them both. Ipse identity, on the other hand, refers to continuation in time that incorporates change (in-corpo-ation is literally to combine or unite into one body) and this implies an internalization of difference. The problem is how to account for the fact that the self maintains fidelity to itself—fidelity being essential, among other things, for ethical responsibility—while also admitting that the self does not belong to the category of sameness. Phrased differently: whenever one remembers oneself, one easily comprehends that “one” is in fact “both”: the same person (the same body; the same name) but also no longer the same

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person (one’s physical appearance has changed, as well as one’s habits, beliefs, aspirations). The passage of time is, thus, the fulcrum alternately supporting/upsetting this paradox of personal identity. The self does not remain identical to itself over time, and the two poles of identity appear to be irreconcilable, as Ricoeur notes: “Indeed, it is with the question of permanence in time that the confrontation between our two versions of identity becomes a genuine problem for the first time” (OA, p. 116). What resolves this paradox for Ricoeur is the function that narrative performs for identity. What subjectivity requires, Ricoeur argues, is “an intervention of narrative identity in the conceptual constitution of personal identity in the manner of a specific mediator between the pole of character where idem and ipse tend to coincide, and the pole of selfmaintenance, where selfhood frees itself from sameness” (OA, p. 119). Ricoeur suggests that the self considered as a character (in both senses) is granted permanence in time, because it then reconciles the twin demands of ipse and idem identity: “an element of loyalty is thus incorporated into character and makes it turn towards fidelity, hence towards maintaining the self. Here the two poles of identity accord with one another. This proves that one cannot think the idem of the person through without considering the ipse [self-continuation], even when one entirely covers over the other” (OA, p. 121).15 It is clear that Ricoeur’s notion of the self as a character is an especially useful critical tool to interpreting memory narratives, not least because the character self is always represented, either explicitly or implicitly, precisely as an other-character (idem) in a story shaped by the present self (ipse).16

II I have said that the protagonist of The Gift , Fyodor GodunovCherdyntsev, recounts his past by repeatedly switching narrative point of view, from third to first person, bringing into relief the self-othering dimension of self-recounting. This novel may be read as a meditation on the relation between the remembering and the remembered selves, and a narrative that in a way performs the theoretical insights we are examining. As Ricoeur puts it, “literature proves to consist in a vast laboratory

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for thought experiments in which the resources of variation encompassed by narrative identity are put to the test of narration” (OA, p. 148). The Gift is an innovative example of such experimentation: the novel, in fact, derives its main creative frisson from its exploration of these dimensions of sameness and selfhood in the identity of its protagonist. One writer who preceded Nabokov, in having carried out perhaps the grandest “thought experiment” in the possibilities of self-narration, is Marcel Proust. Proust’s vast novel issues out of the temporal rift between the narrating and narrated selves. His fictional alter-ego, Marcel, bridges this rift through his artful narration of the past, and the seven-volume In Search of Lost Time is a long, often breathtaking bridge to cross. Reading Proust, one occasionally forgets the bridge, as past and present seem to collapse whenever we rejoin the younger Marcel on the other side, when his past is brought back by the contingent miracle of involuntary recall. However, in Proust the emphasis is almost always on the narrating-I: it is the older Marcel, in the very act of bringing back the past through his language, that is at the forefront of our critical attention. This is the import of Gerard Genette’s memorable claim that, while reading Proust, we experience “[e]xtreme mediation, and at the same time the utmost immediacy.”17 And Proust, or rather, Marcel never fails to remind us that the past self remains a stranger to him, but one whom he nonetheless longs to re-join through his narrative journey via “as if.”18 The difference between Marcel and Fyodor is that whereas in Proust it is the narrating-I that remains at the center of the narrative (we are continually reminded of the older Marcel’s presence “in between the lines” of his narration about his younger self ), in Nabokov it is the narrated or characterI that is the narrative’s focal point, the narrating-I only intermittently obtruding into the third-person voice. This narrative strategy announces itself in the opening chapter, when Fyodor observes an elderly couple moving into their new home: “On the sidewalk, before the house (in which I too shall dwell), stood two people who had obviously come out to meet their furniture (in my suitcase there are more manuscripts than shirts).”19 The autodiegetic narrator has made his presence known, so we expect a first-person voice to continue with the story. However, this expectation is soon upset, as the protagonist is reintroduced in the third-person, seen from the outside through the eyes

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of an omniscient narrator: “Some day, he thought, I must use such a scene to start a good thick old-fashioned novel” (p. 1). The narrative continues in the third person, but, before long, the first person voice again intrudes: “The type of Berlin store he entered can adequately be determined by the presence in a corner of a small table … This shop did not carry the Russian tipped cigarettes that he preferred, and he would have left empty-handed if it had not been for the tobacconist’s speckled vest with mother-of-pearl buttons and his pumpkin-coloured bald spot. Yes, all my life I shall be getting that extra little payment in kind to compensate my regular overpayment for merchandise foisted on me” (pp. 3–4). The reader realizes that this will be a pattern repeated throughout the story: the narrator’s present self will punctuate the narrative’s third person omniscience with “I,” both contrasting itself from, and seeking to merge with, the character-self. There are two percolating themes that infuse the plot of this novel: memory and authorship. Fyodor is an “author” in two senses: he is the (obviously fictional) author of this narrative about his life, and he is also an aspiring poet and writer within the narrative world. The novel begins with Fyodor recounting writing his first volume of poetry, and this poetry is itself concerned with verbally capturing vivid scenes from his past in his native Russia. In Part Two, Fyodor describes a visit from his mother and their shared memories of his father. Part Three is Fyodor’s account of meeting his future wife, Zina, and his plans for and preparation of writing a biography of the nineteenth-century Russian radical, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, and Part Four is this fictionalized biography. The final chapter, Part Five, depicts Fyodor’s merging with his narratedself, and this chapter as a whole might be read as a meditation on the implications of becoming an Author of the story of one’s own life. In terms of narrative voice, the following passage from Fyodor’s narration is typical: But what do I care whether or not I receive attention during my lifetime … I am still a long way from thirty, and here today I am already noticed. Noticed! Thank you, my land, for this remotest … A lyric possibility flitted past, singing quite close to his ear … The rain began coming down faster. Someone had tilted the sky. He had to take cover in the circular

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shelter at the streetcar stop … Shaking her bobbed hair a girl entered the shelter with a small, wheezing, toadlike bulldog. Now this is odd: “remotest” and “noticed” are together again, and a certain combination is ringing persistently. I will not be tempted. (p. 28)

Note, again, the repeated switches in modes of narration, and the fact that this scene is clearly Fyodor’s attempt to re-enter the consciousness of his past self: an attempt to recreate that moment of inspiration and regain a sense of how it then felt to be thus tantalized by rhyme. Commenting on this play with narrative modes in the novel, Nabokov scholar Julian Connolly notes: “the shift from third-person to first-person narrative mode is marked by the insertion of a specific literary text foregrounding the issue of preservation and transmission of experience in verbal art … Significantly, the ensuing segments of first-person narrative depict activities very much in the spirit of the inserted texts which precede them: in each instance, the writer recalls a significant moment from his past and evaluates the effectiveness of his literary work in preserving and transmitting the recorded experience.”20 Connolly’s point is sound, but the significance of these shifts in narrative mode is not confined just to evaluation of past literary works. These switches in mode of narration, I suggest, also serve to disclose a fundamental aspect of all memory writing: in such narration, the relation between the narrating self and the narrated self is always a relation of oneself as if another. Unless the past self is conceived as though it were an independent character, it would be impossible to create the mimesis of re-entering the past other consciousness of oneself. The import of this observation is that conceiving of myself as (if ) a character in the story of my life is only possible when forming a narrativized image of my past. In the present moment, in the moment of phenomenological unfolding, this self-othering process cannot take place: the present consigns one to mutability and contingency, and only writing provides the temporal distance necessary to form a (temporarily) finalized image of oneself, whereby one’s past self adopts the identity of a character—an identity determined and shaped by the very narration that animates it. And this is an opportune moment to turn to Bakhtin.

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III In “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity,” an early but crucial essay that informs his later, more widely-known work, Bakhtin may be read as echoing Cohen’s observations on the metaphoricity inherent in selfhood, when he argues that the ability to conceive oneself “as if ” another is constitutive of the authorial act. It is imperative that an author completely inhabit his hero, Bakhtin argues, in order to portray the hero as a living person: “I must empathize or project myself into this other human being, see his world axiologically from within him as he sees this world; I must put myself in his place, ‘fill in’ his horizon through that excess of seeing which opens out from this, my own, place outside him. I must enframe him, create a consummating environment for him out of the excess of my own seeing, knowing, desiring, feeling.”21 As Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan suggests, the significance of Bakhtin’s early essay, certainly for the study of autobiographical narratives, is that by emphasizing the distinction between first and third-person perspectives, Bakhtin is insisting “on the productivity of the external perspective as the only way towards the attainment of aesthetic wholeness and coherence.”22 Summarizing Bakhtin’s account of authorship, Connolly observes: “Bakhtin expounds the theory that when an author creates a literary hero, the very process of creating the other serves as a means of defining the self … [A]esthetic creation is essentially a two-stage process. In the first stage the author must step outside himself and achieve a state of identification with his hero. In the second stage, he must return to his own place and give completed form to the material gleaned in the identification process” (pp. 113–114, my italics). Although Bakhtin is concerned, as Connolly spells out, with the authorial act as such and does not confine his analysis to autobiographical narratives—where the “hero” obviously becomes the author’s own self—this “stepping outside himself ” is precisely what must take place if one is to visualize one’s past self as a character. Bakhtin’s insight into the dynamic of author-hero relations may be thus said to correspond to the dyad of the rememberingremembered selves‚ which I have been delineating with the help of Ricoeur. Indeed, in memory/autobiographical narratives, it is only this

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“excess of seeing” and this kind of “stepping outside himself ” available to the author that enables him to render an image of himself in the past as if an independent character in a story. Whenever an author writes about himself and his own past, Bakhtin goes on, “the author must [still] take up a position outside himself, must experience himself on a plane that is different form the one on which we actually experience our own life. Only if this condition is fulfilled can he complete himself to the point of forming a whole by supplying those values which are transgredient to life as lived from within oneself and that can consummate that life. He must become another in relation to himself , must look at himself through the eyes of another” (AA, p. 15, my italics). Narrating oneself in the third-person is the most direct way (it is obviously not the only way), in Bakhtin’s sense, of becoming another in relation to one’s present self, and the larger part of Nabokov’s novel is narrated in this manner. For instance, when recollecting his romance with his future spouse, Zina, the narrator depicts their tryst as follows: “Through the glass the ashen light from the street fell on both of them and the shadow of the iron design on the door undulated over her and continued obliquely over him, like a shoulder belt, while a prismatic rainbow lay on the wall” (p. 180). Note that Fyodor is representing himself externally in describing how the shadow fell over his body, which is not something that he could have actually observed happening while living through this moment. This description implies that he is visualizing himself from the outside, representing himself as a character and as living in that character’s world. Satisfyingly enough, Bakhtin refers to this kind of consummated portrayal of the hero as a gift bestowed upon the hero by the author: “The aesthetic interpretation and organization of the outer body and its correlative world is a gift bestowed upon the hero from another consciousness—from the author/contemplator” (AA, p. 100). We might thus read The Gift as Fyodor’s gift to his earlier self— a gift made to his past via an artistic rendering of that past. (This novel is, of course, also Nabokov’s gift to scholars thinking about philosophy and narrative fiction.) Before long, the first person mode makes its reappearance, as Fyodor seeks to re-enter his past consciousness, cease being the omniscient author in relation to his past and inhabit his character-self ’s world. This is

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how, towards the end of the novel, Fyodor describes his afternoon spent sunbathing in the Grunewald: The sun bore down. The sun licked me all over with its big, smooth tongue. I gradually felt that I was becoming moltenly transparent, that I was permeated with flame and existed only insofar as it did. As a book is translated into an exotic idiom, so was I translated into sun. The scrawny, chilly, hiemal Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev was now as remote from me as if I had exiled him to the Yakutsk province. He was a pallid copy of me, whereas this aestival one was his magnified bronze replica. My personal I, the one that wrote books, the one that loved words, colours, mental fireworks, Russia, chocolate and Zina had somehow disintegrated and dissolved … One might dissolve completely this way. Fyodor raised himself and sat up. (pp. 331–332)

We follow Fyodor into the interior of his consciousness and onward towards near dissolution into sunlight and day-dreaming, when Fyodor is again seen from without, externalized by the third-person switch, and before the reader’s gaze as externalized character. In Bakhtin’s view, this kind of return back into himself by the author is ultimately inadmissible: “In the case of the author-person’s aesthetic self-objectification into a hero, this return into oneself must not take place: for the author-other, the whole of the hero must remain the ultimate whole; the author must be separated from the hero—from himself—totally, and one must define oneself purely in terms of values for the other, or, rather, in oneself one must come to see another, and do so utterly” (AA, p. 17). Although it is certainly true that the author must come to see herself as another in telling the story of her past, it is equally true, Nabokov’s narrative shows us, that there is a need for intimate identification with one’s past self. Memory narratives may, therefore, be said to oscillate between the opposing poles of self-presence and self-otherness, as the remembering self both identifies with its past self and acknowledges difference from it, by turns. Towards the conclusion of his essay, Bakhtin notes: “Memory begins to act as a gathering and completing force from the very first moment of the hero’s appearance; the hero is born in this memory (of his death), and the process of giving form to him is a process of commemoration” (AA,

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p. 131). This is a cogent insight into the logic driving memory narratives, where the past is celebrated to the same extent that it is mourned. Memory narratives, certainly those composed in the wake of Proust, are narratives of commemoration in precisely this sense: they are odes of remembrance in prose, virtual journeys to the all-too-figurable country of the past. In memory narratives, it is the figurative death of the narrator’s earlier self (or earlier selves) that is (are) being commemorated. The act of narration sounds a death knell for the life of the past self: from the moment that its story is being told, the past self is fast becoming a departed self—this is why it calls to be remembered. One’s character-self dissolves whenever one concludes one’s narration about oneself—for this is the moment when the past self has rejoined the narrator’s present self, pace Proust.23 One’s character-self must be conceived in this consummated, finalized, completed manner, in Bakhtinian language, in order for the narrative itself to have shape—so that it might acquire the teleological trajectory of a plot. And there is no plot in the living flow of time, as Bakhtin never failed to stress.24

IV I would like to conclude this chapter with a final invocation from Ricoeur’s exposition of narrative identity. Narrative identity, Ricoeur writes, involves a dialectic internal to the character which is the exact corollary of the dialectic of concordance and discordance developed by the emplotment of action. The dialectic consists in the fact that, following the line of concordance, the character draws his or her singularity from the unity of a life considered a temporal totality which is itself singular and distinguished from all others. Following the line of discordance, this temporal totality is threatened by the disruptive effect of the unforeseeable events that punctuate it … Because of the concordant-discordance synthesis, the contingency of the event contributes to the necessity, retroactive so to speak, of the history of a life, to which is equated the identity of a character … It is the identity of the story that makes the identity of the character. (OA, p. 148)

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What Ricoeur calls the “dialectic” of narrative identity is an especially helpful way of elucidating the relation between oneself as character and oneself as narrator in autobiographical narration. Ricoeur’s “line of concordance” corresponds to the authorial “I”: this is the narrating consciousness that conceives of the whole of one’s past—oneself as author of its plot. The “line of discordance” corresponds to the story of one’s remembered self or character “I”: this is the narrated consciousness— oneself represented as the protagonist in a story, faced with myriad contingencies once encountered in the past. All the contingent events that Fyodor as character encounters in his narrative are thus depicted as obstacles to be overcome, as discordances; until, that is, the reader discovers that these obstacles are actually integral of his fate-governed life (a fate produced by Fyodor’s authorial consciousness). For instance, the random circumstances that prevented Fyodor from meeting Zina— Fyodor’s dislike of her friend Romanov and avoidance of his company; Fyodor’s rejection of a translation job offer to aid an anonymous Russian girl, who turned out to be Zina herself—are subsequently described by Fyodor as fate’s attempts to bring them together. Following Ricoeur’s suggestion that “the narrative constructs the identity of the character,” we can see that Fyodor’s identity is produced by emplotment.25 Fyodor’s plotted identity emerges when his character-self catches up and merges with his narrating/remembering self. Leading up to this denouement, he reflects: “gradually his annoyance with himself passed and with a kind of relief—as if the responsibility for his soul belonged not to him but to someone who knew what it all meant— he felt that all this skein of random thoughts, like everything else as well … was but the reverse side of a magnificent fabric, on the front of which there gradually formed and became alive images invisible to him” (p. 312, my italics). The “someone who knew what it all meant” is Fyodor himself, in his capacity as narrator. As the narrated-I, Fyodor is able to glimpse only the “reverse side of a magnificent fabric,” for his character-self belongs to a fated world of his present self ’s story, for whom these patterned “images” are, retrospectively, all too visible the right side up. In the final pages of the novel, Fyodor meets Zina at the train station to say farewell to her foster parents, and Zina suggests that they go to a

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restaurant. “He nodded. Now how to explain it? Why this strange embarrassment—instead of the exultant, voluble freedom I had so eagerly been looking forward to?” (p. 358). Then, shortly afterward at the restaurant: “Beside them a boar and his sow were feeding, the waiter’s black fingernail dipped into the sauce, and yesterday a lip with a sore on it had been pressed to the gold border of my beer glass” (p. 360, my italics). Here, we witness the gradual merging of Fyodor’s remembering and remembered selves, as “I” and “he” become interchangeable. While this merging of past and present selves is happening, Fyodor the diegetic author makes this confession to Zina and the reader: “Pondering now fate’s methods (in this white, illuminated little enclosure, in Zina’s golden presence and with the participation of the warm, concave darkness immediately behind the carved radiance of the petunias) he finally found a certain thread, a hidden spirit, a chess idea for his as yet hardly planned ‘novel’” (pp. 360–361). Of course, this is the novel we have been reading all along. Fyodor then describes to Zina “destiny’s work in regard to us”: how “it” made several frustrated attempts to bring them together, and how they missed fate’s signs and were kept separated. Until, that is, Fyodor was about to miss yet another cue from fate’s helping hand, while being shown a room to let in Zina’s apartment by her mother: “I decided not to take the unattractive room I had glimpsed over her shoulder. And then, at the end of her tether, unable to show me you immediately, fate showed me as a last desperate manoeuvre your bluish ball dress on the chair … and I can imagine what a sigh of relief fate must have heaved” (p. 362). Zina informs him that it was not her dress that he saw and that made him decide to take the room, but her cousin’s, to which Fyodor exclaims: “The most enchanting things in nature and art are based on deception. Look, you see—[fate] began with a reckless impetuosity and ended with the finest of finishing touches. Now isn’t that the plot for a remarkable novel? What a theme! But it must be built up, curtained, surrounded by dense life—my life, my professional passions and cares” (p. 362). This is indeed a “plot for a remarkable novel” and it is a novel that we have just completed reading, having witnessed Fyodor’s plotting of a life dense with authorial anxieties and inspirations.

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The narrative structure of The Gift is a kind of spiral: each chapter leads on to the next and opens up the final arc of its circle, as its themes follow on and echo those of the preceding one, the chapters all following the curve of their unified thematic trajectory. Ricoeur: “As for the notion of the narrative unity of a life, it must be seen as an unstable mixture of fabulation and actual experience. It is precisely because of the elusive character of real life that we need the help of fiction to organize life retrospectively, after the fact, prepared to take as provisional and to revision any figure of emplotment borrowed from history or from fiction” (OA, p. 162).26 Unity implies finitude: as in Proust, the past self is a departed self and its life is, in principle, “finalizable.” And organizing a life retrospectively, with “the help of fiction,” implicates the narrative imagination (a faculty partial to the pull of metaphor) as imagination assists memory in forming such a picture of a unified life. The narrative imagination is what enables one to conceive of one’s past self as though describing another self, and it is this metaphorical self-distancing that acts as the first step to the act of creative self-interpretation. The unity of a life is, therefore, a construct of the configurative imagination inasmuch as it is a product of narrated memory. Emerson and Morson suggest that “as long as difference can be charted between oneself and some other self, and between one’s remembered past and a creative reassessment of it, one possesses the conditions for creativity and freedom” (p. 230). In this sense, one’s past life ends with each new beginning of narration about it, and this also means that the story of my life cannot be completed by me, cannot be rounded off, as long as I am alive. My past self can only ever be figured, and it is only my character self that can find an ending in narrative form. Narrative identity thereby encompasses the metaphorical grasping of oneself-as-if-another, a figuration that reconciles these two dimensions of ipseity: it enacts the “concordant-discordant synthesis,” in Ricoeur’s phrase, and acts as the conciliatory fulcrum supporting sameness and difference, allowing them to interanimate each other. The duality inherent in selfhood finds salient expression in The Gift , as Fyodor’s narration switches from third to first person modes, portraying him as character and as author-narrator of his life, respectively. In this

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way, this novel acts out the dialectic of self-and-other in a more ostentatious way than most autobiographical novels. The self-othering aspect of identity, I have argued, establishes itself not when one simply recalls individual scenes from the past—for one is then either contemplating images or perceiving one’s present self-remembering—but narrativizes these scenes, and, consequently, externalizes oneself as a story-character. In a memory narrative, as in metaphor, one is simultaneously one thing and another: both author and character of one’s own life. One remains oneself while incorporating another, as Ricoeur puts it: “Self-sameness, ‘self-constancy’, can escape the dilemma of the Same and the Other to the extent that its identity rests on a temporal structure that conforms to the model of dynamic identity arising from the poetic composition of a narrative text … Unlike the abstract identity of the Same, this narrative identity, constitutive of self-constancy, can include change, mutability, within the cohesion of one lifetime. The subject then appears both as a reader and a writer of its own life, as Proust would have it.”27 Indeed, Nabokov’s novel follows Proust’s example, in that its form speaks the metaphoricity inherent in the kind of self-understanding provided via the mediation of narrative; a mediation that images the past self as if a character in a story, seen across the bridge of narrative discourse that diminishes gaps between past and present. In the concluding paragraph of the novel, Fyodor the fictional author parts from himself as a character (as Alexander Pushkin’s narrator had to part, at poem’s end, from his hero Eugene Onegin): Good-bye, my book! Like mortal eyes, imagined ones must close some day. Onegin from his knees will rise—but his creator strolls away. And yet the ear cannot right now part with the music and allow the tale to fade; the chords of fate itself continue to vibrate; and no obstruction for the sage exists where I have put The End; the shadows of my world extend beyond the skyline of the page, blue as tomorrow’s morning haze—nor does this terminate the phrase. (p. 364)

Narration ends, life goes on—but with a promise of a remainder of narrative still to come.

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Notes 1. Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), p. 36, my italics. 2. The terms “tenor” and “vehicle” (denoting, respectively, the subject of the metaphor and the image used in the comparison) were coined by I.A. Richards in The Philosophy of Rhetoric (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965 [1936]), pp. 96–101. What makes Richards’s terms attractive in this context is the sense of a journey that they (metaphorically) impart. The narrated self is the vehicle that qualifies and complicates its tenor, the narrating self, and, like in Richards’s conception, a new meaning arises out of their fusion: an enriched understanding of selfhood. More broadly, narrative may also be construed as the “vehicle” that transports both writers and readers into philosophical insights, and the efficacy of its transportation is often determined by its formal singularity. 3. For illuminating accounts that also focus on metaphor’s importance to autobiographical writing, see Paul John Eakin, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self-Invention (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014) and James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton Univeristy Press, 1972). Where my approach differs from theirs is that I see metaphoricity as a key formal property of autobiographical narratives—whether fictional or not—rather than examining the historically changing metaphorical figures through which the self has been imaged, which is the concern of both Eakin and Olney. 4. Lorna Martens, “Mood, Voice and the Question of the Narrator in Third-Person Fiction,” Narrative 25, no. 2 (2017): 187. 5. Caryl Emerson and Gary Saul Morson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 217, my italics. 6. This is where I disagree with Martens’s contention that, in autobiographical writing, the “choice of the third person is artificial and already pushes the work in the direction of fiction” (p. 187). I propose that it is in fact the first person that conceals its own fictionality, whenever “I” designates one’s past self.

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7. Aristotle, Aristotle on Memory, trans. Richard Sorabji (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2012), p. 51. 8. Aristotle’s discussion of memory is also vital for Ricoeur’s final book, Memory, History, Forgetting. Ricoeur here charts the notion of the memory “image” as it recurs in the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, Bergson, Husserl and Sartre. He suggests that one feature that all philosophers agree on is the gulf separating our present from our past, a gulf that can only be crossed via mediation, so that the past is only ever figurable as image. See Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 5–56. 9. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny (London: Routledge: 1978), p. 154, hereafter abbreviated RM . 10. As Ricoeur elsewhere elaborates: “to form an image is not to have an image, in the sense of having a mental representation; instead it is to read, through the icon of a relation, the relation itself ” (Paul Ricoeur, “The Function of Fiction in Shaping Reality,” Man and World 12, no. 2 [1979]: 129). This means that the primary function of an image of one’s past self is not to “reproduce” it, but instead to express the relation between the present and past selves, and this relation, as this chapter argues, is best expressible by memory’s narrativization. The form of narrative, by articulating pastness to futurity, allows for this relation to come into clearer view. 11. Ted Cohen, Thinking of Others: On the Talent for Metaphor (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 9, my italics. 12. Cohen’s point may be said to echo Ricoeur’s observation: “If we pass from the category of the Same to that of the Other in order to express the moment of what is no more in standing for the past, it is still the imaginary that keeps otherness from slipping into the unsayable. It is always through some transfer from Same to Other, in empathy and imagination, that the Other that is foreign to me is brought closer” (RM , p. 184). 13. As Nabokov wryly remarks in his autobiography: “The future specialist in such dull literary lore as autoplagiarism will like to

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16.

17. 18.

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collate a protagonist’s experience in my novel The Gift with the original event” (Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory [London: Penguin, 2000], p. 19). Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 3, hereafter abbreviated OA. Ricoeur also refers to the act of making a promise as another way to account for the permanence of personal identity over time: “Keeping one’s word expresses a self-constancy which cannot be inscribed, as character was, within the dimension of something general but solely within the dimension of ‘who?’” (OA, p. 123). By “memory narratives” I intend narratives that are both about the nature of memory, as well as instances of memory’s narrativization, like autobiography more generally. Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is an exemplary instance of such a narrative, and The Gift continues further experimentation with the possibilities for self-narration, following Proust’s example. Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method , trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 168–169. A particularly affecting instance of this occurs in Time Regained , when the aged Marcel finds himself in the Guermantes library. He begins to read a novel by Georges Sand when, suddenly, reencounters his past self: “My first reaction had been to ask myself, angrily, who this stranger was who was coming to trouble me. The stranger was none other than myself, the child I had been at the time, brought to life within me by the book … wanting to be seen only by his eyes, to be loved only by his heart, to speak only to him” (Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 6: Time Regained , trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin, revised D.J. Enright [London: Vintage, 2000], p. 240). Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift, trans. Michael Scammell and Vladimir Nabokov (London: Penguin, 2012), p. 1. Julian Connolly, Nabokov’s Early Fiction: Patterns of Self and Other (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 201. Mikhail Bakhtin, Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays, trans. Vadim Liapunov, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov,

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23. 24.

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supplement trans. Kenneth Brostrom (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), p. 25, hereafter abbreviated to AA. Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, “The I that Tells Itself: A Bakhtinian Perspective on Narrative Identity,” Narrative 16, no. 1 (January 2008): 1–15, accessed July 25, 2017, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ 231485. Erdinast-Vulcan further argues that for Bakhtin the “aesthetic practice” that enables an author to conceive of him or herself as another was also “a powerful psychic modality, an I-for-the-other mode of being, as relevant to the study of subjectivity as it is to the study of literary texts” (p. 9). The aesthetic is on intimate terms with the ethical, in this sense, in that this “I-for-the-other mode of being” (ibid.) opens up the horizon for empathy. When Marcel the hero has caught up with Marcel the narrator, at the end of his quest for the past. See Proust, pp. 445–451. As Bakhtin writes in a language that sounds the depths of Heideggerian existentialism, “I renew the still-to-be-discovered character of every one of my experiences, I collect all of my experiences, collect of all myself not in the past, but in the future that confronts me eternally as a future yet-to-be … I render myself complete out of what is yet-to-be, what ought to be, what is desired. That is, the real center of gravity of my own self-determination is located solely in the future” (AA, pp. 126–127). Narrative identity encompasses the emplotted identity of the character self, yet personal identity is not reducible to narrativity alone. For a recent critical response to what he calls strongly “narrativist” positions, see Richard Walsh, “The Centre for Narrative Gravity: Narrative and the Philosophy of Selfhood after Dennett,” The Edinburgh Companion to Narrative Theories, ed. Zara Dinnen and Robyn Warhol (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), pp. 389– 399. Narrative sense-making is a crucial aspect of selfhood, Walsh admits, but this does not mean that the phenomenological self is itself narrative in form (pp. 395–396). See also Anthony Rudd: “we cannot define selfhood in terms of a prior notion of narrative that could be understood independently of the concept of self. However, it is also true that selfhood has to be understood in narrative terms.

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This should not be confused with the idea that the self is a narrative; my self is, rather, the protagonist of, or the central character in my narrative” (Anthony Rudd, Self, Value and Narrative [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012], p. 185). 26. The spiral also happens to be Ricoeur’s figure for his conception of hermeneutics, where the hermeneutic circle, due to the constant evolution of narrative genres and their interpretation, opens up into a spiral, a process of change that forecloses the possibility of the hermeneutic circle becoming a vicious one. As Ricoeur suggests, our understanding of mimesis proceeds by way of “an endless spiral that would carry the mediation past the same point a number of times, but at different altitudes” (Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990], p. 72). 27. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 246.

7 Sherlockismus: Freud and the Romance of Detection Stewart Justman

As if endowed with the superiority to reality that makes many a story more vivid than the world around us, Sherlock Holmes came to life even as he became legendary. Just as Conan Doyle created the Holmes series as a sideline to his serious work only to find that it “flew away and had a life of [its] own,”1 Holmes himself transcended the page that held him. He became, indeed, the object of a world cult with innumerable local practices of veneration. Among the terms for the craze was the German Sherlockismus, and among Holmes’s German-speaking enthusiasts was a fellow cocaine-user, Sigmund Freud. Not only, however, did Freud, like millions of others, take pleasure in reading the tales of Sherlock Holmes.2 In his case histories he casts himself implicitly as a Sherlock Holmes, master of observation and inference, as noted recently by Frederick Crews in his brilliant unweaving of the Freud legend.3 S. Justman (B) University of Montana, Missoula, MT, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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A half century ago, Stanley Edgar Hyman pointed out that in the rhetoric of The Interpretation of Dreams a voice of scientific humility plays against the authoritative voice of a Sherlock Holmes.4 Given that Conan Doyle’s detective himself affects humility from time to time, the two notes are less distinct than they seem, and in Freud’s classic case history of “Dora”—that is, Ida Bauer—based on an analysis that took place only months after the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, the entire investigation conveys a cool authority. With Dora Freud’s analytical conduct is at once bold, magisterial, implacable, and above all knowing—in brief, Holmesian—and repeatedly in his account of the case he affirms the undeniability of his deductions in the tradition of Holmes. What better way to suggest that his conclusions arise from pure observation5 than to give himself a resemblance to the keenest of all observers, the perceiver on whom nothing is lost, Sherlock Holmes? With an eye for things that might escape the notice of anyone else, Freud discerns, for example, the “unmistakable” significance of the way Dora toys with her reticule in the course of treatment.6 It’s as if he had not only perfected a mode of inference comparable to that of Holmes (if even more acute) but, like the celebrated detective, possessed an uncanny instinct for the truth. In a dream of Dora’s, he promises, “we shall come upon the solution to [the] riddle” of why she indignantly slapped a man who had reason to believe she was in love with him (SE 46). Later he opens a colloquy with Dora “with a little experiment, which was, as usual, successful” (SE 71). Still later, “a certain suspicion of mine became a certainty” (SE 99), much as Holmes reports that his “suspicions all changed to certainties” as he worked out the details of the crime in “The Naval Treaty.”7 Where Dr. Watson holds up for our admiration the “methods by which [Holmes] disentangled the most inextricable mysteries” (I.249), Freud, who acts as his own Watson, shows himself summarily resolving one interpretive crux after another in the Dora paper. Both Holmes and Freud present the image of “a detached individual of superior ability who alone sees what lesser men fail to comprehend, and who draws quite unexpected conclusions from his observations.”8 This being so, it seems more likely that Freud modeled his image on the fictional genius than that such a striking

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resemblance came about by chance. His self-portrayal as a veritable Sherlock Holmes lent weight to the legend that he discovered psychoanalysis itself because he alone grasped what lesser others had for so long failed to comprehend.9 Where Sherlock Holmes awes us not only by his deductions but his air of effortless mastery, Freud’s style in the Dora case may be as impressive as his solutions themselves. In his claim that “The task of making conscious the most hidden recesses of the mind is one which it is quite possible to accomplish” (SE 78), the Holmesian touch is the easy air of “quite possible.” In a similar show of conquered difficulty, Freud boasts to Wilhelm Fliess that the mystery of Dora’s hysteria “smoothly opened to the existing collection of picklocks” (Crews, Freud , p. 601). In “The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton” Sherlock Holmes takes pride in his burglary kit and actually cracks a safe in an occupied house, showing himself superior to both timidity and conventional propriety. Freud positions himself well above both considerations; and when he reports, following a series of summary judgments of Dora’s behavior, that he “will pass over the details which showed how entirely correct” each and every one of his conclusions was (SE 42), it’s as if Sherlock Holmes left out the middle links in a chain of inferences (I.806). This tone of certitude dominates the Dora case. No wonder many seem to react to Freud’s display of mastery as to a second Holmes. His solution to the Dora case, writes a historian, “leaves most readers dizzy with admiration. To have deduced so much from so little in so short a time was—and is—a psychoanalytic tour de force.”10 From this tribute one might suppose that Freud, who in fact saw Dora for 65 sessions, sized her up like Sherlock Holmes the minute she appeared in his consulting room. So suggestive is Freud’s likeness to Holmes that a researcher once proposed in all sobriety in the pages of the Journal of the American Medical Association that he developed his method from hints Holmes dropped during his cure for cocaine addiction at a sanatorium, possibly in the suburbs of Vienna, between 1891 and 1894.11 From this notion was born Nicholas Meyer’s best-seller The Seven Per Cent Solution (1974), in which Holmes is treated by the young Freud and the two join forces. A major drawback of the attractive theory that Holmes and Freud somehow crossed is that Sherlock Holmes did not have the existence required for

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communication, direct or indirect, with Freud. The fact is that no one can actually solve cases with stunning inferences à la Sherlock Holmes, much less discern another’s “most intimate thoughts” from casual indications (another of his imputed abilities [I.806]), because the Sherlock Holmes stories are fantasies.12 While Freud founded a purported science, the author of the Holmes stories, in his preface to the last volume, placed them in “the fairy kingdom of romance” (II.512), and if he exaggerated it wasn’t by much. From A Study in Scarlet forward, the Holmes stories are such a porridge of romance motifs that when the hero, acting on an inference, rescues a living woman from a closed coffin at the very last minute in “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax,” the reader feels nothing especially out of the ordinary has taken place. Set in a world at once more intriguing and yet simpler than the one known to us, the stories cover romance with a semblance of probability, using the technique Northrop Frye terms displacement, that is, the adaptation of romance conventions to the norms of realism. Significantly for our purposes, Frye includes detective stories in the category of romance. “In the general area of romance we find highly stylized patterns like the detective story, which are so conventionalized as to resemble games. We expect each game of chess to be different, but we do not want the conventions of the game itself to alter.... Whether we consider detective stories worth reading or not depends on our willingness to accept the convention.”13 Generic conventions are so integral to romance that we might define a romance as an adventure narrative patterned with them. Subtract from the Sherlock Holmes stories such romance devices as (a) disguises, (b) signs or tokens of identity, and (c) disappearances and returns (or separations and reunions), and they might collapse for want of structure. Let us remember that the original romance, the Odyssey, while not a detective story, resolves the mystery of what became of a man who seemed to disappear from the face of the earth. The Odyssey tells a story of return in which both disguises and tokens of the hero’s identity figure powerfully. True to their romance origin, the Sherlock Holmes stories continually employ such ancient material; and where Athene sets the homecoming of Odysseus in motion by appealing to Zeus in the name of justice, Holmes styles himself an agent of justice (The difference between justice

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and law sets up the oddity of his alliance with the officers of the law, the police). Like the loyal and the treacherous in the Odyssey, characters in the Sherlock Holmes stories generally get their just deserts, sometimes escaping the law in the higher interests of justice (as in “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange”), sometimes suffering a punishment more poetic than anything the law could deal out (as in “The Speckled Band” or The Hound of the Baskervilles), sometimes both conjointly (as in “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot”). Being everywhere, the romance element of the Sherlock Holmes stories reveals itself where we least expect it. As if a racehorse underwent an Odyssey of his own, Silver Blaze, of noble lineage, acquires fame, disappears, kills the disloyal trainer who would deny him the honor rightfully his, and makes his triumphant return in disguise. This time, however, a dog keeps the villain’s secret by not barking—the “curious incident of the dog in the night-time” (I.540)—rather than keeping the hero’s secret by dying. Sometimes in a Holmes story the outlines of romance show through like original images revealed on an overpainted canvas. Thus “The Noble Bachelor” tells of separated lovers, captivity, trials of fidelity, and reunion—a series of events traversing a vast and wholly abstract expanse of space—in all respects like a Greek romance.14 The tale transcribes an ancient genotype into a modern form, with the nominal hero, Frank Moulton, taken prisoner by the Apaches instead of being kidnapped by pirates, but delivered by Providence at the critical hour to the same spot in London as the heroine, who seems to have preserved her sexual honor all the while. (Fittingly, the earliest identified ancestor of Sherlock Holmes is an explicator of the mystery in the most literary of the ancient romances, Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story.)15 The prospect of a forced polygamous union hanging over the head of the heroine of A Study in Scarlet is similarly consonant with the romance tradition of “the one fate which really is worse than death,” in Frye’s words (Secular Scripture, p. 86). In A Study in Scarlet two murders in London trace back, however improbably, to the Mormon exodus across the American West in 1847. Holmes’s art of “reasoning backward,” as he puts it in the novella’s coda (I.116), seems well adapted to cases like this where the past casts a

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shadow on the present. Even in some of the shorter narratives events originate well before the starting point. “The Five Orange Pips,” published in 1891, goes back to the inception of the Ku Klux Klan following the Civil War; “The Crooked Man” to the Mutiny of 1857. Almost anything in Sherlock Holmes’s world can have a back-story, in fact. A hat trails a history. A certain specially fashioned horse-shoe in “The Adventure of the Priory School” dates to the Middle Ages, no less. While Holmes’s way of digging up the past may have appealed to the archeologist in Freud, Holmes acts in the spirit of romance. In the Odyssey, when Helen stirs a pleasure drug into her guests’ drink, we learn something of its history; when the nurse Eurycleia bares Odysseus’s scar, we learn its history; after meeting the loyal swineherd Eumaeus we discover how it is that this man born the son of a king came to live his life as a slave. Behind one story, it seems, lies another. The Sherlock Holmes stories convey a similar impression by alluding cunningly to multitudes of cases never reported to the public, all presumably shaped by the same formulas as those that are. In a story highly dependent on established conventions, we would like the latter to be used with some ingenuity. The Sherlock Holmes stories specialize in ingenuity. Take the early tale, “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” in which a beggar is arrested and imprisoned for the murder of someone who turns out, remarkably, to be himself. Because the remarkable is his métier, Holmes and Holmes alone figures out that the arrestee (Hugh Boone) and the presumed murder victim (Neville St. Clair) are one and the same. While we might expect that in the course of events Hugh Boone would have proved that he could not have killed Neville St. Clair because he is St. Clair, the story distinctly suggests that without Holmes’ intervention Boone/St. Clair might have allowed himself to be executed for a crime that never occurred rather than suffer the shame of the exposure of his double life. In seeing to it that this perversion of justice doesn’t take place (and perhaps too in requiring St. Clair to cease his deception of his wife and children as well as the rest of the world), Sherlock Holmes performs his accustomed role as agent of justice. In the course of his argument that Dora had motives for being ill, Freud offers the example of an injured worker who has come to “live by his disablement” as he once lived by his labor (SE 44). The story behind the events of “The Man with the Twisted Lip” turns upon the

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ironic profits of disablement, concerning as it does a reporter (St. Clair) who does a bit of street begging in order to write about it, but soon finds himself earning far more as a beggar than he could otherwise and becomes all but addicted to the practice, unbeknownst to his family. Each day St. Clair acts out a charade of going to work in the City like a respectable man, only to transform himself into a facially deformed double in his changing room in an opium den, and then settle into his second identity as the beggar, Hugh Boone, well-known to passersby in the City. In effect, mendicancy has become his opium. In an unusual prologue to the story’s action, Watson tracks a patient to this den only to stumble upon a patron who happens to be none other than Sherlock Holmes, impeccably disguised and at work on the St. Clair case. Without knowing it, St. Clair is being searched out by perhaps the one man in London whose powers of disguise exceed his own. The romance lineage of disguise goes back all the way to the Odyssey, whose hero is protectively disfigured by Athene for much of the poem. In keeping with Frye’s concept of romance conventions brought into some sort of conformity with the norms of everyday life, Holmes is endowed by his author with powers of transfiguration that are definitely extraordinary without being superhuman. (Just as his disguise allows Odysseus to mingle with the suitors who would murder him immediately if they knew his identity, Holmes’s disguise as a miserable addict allows him to linger under the very eyes of a thug who has sworn to kill him.) The double coincidence of Watson’s visit to the den housing Neville St. Clair, and the hunt of one master of disguise by a second, is compounded by yet another: the sighting of St. Clair at the window of his dressing room by his wife as she happens to traverse a back-alley worlds away from the scene of her life. Momentarily, it appears, a certain opium den has become the cross-roads of the Holmesian universe. Such improbabilities comport with the laws of romance. In the Odyssey it so happens that Poseidon departs for Ethiopia, thereby giving Athene her opening to arrange the hero’s release from Calypso’s island, just when events on Ithaca have reached the breaking-point. Each of the romance devices singled out above (not that the list is exhaustive) factors into “The Man with the Twisted Lip.” Such is Neville St. Clair’s skill in disguise that his altered identity fools everyone except

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Sherlock Holmes, who seems to penetrate the disguises of others with the same genius with which he contrives his own. Tokens or talismans of St. Clair’s double identity include the “horrid” but, as it turns out, merely cosmetic facial scar highlighted in the story’s title (an inglorious variant of Odysseus’s tell-tale scar); the hundreds of coins found in St. Clair’s coat on the bank of the Thames, the poisonous fruit of his begging; and a signet ring sent by the missing St. Clair to his wife. Somewhat like the distinctive pin Odysseus describes in detail when he too wears the disguise of a beggar, the ring certifies that St. Clair hasn’t disappeared after all; precisely as a token of identity it also seems to pledge that he will reclaim his unity, that is, his existence as the man his wife knows. The story thus fulfills the romance convention of reunion following separation, with the crafty twist that the protagonist in this case has also become all but hopelessly estranged from his proper self, at least until Sherlock Holmes steps in, summarily ends his addiction to a double life, and restores Neville St. Clair to the world. Because a Sherlock-Holmes solution is bound up with the romance patterns of which the stories are constructed, I have emphasized the importance of these patterns in one story that could serve for many. We might gauge the conventionality of another romance motif at work in “The Man with the Twisted Lip”—the return from presumed death— by tracing a few of its literary variations. The body of Neville St. Clair is thought to have been discarded in the Thames, whose tide happened coincidentally to be “at its very highest” (I.360) at the moment of his disappearance. Having gone missing after the Trojan War, Odysseus himself might well be presumed dead; in the last book of the Odyssey his father Laertes is shown mourning for him. In the ancient prose novels, deaths that “turn out not to have been deaths at all” are common occurrences, to the point that Scheintod (apparent death) and resurrection rank among the genre’s “most beloved themes.”16 In the last of the one hundred stories of the Decameron, Gualtieri tests and tortures Griselda by having their children sent to their death, only to bring them back in good health at the end. Shakespeare’s Juliet, of course, undergoes a semblance of death. So many suspensions and resumptions of animation take place in The Brothers Karamazov, published a few years before the

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debut of Sherlock Holmes, that it’s as if the author were not just recreating but playing on, and at times with, the convention of apparent death. Holmes himself returns from his death at the Reichenbach Falls, and Lady Frances Carfax comes to life in a coffin. When Holmes sponges off the false face of Hugh Boone, revealing the presumptively murdered St. Clair, he performs an action that resonates like a convention with the history of romance. The proof of identity, of which the revelation of St. Clair poses a dramatic example, also alludes to the romance tradition. In romance a person’s identity is subject to loss, question, concealment, recovery, verification. So it is in the Odyssey, whose hero returns from his wanderings in disguise and proves his identity to his doubting wife by describing the secret bed he constructed with his own hands. The probative value of the bed is distinctly emphasized, with Penelope both recognizing inwardly “the clear proofs” given by Odysseus and acknowledging in words the “accurate proof ” he has provided. From this unique article to an also unique pin to a scarred thigh, the Odyssey foregrounds evidence that confirms the hero’s identity despite the grave doubts of his survival held by those who once knew him. Just as Odysseus verifies his identity with his description of the marital bed, he provides “unmistakable sign[s]” and “clear proofs” to his father in the poem’s last book. In all instances the evidence establishes the hero’s identity not just with probability but certainty. Traces of this sort of transcendence of the uncertain linger in the axiomatic tone of Sherlock Holmes’s conclusions, underwritten as they are by his theory that once the impossible is excluded, what remains “must be” the truth (I.160). If many of Holmes’s cases verge on the unbelievable, and if the plots of some span great distances with the ease of Neville St. Clair passing from one persona to another, that too is consistent with their habitation of the fairy kingdom of romance. Of the means of establishing identity, perhaps none is more dramatically effective than the removal of a disguise to reveal the person beneath. In the world of Sherlock Holmes where “It is the first quality of a criminal investigator that he should see through a disguise” (II.132), altered identities are everywhere. That Holmes himself is a virtuoso of the craft we learn in the first of the short stories, “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Confronting in this case the pretty paradox of a supplicant king whose

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powers of disguise are far beneath his own, Holmes elsewhere shows the eye for disguise that we might well expect of someone who really knows how to transform himself—a virtual Proteus. Not only does Holmes remove the make-up of the man with the twisted lip, he peels off a yellow mask to reveal the face of a black child (“The Yellow Face”) and even tells Colonel Ross how to get the dye off his horse, Silver Blaze. More often he tears masks away figuratively, exposing villains who parade as good citizens—an interesting example being “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client,” where he gets his hands on a diary of amorous conquests that proves the writer’s iniquity as nothing else can. In the Dora case as elsewhere Freud too unmasks, but with this difference: the person who wears the mask isn’t conscious of it. The tone of certitude running through the Dora case suggests that Freud considers his method of stripping disguises no less probative than Holmes’s. “The inference is obvious,” he declares, that Dora is “completely in love” with her father (SE 56, 57). As in the world of Holmes, disguise is everywhere Freud casts his eyes. In the realm of Freudian interpretation where symbolism and evidence come to approximately the same thing, the truth (or “meaning”) requires interpretation, because it is tied up in disguises. Dreams and symptoms in particular disguise what they signify, and when the distortion is removed their meaning is revealed with a probative effect similar in principle to the revelation of a black child under a yellow mask or indeed the revelation of the scar of the disguised Odysseus (a Holmesian analogue of which might be the torn ear, acquired in a barroom brawl, that gives away the identity of the villain in “The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax”). If psychoanalysis penetrates mysteries, romance is itself a world of mystery; and if psychoanalysis allows the truth to be recognized, recognition is a powerful trope of romance going back to the scenes in the Ithaca books of the Odyssey in which the hero reveals his identity to those dear to him. Even the exhumation of buried memories has romance roots. “In several Victorian romances a situation recurs in which the key to the recognition is held in the memory of someone who does not know that he or she possesses it” (Frye, Secular Scripture, p. 145). And with Victorian fiction, of course, we enter the arena of Sherlock Holmes. As if in a romance, Dora as portrayed by Freud has become separated from her true self, and with Holmesian audacity he goads her

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to recognize this fact by undoing her disguises, unriddling her dreams, probing her history. But while many have been impressed by Freud’s exhibitions of Holmesian inference—his “stunning and outrageously intelligent interpretations”17 —in the Dora case, the fantasy nature of the Sherlock Holmes stories compels a duly skeptical view of the attempt to translate the detective’s example into a science of the psyche. ∗ ∗ ∗ Just as the passions and scandals seething beneath the well-composed surface of late-Victorian life allow Sherlock Holmes to exercise his craft, Freud discerns another reality hidden beneath the surface of the normal and respectable. In the circumstances in which Ida Bauer (as I will now call her) finds herself, respectability has in fact become the merest veneer. The tale is a twisted one. In addition to her, the principals are Filipp Bauer (Ida’s wealthy father, tubercular, and syphilitic); Katharina Gerber Bauer (Ida’s mother); Hans Zellenka (a shopkeeper); and Giuseppina Zellenka (Hans’s wife and Filipp’s nurse). Their transactions make for a cat’s cradle of complicities and betrayals, with Ida caught in the middle; suffice it to say that Filipp Bauer and Giuseppina Zellenka were a couple, while Hans Zellenka showered Ida with gifts, cornered and kissed her at the age of thirteen, and propositioned her two years later (with the apparent concurrence of his wife) even as Ida cared for the Zellenka children. Though Freud targeted her dreams and symptoms for investigation, what brought Ida to Freud in the first place was her inability to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary and certainly nothing indecent was taking place in the all-too-closely entwined households. Not only were her parents and Giuseppina Zellenka too compromised to defend Ida from a sexual adventurer, but the four adults agreed as if bound by the same pact of mendacity that any report of Hans Zellenka taking liberties with Ida was the product of the girl’s overheated imagination. About the sordid arrangements of the adults Freud has little to say, and precisely in focusing on Ida as a bundle of problems he accepts their estimate of her as a trouble to herself and others. After Ida’s father “handed her over to me for psychotherapeutic treatment” (SE 19) in the

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hope that Freud could rewrite her sense of reality and make her disbelieve in his own liaison with Giuseppina Zellenka (SE 109), Freud saw her for three months in 1900, at which point the girl put an end to her therapy and walked out. Though his treatment of Ida was in this sense an objective failure, Freud presents the case as a Holmes-like exhibition of analytical mastery (flawed only in that he failed to account for transference). “We see the Great Detective in all his glory in the Dora case,” states Hyman (Tangled Bank, p. 343),18 in effect taking Freud’s self-presentation on its own terms. For Freud every neurotic symptom and dream image has some sort of motive behind it, and in the case history in question he deduces these one after another. But because the matter of Ida’s motives is bound up with the behavior of the adults in the case, it’s important to note that Freud lets the latter off lightly. To show the hollowness of Ida’s rejection of Hans Zellenka, for example, Freud casts him as an honorable fellow, minimizing (a) his previous seduction of a governess, whom he won over with the same line he used on Ida (“I get nothing out of my wife”), and then discarded; (b) what Freud himself describes as the “danger for a growing girl in the constant and unsupervised companionship of a man who had no satisfaction from his own wife” (SE 34–35); and, above all, (c) Filipp Bauer’s implicit hand-over of his daughter to Zellenka to buy the latter’s acquiescence in his (Bauer’s) affair with Giuseppina. Not the least of Ida’s troubles was her unheard-of position as a pawn in the unholy, if less than explicit, alliance between her father and her assailant. How many children have been dangled as “sexual bait” by their own parent?19 Though he comes to recognize that Bauer has indeed pandered his daughter in order to continue the affair he (Bauer) lied about, Freud shows little concern with the shocking position in which Ida finds herself. He is most interested in symptoms, symbols, and the wishes allegedly disguised in them. While Freud’s inferences as to the meaning of these clues are as debatable as his portrait of the honorable Hans Zellenka, they are presented throughout the paper as authoritative and objectively undeniable— Holmes-like. Because it “seems to me,” says Freud, that the question “Where is the key?” is the masculine counterpart of the question “Where is the box ?,” these questions related to a dream “therefore” refer to the

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genitals (SE 97). An impression becomes a conclusion. And just as Freud claims “conclusive proof ” (SE 59) that the No delivered by Ida to Hans Zellenka really meant Yes, and furthermore claims that he can “prove” that Ida took the governess’s account of her seduction into her unconscious mind (SE 106), so, over the course of the case, he affirms his inferences with many Holmesian flourishes of certainty. Stripped of these affirmations, his conclusions in the Dora case might well seem forced, convoluted, or simply arbitrary. But while Holmes’s demonstration that Hugh Boone and Neville St. Clair are one and the same is incontestable (precisely in that he unmasks one to reveal the other), the meaning of Ida’s toying with her reticule is “unmistakable” (SE 77) only if that item is assumed to be a symbol of the genitalia, just as the meaning assigned to her symptoms and dreams by Freud is undeniable only in the sense that if Ida denies it, that in itself will tend to prove that her desires are repressed, much as Freud alleges. As Holmes unravels the mystery of Wisteria Lodge, “the whole inexplicable tangle seemed to straighten out” in front of Watson’s eyes (II.346). While Freud presumably intends the reader of the Ida Bauer case to experience a similar sense of enlightenment, the solution of the case is itself a tangle. Freud discovers (a) that Ida is obviously and completely in love with her father and wishes to have sexual intercourse with him despite his presumed impotence, and to perform oral sex on him as well (SE 48, 56), even though (b) she is actually in love with Hans Zellenka, notwithstanding that (c) her homosexual love of his wife constitutes “the strongest unconscious current in her mental life” (SE 120n). According to Freud, it is this boiling cauldron of conflicting desires that produces Ida’s symptoms and dreams, among the former of which is a recurring cough, caused (according to the art of reasoning backwards) by a tickling sensation in the throat which in turn is induced by Ida’s allegedly inveterate habit of imagining oral sex between her father and Frau Zellenka. This analytical inference is framed by Freud as an “inevitable” one: The conclusion was inevitable that with her spasmodic cough, which, as is usual, was referred for its exciting stimulus to a tickling in her throat, she pictured to herself a scene of sexual gratification per os between the two people whose love-affair occupied her mind so incessantly. (SE 48)

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That Ida’s cough cleared up shortly after she “tacitly accepted” this explanation (whatever that means)20 proves nothing because, as Freud concedes, the cough had often come and gone. This could well be a case, then, where treatment coincides with natural history. However, Freud leaves the impression that his conclusions stand regardless of the cough’s behavior, quite as if they possessed the shining certainty of a Sherlock Holmes proof, or indeed the romance proofs underlying it. In theory, that is, Freud’s explanations resolve interpretive problems as conclusively as a removed disguise, a document or a telltale mark might solve a question of identity in the world of romance, including that of Sherlock Holmes. But if Freud’s findings really were indubitable, perhaps he wouldn’t have to assert their indubitability so rhetorically throughout the Ida Bauer paper. The loss of voice that sometimes accompanies Ida’s cough is handled like the cough itself. As if drawing an iron-clad inference, Freud concludes that the duration of Ida’s aphonia, corresponding as it does with the duration of Hans Zellenka’s absences, proves her love of him. When her cough turns out not to coincide with his absences after all, Freud reaffirms his original conclusion, arguing that Ida has unconsciously altered the timing of her aphonia in order to keep her love of Zellenka from becoming too obvious to her. The discussion is framed in the idiom of certainty, with expressions like “therefore” and “no doubt” (SE 39), just as we later learn that “there could be no doubt... that [Ida] had an aim in view which she hoped to gain by her illness” (SE 42), and no doubt what the aim was. Like proofs of identity with the force of a revelation, these are no ordinary conclusions. They transcend the merely probable, and are so clearly undeniable that it is only by willfully blinding herself that Ida succeeds in not recognizing them. Of the two dreams tackled in the Ida Bauer paper, only the analysis of the first is completed. The dream is a succinct one: A house was on fire. My father was standing beside my bed and woke me up. I dressed quickly. Mother wanted to stop and save her jewel-case; but Father said: “I refuse to let myself and my two children be burnt for the sake of your jewel-case.” We hurried downstairs, and as soon as I was outside I woke up. (SE 64)

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While Freud interprets the jewel-case as another undeniable symbol of the female genitalia, and the dream as saying in a roundabout way that Ida wishes to give herself sexually to Hans Zellenka, the motif of a precious possession endangered in a house fire has a Sherlock Holmes connection at the literal level. Recall that in “A Scandal in Bohemia” Holmes has a smoke bomb hurled into the house of Irene Adler to get her to disclose the whereabouts of a certain compromising photograph of the King of Bohemia, on the theory that “when a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her instinct is at once to rush to the thing which she values most. It is a perfectly overwhelming impulse, and I have more than once taken advantage of it” (I.258). Because instinct doesn’t lie, the ruse allows Holmes to find concealed objects with a certainty alien to the world as we know it, where people fail to behave altogether predictably (In the event, while the cry of “Fire!” does reveal the photograph’s hiding place, Holmes never gets his hands on it). It’s the supposedly foolproof nature of Holmes’s trick that links it to the indubitable identifiers of romance, from Odysseus’s scar to the scroll that proves Perdita to be of royal blood in A Winter’s Tale. In the Ida Bauer case, a claimed ability to penetrate the psyche’s hiding places enables Freud to state, with an assurance equal to Holmes’s, that the dream of the jewel-case in a house fire “prove[s]” that Ida is deeply in love with Hans Zellenka and has repressed this truth to avoid becoming aware of it (SE 70). Such a claim makes up in audacity what it lacks in evidence. If Sherlock Holmes does not belong to the real world, Freud’s analysis of Ida was, arguably, completely out of touch with the reality of her position as an adolescent exposed to a sexual aggressor with the consent of her own father. Subject to adults who wove an intricate web of lies and “not only used her for their own ends, but then denied using her,”21 Ida’s sense of reality was under assault, and Freud compounded that assault by asking her to credit the fairy tale of a Hans Zellenka who made a decent proposal of marriage while already married. It seems only fitting that Freud seems to have believed that Ida could resolve the imbroglio of the two households simply by marrying Zellenka, marriage being the conventional conclusion of the romance plot. Theorizing as he did that Ida’s hysterical symptoms had their origin in masturbation and would persist until she arrived at the normal means of sexual satisfaction,

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Freud probably considered marriage the best cure of her hysteria, too. This, then, is a romance of detection in which clues point in the most mysterious manner to the most formulaic of solutions. If Freud’s belief that Hans Zellenka wished only for honorable marriage to Ida represents a “cliché from his romance novelist’s hoard” (Crews, Freud , pp. 598– 99), the notion that Ida was secretly in love with him—as Freud insists throughout the tortured analysis—plays on the venerable romance motif of the virgin destined for matrimony. As suggested by the heavy use of expressions of certainty throughout the study, Freud would have us believe that he has not merely surmised but established the meaning of Ida’s dreams and symptoms, pointing for the most part to her well-concealed love of Zellenka. Ida disagreed. Inasmuch as Freud states near the end of the analysis of her second dream that she listened “without any of her usual contradictions” (SE 108–9), it appears Ida had a habit of contesting conclusions presented to her as inarguable. Perhaps because Freud saw nothing amiss in Zellenka’s aggression and conducted himself with an aggression of his own, his certainty seems to have had the effect of repelling rather than convincing his patient. While Freud maintains that he has solved her enigmas, his very way of regarding her as a set of codes and his evident pride in breaking them to his own satisfaction could well have aroused Ida’s resistance. Freud’s attempt to play Sherlock Holmes to her psyche—to tear away its disguises, to uncover not merely a probable but an indisputable solution to its most guarded mysteries—ends with Ida putting a stop to the investigation, a deed Freud interprets characteristically as “an unmistakable act of vengeance on her part” (SE 109). Careful review of the evidence reveals that “Ida’s contribution to Freud’s case history was quite minimal. The rest is pure speculation on Freud’s part; however, he narrates all of this as if the events [such as memories and their repression] had actually occurred in Ida’s mind.”22 In other words, Freud’s report of the Ida Bauer case showcases his own heroic powers of detection. By terminating treatment, Ida made it known that she did not care to be cast as a character in a narrative of Freud’s creation. While some would say this only proves she couldn’t face the truths Freud uncovered (or that Freud should have been more circumspect in dishing out them out), the actual point may be that a human

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being is not a puzzle to be solved by a feat of cryptographic mastery that can only be compared with the exploits of an imaginary detective. ∗ ∗ ∗ Freud was aware of his cases’ resemblance to fiction, conceding that “it still strikes me as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories [Novellen]” (SE II.160), but insisting nonetheless on their superior truth and insight. Thus, if the interpretive journey or odyssey on which he leads us in the Ida Bauer case should lead to the conclusion that the patient is an “orally fixated masturbating hysterical homosexual” (Crews, Freud , p. 613)—and a homosexual secretly in love with her own male assailant to boot—this is to be regarded not as a flight of fantasy but an objective discovery. As gothic as Freud’s portrayal of Ida is, then, he insists that he reads her correctly; if his analysis of her failed, it was because he neglected to take account of transference (that is, Ida’s reaction to him as if he were Hans Zellenka), not because he deciphered her wishes and motives wrongly and not because she was never a puzzle in the first place. Yet Freud failed precisely because he saw the patient as a puzzle. Regarding the case as a precious opportunity to prove the value of his interpretive system, Freud had his theories before Ida Bauer entered treatment (hence “the existing collection of picklocks”) and was more committed to them than to treatment itself. The Holmesian certainty of his findings is the note of a man enthralled with his own deductions. Finding that Freud’s treatment of Ida “did permanent harm,” Hannah Decker concludes that “Freud compounded her father’s betrayal by his unconscious exploitation of her. His primary interest in her predicament lay in using psychoanalysis to support his theories and his reputation; his interest in curing her, though real, was secondary” (Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900, p. 199). The subject of another of Freud’s case histories, Sergei Pankeev (the Wolf Man), remarked of Freud’s fascination with Sherlock Holmes, “Once we happened to speak of Conan Doyle and his creation, Sherlock Holmes. I had thought Freud would have no use for this type of light reading matter, and was surprised that this was not at all the case and that Freud read this author attentively.”23 In the Ida Bauer case,

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as we have seen, Freud conducts himself as a second Holmes, drawing bold inferences from small details in an autocratic manner and in a tone of the indubitable. His impersonation of a hero of the world of light reading, and his construction of the case itself as a kind of cryptographic adventure, by no means ensure the soundness of his conclusions. Indeed, something was wrong with Freud’s thinking if he considered the case of Ida Bauer a demonstration of the power of his theories, notwithstanding that the patient (like the Wolf Man) received so little benefit from them. By reducing Ida Bauer to a collection of involved problems analogous to the puzzles that rouse Sherlock Holmes from his lethargy and delight him like nothing else, Freud placed both himself and her in a false position. It was his belief in his own Holmesian powers of deduction that led him to conclude that this patient, despite her evident individuality and the unique circumstantial web in which she was trapped, simply confirmed the worth of his interpretive system.24 It should come as no surprise that a mode of inference styled on an imaginary original should yield dubious results. The Sherlock Holmes stories do not constitute a template for making stunning deductions or reasoning from effect to cause. They are romances with enough coloring of realism to placate common sense, and with solutions too rooted in fantasy to be adapted to the world at large. What mortal can match a detective who raises a woman from a closed coffin? Holmes’s miracles of deduction apply only in the Holmes stories themselves, with their improbabilities, their unwritten rules, their disguises, their adventure plots in which space and time are as nothing. Some of Holmes’s shows of deduction are all show, such as his ludicrous pretense of being able to read another’s “inmost thoughts” from “a momentary expression, a twitch of a muscle or the glance of an eye” (I.16), without so much as the utterance of a word (II.357). When Ida Bauer sought Freud’s help some fifteen months after she walked out (one of the Zellenka children, whom she had looked after, having died in the interim), “one glance at her face... was enough” to tell Freud she was insincere (SE 120–21). Unlike the thousands who directed letters to Sherlock Holmes, Freud knew perfectly well that Holmes was a fictional being, yet he attempted, even so, to transpose the art of backwards reasoning from Holmes’s consulting room at 221B Baker Street to his own at Berggasse 19. With

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his imitation of Holmes, Freud may have sought to tap the detective’s legend as he constructed that of his own genius, or he may have actually believed that he could penetrate the mysteries of the psyche with the relentless accuracy of a Holmes. He succeeded in the first but not the second. His presentation of himself as a Holmes of the psyche—cool, superior, fearless, brilliant, indisputable—constitutes, in all, a thoroughly ironic application of the principle that fiction can enlighten our vision of the world. Acknowledgments The author thanks Frederick Crews for his invaluable assistance.

Notes 1. Edmund Wilson, “Mr. Holmes, They Were the Footprints of a Gigantic Hound,” Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties (New York: Farrar, Straus and Company, 1950), p. 266. 2. Amy Yang, “Psychoanalysis and Detective Fiction: A Tale of Freud and Criminal Storytelling,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 53 (2010): 596–604. 3. Frederick Crews, Freud: The Making of an Illusion (New York: Metropolitan, 2017), p. 383. 4. Stanley Edgar Hyman, The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazier and Freud as Imaginative Writers (New York: Atheneum, 1962), p. 313. 5. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and Sonu Shamdasani, The Freud Files: An Inquiry into the History of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 6. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, tr. James Strachey, Vol. VII (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), p. 77. Henceforth abbreviated SE. 7. Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, two volumes (New York: Bantam Dell, 1996), I.735. Henceforth volume and page references appear in my text. 8. Michael Shepherd, Sherlock Holmes and the Case of Dr. Freud (New York: Tavistock, 1985), p. 8.

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9. Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani, The Freud Files. 10. Hannah Decker, “Freud and Dora: Constraints on Medical Progress,” Journal of Social History 14 (1981): 459. 11. David Musto, “A Study in Cocaine: Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud,” JAMA 204 (1968): 27–32. 12. That Holmes was inspired in part by one of Conan Doyle’s teachers, Joseph Bell, doesn’t make him any less imaginary. 13. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), p. 44. 14. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, tr. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), pp. 86– 111. 15. J. R. Morgan, Introduction to Heliodorus, Ethiopian Story, tr. Sir Walter Lamb (London: Dent, 1997), p. xxiii. 16. G. W. Bowersock, Fiction as History: Nero to Julian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 99. 17. Steven Marcus, “Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case History,” Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Science 5 (1976): 398. 18. Cf. Philip Rieff, Introduction to Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (New York: Touchstone, 1997), p. xii. 19. Hannah Decker, Freud, Dora, and Vienna 1900 (New York: Free Press, 1991), p. 79. 20. Allen Esterson, “Delusion and Dream in Freud’s ‘Dora,’” in Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend , ed. Frederick Crews (New York: Viking, 1998), pp. 153–54. 21. Decker, “Freud and Dora”: 456. 22. Borch-Jacobsen and Shamdasani, The Freud Files, p. 201. 23. Muriel Gardiner, The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1972), p. 146. 24. Cf. David Sachs, “Reflections on Freud’s Dora Case After 48 Years,” Psychoanalytic Inquiry 25 (2005): 51. “Consider how similar Freud’s work with Dora is to Sherlock Holmes’s deductions. Both Freud and Holmes seem to find hidden targets with unerring accuracy.... Our need to accept authorial omniscience in order to believe in the infallibility of the conclusions of both Freud and Holmes allows us to

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accept them. Instead of finding the answer to the cause of Dora’s symptoms, Freud found what he had in mind in the first place”.

8 Extrahuman Transcendence in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray Katie Fry

The contemporary transhumanist movement, as philosopher Michael Hauskeller writes in his book Mythologies of Transhumanism (2016), “promotes the use of biotechnologies to modify and improve our nature, to transform us into a different kind of being.”1 Undaunted by the potential ramifications of their revolutionary project, transhumanists— not to be confused with critical posthumanists who seek to dismantle the historico-metaphysical category of “the human”2 —routinely maintain that pursuing radical human enhancement will bring about a better world not just for individual humans, but for all living creatures. Although it is only because of the rapid development of bio- and computer sciences over the past few decades that the dream of becoming as all-knowing and ageless as the gods we once worshipped appears imminently achievable, a significant number of literary texts from the K. Fry (B) University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73061-1_8

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late nineteenth century experimented imaginatively with pushing the boundaries of what it means to be human. At the fin de siècle, when the relentless advancement of modernity was transforming everyday life in an unprecedented manner and Darwin’s discovery of humankind’s animal ancestry provoked urgent questions about the borders between human and non-human forms of life, fictional worlds served as venues where utopian (and dystopian) visions of human potential could be developed and explored. Novels considering how advances in scientific research might radically extend human and animal faculties—such as H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), and The Invisible Man (1897), and R. L. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)—are perhaps the most obvious examples of the fin-de-siècle literary imagination’s preoccupation with transcending biological limitations. However, the Aesthetic Movement’s bid to adorn, enhance, or even supplant nature via art can also be regarded as a testament to the period’s widespread interest in testing the boundaries of what it means to be human. From Walter Pater’s assertion that art provides a “cloistral refuge […] from a certain vulgarity of the actual world”3 to Oscar Wilde’s insistence that the aesthetic critic “will become divine”4 to Max Beerbohm’s spirited “Defence of Cosmetics” (1894), aestheticism was deeply committed to exploring how (human) nature might be improved or replaced by artifice. The Picture of Dorian Gray,5 Oscar Wilde’s only novel, is perhaps the Aesthetic Movement’s most sustained meditation on the theme of transcending human limitations via art. In Wilde’s fictional world, the eponymous protagonist is granted the ability to exchange his aging, mortal body with the ageless, immortal beauty of his portrait. In this chapter, I would like to examine an aspect of the narrative whose significance has been largely overlooked in the secondary literature: the transhuman—or, to use the philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s term, “extrahuman”—form of aesthetic transcendence desired and attained by Dorian. Wilde’s treatment of this theme, I argue, is indicative of the author’s underlying ambivalence towards the aesthetic doctrine he advances, to all intents and purposes, in his “Preface”6 to The Picture of Dorian Gray and Intensions (most brazenly in “The Critic as Artist”).7 Since Wilde was revising the Intensions essays over the same period he was revising and

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extending Dorian Gray, one cannot speak of a progression or turn in Wilde’s thought when addressing the discrepancies between these texts. What these discrepancies reveal, rather, is that Wilde was not nearly as convinced about the coherence of the views presented in the “Preface” and Intentions as many of his readers have believed. Although the image of Wilde firmly entrenched in both the popular imagination and Wildean scholarship (at least until the late twentieth century8 ) is that of the chief spokesperson of the Aesthetic Movement who “never ceased discoursing on the supremacy of art over life,”9 the critique of aesthetic transcendence running through The Picture of Dorian Gray demonstrates that Wilde’s attitude towards art—even before his trial and incarceration in 1895—was far more equivocal than is generally assumed. I have borrowed the term “extrahuman” from Martha Nussbaum’s essay “Transcending Humanity” (1990). Prompted by Charles Taylor’s questioning of what she “really think[s] about the human aspiration to transcend humanity,”10 Nussbaum attempts to articulate what kind of transcendent aspirations she endorses and what kind she thinks might be not only unsuitable for but also ultimately detrimental to human flourishing. Her inquiry leads her to distinguish between two forms of transcendence: “extrahuman” or “external” transcendence, defined as the endeavor to entirely vanquish our human limitations and assume “the life of another sort of being, as if it were a higher and better life for us” (“TH,” p. 379), and “internal” or “human” transcendence, which strives to cultivate a deeper and more refined sense of our humanity. Nussbaum illustrates the difference between these two types by recalling Odysseus’s encounter with Calypso in Homer’s Odyssey. When the goddess Calypso offers to make him immortal, Odysseus refuses because his desire to return home to Ithaca and his wife Penelope outweighs his desire to become a god. In choosing Penelope over Calypso, Odysseus chooses a life constrained by imperfection, ageing and mortality over a life of immortality and eternal youth. For Nussbaum, Odysseus’s choice exemplifies the fact that the things we value most—such as love, compassion, courage, and strength—presuppose human limitations and would be meaningless without them. There is thus an “incoherence lurking somewhere in the wish [to transcend humanity]” (“TH,” p. 368) because “many of the activities we now prize and consider fine will not figure in a

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divine life, consistently imagined” (“TH,” p. 372). Nussbaum therefore urges us to dismiss the desire for extrahuman or godlike transcendence of the conditions of human existence (conditions that include suffering, ageing, and death), and to instead turn our attention and energy to endeavors that cultivate “a specifically human good” (“TH,” p. 389). Nussbaum’s category of “extrahuman transcendence” encompasses not only the aims of the contemporary transhumanist movement, but also the form of transcendence Wilde ascribes to art, the artist, and the critic in “The Critic as Artist” and to Dorian in The Picture of Dorian Gray. In “The Critic as Artist,” Wilde (through his Socratic mouthpiece Gilbert) puts forth a vision of aesthetic autonomy that is at bottom a wish to become something other than human, to discard one’s human life in exchange for (to quote Nussbaum once again) “the life of another sort of being.” The sphere of art is declared superior to the sphere of human life because art invariably accommodates our desires and caprices. Art accords us absolute freedom in choosing what emotions we would like to experience and what situations we would like to live through (and when). Mortal life may, at times, concede to give us “pleasure” when we ask for it, but “bitterness and disappointment” are always sure to follow (“CA,” p. 167). Art, on the other hand, never denies or modulates our request, congenially allowing us to “settle beforehand what our experiences are going to be” (“CA,” pp. 167–168). Whereas suffering in life entails “a passage to a lesser perfection,” the emotional catharsis generated by tragic art “both purifies and initiates” us (“CA,” p. 173). Since there are no consequences for the actions and emotions we encounter in art, art allows us to experience all that life has to offer in a way that is both more refined (more pleasing to our aesthetic judgment) and free from risk. The buffered realm of art envelops the artist-critic and marks an impenetrable border between him and the pain of the world: “From the high tower of Thought we can look out at the world. Calm, and self-centered, and complete, the aesthetic critic contemplates life, and no arrow drawn at a venture can pierce between the joints of his harness. He at least is safe. He has discovered how to live” (“CA,” p. 178). To “live” by not living, to so completely transcend the human condition that one becomes immune to physical and mental suffering—this is the aspiration of the aestheticism formulated in “The Critic as Artist.”

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The “aesthetic critic” is expressly encouraged to emulate the perfection and invulnerability of the Greek gods, who look down on a world of their own creation from their place on high: Yes, Ernest: the contemplative life, the life that has for its aim not doing but being, and not being merely, but becoming —that is what the critical spirit can give us. The gods live thus: either brooding over their own perfection, as Aristotle tells us, or, as Epicurus fancied, watching with the calm eyes of the spectator the tragi-comedy of the world that they have made. We, too, might live like them, and set ourselves to witness with appropriate emotions the varied scenes that man and nature afford. We might make ourselves spiritual by detaching ourselves from action, and become perfect by the rejection of energy. (“CA,” pp. 178–179)

Unlike the “contemplative life” led by the saint or the mystic, whose gaze is directed upwards towards the god he serves, a god, who serves no one, looks down on all he has created, on all that exists to serve him. The radical autonomy to which the artist-critic aspires thus parallels the absolute sovereignty of the divine, a being perfect in itself and subject to no law external to its own will. Such an extreme degree of detachment would enable the aesthete to exercise unmitigated control over the conditions of his existence, rendering him impermeable to pain and suffering inflicted by outside forces. Modeled as it is on total transcendence of the earthly realm, this godlike existence has little to do with the possibilities of human life. Wilde’s vision of aesthetic sovereignty is conceptualized as a victory over the human condition, an act of divinization. In fact, as Gilbert states near the end of the essay, the ultimate goal of the artistcritic is to cast off his human status altogether, to transform himself into a god: “By contact with divine things, he will become divine. His will be the perfect life, and his only” (“CA,” p. 204). In The Picture of Dorian Gray, it is precisely this godlike form of transcendence that Dorian so desperately desires. ∗ ∗ ∗ Frederick Roden has argued that The Picture of Dorian Gray punishes Dorian for his “failure to realize spiritual transcendence.”11 I find it

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significant, however, that Dorian actually does achieve a kind of transcendence in Wilde’s fictional world, albeit a bodily or formal one: he is granted the ability to transcend transience. Dorian makes a Faustian pact12 with an unspecified supernatural force so that he can take on the eternal and unchanging form of a work of art and thereby preserve his beauty from being tarnished by experience and the passage of time. Even though the prototype that Dorian aspires to become like is not a divine being, but rather a portrait of himself, the transcendence Dorian desires (and acquires) is clearly what Nussbaum would call “extrahuman,” since eternal youth and beauty lie far beyond the natural bounds of the human condition. The aesthetic immortality that Dorian is granted, however, ends up engendering a hell rather than a heaven for him and those around him: what initially appears to be a blessing—the opportunity to experience the godlike existence of the artist-critic that Wilde commends in “The Critic as Artist”—becomes a catalyst for damnation. In this way, the novel casts doubt upon the aspiration to achieve aesthetic divinity (that is, to assume the attributes of a work of art and thereby become godlike), suggesting that such an existence would ultimately be unfulfilling to a human being. The young, beautiful, and (to all appearances) kind-hearted Dorian becomes an object of intense interest to both the painter Basil Hallward and the aesthete Lord Henry Wotton, and the combined influence of both men plays a significant role in precipitating his fatal experiment with extrahuman transcendence. Basil sees Dorian as the human embodiment of his aesthetic ideal; as he says to Lord Henry: “Unconsciously [Dorian] defines for me the lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. The harmony of soul and body—how much that is!” (DG, p. 13). Basil views Dorian’s beautiful body as the perfect formal correlative of his beautiful soul,13 a fact that renders the boy a living work of art (in accordance with Walter Pater’s influential definition of art as the absolute correspondence between form and spirit, as that in which the “spiritual motive […] saturates and is identical with [‘sensuous form’]”).14 Basil, unlike Lord Henry, appears oblivious to the fact that Dorian’s ability to embody the artist’s ideal—his “harmony of soul and body” or, in Pater’s terms, the indivisibility of “the

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form [and] the substance” (“S,” p. 37)—will inevitably be short-lived, since the human mind and body evolve over the course of a lifetime in ways that make human beings constitutionally distinct from works of art. The portrait he paints of Dorian succeeds in arresting the boy’s present harmonious state. Although Basil considers it to be “the finest piece of work [he has] ever done” (DG, p. 26), he fears that the painting reveals “the secret of [his] own soul”15 and decides never to exhibit it (DG, p. 9). Infused as it is with Basil’s “curious artistic idolatry” (DG, p. 14), the portrait thoroughly enchants the two men other than the artist who are granted permission to view it: Henry declares the painting to be “one of the greatest things in modern art” and worth acquiring at any price, while Dorian’s “cheeks flus[h] for a moment with pleasure” upon viewing it, as it reveals to him the power of “his own beauty” (DG, p. 25). When Lord Henry meets the model behind the portrait that “fascinates [him]” (DG, p. 7), he declares Dorian to be the “visible symbol” of the “new Hedonism” (DG, p. 23)—the philosophy of life he espouses but does not necessarily abide by, and that bears a stark resemblance to the aestheticism formulated in Intentions. Henry encourages Dorian to take hold of his youthful beauty, which time will inevitably deprive him of. He tells Dorian: “You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you [….] Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing” (DG, pp. 22–23). Wotton’s “new Hedonism” exemplifies the morally dubious misinterpretation of the “Conclusion” to Walter Pater’s The Renaissance that Pater had tried to counteract by omitting the “Conclusion” from the book’s second edition and more fully explaining his aesthetic worldview in the “New Cyrenaicism” chapter of Marius. As Pater himself noted in a review of Wilde’s novel, whereas “A true Epicureanism aims at a complete though harmonious development of man’s entire organism,” Dorian is led to “pass from a higher to a lower degree of development” as a result of Lord Henry’s teachings.16 Significantly, Wotton himself does not even live by this creed: despite his advice to Dorian to go out and seek “new sensations” wherever they are to be

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found (following the logic that “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it” [DG, pp. 19–20]), Henry leads the buffered existence of an aesthete. Rather than expose himself directly to life’s risks, he prefers to observe the theater of the world from the darkness of the auditorium. Terrified of death (“Death is the only thing that ever terrifies me,” he confesses to Dorian [DG, p. 175]) and repulsed by suffering (“I can sympathize with everything, except suffering. [...] It is too ugly, too horrible, too distressing” [DG, p. 37]), Henry limits himself to the pursuit of benign sensations.17 By persuading his protégé to “Be always searching for new sensations” and “Be afraid of nothing,” Henry procures for himself the opportunity to live vicariously through Dorian’s experiences without subjecting himself to the consequences that such an extravagant or reckless life inevitably entails.18 The combined effect of seeing Basil’s painting, which overwhelms Dorian with “the sense of his own beauty [...] like a revelation” (DG, p. 25), and hearing Lord Henry’s “strange panegyric on youth” (DG, p. 25), is that Dorian apprehends, for the first time, both the power and the fleetingness of his bodily perfection. Immediately thereafter, he curses the constraints of human existence and wishes to be rid of them: “‘How sad it is!’ murmured Dorian Gray, with his eyes still fixed upon his own portrait. ‘How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June. [...] If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!’” (DG, p. 25). Suddenly aware of both the magnitude of his beauty and its tragic brevity, Dorian entreats the universe to bestow upon him the timeless beauty of the painting. And Wilde, the author, grants his wish: from this point on, Dorian’s body and visage remain unmarked by the passage of time and the accretion of lived experience, while the portrait begins to show signs of physical and moral decay. Wilde transfers to the painting not only the transience to which the human body is subjected, but also Dorian’s “soul” (which he swore he would give up to remain eternally youthful); the portrait visually registers the changes, increasingly degrading ones, that Dorian’s “soul” undergoes. No matter what

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he does or how much time passes, the human Dorian appears the same, as spotless and youthful as the day on which the portrait was painted, while the painted Dorian grows older, uglier, disfigured. At the novel’s commencement, Dorian is described as an innocent young man with a “simple and beautiful nature” (DG, p. 16). His face is said to emit “all youth’s passionate purity” and the impression that “he had kept himself unspotted from the world” (DG, p. 17). Once he utters his plea to transcend his human limitations, however, his behavior changes: little by little, Dorian’s moral integrity deteriorates. He commits his first significant moral offence in his heartless treatment of the young actress Sibyl Vane, whom he promises to marry and then mercilessly discards when she loses her ability to act as a result of the real-life love she feels for him. It is after this scene, which results in Sibyl’s suicide, that Dorian notices the first change in his portrait: he observes “a touch of cruelty in the mouth” (DG, p. 77). The portrait, from this point on, becomes “to him the visible emblem of conscience” (DG, p. 78); instead of encouraging him to “resist temptation” (DG, p. 78) and behave virtuously, as he originally hopes, the painting emboldens him to behave more and more recklessly, since the sins of his soul now appear to be divorced from his own person. A number of critics have entertained Dorian’s own supposition (in Chapter 11) that his progressive moral disintegration might be the offshoot of “some strange poisonous germ” (DG, p. 120) inherited from his dissolute ancestors.19 Even studies that investigate the role played by evolutionary biology in Dorian’s downfall, however, tend to acknowledge the at least equally important role played by “aesthetic influences,”20 or what the narrator refers to as Dorian’s “ancestors in literature.”21 Regardless of whether we take the preliminary precipitant of Dorian’s dissolution to be his “poisonous” genes, the influence of Basil and Henry (and their respective gifts of the portrait and the “poisonous book” [DG, p. 104]), or a complex constellation of these and perhaps other factors, the narrative makes a conspicuous point of stressing the ways in which Dorian’s new-found ability to transcend human limitations abets and accelerates his descent into criminality. In my view, Dorian’s moral devolution is decidedly not, as Christopher Nassaar has influentially argued, the product of a conscious decision to cultivate the “evil”

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within himself22 —an act that makes Dorian, for Nassaar, a quintessential devotee of Wilde’s “religion of evil,” in which “evil beauty” becomes the object of “unholy worship” (DU, p. xii)—but rather a corollary of his newly acquired transhuman status. Set free from the visual markings that time and experience imprint upon us, Dorian loses his sense of compassion and becomes increasingly indifferent to how his actions affect those around him. He seeks deeper and ever more degraded forms of pleasure in life, shielded by the mask of virtue that his beautiful face provides him with. He begins to derive “real pleasure in watching” the changing portrait, as its decay highlights his own unchanging beauty: “When the blood crept from its face, and left behind a pallid mask of chalk with leaden eyes, he would keep the glamour of boyhood. Not one blossom of his loveliness would ever fade. Not one pulse of his life would ever weaken. Like the gods of the Greeks, he would be strong, and fleet, and joyous. What did it matter what happened to the colored image on the canvas? He would be safe. That was everything” (DG, p. 89). That Dorian compares himself here to the Greek gods is telling. Both Wilde (in “The Critic as Artist”) and Nussbaum (in her discussion of extrahuman transcendence) had in mind the gods of the ancient Greek Pantheon in their discussion of divinity. The Greek gods were famously callous; they lacked, as Nussbaum observes (following Aristotle), what we as humans would consider ethical virtues (“TH,” p. 374). Because they require nothing to subsist, because they are not susceptible to suffering or death, the gods are incapable of or simply do not see the point in behaving courageously (nothing is risky to them), selflessly (they have nothing to sacrifice), and compassionately (mortal pain is foreign to them). In their transcendent state, the gods look down on our suffering but remain unmoved by it because they are immune to it themselves. As one who has transcended the human affliction of ageing by taking on the extrahuman attributes of an artwork, Dorian becomes similarly defective as a moral being; as Michael Patrick Gillespie has noted, Dorian’s increasingly reckless exercise of power prefigures the machinations of fascism.23 And like the gods of Greek mythology who, as Nussbaum reminds us, are actually not supremely and eternally satisfied, but who instead fall in love with mortals and meddle in the mortal realm in an attempt to escape the

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monotony of their own limitless existence (“TH,” p. 377), Dorian also finds that he is not exceptionally happy or satisfied with his unchanging state. Instead of being eternally grateful to Basil, the artist who painted the portrait, Dorian comes to loathe him “more than in his whole life he had ever loathed anything,” and he murders Basil one night when “an uncontrollable feeling of hatred” comes over him (DG, p. 132). While Dorian has already ruined countless men and woman by his influence, this murder of an old friend, of the man who worshipped him and who made him aware of his own beauty, reveals to just what extent Dorian has lost his moral sense. It is thus not “an absence of spirituality, of faith” that makes a “monster” of Dorian, as John Allen Quintus has argued24 ; rather, it is the acquisition of extrahuman attributes that gives rise to his moral dissolution. In his struggle to justify his criminality to himself, Dorian blames the portrait for corrupting his soul: that the portrait bore “the burden of his days” while he kept “the unsullied splendor of eternal youth” is declared to be the cause of “All his failure” (DG, p. 181). He recants his youthful wish to trade places with the portrait, and wishes now, in vain, that “each sin of his life had brought its sure, swift penalty along with it” (DG, p. 181). Ironically, it is precisely Dorian’s miraculous ability to indulge in every impulse without appearing to have endured the smallest amount of suffering that Lord Henry eulogizes near the novel’s end. As he tells Dorian in their final meeting: “Ah, Dorian, how happy you are! What an exquisite life you have had! You have drunk deeply of everything. […] And it has all been to you no more than the sound of music. It has not marred you” (DG, p. 178). Henry marvels at and is envious of the way in which Dorian has (ostensibly) succeeded in making his life as beautiful and pleasurable as a work of art: “I wish I could change places with you, Dorian. […] Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets” (DG, p. 179). Dorian appears to have realized the aesthete’s ideal of godlike autonomy and invulnerability that Wilde outlines in “Critic”: he appears to have transcended the pain of life by becoming a kind of living artwork. To Henry, who (to recall) abhors suffering and profoundly fears death, this is a truly wondrous, truly admirable, feat. While Lord Henry views Dorian as proof that art can indeed save one from the “sordid perils of actual existence” (“CA,”

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p. 173), Dorian and the reader of Dorian Gray (and, of course, its author) are cognizant of the dramatic depths of his error. By the novel’s conclusion, Dorian has become so distraught at the disconnect between his beautiful body and his “hideous” soul that he stabs the painting which has become a visual archive of his inner strife; instead of being destroyed, however, the image returns to its original, immaculate state, and Dorian himself is killed, stabbed in the heart, his dead body “withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage” (DG, p. 184). Henry’s rejection of suffering and pain in art—and his attempt to dispel these unpleasant truths from life as well—correspond to the wholly Apollonian (Nietzsche’s term for art’s beautiful Schein) definition of art that Wilde puts forth in Intentions. However, the actual work of art depicted in The Picture of Dorian Gray contradicts this view. In “The Decay of Lying,” Wilde (or, rather, Vivian, the Socratic figure in the dialogue) argues that “Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.”25 Art’s domain is said to be not the “sordid,” “hideous,” and “vile” truth of reality, but rather the idyllic dreamscapes of Apollo (“DL,” pp. 82–83). While Dorian’s portrait originally manifests an idealized (and idolized) image of its subject, the painting ultimately displays the unvarnished decay of body and spirit, exposing both “the signs of age” and “the signs of sin” (DG, p. 106). In a reversal of Wilde’s dictum in “Decay” that art is a “veil, rather than a mirror” (“DL,” pp. 89–90), here it is art that comes to reflect the truthful image of Dorian’s “evil and aging face,” while the mirror reflects the external but fundamentally deceitful image of a visage “unspotted from the world” (DG, p. 106). Dorian’s love of mirrors distinguishes him from the main character of the “poisonous book” (DG, p. 104) that Lord Henry gives to him, the “wonderful young Parisian” who in other ways serves as a “prefiguring type of himself ” (DG, p. 105).26 Whereas the book’s protagonist develops a “grotesque dread of mirrors” because they reveal to him “the sudden decay of a beauty that had once, apparently, been so remarkable” (DG, p. 105), Dorian delights in the contrast between “the fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass” and the “evil and aging face on the canvas” (DG, p. 106). He reads with “cruel joy” about the protagonist’s despair at losing his beauty (that which “in others, and

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the world, he had most dearly valued” [DG, p. 105]), since he himself has been liberated from the affliction of aging. It is his portrait, rather than his mirror image, that Dorian comes to dread, so much so that he has it moved to a locked room on the top floor of his house (although he cannot keep from venturing up there, “[o]ften,” to witness the progressive perversion of the image [DG, p. 106]). Despite the many ways in which the “Preface” Wilde added to the novel in 1891 appears to be at odds with the message of the narrative, the assertion there that “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors” (DG, p. 4) seems to speak directly to Dorian’s case: Dorian sees his true self, the “mirror of his soul” (DG, p. 183), reflected in the portrait, and it is abhorrence of this unsightly truth that precipitates his iconoclastic act—an act that inadvertently results in his own destruction. The reversal of the roles ascribed to art and life in Dorian Gray— the fact that life masks an uncomely truth which art proceeds to lay bare—challenges both the definition of art as beautiful, pleasure-giving untruth from “Decay” and the legitimacy of the endeavor to transcend human limitations through art advanced in “Critic.” From the moment he makes the wish to remain eternally beautiful until the moment he destroys the portrait, Dorian is granted the ability to transfer his human attributes (his inner strife, his aging body) to the portrait and, in exchange, assume extrahuman attributes (the harmonic, static beauty of a work of art). To transcend nature in this way remains, much to the chagrin of contemporary transhumanists, sheer fantasy, but the fictional world of Dorian Gray lays bare the ramifications of the extrahuman aestheticism Wilde appears to endorse in the Intentions essays. Art that strives to create enduring, eternally beautiful forms is antithetical to the human body (a living, evolving, and mortal entity), and the aesthete’s endeavor to transform life into a work of art is motivated by denial or resentment of our inability to fully emulate art’s superhuman qualities. The tragic case of Dorian Gray reveals how the aesthetic doctrine espoused in Intentions, which champions art over life and attempts to transcend humanity by rectifying our limitations through artifice, parallels certain extrahuman religious principles (such as the worship of superhuman beings or the anticipation of a paradisal afterlife) that may impair our ability to affirm and cherish earthly existence.

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∗ ∗ ∗ Although Dorian Gray and Lord Henry Wotton have often been read as mouthpieces for Oscar Wilde’s own aesthetic doctrine, to locate the author’s position within this work is not such a straight-forward affair. Wilde (if we are to take him at his word) offered the following account of his personal relation to his characters: “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks of me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.”27 Despite the fact that Dorian in some sense fulfils the author’s otherwise unattainable wish to transcend the temporal conditions of human life, the novel’s tragic conclusion—in which Dorian’s destruction of his portrait results in his own death—suggests that Wilde recognized the incoherence inherent in this wish to remain unchanged. As Jarlath Killeen has noted, the disastrous consequences of Dorian’s experiment in “remain[ing] young forever” ultimately render the novel an “indictment of the cult of youth rather than a celebration of it.”28 That other fictional meddlers in human nature from the fin de siècle period meet a similarly grisly end—consider Dr. Jekyll, whose experiments with “transcendental medicine”29 spiral out of control and end in suicide, or Griffin, who is beaten to death by a mob after attempting to “establish a Reign of Terror” that would make his invisibility “useful”30 —suggests that anxiety, rather than optimism, characterized the attitude towards transhumanism at the turn of the century. A more extensive study of the distinctive versions of transcendence depicted in fin-de-siècle fictional worlds might reveal further links between aestheticism, the nascent genre of science fiction, and other late nineteenth-century experimental forms of thought and action, such as gender-bending, occultism, and utopian socialism. In his later works, perhaps most explicitly in the long prison letter to Lord Alfred Douglas known as De Profundis,31 Wilde espoused a far less radical theory of aestheticism, one that celebrated the way in which art can help us to deepen our sense of our own humanity and our compassion for others, rather than transcend them. De Profundis delineates an aesthetic attitude towards life that embraces suffering and directly opposes Lord Henry’s creed in The Picture of Dorian Gray that “To become the spectator of one’s own life […] is to escape the suffering

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of life” (DG, p. 92). The aesthetic way of life becomes not, as it was for Dorian and Lord Harry, a shield that safeguards one from the pain of the world; rather, the reality of sorrow becomes “the type and test of all great art.”32 Wilde holds up a heterodox version of Jesus Christ,33 who “made of Himself the image of the Man of Sorrows” (DP, p. 115), as an exemplar of the individual who turns his life into a work of art. Just as “every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image,” so “every human being should be the realization of some ideal” (DP, p. 116). In De Profundis, Wilde directly criticizes the Greek gods—who had served as the prototypes for the form of aesthetic transcendence espoused in Intentions and put to the test in the fictional world of Dorian Gray—for their inhumanity: he finds fault with Apollo’s treatment of Marsyas and Niobe, with Athena’s lack of pity, with Hera’s merely superficial (“pomp and peacocks”) nobility, and with to the fact that Zeus, king of the gods, was “too fond of the daughters of men” (DP, p. 115). Where Wilde had originally divinized the artist-critic as a transcendent being immune to earthly suffering, he ends by humanizing the divine—by characterizing Jesus as a human artist who made of his life a work of art and, in doing so, personified the transformative impact that art can have on the world. This chapter has explored how Martha Nussbaum’s notion of “extrahuman transcendence,” defined as the desire to cast off the contingent and transient conditions of earthly life in order to live the unconstrained existence of a god, helps us to discern the particular facet of Dorian’s aestheticism that The Picture of Dorian Gray critiques. By way of conclusion, I would like to briefly sketch how the aesthetic attitude Wilde articulates in De Profundis comes remarkably close to the aspiration for “internal transcendence” that Nussbaum encourages us to pursue. Nussbaum visualizes internal transcendence, in contradistinction to religious images of ascension to heaven, as a downward movement, a “transcending by descent, delving more deeply into oneself and one’s humanity, and becoming deeper and more spacious as a result” (“TH,” p. 379). She sees this internal kind of transcendence exemplified in the works of Henry James and Marcel Proust, in their “explicit claims that the artist’s fine-tuned attention and responsiveness to human life is paradigmatic of a kind of precision of feeling and thought that a human being can cultivate, though most do not” (“TH,” p. 379). In

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De Profundis, Wilde professes to have become “a deeper man” as a result of the suffering he has experienced (DP, p. 126), and his reformulated aestheticism certainly supports this claim. No longer a lover of beautiful veils that mask a vulgar and incoherent world, Wilde struggles to embrace all that has come his way, to “accep[t] it as an inevitable part of the evolution of [his] life and character: by bowing [his] head to everything that [he] ha[s] suffered” (DP, p. 155).34 Wilde’s new aestheticism views Jesus’s ability to unite “sorrow and beauty” as emblematic of an aesthetic existence that accepts and works within worldly conditions, and that fosters (to quote Nussbaum again) “a more compassionate, subtler, more responsive, more richly human world” (“TH,” p. 379). Oscar Wilde’s critical portrayal of the extrahuman transcendence pursued by Dorian in The Picture of Dorian Gray, alongside his later articulation of the artistic way of life in works such as De Profundis, lead me to propose that we should reevaluate our common perception of Wilde as an aesthete who tirelessly asserted the superiority of art to life, and regard him instead as a writer who exemplifies how we can do meaningful work on ourselves and our world without disparaging, resenting, or seeking deliverance from that which makes us human.

Notes 1. Michael Hauskeller, Mythologies of Transhumanism (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 3. 2. The posthumanist critic Stefan Herbrechter, for example, calls for a posthumanism “which understands the human species as a historical ‘effect’, with humanism as its ideological ‘affect’, while distancing itself from both—a ‘critical posthumanism’, which [...] inhabits humanism deconstructively, and for which technology and Lyotard’s principle of the ‘inhuman’ are merely a means and not an end in themselves. A posthumanism which, precisely, is not post-human but post-human(ist)” (Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis [London: Bloomsbury, 2013], p. 7). 3. Walter Pater, “Style,” in volume 5 of The Works of Walter Pater, 10 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1910), p. 18; hereafter abbreviated “S”.

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4. Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” in volume 4 of The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, gen. ed. Russell Jackson and Ian Small (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000-), p. 204; hereafter abbreviated “CA”. 5. The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published in July 1890 in Lippincott’s Monthly as a narrative of thirteen chapters. Wilde revised and greatly expanded his text into a twenty-chapter novel, which he published with Ward, Lock & Co. in April 1891. For a detailed discussion of the changes Wilde made to the narrative and the role played by publishers, editors, and critics in the text’s construction, see Joseph Bristow’s “Introduction” to volume 3 of Oxford’s Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, pp. xi–lx. I am working from the 1891 version in my analysis here, since it represents the final state in which the author left his text (Wilde did not revise his novel subsequently). Page numbers refer to The Picture of Dorian Gray: Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds, Reviews and Reactions, Criticism, 2nd edition, ed. Michael Patrick Gillespie (New York: Norton, 2007); hereafter abbreviated DG. This Norton Critical Edition is the most widely available variorum edition of the narrative. 6. The “Preface” was first published in The Fortnightly Review in March 1891, and forms part of the public war of words between Wilde and the viciously hostile critics of the Lippincott’s edition of Dorian Gray. In response to those who censured his story on moral grounds, Wilde put forth twenty-three aphorisms (twenty-five would appear the following month in the “Preface” published with the novel) in defiance and self-defence, championing the autonomy and amorality of art. For an excellent account of the social and material conditions that led to Wilde’s writing of the “Preface,” see Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), pp. 56–62. 7. Intensions (1891) comprises “The Decay of Lying,” “The Critic as Artist,” “Pen, Pencil, and Poison,” and “The Truth of Masks.” For a detailed account of the changes Wilde made to these previously published essays for their publication in Intentions, see Josephine Guy’s “Introduction” to volume 4 of Oxford’s Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, pp. xix–lxxxvi.

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8. See Ian Small’s Oscar Wilde Revalued: An Essay on New Materials and Methods of Research (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 1993) and Oscar Wilde: Recent Research. A Supplement to “Oscar Wilde Revalued” (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 2000) for a survey of twentieth-century trends in Wilde scholarship. 9. Epifanio San Juan, The Art of Oscar Wilde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 8. 10. Martha Nussbaum, “Transcending Humanity,” in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 368; hereafter abbreviated “TH.”. 11. Frederick Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 140. 12. We might underscore the extrahumanly transcendent nature of Dorian’s request further by recalling that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust makes his pact with Mephistopheles not for the sake of diabolical transcendence (for the eternal perpetuation of his physical form), but rather to experience just one moment of bliss: “Werd ich zum Augenblicke sagen: Verweile doch! Du bist so schön! Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen, Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehn! [‘If to the moment I should say: Abide, you are so fair— Put me in fetters on that day, I wish to perish then, I swear’]” (Faust: the Original German and a New Translation and Introduction, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Anchor Books, 1990], pp. 184– 185). Faust’s wish, unlike Dorian’s, is entirely compatible with the conditions of earthly life. 13. In his biography, Richard Ellmann notes that Wilde himself possessed “a childlike faith in physiognomy” evinced in the letters he wrote about a visit to the Lincoln penitentiary in Nebraska during his North America tour: “On being shown photographs of some of the convicts, he commented, ‘O, what a dreadful face. And what did he do?’ Warden Nobes did not hesitate to tell of the criminals in the most graphic manner. ‘Oh, here’s a beast, an animal,’ exclaimed Wilde of one picture, ‘nothing of the man left.’ He would write Helena Sickert afterwards, ‘They were all mean looking, which

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consoled me, for I should hate to see a criminal with a noble face’” (Oscar Wilde [London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 1987], p. 191). Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 4th ed., ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 132. Several passages alluding to the sexual nature of Basil’s feelings for Dorian in Wilde’s manuscript were revised or excised by the editor of Lippincott’s Magazine (Stoddart), and Wilde himself omitted a number of homoerotic references from the 1891 edition (see Bristow’s “Introduction” to volume 3 of Oxford’s Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, pp. xxxix–liii). Nevertheless, enough material remained in the published editions to be used as evidence against Wilde by defense attorney Edward Carson in the libel suit that Wilde brought against the Marquess of Queensberry in March 1895 (see The Trials of Oscar Wilde. Regina (Wilde) v. Queensberry. v. Wilde and Taylor, ed. H. Montgomery Hyde [London: W. Hodge, 1948]). Patrick O’Malley has suggested that Carson’s (and, later on, a number of critics’) construal of Dorian Gray as a confessional text is telling of the “rhetorical slippage between Catholicism and sexual deviance” that occurred in nineteenth-century Gothic literature (Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006], p. 192). Walter Pater, “A Novel by Mr. Oscar Wilde,” in Oscar Wilde. The Critical Heritage, ed. Karl Beckson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 84. As Bristow notes in his “Introduction,” Wilde excised from Chapter XVIII of the typescript a passage that further highlighted Lord Henry’s detached approach to life: “I [Henry] have always been too much of a critic. I have been afraid of things wounding me, and have looked on” (p. xxxviii). Wilde may have chosen to do so out of concern that the moral message of his tale—which he described, in a letter to the editor of St. James’s Gazette (June 26, 1890), as “All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment”—was becoming too pronounced (The Picture of Dorian Gray, p. 358). San Juan has formulated this aspect of the relationship between Dorian and Lord Henry in a particularly evocative way: “From an allegorical standpoint, Dorian represents the experiencing self

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while Lord Henry represents the rationalizing self. Dorian acts, Lord Henry abstracts. It is possible also to discern in Lord Henry the intelligence of Wilde, in Dorian, his sensibility” (The Art of Oscar Wilde, p. 64). See, for instance, Michael Davis’s “Mind and Matter in The Picture of Dorian Gray” (Victorian Literature And Culture 41 [2013]: 547– 560), Mary C. King’s “Digging for Darwin: Bitter Wisdom in The Picture of Dorian Gray and ‘The Critic as Artist’” (Irish Studies Review 12.3 [2004]: 315–327), Heather Seagroatt’s “Hard Science, Soft Psychology, and Amorphous Art in The Picture of Dorian Gray” (Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 38.4 [1998]: 741– 759), Caroline Sumpter’s “‘No Artist Has Ethical Sympathies’: Oscar Wilde, Aesthetics, and Moral Evolution” (Victorian Literature and Culture 44 [2016]: 623–640), and Michael Wainwright’s “Oscar Wilde, the Science of Heredity, and The Picture of DorianGray” (English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 54.4 [2011]: 494–522). Seagroatt, “Hard Science, Soft Psychology, and Amorphous Art,” p. 753. Quoted in Davis, “Mind and Matter,” p. 557 (p. 121 in Wilde’s text). Christopher S. Nassaar, Into the Demon Universe: A Literary Exploration of Oscar Wilde (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 38; hereafter abbreviated DU . “In the narrative, power affirms individuality, denying any meliorating impulse towards the common good. Thus, the more Dorian exercises power, the more tyrannical and ruthless his attitude toward society inevitably becomes” (Michael Patrick Gillespie, “From Romanticism to Fascism: The Will to Power in The Picture of Dorian Gray,” in Oscar Wilde, ed. Jarlath Killeen [Dublin; Portland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 2001], p. 94). John Allen Quintus, “The Moral Implications of Oscar Wilde’s Aestheticism” (Texas Studies in Literature and Language 22.4 [1980]: 559–574), p. 563. Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in volume 4 of Oxford’s Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, p. 103; hereafter abbreviated “DL”.

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26. The “poisonous book” given to Dorian by Lord Henry is modeled in many ways on Joris-Karl Huysmans’ 1884 decadent classic À Rebours, which depicts a young and frail aristocrat seeking refuge from the vulgarity of modern cosmopolitan life in the pleasures of art and artifice. The “dread of mirrors” Wilde attributes to Huysmans’ protagonist, however, is not in fact exhibited by Des Esseintes; Wilde presumably added this detail to emphasize his own protagonist’s ageless beauty. In the manuscript, Wilde had titled the book Le Secret de Raoul —an oblique reference to the protagonist of another 1884 decadent novel, Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus—but Stoddart censored it, most likely because he did not want his readers connecting the “poisonous book” to the deviant sexuality portrayed in Rachilde’s novel. 27. Wilde, The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000), p. 585. 28. Jarlath Killeen, Gothic Literature 1825–1914 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), p. 76. 29. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 2nd ed., ed. Martin A. Danahay (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2005), p. 76. 30. Herbert George Wells, The Invisible Man, in Seven Famous Novels (Garden City, New York: Garden City Pub. Co., 1934), p. 244. 31. For a detailed account of the complicated textual and publication history of De Profundis, see Ian Small’s “Introduction” to volume 2 of Oxford’s Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, pp. 1–30. Small makes a strong case for regarding Vyvyan Holland’s 1949 text—rather than Wilde’s manuscript or Robert Ross’s 1905 or 1908 publications of De Profundis—as the fullest representation of Wilde’s intentions to rework the manuscript letter into a literary work, and I therefore quote from Holland’s text, which Small uses as copy-text for his edition. See Chapter 5 of Gagnier’s Idylls of the Marketplace for an insightful look at the ways in which Wilde’s physical condition (imprisonment) and very specific projected readership (namely, Lord Alfred Douglas) shaped the form and style of the text.

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32. Wilde, De Profundis, in volume 2 of Oxford’s Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, p. 105; hereafter abbreviated DP. 33. Critics generally view Wilde’s portrait of Jesus in De Profundis as more secular than religious because Jesus is exalted as an exceptional human individual rather than as the son and incarnation of the divine father. See, for instance, Philip K Cohen’s The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1978), p. 236, Ellmann’s Oscar Wilde, p. 483, Hilary Fraser’s Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and religion in Victorian literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 230, Kate Hext’s “Oscar Wilde and Friedrich Nietzsche: ‘Rebels in the name of beauty’” (Victoriographies 1.2 [2011]: 202–220), p. 202, Norbert Kohl’s Oscar Wilde: The works of a conformist rebel , trans. David Henry Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 284, Julia Prewitt Brown’s Cosmopolitan Criticism. Oscar Wilde’s Philosophy of Art (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1997), p. 96, and Guy Willoughby’s Art and Christhood: The Aesthetics of Oscar Wilde (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, Inc. 1993), p. 15. Ellis Hanson, however, has complicated this view by suggesting that Wilde depicts “divinity [as] realized through perfection of form” (Decadence and Catholicism [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997], pp. 238–239). Frederick Roden, in an extension of Hanson’s reading, has argued that Wilde’s portrait of Jesus reveals “the flesh’s mystical connection with Divine Presence,” thereby confirming “Wilde’s importance as a theologian who brings together body and spirit” (Same-Sex Desire, p. 155). Roden goes too far, I think, in claiming that “Divine Presence” is inherent in Wilde’s Jesus; he does not acknowledge how careful Wilde is to extricate Jesus from all that marks him as more than human in the Bible. Hanson’s reading is far subtler in this regard, since he emphasizes the fact that Jesus’s perfection (which he terms “divinity”) is equated with “its performance, its sensuous existence” (p. 239). 34. Wilde’s formula for learning to embrace the past comes remarkably close to Nietzsche’s notion of “amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not

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merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it” (“Why I am so Clever,” Ecce Homo, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Vintage, 1989], p. 10).

Part III Philosophical Saying, Literary Showing

9 A Nietzschean Wuthering Heights? Charles Nussbaum

∗ ∗ ∗

Introduction Since the publication of Wuthering Heights in 1847, its moral focus (or its apparent lack thereof ) has flummoxed readers.1 In an unsigned review that appeared in December 1848 in the Quarterly Review, Elizabeth Rigby voiced a complaint that was to become all too common: At all events there can be no interest attaching to the writer of Wuthering Heights – a novel succeeding Jane Eyre, and purporting to be written by Ellis Bell—unless it were for the sake of individual reprobation. For though there is a decided family likeness between the two, yet the aspect C. Nussbaum (B) University of Texas, Arlington, TX, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73061-1_9

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of the Jane and Rochester animals in their native state, as Catherine and Heathfield [sic], is too odiously and abominably pagan to be palatable even to the most vitiated class of English readers.2

The same year, another unnamed reviewer wrote in the Examiner (one of five reviews found in Emily Brontë’s desk after her death) that the work was “wild, confused, disjointed and improbable; and the people who make up the drama, which is tragic enough in its consequences, are savages ruder than those who lived before the days of Homer” (Allott, p. 220). A third, also unsigned review published January 15, 1848, in Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, found Wuthering Heights to be “a strange sort of book,–baffling all regular criticism;…In the midst of the reader’s perplexity the ideas predominant in his mind concerning the book are likely to be—brutal cruelty and semi-savage love. What may be the moral which the author wishes the reader to deduce from his work, it is difficult to say…” (Allott, p. 228). In more recent times, John Hewish3 judged Wuthering Heights to “manifest not an ethically valid view of life, but an artistically effective one,” and Dorothy Van Ghent4 wrote that, “Wuthering Heights so baffles and confounds the ethical sense because it is not informed with that sense at all.” Much rides on what we understand “an ethically valid view” or “the ethical sense” to be. Van Ghent seems to mean “civilized institutional” ethics or conventional morality, for she goes on to observe that the novel “is profoundly informed with the attitudes of ‘animism,’ by which the natural world—that world which is ‘other’ than and ‘outside of ’ the consciously individualized human—appears to act with an energy similar to the energies of the soul…” She also recognizes that the novel’s alleged lack of ethical sense does not amount to an endorsement of value nihilism, for the energy of which she speaks “must be given religious recognition both for its enormous fertility and its enormous potential destructiveness” (p. 165). Furthermore, she puts her finger on a principal source of the novel’s moral ambiguity. Heathcliff embodies a “daemonic archetype” that is “deeply serious in quality because of his ambivalence: he is a fertilizing energy and profoundly attractive, and at the same time horribly destructive to civilized institutionalism” (p. 164). She goes on to identify other literary incarnations of this archetype: Milton’s Satan,

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Byron’s Manfred, Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, and Thomas Mann’s Devil in Dr. Faustus. But she does not try to explain what makes these diverse figures both horribly destructive and profoundly attractive (assuming they are), nor does she explain Brontë’s apparent contempt for her weak, if conventionally ethical, characters. I shall argue that viewing the novel through a Nietzschean lens offers considerable assistance in sorting all this out. The obvious difficulty with this approach is that there is no possibility of a Nietzschean influence. If we are to rely on more than an accidental confluence of philosophical views resulting from a possible temperamental similarity, we shall have to find some common cause. The omission of the name of Goethe from Van Ghent’s list is surprising, not, as might be expected, because of his treatment of the figure of Mephistopheles in Faust, but because of the important role the daemonic (das Dämonische) plays in his thought and philosophy. As I hope to show, it was Goethe, more than any writer, or at least any other German writer,5 who influenced Emily Brontë’s novel. Goethe, however, was also a major influence on Nietzsche’s conceptions of the Übermensch, the will to power, and the Apollonian/Dionysian distinction. The application of a Nietzchean lens, I shall try to show, focuses Brontë’s dismissal of conventional morality as a critique of Christian conventional morality and helps explain more profoundly, I believe, than do Van Ghent’s observations concerning the daemonic, why it is that “Emily Brontë’s characters were criminal, but she defied the reader not to admire them” (Hewish, p. 166), a claim I endorse. This approach will also serve to highlight the novel’s substantial philosophical content.

Emily Brontë and German “Romantic Philosophy”6 His opponents have often accused him of having no faith; but he merely had not theirs, because it was too small for him…But Goethe is far from believing that he knows the Highest Being as it is…For the rest, nature and we men are all so penetrated by the Divine, that it holds us; that we live, move, and have our being in it; that we suffer and are happy under

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eternal laws; that we practice these, and they are practiced on us, whether we recognize them or not.7

Brontë’s fascination with the German culture of her time is well documented. Elizabeth Gaskell’s comment in her early biography of Emily’s sister Charlotte that “it was Emily who made all the bread for the family; and anyone passing by the kitchen door might have seen her studying German out of an open book” has been widely noted.8 Ward (“Introduction,” p. 12) characterized Wuthering Heights as “the product of romantic imagination, working probably under influences from German literature, and marvelously fused with local knowledge and a realistic power which, within its own range, has seldom been surpassed.” In the article “Les Soeurs Bronte [The Brontë Sisters],” published in La Revue de Paris in December 1899, Ward described Emily as “cette petite sœur de Spinoza et de Hoffmann” (this little sister of Spinoza and Hoffmann).9 The novel was translated into German (as Wutheringshöhe) within one year of the publication of the second edition in 1851, and by 1950, five additional German translations had appeared. Because of its themes and style, Davies tells us,10 “Wuthering Heights spoke first to a German readership.” In the Brussels of 1842, the year during which Emily resided there with Charlotte,11 says Davies (EBH , p. 50), German literary and musical culture were ascendant. A decisive influence, according to Davies (EBH , p. 52), was Beethoven, whose music Emily favored and was able to perform with precision and feeling on the Haworth Parsonage piano after her return from Brussels.12 One writer13 goes so far as to claim that Emily modeled Heathcliff on Beethoven’s persona and physical appearance. Prima facie, this seems preposterous: Beethoven may have been swarthy, but he was no Heathcliff. It may, however, be that Emily accurately discerned the daemonic element in Beethoven’s music and that his inspiration was primarily a musical one. Brontë is commonly thought to have read German Romantic14 writers in the original during her stay in Brussels, but there is no reliable evidence of this. Among German philosophers, Davies (EBH , p. 144) singles out as an influence F. W. J. von Schelling, a contemporary idealist proponent of nature philosophy, who held the panentheist view that God is in nature and nature in

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God,15 and that the cosmos was animated throughout by polar oppositions. But again, there is no evidence that Emily read Schelling or was familiar with his thought. What we do know is that Emily’s father, Patrick, subscribed for many years to Blackwood’s Magazine, which, because of the influence and contributions of Thomas Carlyle, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey, Robert Pierce Gillies, and John Gibson Lockhart, provided copious samplings of the writings of such major German figures as Goethe, Kant, and Schiller as well as critical articles on their works.16 Lockhart, for example, published penetrating reviews of Goethe’s novels Wilhelm Meister and Elective Affinities during Emily’s lifetime (Hewish, p. 126). Lockhart (who happened to have been Sir Walter Scott’s son-inlaw) became personally acquainted with Goethe during a visit to Weimar which William Blackwood, the editor of the periodical, financed. Scott himself had by that time already developed an interest in German literature and in Goethe in particular, having translated Goethe’s play Götz von Berlichingen and the ballad, Der Erlkönig, into English. A comparison between the final paragraphs of Elective Affinities 17 and Wuthering Heights suggests that Brontë probably knew Goethe’s novel, for the similarity seems too close to be coincidental18 : Thus the lovers rest side by side. Peace hovers over their burial place; gay and kindred images of angels look down at them from the vaulting; and what a happy moment it will be when, one day, they will waken together once more. I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

There are differences, to be sure, and not only differences of mood. The second passage, from Wuthering Heights, expresses the thoughts of Lockwood, the less insightful and less intimately involved of the two narrators of the story, so it could be intended ironically, whereas the first

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is presumably an expression of the authorial voice. But since the eschatology is so foreign to Goethe’s considered views, it, too, may express some ironical distancing.19 There are, however, similarities between the two works that go deeper. Both stories involve couples that are buffeted by forces, both internal and external, which they do not understand and are unable to control, and that are destructive of conventional mores. Such forces Goethe terms “daemonical.” What is perhaps his most explicit account of this notion is to be found in Part Four, Book 20 of his autobiography, Poetry and Truth, From My Life, first published in English translation during Emily’s lifetime20 : He [Goethe] supposed that he detected in nature—animate and inanimate, with soul or without soul—something which was manifested only in contradictions, and which, therefore, could not be comprehended under any idea, still less under one word. It was not godlike, for it seemed unreasonable; not human, for it had no understanding; nor devilish, for it was beneficent; nor angelic, for it often betrayed malicious pleasure. It resembled chance, for it entailed [bewies] no consequences; it was like providence, for it hinted at connection…To this principle…I gave the name Demonic, after the example of the ancients…

“Although that Demonical element can manifest itself in all corporeal and incorporeal things,” Goethe continues, and even expresses itself most remarkably in animals, yet it stands especially in the most wonderful connection with man, and forms a power which, if it be not opposed to the moral order of the world, yet crosses it, so that you may regard the one as the warp, the other as the woof…But the most fearful [fearsome] appearance of the Demonical, is when it is seen predominating in some man…a tremendous power proceeds from them…All united moral forces are of no avail against it…21

“After the example of the ancients,” says Goethe. This means that he conceives the daemonic both as a power residing in the individual, modeled on, though also departing from, the Socratic “daimonion,” an individual’s protective spirit, and as an external power of fate capable

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of crushing any individual.22 Eckermann (p. 395), in conversation with Goethe, ventures the following: “Into the idea of the Divine, by way of experiment, this active power which we name the Daemonic would not seem to enter.” To this, Goethe retorts, “My good friend, what do we know of the idea of the Divine? And what can our narrow ideas tell us of the Highest Being? Should I, like a Turk, name it with a hundred names, I should still fall short, and, in comparison with such boundless attributes, have said nothing.” Goethe also denies Eckermann’s suggestion that Mephistopheles has “daemonic traits.” “No,” he says, “Mephistopheles is much too negative a being. Among artists it is found more among musicians—less among painters. In Paganini, it shows itself in a high degree, and it is thus he produces such great effects” (p. 392). If Goethe had been musically more astute, one of his very few weak spots, he would have noted Beethoven the composer, of whom he was well aware, perhaps all too aware, along with Paganini the performer. Only the youthful Felix Mendelssohn, a favorite of the aged Goethe, was able to cajole the reluctant poet into engaging with Beethoven’s daemonic aspect by playing the first movement of the Fifth Symphony for him on the piano during a visit to Weimar in 1830, an experience Goethe found deeply disturbing.23 Here, then, we have our second hint of Goethe’s theology, which, like that of Schelling, is a Spinozistic (or perhaps, more guardedly, a Spinozaesque) Deus sive Natura (God or Nature),24 but one with a definite Leibnizian, metaphysically pluralistic flavor, indicating a resistance on Goethe’s part to full embrace of Spinoza’s metaphysical monism in order to preserve the actuality of individuals (monads, in Leibniz’s system) and their internally determined activity.25 It is also a position that may in the end fail to achieve a consistent mix of monism and pluralism. Be this as it may, Goethe’s theology is a vitalist, not a panpsychist (see note 26 below), Leibnizianism that respects Spinoza’s rejection of the legitimacy of teleological or purposive explanation: Goethe dismisses the Leibnizian doctrines of divine creation, the principle of sufficient reason, and preestablished harmony.26 Since God, according to Leibniz, was free to create any world whose description was logically consistent, a reason sufficient for his creation of the actual world was required. Otherwise, God’s choice would be capricious, which would be a flawed decision,

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and that is impossible for God. God’s sufficient reason for creation was that the actual world is the best of all possible (i.e., descriptively consistent) worlds. Leibniz’s metaphysics is, then, a theodicy, an expression he coined in his eponymous essay: any elimination from the actual world of an apparent evil, physical or moral, would diminish the goodness of the whole. Unlike the serene rationalisms of both Spinoza and Leibniz, or the panentheistic absolute idealisms of Schelling and Hegel, Goethe’s theology was a naturalistic cosmology, but one that acknowledged the presence of a daemonic surd, the amoral cosmic power that eludes the grasp of reason.27 Here, Goethe respects Kantian admonitions concerning the limits of human cognition (compare Nicholls, pp. 26, 199). Such, I shall try to show, was Emily Brontë’s implicit theology as well. Like Goethe, she seems to have been committed to a pantheistic (or perhaps a panentheistic) nature theology, and Heathcliff certainly fits Goethe’s profile of the fearsome daemonic individual. He is referred to on multiple occasions as a “devil,” a “ghoul,” an “afreet,” and throughout the novel an implacable external fate makes its presence felt. But I shall also argue for the consanguinity of this vitalist nature theology with Nietzsche’s atheistic doctrine of the will to power, as well as for the heuristic value of the Nietzschean lens for sharpening the critical moral focus of Wuthering Heights.

Emily Brontë’s Theology I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes!28

References to conventional Christian doctrine and practice in Wuthering Heights are consistently negative. The surrounding community has allowed Gimmerton Kirk to fall into serious disrepair and has shown no interest in hiring a full-time clergyman to preach there. In addition, the novel’s most overtly Christian character, the servant Joseph, is portrayed as a canting, self-righteous Pharisee.29 The novel’s

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only church service occurs during Lockwood’s first dream at Wuthering Heights. In the dream, either Lockwood, the preacher, or Joseph is to be exposed as having committed a mortal sin, the “First of the Seventy-First,” as it is described. The preacher, one Jabes Branderham,30 fixes the number of times a Christian must forgive a transgressor not at seventy-seven, as reported in Matthew 18: 21–22, but at seventy times seven, or 490, most likely a satirical bit of deliberate textual garbling, and then launches into a sermon with 490 parts. Having endured this interminable harangue, Lockwood loudly objects when Branderham proceeds to the 491st part. Lockwood incites the congregation to attack Branderham physically, whereupon the preacher promptly sets the congregation upon Lockwood, whom he now identifies as the previously designated sinner: “Thou art the man!” he intones with pointed finger. This ends in a general melee. Not a sympathetic representation of a church service, one would think. Upon waking, Lockwood notes that the thuds of the clashing cudgels in the dream were in reality the banging of a tree limb on the windowpane. Although Brontë supplies no explicit eschatology in her novel, she hints at one in this famous passage from Chapter IX, the recounting by the elder Cathy, once again of a dream, to the servant Nelly Dean: “If I were in heaven, Nelly, I should be extremely miserable.” “Because you are not fit to go there, “I answered. “All sinners would be miserable in heaven.” “But it is not for that. I dreamt, once, that that I was there.”… “I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.”31

For Cathy, the heath about Wuthering Heights, and, more generally, the earth, was heaven. And so it was, by all accounts, for Emily herself. When absent for any protracted period from the Haworth heaths, she

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suffered debilitating homesickness. But for something more explicit, we must turn to her poetry.32 We find there expressed a nature theology akin to Goethe’s modified Spinozism. In a poem written on May 16, 1841, Nature speaks to the poet: I’ve watched thee every hour; I know my mighty sway, I know my magic power To drive thy griefs away. Few hearts to mortals given On earth so wildly pine; Yet none would ask a Heaven More like this Earth than thine.

And again, on July 17, 1841, but on this occasion, the poet speaks to Nature: We would not leave our native home For any worldbeyond the Tomb. No—rather on thy kindly breast Let us be laid in lasting rest; Or waken but to share with thee A mutual immortality.

For recognition of an element like Goethe’s daemonic, consider the following poem, penned in October of 1839, which seems to express a Goethean acceptance of daemonic fate. Note particularly the italicized lines: There was a time when my cheek burned. To give such scornful fiends the lie; Ungoverned nature madly spurned The law that bade it not defy. O in the days of ardent youth I would have given my life for truth.

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For truth, for right, for liberty. I would have gladly, freely died; And now I calmly hear and see. The vain man smile, the fool deride; Though not because my heart is tame, Though not for fear, though not for shame. My soul still chafes at every tone Of selfish and self-blinded error; My breast still braves the world alone. Steeled as it ever was to terror; Only I know, however I frown, The same world will go rolling on.

Brontë’s Critique of Conventional Morality Goethe’s daemonic does shed some light on readers’ perennial fascination with Heathcliff. But it leaves much of Brontë’s axiology unexplained. Not only does she defy her readers not to admire, or at least to fail to be strongly attracted by, Heathcliff and the elder Cathy, but she also defies them to admire the conventionally morally admirable Edgar Linton. Notable, indeed shocking, are Cathy’s contemptuous dying words, cruelly spoken to her husband in Chapter XII: “Ah! you are come, are you, Edgar Linton?” she said, with angry animation. “You are one of the those things that are ever found when least wanted, and when you are wanted, never!”… I don’t want you, Edgar; I’m past wanting you. Return to your books. I’m glad you possess a consolation, for all you had in me is gone.”

And earlier, during a confrontation between Heathcliff and Edgar, Cathy locks the door to prevent Edgar from summoning the aid of his footmen and flings the key into the fire (Chapter XI): “Fair means!” she said, in answer to her husband’s look of angry surprise. “If you have not the courage to attack him, make an apology, or allow

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yourself to be beaten. It will correct you of feigning more valour than you possess.”… “Oh, heavens! In old days this would win you knighthood!” exclaimed Mrs. Linton. “We are vanquished! we [sic] are vanquished! Heathcliff would as soon lift a finger at you as the king would march his army against a colony of mice. Cheer up, you shan’t be hurt! Your type is not a lamb, it’s a sucking leveret.”

Not just contemptuous, Cathy is angry. But why? What has the eversolicitous Edgar done? In a strange moral inversion, Edgar has become an agent of betrayal, having induced Cathy with blandishments of wealth and comfort to betray herself to herself, to sin against herself. And by sinning against herself, she has sinned against the Divine, in particular, the daemonic power that manifests itself within her, that determines her destiny. Whatever may be said regarding Heathcliff ’s merciless cruelty, he has remained, in one respect, pious: he has remained faithful to himself, to Cathy, and to the God of Brontë’s nature theology, the Spinozainspired, naturalistic God of Goethe, if not the God of Christianity. This, I think, is the significance of Cathy’s celebrated, if metaphysically puzzling, peroration in Chapter IX: My love for Linton is like foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff—he’s always, always in my mind—not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself—but as my own being…

Cathy and Heathcliff are identical because the Divine is self-identical, and the eternal daemonic power animating them is, as Goethe suggests, an aspect of the Divine, the woof that crosses its warp. By sinning against herself, she has sinned against Heathcliff and sinned against God/Nature. “Kiss me again;” Heathcliff implores Cathy on her deathbed, “and do not let me see your eyes! I can forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer—but yours! How can I?”

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More contemptuous still is Brontë’s presentation of the “puling chicken” (Chapter XX) Linton Heathcliff, Heathcliff ’s son by vengeful marriage to Edgar’s sister Isabella. Heathcliff is using Linton as bait to lure and then entrap the younger Cathy into marriage to Linton in order to usurp the dying Edgar’s property (Chapter XXVII): Linton had sunk prostrate again in another paroxysm of helpless fear, caused by his father’s glance towards him, I suppose: There was nothing else to produce such humiliation. He made several efforts to obey, but his little strength was annihilated for the time, and he fell back again with a moan. Mr. Heathcliff advanced, and lifted him to lean against a ridge of turf. “Now,” he said with curbed ferocity, “I’m getting angry—and if you don’t command that paltry spirit of yours—Damn you! Get up, directly!”

To be sure, this is Heathcliff ’s attitude, not necessarily that of Brontë herself. But recall Hewish’s claim, which I had endorsed, that she defies the reader not to admire him, or at least not to be somehow attracted to him. Moreover, there is evidence that Brontë admired strength and held weakness, and most especially mendacious, self-deceptive weakness, in contempt, in others, but most of all in herself. Consider stanzas from two poems, the first written January 2, 1846, the second May 17, 1837: No coward soul is mine No trembler in the world’s storm-trouble sphere I see Heaven’s glories shine And faith shines equal arming me from Fear. ‘Twas grief enough to think mankind All hollow, servile, insincere; But worse to trust my own mind And find the same corruption there.

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Wuthering Heights and Nietzsche’s Inversion of Values Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws. [Z , Second Part, 230]

Brontë seems to have been aware of the metaphysical implications of her theological commitments. The same divine nature manifests itself, albeit not in the daemonic mode, in Edgar and Linton. In a poem dated November 14, 1839, eight years before the publication of Wuthering Heights, she asks: Do I despise the timid deer Because his limbs are fleet with fear? Or would I mock the wolf ’s death-howl Because his form is gaunt and foul? Or hear with joy the leveret’s cry Because it cannot bravely die?’

To these questions, the poet answers a resounding “No!” The leveret, recall, was Cathy’s contemptible analogue for poor Edgar. Every existent, says Spinoza, tends to persist in its being, whatever it is, and can do no other. Brontë’s temperamental tendency was to despise the timid deer, to mock the foul wolf ’s death howl, to hear with joy the death-cry of the cowardly leveret. But her theology puts pressure on this tendency, and she seems to have struggled against it. Davies (EBH , 127) proposes that Brontë not only harbored a “constitutional prejudice in favor of the strong (like herself ) against the weak” but that this was a “tendency she sought to conquer, with considerable, though perhaps imperfect success.” How are we to understand this attempt at self-conquest? Was it an attempt to extirpate? The axiology of Wuthering Heights would suggest not. But she may have tried to overcome it, that is, to self-overcome in the Nietzschean way. If this is a tenable interpretation, it is significant, because self-overcoming does not

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bring about extirpation, but a kind of sublimation: the canalization of the transcended defect to produce something better, because stronger. It is surprising how little attention early, harshly critical reviewers paid to the hopeful conclusion of the novel, hopeful because of the burgeoning relationship of love and respect between Hareton, the hated Hindley’s son whom Heathcliff did everything in his power to degrade, but failed to degrade, and the younger Cathy. The presence of the elder Cathy’s fire in the younger Cathy is something Brontë makes quite clear. Not so obvious is Hareton’s core strength. Astoundingly, it is Hareton, and Hareton alone, who genuinely mourns Heathcliff ’s death, weeping bitter tears of grief over his dead body. Why does Brontë include such an improbable scene, given Heathcliff ’s consistently execrable usage during Hareton’s childhood and youth? The answer, or at least an answer, is that this is strength responding to strength, a sort of recognition of the noble by the noble, of the “good,” in Nietzsche’s aristocratic sense, by the “good.” Heathcliff ’s grudging regard for Hareton emerges when, in Chapter XXI, he reflects aloud, “I’ve had a pleasure in him. He has satisfied my expectations. If he were a born fool I should not enjoy it half so much. But he’s no fool; and I can sympathize with all his feelings, having felt them myself.” Hareton, in turn, will not abide denigration of Heathcliff (Chapter XXXIII): He said he wouldn’t suffer a word to be uttered to him, in [Heathcliff ’s] disparagement; if he were the devil, it didn’t signify; he would stand by him; and he’d rather she [younger Cathy] would abuse himself, as she used to, than begin on Mr. Heathcliff… [Catherine] comprehended that Earnshaw [Hareton] took the master’s reputation home to himself, and was attached by ties stronger than reason could break—chains forged by habit, which it would be cruel to attempt to loosen.

But, crucially, Hareton can also be said to be good from a Christian standpoint: gentle, respectful, and forbearing, once he comes to trust the younger Cathy. But he is not mendaciously, self-deceptively good: he is not good because he lacks claws: in Chapter XXXIV, Hareton “bemoans

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[the dead Heathcliff ] with that strong grief which springs naturally from a generous heart, though it be tough as tempered steel.” These unspoken thoughts are presented as those of Nelly Dean, but they pretty clearly are thoughts endorsed by Brontë. How Nietzschean to the core: a generous heart tough as tempered steel! Much tends to be made, and rightly so, of the influence of Schopenhauer on Nietzsche. But the influence of Goethe is as great or even greater, particularly in light of Nietzsche’s later repudiation of Schopenhauer’s world-weariness. Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, Nietzsche opined, was “the best German book there is,”33 and Nietzsche never ceased to regard Goethe as the leading German exemplar of his ideals.34 (One must always leave space for Napoleon and Caesar.) Like Goethe, Nietzsche held Spinoza in high esteem. In an often-quoted letter to his friend Franz Overbeck dated July 30, 1881, he wrote: “I am amazed, utterly enchanted! I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza…Not only is his over-all tendency like mine— namely to make knowledge the most powerful affect—but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself…he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world-order, the unegoistic, and evil…In summa: my lonesomeness [Einsamkeit ]…is now at least a twosomeness [Zweisamkeit ].”35 But, unlike Goethe, Nietzsche appears not to have studied Spinoza’s original Latin texts (though, of course, he could have). He derived his Spinoza from Kuno Fischer’s at the time widely read History of Modern Philosophy, a work Nietzsche owned and on which he took copious notes.36 Fischer’s Spinoza is not quite Spinoza himself. For example, Fischer, as Nietzsche read him, interpreted Spinoza’s conatus, the tendency of an individual thing to persist in its being, as a power of self-preservation. As Fischer paraphrases Spinoza: “Since each thing can only be destroyed externally, it is clear that no thing will be destroyed by means of its own capacity. Rather, since it is opposed to the destructive cause, it strives with all power [mit aller Kraft strebt ] to persist in its being.”37 This led Nietzsche to charge Spinoza with “inconsistency”: Spinoza’s conatus, he claims, is the expression of an “instinct of selfpreservation,” a bit of teleology smuggled into Spinoza’s system, which is in general admirably teleology-free. For Nietzsche, self-preservation is

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merely an “indirect and most frequent result” of the will to power that is life itself.38 The will to power, that is to say, does not aim at the selfpreservation of the individual, or at anything. Life is discharge of power and nothing else. I do not, however, see Fischer interpreting Spinoza to be saying that each thing strives for a continual expansion of power, as Sommer (pp. 172–173) and Wollenberg (p. 632n72) apparently do. Our present concerns, to retrieve the argumentative thread, are not primarily metaphysical, but axiological, and our focus now will shift to Nietzsche’s account of value inversion in On the Genealogy of Morals.39 As we know, in the first of the three essays that comprise the work (“Good and Evil,” “Good and Bad”), Nietzsche proposes the radical hypothesis that the distinction between good and evil was the product of a diabolical plot, an act of spiritual revenge (or perhaps more positively, as a student once suggested to me, a resourceful guerilla action) on the part of an oppressed people, the ancient Jews, the “priestly people,” the “stiff-necked people,” who suffered under the Roman yoke. The oppressed presented their oppressors with a Trojan horse, namely Christianity, which the oppressors internalized and which then destroyed them from the inside by inverting their aristocratic value hierarchy of good vs. bad to derive good vs. evil, thereby weakening them by poisoning them spiritually. The aristocratic good (strong) became the Christian evil, while the aristocratic bad (weak) became the Christian good. This story is familiar enough to obviate any need for detailed explication. Nietzsche’s inversion of values may be represented graphically thus (see Fig. 9.1). By drawing parallel lines from corner to corner it is possible to generate from this figure what might be termed a Nietzschean square of value opposition (see Fig. 9.2). On this square of value opposition, the diagonally opposed corners do not, as with the logical square of opposition, represent incompatible contradictories, but incommensurable moral values that are, nonetheless, affine regarding strength: upper left and lower right are strong, lower left and upper right are weak. Moreover, the square represents a continuum of valuations, not, as with the logical square, discrete truth values. Movement up the left side represents increase of strength, as does movement down the right side. Movement from right to left across the top edge

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Aristocratic (gut) Good

Bad (schlecht)

Christian (gut) Good

Evil (böse)

Fig. 9.1 The Nietzschean Value Inversion

Good

Good

Bad

Evil

Fig. 9.2 The Nietzschean Square of Value Opposition

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also represents an increase of strength, as does movement from left to right along the bottom edge. The two orthogonal diagonals even suggest Goethe’s warp and woof of Nature. Interpreting the square thus as a two-dimensional graph, it divides symmetrically into four equal quadrants, which may be regarded as attractors. The upper left and lower right quadrants are attractors of strength, lower left and upper right are attractors of weakness. All of the principal characters, with the exceptions of Lockwood and Nelly Dean who have special status as narrators, can be assigned locations on this graph, depending on their relations to the various attractors, their “elective affinities.” Exactly where various characters fall cannot be precisely determined: this is a matter of considered judgment and reflective equilibrium. But as such, these determinations are not capricious: they must accord with intuition. It is evident (or at least eminently plausible) that the elder Cathy and Heathcliff belong, respectively, in the upper left and lower right quadrants, whereas Linton, Hindley, Edgar, Isabella, and Joseph belong in the lower left and upper right quadrants. But where, exactly? And, perhaps most crucially, where do Hareton and the younger Cathy belong? In making these judgments, a number of factors must be taken into consideration. First, how strong or weak is the character, as judged according to the Nietzschean aristocratic value hierarchy? But second, to what extent does a character combine, through a Nietzschean self-overcoming, aristocratic strength with what might be thought of as Christian love and forbearance, and to what extent does a character avoid the Nietzschean vice of ressentiment exemplified by Joseph? It would be a gross, if all too common, misunderstanding to take Nietzsche to be advocating a return to the world of Homeric values. That is neither possible nor desirable. Still less does he recommend Christian mendacity. In GM Nietzsche presents Christianity as a disease of Western civilization, but he presents it as an opportunity for Western humanity to overcome itself, to become stronger and better than it was, as an opportunity for the exercise of the will to power.40 With such considerations in mind, we may locate the principal characters as represented in Fig. 9.3.

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Good

Weak

Strong Young Cathy Hareton

Good Edgar

Isabella

Elder Cathy

Strong Joseph

Weak

Strong

Weak

Hindley Heathcliff

Linton

Bad

Weak

Strong

Evil

Fig. 9.3 Placement of Characters on the Square of Value Opposition

The elder Cathy is in the upper left quadrant, Heathcliff in the lower right: his brutal and unforgiving nature earns him this location. Both are located near the Good/Evil diagonal. Linton and Hindley are located in the lower-left quadrant, while Edgar, Isabella, and Joseph are located in the upper right, all as shown. They are clustered around the Good/Bad diagonal. Of these seven, Isabella and Linton come out weakest, but differently valenced. In addition to being weak, the perfidious Linton is also gratuitously cruel and thus, especially contemptible. We allow for the superior status of Hareton and the younger Cathy by locating them in the upper left-hand quadrant, but closer to the Christian good than is the elder Cathy, to indicate the admixture of Christian love approved by Brontë, but in a higher vertical position in this quadrant than the elder Cathy, signifying even greater strength. On this construal, the younger Cathy emerges as the character most superior from a Nietzschean standpoint, and from Brontë’s as well, a result that I believe accords with

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intuition. Recall that it is her gentle but firm ministrations that gradually lead the understandably wary Hareton to lower his guard and submit to the potentially humiliating, but civilizing influence of instruction in literacy. Most readers probably find it satisfying that in the end, the two inherit both estates, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, polar locations inanimate but so emotionally charged that they almost play the roles of living characters in the novel. None of the characters, however, is uniformly strong or weak. Each is an amalgam of elective affinities based on the four forces of attraction represented on the Nietzschean square of value opposition. And this, I believe we feel, is how it should be. Acknowledgements Thanks to Stephen Hiltz and Martha Nussbaum for helpful comments and criticisms. This article is dedicated to the memory of my mother, who adored Goethe.

Notes 1. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights: An Authoritative Text, with Essays in Criticism, Second Edition, ed. W. Sale (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1847/1972). 2. In Miriam Allott, The Brontës: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1974), p. 111. 3. John Hewish, Emily Brontë: A Critical and Biographical Study (London: Macmillan/St. Martin’s Press, 1969), p. 151. 4. Dorothy Van Ghent, “On Wuthering Heights,” in The English Novel: Form and Function (New York: Rinehart & Company. Inc., 1953, pp. 153–170), p. 164. 5. A possible competitor is E. T. A. Hoffmann, with whom Brontë was almost certainly familiar and whose story “The Deed of Entail” bears some superficial resemblances to Wuthering Heights (see Hewish, pp. 126–128). Compare Mary Augusta Ward, “Introduction to Wuthering Heights,” (Digireads.com Publishing, 1900/2015, pp. 3– 20), hereinafter “Introduction,” p. 18: “For all her crudity and inexperience, [Brontë] is in the end with Goethe, rather than with

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8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

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Hoffmann, and thereby with all that is sane, strong, and living in literature”. This is Brontë scholar Stevie Davies’ characterization. See Davies, Emily Brontë: Heretic (London: The Women’s Press, 1994), p. 57; hereinafter abbreviated EBH . Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, trans. J. Oxenford, ed. J. K. Moorhead (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1836– 1848/1930), Mon. February 28, 1831, a soliloquy elided in the J. K. Moorhead edition of the Oxenford translation. Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (New York: Penguin Books, 1857/1985), p. 159. See the entry under Hoffmann on theBrontes.net/reading, p. 833. Stevie Davies, Emily Brontë (Horndon, UK: Northcote House Publishers, Ltd. 2006), p. 94; hereinafter abbreviated EB. An experience rendered fictionally by Charlotte in her novel Villette. See EBH , p. 52: “Emily’s markings of the table of contents [of her eight-volume anthology of piano music] record her preference for Beethoven”. Robert K. Wallace, Emily Brontë, and Beethoven: Romantic Equilibrium in Fiction and Music (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1986). I do not differentiate here between early German Romanticism (Frühromantik, Sturm und Drang ), its later incarnations, or the Weimar Classicism of Goethe and Schiller, all of which may be broadly termed “German Romantic”. Pantheism identifies God with the world. Panentheism holds the world to be encompassed by God and God to be present (immanent) in the world. Between the years 1750 and 1860, Goethe is by far the German writer most cited in all British literary magazines of the period, with 697 references. His closest competitor is Schiller, with 524. See B. Morgan and A. R. Hohlfeld, German Literature in British Magazines 1750–1860 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1949), p. 111. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Elective Affinities, trans. E. Mayer and L. Bogan (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1809/1963).

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18. Noted by Inga-Stina Ewbank, Their Proper Sphere: A Study of the Brontë Sisters as Early-Victorian Female Novelists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 111. 19. See Goethe to Eckermann (p. 45): “This preoccupation with immortality is for people of rank, and especially ladies, who have nothing to do. But an able man, who has something regular to do here, and must toil and struggle and produce day by day, leaves the future world to itself, and is active and useful in this. Thoughts about immortality are also good for those who have not been very successful here…” This last sentence is unmistakably Nietzschean. 20. Ward (“Introduction,” p. 8) tells us that in 1839, Blackwood’s published “a long section, excellently rendered, from Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth]. In that year Emily Brontë was alone with her father and aunt at Haworth… ‘Blackwood’ came as usual, and one may surely imagine the long, thin girl bending in the firelight over these pages from Goethe…nourishing from them the vivid and masterly intelligence which eight years later produced ‘Wuthering Heights.’”. 21. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Autobiography of Goethe: Truth and Poetry [sic], From My Life, Vol. I, Books I–XII, trans. J. Oxenford. (London: George Bell and Sons, 1811–1833/1881). Autobiography of Goethe: Truth and Poetry [sic], From My Life, Books XI–XX, ed. P. Godwin, various translators (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1811– 1833/1847), Fourth Part, pp. 105–106, translation modified. 22. See Angus Nicholls, Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic: After the Ancients (New York: Camden House, 2006), p. 158 and surrounding discussion. 23. Alessandra Comini, The Changing Image of Beethoven (New York: Rizzoli, 1987), p. 135. 24. See Goethe’s autobiography, Part Three, Book Fourteen: “This mind, which worked upon me so decisively and was destined to affect so deeply my whole mode of thinking, was SPINOZA” (p. 170). See also Goethe’s letters to the philosopher F. H. Jacobi, a fierce critic of Spinoza, of June 9, 1785, and May 5, 1786: “He [Spinoza] proves not the existence of God, but rather that existence is God.” “I cling more and more to the devotion of this ‘atheist’,”

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quoted in Julie D. Prandi,“Dare to be Happy!”: A Study of Goethe’s Ethics (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc., 1993), p. 19. See Nicholls (p. 140): “Goethe’s preoccupation with the destinies of individuals made it difficult for him completely to reconcile himself to Spinoza’s assertion that humans have little freedom in the face of God/Nature’s divine order”. Since the Leibnizian monads, all of which are minds of widely differing capacities, are “windowless” and do not interact perceptually or in any other way, the sequence and degree of accuracy of their representations are built into them or “pre-established” by God upon creation. Because all existents are monads and all monads are minds, Leibniz’s monadology is a panpsychism. Vitalism, on the other hand, holds all existents to be living, but not necessarily representing, entitles. Spinoza would dismiss any such category of the incomprehensible. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, hereinafter abbreviated Z , trans. W. Kaufmann, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. W. Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1891/1954), pp. 112–439, First Part, p. 125. Compare Davies (EB, 109): “As sole representative of the Christian Deity in Wuthering Heights, Joseph stands in for the Almighty and comes in for mockery all round”. Perhaps based on the Reverend Jabez Bunting, a prominent fire-andbrimstone Methodist minister of the time, with whom Brontë was familiar. Perhaps an allusion to the casting out of Lucifer? Emily Brontë, The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Brontë, ed. C. W. Hatfield (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Wanderer und Sein Schatten, in Werke in Drei Bänden (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1880/1966), I, sec. 109, 921 (standard translation). In a note written in preparation for his Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche asserts the following: “Goethe is exemplary: the impetuous naturalism which gradually becomes severe dignity. As a stylized human being, he reached a higher level than any other German ever

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did. Now, one is so bigoted as to reproach him therefore and even to censure his becoming old. One should read Eckermann and ask oneself whether any human being in Germany ever got so far in noble form,” quoted in Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Third Edition (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), p. 155. Quoted in Kaufmann, p. 140. Andreas Sommer, “Nietzsche’s Readings on Spinoza: A Contextualist Study, Particularly on the Reception of Kuno Fischer,” The Journal of Nietzsche Studies (2012): 43, 2, 156–184, p. 158. David Wollenberg, “Nietzsche, Spinoza, and the Moral Affects,” Journal of the History of Philosophy (2013): 51, 4, 617–649, pp. 621–623. According to Sommer, p. 158, Nietzsche’s personal notebooks document his return of a new edition of Spinoza’s Ethica to his bookseller on July 13, 1875. Kuno Fischer, Spinozas Leben, Werke, und Lehre, Vierte neu bearbeitete Auflage (London: FB&c Ltd., 1898/2017), p. 430, translation and emphasis mine. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1886/1966), sec. 13, p. 21. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingsdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1888/1969); hereinafter abbreviated as GM . See Nietzsche (GM I, sec. 16): “today there is perhaps no more decisive mark of a ‘higher nature,’ a more spiritual nature, than being divided in this sense and a genuine battleground of these opposed values [‘good and bad,’ ‘good and evil’].” Compare also Goethe’s journal entry, made on May 27, 1787, in Naples during his Italian journey: “I must also say, and I hold it to be true, that humanity will in the end be victorious, but I fear that at the same time the world will be a great hospital and one human being will be the nurse of another.” J. W. von Goethe, Goethes Werke: Festausgabe (18 Bände) (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1926), 17, p. 34 (my translation).

10 Wordsworth’s Literary Sublime Katherine Elkins

William Empson has famously argued that “Tintern Abbey” is a muddle, and this same muddle is evident in the many different critical approaches to the poet. Does Wordsworth herald the triumph of an egotistical sublime, or an impersonal one? Does he write about history, or evade it? Is his lens thoroughly ideological, or representative of unmediated vision? The fact that critics have argued so many opposing viewpoints suggests it’s time to reconsider just what this muddle is. Perhaps the best place to start is with the muddle the poem seems to make of the philosophical sublime. Indeed, within the single poem, one finds multiple and very different positions. A philosopher could be forgiven for believing the poet to be a very poor philosopher indeed. But what if the muddle is the point? What if Wordsworth’s poem represents a more complex representation of a literary sublime, one that is mediated, K. Elkins (B) Kenyon College, Gambier, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73061-1_10

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multifaceted, and that tries to account for multiple perspectives? This essay will try to make sense of the muddle by building on recent scholarship that rethinks Wordsworth’s sublime,1 his relation to women,2 and his emphasis on materiality.3 There are two obvious places to begin an examination of Wordsworth’s sublime, one described as a youthful experience and the other as a more mature one. The first description of a youthful experience of nature invokes both a “mountain,” “and “sounding cataract” (78–80), but it seems to be more Burke than Kant in highlighting the negative aspects of the experience. Wordsworth writes, the sound “haunt[ed] me like a passion,” (79) and the wood appeared “deep and gloomy” (80). There is no moment of transcendence, for the young man flies “from something that he dreads” (73) rather than standing in awe-inspired wonder. In this youthful sublime, the imagination—so integral to Kant’s experience of the sublime—is nowhere to be found. “Their colours and their forms,” Wordsworth insists, “had no need of a remoter charm, / By thought supplied, nor any interest/ Unborrowed from the eye” (81–85). Kant’s more ideal experience,4 in which cognition helps overcome a sense of unease or fear, is absent. There is a second depiction of the sublime, however—one that starts with an experience of revelation and lightness, and this depiction is the one that many have described as the more Kantian. It allows the speaker to see “into the life of things” (50) as the “weight of all this unintelligible world is lightened” (42) Here, the self is able to see into the life of things precisely because the material “weight” of the world—that very embodied and highly perceptual experience he had as a youth—has been lifted. Rather, the empirical, perceptual experience of nature typified by the youthful experience is almost entirely sublimated or transcended. This experience, significantly, depends on a long absence from the site. “These beauteous forms,” he writes, “through a long absence” (23–4) produce the effect. With the removal from the initial perception and the fading of the image in memory,5 the speaker can now access “gleams of half-extinguished thought ” and “recognitions dim and faint” (60–1, my emphasis). Distance, absence, and the fading of memory allow the transference from the particular to the general by effecting a passage of the experience “even into [his] purer mind” (30) through becoming “faint.”

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This sublime depends on an experience of nature that is separated by a temporal gap and perhaps even, a spatial separation—the experience seems to take place (if it can even be determined to take place at a concrete time and place) “mid the din of towns and cities.” At first glance, it would be easy to argue that the more mature Wordsworth is comparing an early, youthful Burkean sublime with a far more ideal model along Kantian lines. Still, notice how much hesitancy surrounds this sublime, as the speaker qualifies the description with words like “nor less” and “may” (36–7). Later in the poem, a similar “weightlessness” permeates the descriptions of the natural scenes that create this sense of sublime. It can be found “in the light of setting suns, / And the round ocean and the living air, / And the blue sky, and in the mind of man” (99–101). Rather than an encounter with the materiality of nature, as in the earlier Burkean rendition, these are experiences of nature in which the material world disappears into “light” and “air,” color, and roundness. One could argue that this sublime experience found in the “mind of man” partakes of idealism. But significantly, the “mind of man” is equated with all the weightlessness of light, air, and color. This sublime is so dematerialized as to emphasize neither a typical content (as in Burke’s empirical material) nor the container (as in Kant’s emphasis on ideal form) but a kind of contentless and containerless light (sun), color (blue), and air (sky); a quality of roundness, rather than the round shape itself invoked. These terms are ones Kant explicitly excludes from his sublime, which is attributable to form, but never to aspects of qualitative perceptual experience, or what we would term qualia. By focusing on an experience that always seems to occur elsewhere and offsite, this second Wordsworthian sublime is already well on the way to a modernist aesthetic whose cornerstones are memory, repetition, absence, and the enchantment of the everyday.6 There is an interrogation of philosophical theories in light of a personal experience that qualifies the philosophical concept. Whose sublime do we find in Wordsworth’s poem? Both Burke’s and Kant’s, but subtly reworked into Wordsworth’s focus on the qualitative structure of experience. Furthermore, these qualia might be imagined—as in the roundness of the ocean—or perceived—as in the blueness of the sky—anywhere and

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everywhere. They are not just ethereal images, but quotidian—blue sky, setting suns, and a roundness that one might experience on a daily basis even, one imagines, in the city. When Wordsworth adds an “s” to “setting suns,” he also transfers it from the singular to the everyday. Wordsworth replaces the terror of the sublime—a youthful experience that lacks all mental mediation and is imbued with dread—with a sublime that has been almost dematerialized by memory into a palimpsest of quotidian experiences. In the case of Kant’s philosophical sublime, the phenomenon is precisely what cannot be found solely in memory, imagination, or daily, repetitive, ordinary experiences, and yet this is precisely the direction in which Wordsworth’s sublime takes us. We might say that what Wordsworth does, then, is to extend the philosophical sublime to the everyday experiences which his poetry seeks to capture. Repetition, coupled with revision, seems to be the modus operandi of his engagement with these thinkers as he repeats them while modifying them to fit individual experience. It is also, as we shall see in a moment, the mode with which the speaker himself engages with nature. Perhaps this is why, as Sperry so aptly notes, the sublime appears to be a memory or even, perhaps, a memory of a memory.7 Wordsworth is turning his philosophical precursors into a memory associated with youth (Burke) or an everyday experience that turns the singular aweinspiring event (Kant) into the quotidian that, like a memory of a memory, lacks clear temporal and spatial dimensions. If this qualitative sublime is perhaps a bit too safely ensconced in the mind, it is in contrast to the youthful experience in which the material experience of nature is all. The poem opens, however, with yet another sublime that combines, again imperfectly, elements of the Burkean and the Kantian. The empirical creation of an impression leads to a kind of mental reflection. The “wild secluded scene” “impress[es] thoughts of more deep seclusion” (6– 7). Notice the echo of the word “secluded” in the thoughts of “seclusion.” The scene produces thoughts that mirror the physical impression. Sensibility leads to matching sense. Different from the dread of the youthful experience or the a-temporal sublime removed from the natural scene,

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this mediated vision connects a distant viewer to a natural scene in a way that relies on absence and imperfect connection. Connection is mirrored in the structure of the experience, which combines the empirical perception of the experience with the mental thoughts that it produces. Grammatically, the “lofty cliffs” that inspire these thoughts are the subject of two actions. The first is the creation of the mental “impression.” The second is the connection of “The landscape with the quiet of the sky” (8). The cliffs therefore connect doubly: the scene to the viewer, and the two seemingly separated elements of land and sky. The cliffs thus serve like a hyphen connecting separate elements, highlighting their relationality even as the elements remain separate in their distinct identities. This “connecting” function works even analogically, in the sense that ground and sky mirror the connection between empirical natural impression (ground) and the less material “thoughts” (sky). This kind of relational linking is also visible in the pastoral scene that follows. The “cottage-ground” and “orchard-tufts” are hyphenated identities. The first term invokes human labor in the cottage and the orchard, the second, the natural scene that alters the vision by contextualizing it within its surroundings. The cottage is connected to its ground; the orchard is, by contrast, etherealized into “tufts” by its place in a larger panorama. The self, rather than merging with the grandeur of nature, is a part of a world in which different elements are connected relationally without allowing for full integration or unity. This opening sublime, what I am calling a literary sublime, represents nature in a way that mediates the sublime with a clear spatial and temporal distance.8 The opening vision encompasses both sense and imagination, perception and memory, here and not here, the timely and the timeless. The threat of nature remains, attenuated, since the natural elements threaten to encroach upon or undo human labor: the cottage is connected to but not unified with its ground; the carefully tended orchard becomes, in the scheme of the entire visual pattern, less differentiated as humanly made: “tufts.” Nature is barely domesticated; the human has only barely disturbed the natural. Paul Fry has eloquently argued that this pastoral shows the indifference of nature.9 I would argue that we still see human labor even if only

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indirectly represented in effects. Still, it is true that these effects barely impress upon nature, whereas nature quite forcefully impresses upon the human. It is an unequal relationship without a doubt. The hermit has his cave, the wreath of human-made smoke appears almost like another dark tree trunk, and the hedgerows barely show a human hand. Any attempt to domesticate nature is to little effect and the difference between the two is barely maintained. Fry is right to notice that nature tends to create undifferentiation, and human labor works against such a tendency but cannot halt, let alone eradicate it. Wordsworth’s poem suggests that the attempt to live secluded in nature leads only to the continual effacement and eradication of any attempt to domesticate it. Hedgerows quickly disappear, and the home is subsumed by greenery. It may be a more realistic pastoral,10 but it is realistic for a purpose: to show the kind of effacement of the human that quickly takes place if one chooses to live in a secluded, isolated state in nature.11 This is the pastoral without sociability between selves or full integration between nature and human. Critics have debated whether a key material element is missing in the scene: the human labor of the local charcoal producers surrounding the abbey.12 But critics have been less inclined to note that the ideal sublime is missing as well in the scenes that produce the only direct experience of nature in the present. Where are the lofty mountains and the crashing cataracts? The most we have are “these steep and lofty cliffs” (5) that hardly portray the “vastness” of Kant’s sublime. The auditory impression is also less than sublime. Burke includes loudness in his definition, but Wordsworth evokes these sounds as a “Soft inland murmur” (4). The waters heard are “rolling from their mountain springs” (3). Indeed, so much in this pastoral is understood indirectly, whether it be the barely domesticating human labor or the sublime mountains that are heard only at a distance. Instead, the emphasis seems to be on a proximity that implies a kind of relational connection, but not sublimation or integration. This is true on a figural level, as well. The springs also invoke a cultural source of poetry—those watery fountains that early lyric poets like Horace cite as the source of all poetry. Wordsworth’s choice of what to represent is therefore mediated by an earlier cultural aesthetics of nature. Hardly an unmediated experience, this vision shows

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that mediation is at work in countless ways including through cultural mediation. To all of these forms of relationality, we should add the temporal. As he leaves for the city and returns, the speaker is afforded a pleasure from the temporal mediation that informs his sense of absence and return. In fact, the speaker of the poem depends on a singular spatial and temporal location that diverges quite clearly from the more abstract a-temporal sublime discussed earlier. How different those philosophical lines examined earlier from the bold assertion of being here now: “here I stand” (64). Nothing could be more concrete than the description of the opening lines in which he describes standing in a particular location at a particular date.13 The stress on time is so pronounced that one could almost fault Wordsworth with the opening lines that repeat “again” so often. In contrast to a sublime that would privilege unmediated vision or impersonal a-temporal experience, this revision emphasizes the experience of repetition as integral. The speaker’s experience of nature is never entirely immersive except as a youth, but is always mediated by temporal, spatial, and conceptual distance. So far we have examined three experiences of nature: the wilding of youth, the highly a-temporal “memory of a memory,” and a compounded, secluded, and isolating experience that is a mediated pastoral. What unites these lyrical reflections, however, is the position of the speaker. Each experience is filtered through temporal and physical differences whether from maturity, spatial dislocation in the city, or from a visual/temporal distance in the now that separates the viewer from viewed. The Wordsworthian pastoral, however, is unique in its complex, multifaceted “sublime” that includes elements of Burke’s empirical stress on perception, elements of Kant’s emphasis on the mind, and elements of personal experience. If Wordsworth repeats earlier sublimes, then, he repeats them by compounding in both senses of the world—through combining distinct elements into a new admixture, and by incorporating repetition in time to significantly change the value of the total experience. There is pleasure in repetition—the repetition (both linguistically and experientially) that begins the poem and the repetition that the poet

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imagines extending into the future. With repetition and return, the vision provides a “present pleasure” (65) that is absent from the “coarser pleasures” (75) of youth—a youth who evades “the thing he loved” (74). Wordsworth writes: “While here I stand, not only with the sense of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts/ That in this moment there is life and food for future years” (64–7). Even more striking is the degree to which the present pleasure is predicated on a temporal foresight—a hope that the experience will continue to bring pleasure in the future and thus extend beyond the boundaries of the present experience. The pleasure is also linked to a concrete spatial experience “while here I stand” that exhibits duration—spanning the past “recognitions dim and faint,” the “present pleasure,” and the conviction that “this moment” will extend to “future years.” Wordsworth’s literary sublime thus offers a consolation both in time and of time.14 De Man focuses on the temporal sense of being as a lack.15 In Derridean terms, we might say that there is something in the experience of being present that begs supplementarity.16 But one might also suggest that this kind of extension and recombination is precisely what allows the speaker to experience the present moment, the “here and now” sublimely.17 It allows him to align his personal experience with his precursors and create his own temporal perspective that is unique. The stress in Wordsworth is in acknowledging this process of repetition and return. Wordsworth’s revision of the earlier sublimes finds consolation in a very different and fragmented kind of unity—the unity that comes with perceiving an event after a long absence such that there is some sense of continuity between past and present selves, but not a total unity. It is a compounded vision not dissimilar from the compounded pastoral that opens the poem. This revision is also similar to his “sublime” sunsets—a singularity made multiple through addition and compounding. Wordsworth may hesitantly toy with the notion of a sublime experience that suggests a-temporality, but the poem is equally— if not more—about this other re-vision. Return and repetition—the two elements that ground the concrete experience of the poem—are only possible with continued life, presence, and vision. Part of the pleasure in the present moment is in the anticipation that it will repeat for many

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years to come. Dreams of immortality are replaced by prosaic imaginings of a long life. The real consolation is a temporal consolation, and the imagination and perception conjoined bring pleasure that the initial perception did not allow. This is why the experience of youth is necessarily downgraded. Less complex, nature is simply empirical: “all in all,” (77) coupled with “animal movements” (76) and the “coarser pleasures” of a wilder, unfiltered nature. In this wilder experience, nature is seen offering nothing more: no interpretation and no greater significance of experience. Wordsworth is truly moved by the insight of repetition—that things are always better the second time around.18 First instances are rarely processed as significant; experience allows a more complex understanding that combines sense and sensibility. Imagination and memory, then, deepen experience, but they deepen it in a direction that is the opposite of the sublime—in the direction of the fragility of the most personal and temporal of experiences that also serve to domesticate the wilding of youth or the effacement of the human in the Wordsworthian pastoral.19 If earlier I suggested that Wordsworth is rewriting philosophical predecessors, he may also be rewriting Coleridge. The few non-localized and non-temporalized “sublime” experiences give rise to the sensation of a non-localized and non-temporalized self. Spirit and death become almost interchangeable in the description. What is striking is just how much this notion of pure spirit reflects the probable influence of Coleridge who had been discussing this idea with Wordsworth and Dorothy and who had written of it in a letter of 1796. He explained, “on the whole I have rather made up my mind that I am a mere apparition—a naked Spirit! And that life is I myself I!”20 Critics have also noted Wordsworth’s remarks about his own feelings of insubstantiality as a youth—feelings that led him to grasp a tree to ground his own sense of materiality.21 In contrast to this perception of the near-extinction of the self, the repetition and return of the poem emphasize the survival and continuity of the self in a way that blends material and immaterial, sensibility, and sense, and, as will be discussed in a moment, the sense of (to rewrite Coleridge’s formulation) “I myself we.” Seen in this light, Dorothy’s appearance at the end of the poem makes perfect sense. Wordsworth’s doubling is more than just the extension of the self through memory.

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It is also more than the experience of literary and philosophic company with Horace and Coleridge, Kant and Burke. It is, finally, the company in the here and now with Dorothy. The turn to Dorothy might be read as yet one more attempt to extend the particular and to suggest that these personal moments can be shared by others, thereby prolonging their existence in time and space. The poet reflects on his own absence in time and place twice in the poem—first, through the material dissolve of the first sublime moment discussed earlier. But there is a second dissolve, this time when he imagines his absence in a future time and place. Dorothy’s memory then becomes an additional site to store this fragile experience. Her pleasure comes not from remembering the site, but from remembering him: “If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief/ Should be thy portion…remember me” (146–8, my emphasis). Natural consolation is mirrored in human consolation: he offers to be her own “memory” just as his memory nature offered him consolation in the city. The ending is a concrete remembrance of joint experience that replaces the singular, sublime experience of nature with a sociable sublime: “on the banks of this delightful stream/ We stood together” (153–4). Far from charging Wordsworth with an egotistical or impersonal sublime, we might say that he imagines a communal sublime: shared experience outstrips any solitary experience of nature, and we see that both in his invocation of earlier, philosophical sublimes and the ending focused on Dorothy. Still, he anticipates that he may one day soon “be where I no more can hear/ Thy voice” (150). If this is true then we readers, like Dorothy, serve the function of memorial extenders—of remembering an experience that threatens to disappear with the speaker’s passing. Far different from the earlier philosophical sublime that is shared because it is a universal, generalizable experience, 22Wordsworth offers us a literary sublime—an experience of being here in a particular time and place.23 We view Wordsworth’s poem, perhaps, the same way he views the pastoral that opens the poem. The William-Dorothy compound is not, perhaps, dissimilar in suggesting a connection that preserves identity while affirming relationality. This Wordsworthian sublime focuses on company through repetition and compounding. The speaker experiences the same site literally two

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times, but expands on this through his own imagination, through sharing the experience with Dorothy, through seeing it in her eyes, and finally, through recording it in a poem. Compounding, not transcendence, is the strategy. Returning to the opening “pastoral,” it becomes clear that nothing could be further from the community Wordsworth seeks with both Dorothy and the readers of his poem. Within the woods, the hermit accommodates himself to the natural dwelling of the cave, while the “vagrant” remains “houseless” (20). This is a vision of the human as effaced by nature—a vision that is beautiful but that Wordsworth prefers to view at a distance. Newman argues Wordsworth adopts the “hermit among the mountains, attaching himself to no party and asking no favors from power” as a reaction to his experience in Revolutionary France24 But Wordsworth himself seems less than eager to emulate this position, though he admires it. His suggestion of compounded, hyphenated, relational visions suggests a much more nuanced political stance.25 In unpublished fragments, recollected and printed now as The Beautiful & the Sublime, Wordsworth thinks through definitions of the sublime that may help shed even more light on “Tintern.” He writes, “For whatever suspends the comparing power of the mind & possesses it with a feeling or image of intense unity, without a conscious contemplation of the parts has produced that state of the mind which is the consummation of the sublime” (xx). Notice that the feeling of intense unity is remarkably different from the kind of mediated vision just examined in this compounded pastoral and social sublime. True, there are experiences which efface this compounded sublime, even as they invoke Burke and Kant: his youthful self felt a kind of unity in his experience of nature, which was “all-in-all”—unity by any measure. Likewise, the unity of the dematerialized “memory of a memory” is so ethereal as to create a kind of spiritual unity. But what is more interesting in “Tintern Abbey” may be these other depictions of a different sublime that undercuts that unity. Comparison is everywhere, compounded identities abound, and there are many connections that maintain singular identities. Similarly, Wordsworth maintains the singularity of these philosophical sublimes in his poem, conjoining them but never subsuming them in a unified vision.

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What is his goal, then, in offering so many connections and perspectives without unifying them? It could be that it would offer one solution to the problem that Wordsworth identifies with the sublime. The risk of philosophy, he notes, is that the ideas will “perpetually interpos[e] between the light of nature and [the viewer’s] own mind.” Alan Vardy takes this to mean that any philosophy of the sublime may create an artificial barrier. The risk of too much philosophy is that it will come between us and our own unique perspective on nature. What Wordsworth shows us in practice in “Tintern Abbey” is a way to counteract the imposition of any singular philosophical theory both by considering multiple theories and by always reframing them through one’s own structure of experience. By compounding perspectives—his own and Dorothy’s, Kant and Burke’s–he actually produces a “muddle” that, in being compounded, shows the relationality of the various views. This muddle may in fact be a solution to another problem that Wordsworth identifies in that essay: it is actually difficult for most to appreciate the sublime. Why are houses turned away from beautiful sights, and why do most travelers bypass some of the most sublime vistas, he wonders? His musings on how difficult it is to experience nature point to a shared human failing. Whether it be the person who confronts for the first time the “sublime pictures in the Vatican & the Cistine Chapel,” or the Lady of the Orcades who seeks out the “finest” trees because she believes all her pictures and book learning to be inadequate, exposure to art and nature do not guarantee the experience. Both unmediated experience (i.e., Exposure to the Cistine chapel without preparation) or too mediated an experience (book learning that can cause the “natural” to seem disappointing) cause problems. Philosophy, art and nature: none guarantee an ability to experience the sublime. It is here that Wordsworth begins to develop a notion of beauty— unfinished in the fragments—that moves beyond the impediments attributable to “novelty,” “inexperience,” or philosophical or aesthetic over-conceptualization. Wordsworth writes: “Though it is impossible that a mind can be in a healthy state that is not frequently and strongly moved both by sublimity and beauty, it is more dependent for its daily well-being upon the love & gentleness which accompany the one, than upon the exaltation or awe which are created by the other.” 26 One could

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argue that the literary sublime Wordsworth develops moves more in this direction of the beautiful. 27 Perhaps the poem turns, ultimately, toward that love and gentleness he values as a necessary daily experience. But one could go even further and say that the poem’s goal is to “muddle” beauty and the sublime such that readers might “learn” to perceive that the experience lies not in the object itself, but in one’s particular relation to it—the connection is the thing, not the thing itself. There is something about his literary sublime, in the way it connects experiences, people, and material elements into a fragile and temporary collection that goes against the usual understanding of beauty. What Wordsworth seems to be suggesting is that nature or art can be experienced as sublime depending upon one’s spatial or temporal location as well as one’s previous experiences. Or as Lily Gurton-Wachter so eloquently puts it, “Romantic aesthetics pivots on the possibility that how we watch might alter what we notice.”28 For our purposes here, the point is to stress that the muddle of multiple perspectives, times, and locations are all part of Wordsworth’s rethinking of the sublime as distinctly literary—a recapturing of the general in the most particular here and now. The literary sublime—both depicted and recreated by poetry— offers a way to overcome both the first-time poverty of experience and an experience too highly mediated by books and philosophy. Wordsworth’s “muddle” of “Tintern Abbey” gives us the inexperienced youth who flees the Burkean sublime, the philosophical immateriality of the Kantian “sublime,” and a muddled or compounded experience that looks, through familiarity and repetition, more like beauty. Rather than being the poet of the isolated individual, Wordsworth is actually a poet with a profound and sustained interest in a literary sublime that is sociable, connected, but never so overpowering that it would subsume the individual with all her qualitative experiences.29 That, indeed, is the real muddle that “Tintern Abbey” offers us.

Notes 1. Theresa M. Kelley offers an insightful revision of Wordsworth’s sublime and the restoration of beauty to a prominent place in her

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4. 5.

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Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). See also William Wordsworth, Rainer J. Hanshe, and Alan D. Vardy, William Wordsworth: Fragments: Including Hawkshead & the Ferry and The Sublime & the Beautiful (New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2013). Vardy is skeptical that Wordsworth actually develops the interest in the beauty that intrigues him, a point to which I return at the end of the essay. Judith W. Page, Wordsworth and the Cultivation of Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Most notable are Nicholas Roe, Politics of Nature: Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and Onno Oerlemans, Poetry and Animals: Blurring the Boundaries with the Human (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime, (New York: Routledge, 1992), 55–97. Part of the hesitancy here may stem from the fact that he is reworking Coleridge in these lines. See Seamus Perry’s “Wordsworth and Coleridge,” in The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gil (New York: Cambridge UP, 2003) 169. Also helpful is John Beer’s chapter on “Coleridge, Wordsworth and ‘Unknown Modes of Being’” in Romantic Consciousness: Blake to Mary Shelley (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Note temporarily deleted to preserve anonymity. Stuart M. Sperry, Jr., “From ‘Tintern Abbey’ to the ‘Intimations Ode” Wordsworth and the Function of Memory,” Wordsworth Circle, 1 (1970), 40–49. Sperry suggests that there are two types of memory at work—reconstitutive in “Tintern” and premonitory in the Ode. In fact, I think Wordsworth is depicting a complex temporal perspective in “Tintern Abbey.” See also Kenneth R. Johnston’s response to Speer in “Recollecting Forgetting: Forcing Paradox to the Limit in the “Intimations Ode,” Wordsworth Circle, 2:2 (1971: Spring) 59–64.

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8. Mary Jacobus was the first to argue that “masculine” critics have ignored the unease and anxiety surrounding Wordsworth’s meditation on the sublime., in Romanticism, Writing, and Sexual Difference. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. 9. Paul H. Fry, “Green to the Very Door? The Natural Wordsworth,” Studies in Romanticism 35:4 (1996). 10. John Bugg, “Shepherding Culture and the Romantic Pastoral,” in A Companion to Romantic Poetry, ed. Charles Mahoney, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 159–176. 11. Paul Fry expresses this differently when he reads the greenness of everything as the disappearance of difference and of pastoral itself. If pastoral is the harmony of the human and the natural, then he is right that the “greening” of everything results in its disappearance. Wordsworth and the Poetry of What We Are (New Haven: Yale UP, 2008). 12. See Adam Potkay’s summary of the debate in Wordsworth’s Ethics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2012), Chapter Four. 13. Kenneth R Johnston, “The Politics of ‘Tintern Abbey,’ “in Romantic Poetry: Recent Revisionary Criticism, ed. Karl Kroeber et al., (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1993), 135–6. 14. Steven Knapp, while keeping to a Kantian reading of Wordsworth’s sublime, does note the importance of the “disparity between the mind’s exertions and the objects in which its energies are invested.” He also notes the contrast between the successive moments constituting each “spot of time,” which he attributes to a “Differential measure of imaginative power.” See Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985, pages 107 and 121. 15. Paul de Man, “Time and History in Wordsworth.” Romanticism and contemporary criticism: The Gauss Seminar and other papers. Ed. E.S. Burt, Kevin Newmark, and Adrzej Warminski, (London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993) 74–94. 16. Paul de Man, in his examination of a similar phenomenon in The Prelude, asks “how trustworthy the ensuing claim of compensation and restoration can be,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism, (New York: Columbia UP, 1984) 73–4. Bloom sees it as compensation, but only

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because Wordsworth is a strong poet who manages to overcome his fears of mortality. “Tintern Abbey,” in William Wordsworth, Ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1985), p. 133–4. Anne-Lise François’ articulation of this “uncounted experience” as a critique or despair of progress is probably accurate in Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008), 152–153. There she focuses on the a-temporal moments in which nothing happens, moments that produce a form of inverted carpe diem. The focus here is on drawing attention to the temporal consolation that forms such a rich strand of Wordsworth’s poetic meditations. Ralph Pite makes a claim for this repetition as distinct from Proustian. While we agree that “more important than what he sees is the fact that he is seeing these things again,” we differ in this conclusion. See Pite’s “Wordsworth and the natural world” in The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth, Ed. Stephen Gil (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003) 182. [The continuation of this footnote is temporarily deleted in order to preserve anonymity.]. Catherine E. Ross provides a remarkable analysis of Wordsworth’s rivalry with scientific notions of progress. Noah Heringman also reads Wordsworth’s increasing concern with beauty as evidence of a response to the challenge of science in Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History, Ed. Noah Heringman, (State U of New York P, 2003), 40 (Ross) and 78 (Heringman). My own argument for his sublime as a kind of temporal understanding provides further evidence that Wordsworth may be responding to the challenge of science by arguing for an oddly “progressive” poetic act. As cited in John Beer, Romantic Consciousness: Blake to Mary Shelley, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003). See, especially Frances Ferguson’s description of this event and its significance in Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (New Haven: Yale UP, 1977), 104–105. Emma Mason also gives an excellent analysis of this passage to show Wordsworth’s fascination with the relationship between the immaterial and the material. The Cambridge Introduction to William Wordsworth (Cambridge UP: 2010), 55.

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22. Scott Hess is right to note that Wordsworth’s legacy has been a Romantic belief in a universalized subject whose imaginative turn to nature represents a “flight from the social and the everyday” (William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 17. I believe that legacy is a simplistic misreading of Wordsworth’s complex position. 23. While my argument diverges from Hartman’s early assertions about Wordsworth and unmediated vision, my approach shares many similarities with Hartman’s later work in The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). See especially chapter 13, “Wordsworth before Heidegger,” 194–206. 24. Cited in Lance Newman, A Common Dwelling (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 80. 25. Nicholas Roe investigates the Miltonic allusions in “Tintern Abbey” and suggests that Wordsworth’s picturesque poetry “accommodated rather than overlooked human society and history” (180). See Chapter 7 of The Politics of Nature: William Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 26. As Theresa Kelley has argued, Wordsworth places less emphasis on the sublime and more on the beautiful than most critics have realized. Kelley suggests the beautiful is, for Wordsworth, a “refuge from the sublime structures,” suggesting, therefore, that Wordsworth was aware of the tension between the two that, in her words, is indicative of the Romantic (Kelley, 61). 27. Kelley is absolutely right to highlight Wordsworth’s emphasis that aging brings with it an increased concern with beauty over the sublime. But one might also stress the mixed nature of Wordsworth’s inquiry into beauty and the sublime as it persists over the course of his writing. 28. There are many interesting parallels with Gurton-Wachter’s description of a poetics of attention in Watchword: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2016). See, for example, her account of the dismissal of the despotism of the eye and the courting of susceptibility and vulnerability over security (12). Wordsworth’s openness to multiple ways of seeing the sublime as well as a hesitancy to embrace securely any particular

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philosophical position might be a way of insisting on ever new ways of paying attention. 29. Useful here is Jonathan Sachs’ “Slow Time,” PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 134 (2): 315– 31. Sachs outlines the way Wordsworth, alongside other Romantic poets, thinks through the complex human experience of temporality. In particular, Sachs links this temporality to a “less hierarchical version of the older chain of being, in which all matter and life” are inseparably linked (325). Here we can see that the unique temporal nature of Wordsworth’s sublime and the ways in which it connects “all matter and life” are themselves linked as part of the same poetic project.

11 Searching for Chad, He Found Himself: Peirce, Wittgenstein, Pragmatism, and the Case of Lambert Strether in Henry James’s The Ambassadors Garry Hagberg

Introduction There is philosophy of literature, and there is philosophy in literature. This chapter is a study of the latter. Henry James, as the historical record and the correspondence show, was in very frequent contact with his brother William, and he was a friend of William’s close pragmatist colleague, C. S. Peirce. One often hears that, of such connections or influences, the ideas in question were “in the air.” That is surely right in this case—but it is also more than that. Peirce and William James were developing the new American philosophical movement called pragmatism in Cambridge Massachusetts, and in doing so offering a way of seeing questions of mind, language, perception, and meaning in a new light. Henry James was writing fiction on the cusp between the late Victorian and the emergent new Modernism, and the new modernist G. Hagberg (B) Department of Philosophy, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73061-1_11

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sensibility accorded very well with the pragmatism that his brother and Peirce were developing. And in Cambridge England, a bit later, Wittgenstein was developing his new approach to philosophy, that we have known for some time was influenced in frequent dialogue with Frank Ramsey—who was reading, and bringing into Wittgenstein’s thought, the work of Peirce.1 So this chapter will unfold in five sections: first, and necessary for the philosophical understanding that will make possible the reading of Henry James in pragmatic terms, I will discuss the work of Peirce as it will later show itself within the changing mind, heart, thought, action, and speech of James’s Lambert Strether. Second, I will review a number of themes from the philosophy of Wittgenstein that display a broader pragmatic approach (of course he was not an American Pragmatist, but the close affinities—and direct influences—will emerge) that can illuminate what it is about the mind and language that Henry James captures in literary form; before moving on, we will pause to list some of the significance the pragmatic approach holds for aesthetic understanding more broadly. And then third, I will offer a reading of the novel that brings to the fore these philosophical themes concerning mind, language, and perception, and fourth, we will see how Henry James’s late masterpiece (one of the three, along with The Golden Bowl and The Wings of the Dove) speaks powerfully for the pragmatic approach (with some mentions of the work of Henry’s brother, William James). Lastly, I will return to the discussion of pragmatic philosophy with which we began, but perhaps see it—its central terms, its central points—in light of what it calls for: the finely detailed and extensive examples provided by The Ambassadors that, indeed, show what those central terms and points mean and—this is literature’s gift to philosophy—how we might more thoroughly and deeply understand them.

Peirce and the Content of Our Concepts In the remarkable brief essay2 that succinctly captures so much of C. S. Peirce’s philosophical outlook—indeed so much of both the letter and spirit of pragmatism—he writes,

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Descartes is the father of modern philosophy, and the spirit of Cartesianism – that which principally distinguishes it from the scholasticism which it displaced – may be compendiously stated as follows: 1. It teaches that philosophy must begin with universal doubt, whereas scholasticism had never questioned fundamentals. 2. It teaches that the ultimate test of certainty is to be found in the individual consciousness, whereas scholasticism has rested on the testimony of sages and of the Catholic Church. 3. The multiform argumentation of the middle ages is replaced by a single thread of inference depending often upon inconspicuous premises. 4. Scholasticism had its mysteries of faith, but undertook to explain all created things.

And then Peirce adds the line that points out his direction for the rest of his essay: But there are many facts which Cartesianism not only does not explain, but renders absolutely inexplicable, unless to say that “God makes them so” is to be regarded as an explanation.

The effort to begin with universal doubt seems at a glance to be both plausible and, in its way, profound: if we want to know what human knowledge is, and particularly where to find certainty as an Archimedean epistemological starting point, why not remove, with a kind of acid-bath of doubt, everything that succumbs to it and then see what remains? That remainder (for Descartes, the cogito of Meditation II), once properly identified, would then serve as the foundation upon which our subsequent certainties could stand. The “subtractive” method has also proven attractive for definitional reasons: to exactingly examine the remainder and identify it would, to many thinkers, provide the essence of certainty—the element that all individual cases of certainty would possess, and against which all claims to certainty could be judged and measured. But here is Peirce’s (and as we shall see, Wittgenstein’s as well) problem: this train of thought extends from an initial presumption about the nature of doubt that is for Peirce false to the facts (or as Wittgenstein will show, false to our practices—practices bought to our

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minds so fully by literature—and thus false to the nature of the concept of doubt). Peirce writes: We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence this initial skepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt; and no one who follows the Cartesian method will ever be satisfied until he has formally recovered all those beliefs which in form he has given up.3

To dispel a belief—a real belief—by a maxim is an impossible task; belief is not a concept that functions in that way. Indeed, the fact that such epistemic wholesale removal is something we can in empty terms say but not something we can substantially do supports Peirce’s observation concerning what can, and instructively cannot, be questioned in a deep and thoroughgoing way. We can imagine “What if I believed the earth is flat?” or “What if I believed we are actually undersea octopi dreaming of being humans?”, and so forth, but the real beliefs—what Wittgenstein will call the scaffolding of beliefs—on the other side of these imagined counterfactuals are not equal to them or on an epistemic par with them. By contrast, in the case, say, of building a house, we can suddenly say “Wait, what about reversing the entire plan and putting the garden on the other side?”, where the plan as-is and the plan-in-reverse are equal possibilities. The misconception Peirce is excavating is that, because we can truly imagine some sets of options in equal terms, we can imagine all sets of options in equal terms. For him (and again, as we shall see, for Wittgenstein), the “method of doubt” proceeds from this misconception, this systematic misconstrual of the concepts of belief and doubt. Thus, Peirce continues: A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of the Cartesian maxim. Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.4

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Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy: this itself is a maxim, and it is one that is not on an equal par with its opposite. And this point—fundamental to an understanding of pragmatism—is easily misunderstood. This is not for Peirce, or for any of the pragmatists, a methodological decision; it is not a maxim to which one can voluntarily subscribe. If it were, one could say: “Well, you, Peirce (and as we shall see, Wittgenstein) can do philosophy, proceed with your conceptual work on belief and doubt, in a way consistent with your chosen maxim, but I shall proceed in a way consistent with the Cartesian presupposition. Both are equally viable; we just choose to take different paths at this fork in the road.” But to pretend to doubt is not to use the actual concept of doubt as it has been established within what Wittgenstein called the language-games of real usage and carrying it, unharmed, into its universal philosophical employment. Rather, it is to strip it of its contextually determined associations, connotations, and use-emergent criteria; it is as if we are taking the sound of the word “doubt” but not the actual word . For Peirce, to pretend to doubt is to leave all of what in truth constitutes the meaning of the word “doubt” behind and then proceed with the self-deception that we have not just removed precisely what it is we are trying to employ. And it is philosophical literature, rather than philosophy itself, that shows this with the rich contextual detail that is required to comprehend the strength of the point. It is for this reason that Peirce—if with a hint of the poetic—adds the phrase, “what we do not doubt in our hearts.” That is to say, the genuine experience of doubt (and I want to add here, thus what the word “doubt” means) is not volitional; it is not a hermetically contained item of consciousness that has an “on” or “off ” switch. We can and do on occasion try to avoid what we tellingly call a seed of doubt; we can and do try to rationalize-to-minimize, or try to reason growing doubt away; we can and do try to summon positive elements to counterbalance an increasingly weighted negative side—in the following, we will see Lambert Strether do all of these things. But these cases prove the rule: doubt, if it is real, is occasioned by circumstance, where that circumstance is usually out of our volitional control. And so why precisely does Peirce appeal to the machinations, vicissitudes, and struggles of the heart ? He

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makes this appeal because doubt is not purely mental in the philosophical sense, not purely a phenomenon of inwardly contained intellection. The concept of doubt, despite the initial attractions of the fundamental Cartesian move, is not separable from the circumstances that motivate it: like the work of a detective, if we have doubt, we have reason to doubt, and those reasons are embedded within—and emerge and are found only within—the human settings in which “doubt,” as a word, comes to life. (This anticipates precisely what Wittgenstein said about words in The Blue Book.5 ) Those human settings are the contexts that are the mimetic or realist subject of James’s fiction; as we shall see, they are the settings within which the minds of his characters move. These reflections lead directly to Peirce’s second point in his enumeration of what he sees as the central tenets of Cartesianism and its philosophical method: that “certainty is to be found in the individual consciousness.” This of course is part and parcel of the Cartesian conception of selfhood as an inner repository of the private contents of consciousness; the first fact of human existence on this view is that we have unmediated introspective access to our own mental furnishings, whereas any claim concerning what we will then call the outside world will be mediated, inferential, and irredeemably hypothetical. No such claim about the outside world, on this picture, can equal the certitude we have inside the hermetic mind. (This is directly linked to the first point because, on this picture, if we place doubt within the mind, then it is definitively there, and for reasons of metaphysical privacy, there could not be a correction from the outside to the identification of our mental contents inside. Lambert Strether’s life, like ours and as we will also see below, is very different.) Further articulating the approach of pragmatism and criticizing what he regards as the traditional methodologically misleading picture or epistemic model, Peirce alludes to the Cartesian criteria of clarity and distinctness of mental content as, minimally, a reliable symptom, or maximally, a guarantor, of truth. For Peirce, these inwardly-held criteria reverse what we actually do in our established epistemological practices. He writes:

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The same formalism appears in the Cartesian criterion, which amounts to this: “Whatever I am clearly convinced of, is true.”6

This, it must be said, is probably too schematic to be convincing as an exposition of the Cartesian position or as the basis of a serious criticism (and he has reduced the two criteria of clarity and distinctness to a single more general one), but what he has his eye on, as we shall see shortly, is also a central theme of Wittgenstein’s much fuller critique: Peirce is objecting to the location of the criterion in the private individual mind, and to its alleged epistemic metaphysically-ensured priority. And so he continues: If I were really convinced, I should have done with reasoning, and should require no test of certainty.

Doubt is not invariably, universally present, not generically present in every case in which we have a belief or make a claim to knowledge. Thus, there will not be an evident way of proceeding in every case with regard to justification, to explicit reasoning, and to answering a universalized skepticism. As Wittgenstein will also say, there are cases of certainties that seem severely mischaracterized when artificially challenged in terms of explicit justifications, or where the degree of certainty seems greater to begin with than that produced by any chain of reasoning we might come up with in answer to an idle (or false-doubt-generated) skeptical challenge. And so for Peirce, there is no single inner-consciousness criterion that justifies all beliefs or claims, just as no single test is generically applicable in the first place. Concerning that alleged inner-consciousness criterion and the inner-certitude model, Peirce writes: But thus to make single individuals absolute judges of truth is most pernicious. The result is that metaphysicians will all agree that metaphysics has reached a pitch of certainty far beyond that of the physical sciences; -only they can agree on nothing else. In sciences in which men come to agreement, when a theory has been broached, it is considered to be on probation until this agreement is reached. After it is reached, the question of certainty becomes an idle one, because there is no one left who doubts

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it. We individually cannot reasonably hope to attain the ultimate philosophy which we pursue; we can only seek it, therefore, for the community of philosophers.7

As Wittgenstein showed through painstaking investigations, if language can be said to reside anywhere, it resides not within the metaphysical confines of the private mental interior but in the community; it is not a system for the contingent externalization of prior or pre-verbal mental content (I will return to this below).8 It is a misleading picture to suggest that language proceeds outward from single individuals. So when we turn to Wittgenstein, we will see that for him as well single individuals are not the “absolute judges” of linguistic meaning—not any more than Peirce says single individuals are the absolute judges of truth. Literature generally, and James in The Ambassadors particularly, shows this; we recognize literary verisimilitude when we recognize the intricate details of our practices therein. Peirce discerned the third major methodological tenet at the originating point of Modern (anti-Scholastic) Philosophy in the presumption that it is the single thread of inference that will generate or uncover the strongest truth. And this comes, here again, with the “common-property” picture mentioned above: all cases of justified truth or of belief, it is thought on this picture, will share this property. But once again (and as we will also see shortly, vital to an understanding of the connections between pragmatism and Wittgenstein), Peirce refers to established practice against an oversimplifying picture or conceptual model. He writes that in placing our trust, we should turn …rather to the multitude and variety of its arguments than to the conclusiveness of any one. Its reasoning should not form a chain which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose fibers may be ever so slender, provided they are sufficiently numerous and intimately connected.9

Our beliefs do not conform to a single model, and reasoning in support of those beliefs—where, that is, such reasoning is called for and in place—will similarly not conform to a single-line chain with a

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unitary structure that all good reasoning has in common. “Multitude” and “variety” are terms that invite an awareness of the diverse manifestations of argumentation and preserve conceptual space for them; the alternative does not. Syllogistic reasoning is one small, formalized subsection of human rationality; explicit inference is another close relative. Peirce knows as much as anyone about them, but he sees them for what they are, and he sees the much larger scope of rationality for what it expansively is. Reductionism, for him, is not reduction to essence; it is reduction to conceptual impoverishment—or what Wittgenstein called a “one-sided diet” of examples. Literature, instructively, resists this. However, Peirce sees in his encapsulation of the Cartesian approach to philosophical work not only reduction; in his fourth point above, he mentioned, “there are many facts which Cartesianism not only does not explain, but renders absolutely inexplicable.” He means by this that certain philosophical doctrines, and certain methods from which those doctrines are derived, on close inspection actually make more mysterious what it is they are attempting to explain. As he proceeds with his discussion, he refers back to four of his own earlier conclusions (we will consider two of them here) that, as he says, were “written in this spirit of opposition to Cartesianism.”10 The first conclusion is: We have no power of Introspection, but all knowledge of the internal world is derived by hypothetical reasoning from our knowledge of external facts.11

As stated, this also is too telegraphic to stand by itself. But it is for him the distillation of his earlier body of thought and argument that yields a kind of inversion of the classic dualistic picture of hermetic mental enclosure mentioned above. Rather than introspection as understood on the classic “transparent inner contents” model, Peirce is reversing that picture, and in doing so, he is emphasizing how what we call the inner is derived from the social, environmental, and “externally” contextual circumstances within which thought and action have their meaning-determining roles, in which they arise in the first place, and in which words like “doubt” have their meaning-determining usages— and so again: literature serves. (Wittgenstein’s excavation and removal

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of the “private inner object” as the alleged meaning-determining referent achieves, with enormous philosophical reach and power, a parallel result.) If the first fact of human existence were psychic metaphysical enclosure, all of the relations into which we enter and that make us who and what we are, would be mere contingencies rather than profoundly selfconstitutive: that view, if pressed to its conclusion, would render human selfhood, as he says, “absolutely inexplicable.” He writes, “In accepting the first proposition, we must put aside all prejudices derived from a philosophy which bases our knowledge of the external world on our self-consciousness.”12 Peirce’s second encapsulated conclusion is as brief as it is significant for the entire pragmatic movement: We have no power of thinking without signs.13

Consistent with his grand pragmatic reversal, he is here placing at the very center of philosophical importance that which, on the “hermetic interior” model of selfhood and consciousness, we would place on the periphery: language itself (as Wittgenstein was to say) is the vehicle of thought. (It is true that the word “signs” may give rise to difficulty, precisely because it can appear at odds with Peirce’s fundamental observation here, i.e., that thought takes place in, and not temporally prior to or ontologically separate from, language; the problem is that a sign represents or conveys content other than itself, which could re-enliven the very dualist model Peirce is arguing against. But the fundamental observation is what is important here, and that is what brings Peirce and Wittgenstein into striking proximity on this point.) And for Peirce, our interaction with what he calls signs—our use of our words—is the substance of our interaction with the world; words, like the selves that use them, are already and unavoidably relationally constituted. Thus “every emotion has a subject. If a man is angry, he is saying to himself that this or that is vile and outrageous. If he is in joy, he is saying ‘this is delicious’. If he is wondering, he is saying ‘this is strange’. In short, whenever a man feels, he is thinking of something.”14 We cannot truly, fully, imagine anger, joy, or wonder simpliciter; like doubt, these will be occasioned, and the meaningful, truly intelligible use of the words requires

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that they be so situated. The word is not, as Wittgenstein showed, a name of an inner mental event (we will also return to this below)—and so it does not get its meaning in that way, i.e., according to the misleading model of inner ostensive definition. And so, bringing the elements of his discussion together, Peirce writes, The irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief,15

and he explains, some philosophers have imagined that to start an inquiry it was only necessary to utter a question or set it down on paper, and have even recommended us to begin our studies with questioning everything! But the mere putting of a proposition into the interrogative form does not stimulate the mind to any struggle after belief.16

And this is followed in turn by a statement that could easily be misattributed to Wittgenstein: “There must be real and living doubt, and without all this, discussion is idle.” Strether will richly, and movingly, illustrate what real and living doubt is. In still another article, in discussing belief and its properties, Peirce observes that belief “involves the establishment in our nature of a rule of action, or say, for short, a habit.”17 For a pragmatist, beliefs are enacted, and that embodied social world—and not in a solipsistic interior—is where they have their life, their meaning, and their definition.18 It is a rule or habit of action, established in his nature, that will determine Strether’s final life-defining decision. Before turning to Wittgenstein, there remains one more centrally important strand of Peirce’s work to more fully articulate. As mentioned above, one historically entrenched approach to the study of any philosophical concept (e.g., belief, knowledge, doubt, truth, ethical value, intention, self, art, and so forth) is that of conceptual analysis: the search for the essence, the common quality or property, that all members of the class in question share and by virtue of which they are members of that class. This approach, derived from Platonism and repeatedly modernized throughout philosophy’s history, promises a full and determinate

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comprehension of the concept in question. Pragmatism, supplanting this image or picture of philosophical progress, posits that if we want to truly deliver a full comprehension of any concept, we might be better served by an alternative method: It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the third grade [Peirce’s highest level] of clearness of apprehension is as follows: consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.19

Clearness of apprehension is—invariably and inextricably—intertwined with a concept central to Wittgenstein’s philosophy: use.

Wittgenstein and the Sense of Pragmatism Wittgenstein writes, “But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use.”20 And he observes, “The mistake we are liable to make could be expressed thus: We are looking for the use of a sign, but we look for it as though it were an object co-existing with the sign.” And a moment later, he adds, “The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.”21 Wittgenstein is concerned with the same wrong-turning in approach due to a misleading presumption that Peirce was: because of the hermetic-enclosure model of the mind, we are inclined to think that any life the sign might acquire must come from the hermetic interior, from a mental act on the part of the speaker only contingently conjoined to outward carriers of that content. And so: “As part of the system of language, one may say, the sentence has life. But one is tempted to imagine that which gives the sentence life as something in an occult sphere, accompanying the sentence.”22 Peirce wrote, recall, “We have no power of thinking without signs.” And now, in his unfolding discussion, Wittgenstein adds the reorienting remark, “But whatever accompanied it would for us just be another sign.”23

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Peirce’s second item on his original list above concerned the presumption that certainty will be found in the individual consciousness, and it led to a consideration of meaning as determined from within individual consciousness. On that view, the attachment of signs to thoughts would without exception be “after the fact” of meaning-determination: one would think the thought first within the speaker’s psychic enclosure and then attach it to its vehicle. Wittgenstein, here, is excavating the presuppositions of that picture, in such a way that the concept of “attachment” will fall away as irrelevant, as otiose—or indeed, a concept that we cannot truly comprehend in this context, a word with only the appearance of sense. And so Wittgenstein, ever wary of and closely attentive to the impulses to think in accordance with underlying philosophical presumptions and pictures, writes: If we say thinking is essentially operating with signs, the first question you might ask is: “What are signs?” – Instead of giving any kind of general answer to this question, I shall propose to you to look closely at particular cases which we should call “operating with signs.”24

Looking closely at particular cases is, one might argue, the most central task of James’s fiction. But be that as it may, if we ask “What is a sign” with all the underlying conceptual baggage that both Peirce and Wittgenstein are uncovering, then we will expect an answer that itself proceeds in dualistic fashion, i.e., an answer that re-insinuates the dualistic model by answering that the sign is an inert external contentcarrier that is given life by prior inward pure and pre-linguistic thought. The desire to escape that particular undertow motivated Peirce’s assertion that we have no power of thought without signs, and it motivated Wittgenstein to redirect our attention from the expectation of a general philosophical pronouncement on the matter to particular cases in which the words in question (here, “operating with signs”) are employed in ways that show their life within a context of usage. That will show what a sign is—what “sign” means. And thus: If we study the grammar, say, of the words “wishing”, “thinking”, “understanding”, “meaning”, we shall not be dissatisfied when we have described

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various cases of wishing, thinking, etc. If someone said, “surely this is not all that one calls ‘wishing’”, we should answer, “certainly not, but you can build up more complicated cases if you like.” And after all, there is not one definite class of features which characterize all cases of wishing (at least not as the word is commonly used). If on the other hand you wish to give a definition of wishing, i.e. to draw a sharp boundary, then you are free to draw it as you like; and this boundary will never entirely coincide with the actual usage, as this usage has no sharp boundary.25

This strongly links both to Peirce’s comments on what it takes to achieve the highest level of clearness in the apprehension of a concept and to the presumption of essential defining qualities and essentialist class membership. Consider then in this connection Wittgenstein’s passage: The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to find the common element in all its applications has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, which alone could have helped him to understand the usage of the general term. When Socrates asks the question, “what is knowledge?” he does not even regard it as a preliminary answer to enumerate cases of knowledge.26

And so circling back to Peirce’s point of departure: what shall we now, at this stage, say of doubt? Compressing into a few words so much of the foregoing, Wittgenstein writes: “One gives oneself a false picture of doubt .”27 But what with greater precision are the constituent elements of that false picture, what misled impulses drive it, and what methodological points can be derived from that misleading picture’s dismantling? As if deliberately interweaving themes in play from the discussion of Peirce, Wittgenstein writes, “…A meaning of a word is a kind of employment of it. For it is what we learn when the word is incorporated into our language.”28 This is of course social, and in the way we saw with Peirce, external. But what is of paramount significance here is what meaning is not: it is not determined by ghostly interior content only contingently made manifest and only contingently “attached.” And the languagegame, the circumscribed contexts of discourse, is what is (if anything is) fundamental: if one wants the meaning, look to the use. And meaning,

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for Wittgenstein, is an instructively subtle matter: as Henry James so acutely perceives, shades of differences of context change or alter the concepts in play. “When language-games change, then there is a change in concepts, and with the concepts the meanings of words change.”29 The notion of an invariant, essence-determined meaning (that all uses of the word share) is becoming ever more remote—just as it did in Peirce’s discussions. The comprehension of the actual experience of doubt and the question of the meaning of “doubt” are showing themselves (as they also did in Peirce) to be the same subject. As we saw above, the Cartesian point of departure, the first step that Peirce described, was to apply Cartesian or universal doubt and then search for the Archimedean remainder. We saw what Peirce said about this, and now we have Wittgenstein saying: “If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.”30 That is, exactly as we saw in Peirce, if doubt is not contextually occasioned—if it is not doubted in the heart—it is not real, and the use of the word, the concept, as “pretended,” is not legitimate. And, here again using the same word as Peirce, Wittgenstein observes that if he tried to doubt that he has never been on the moon, “the supposition that perhaps I have been there would strike me as idle. Nothing would follow from it, nothing be explained by it. It would not tie in with anything in my life.”31 An introspectionist view of a mental content, content named “doubt,” need not tie in with any external thing or indeed any thing beyond itself. Peirce said that there is no distinction so subtle that it does not manifest in practice; Wittgenstein asks of such a philosophical doubter, “how would his doubt come out in practice? And couldn’t we peacefully leave him to doubt it, since it makes no difference at all?”.32 Wittgenstein also observes the way in which the idea of determining the Cartesian Archimedean or foundational proposition first and then building on that deeply falsifies the way we actually, in the world of human practices and social engagement, come into a web of belief: “what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions” (that whole system is what Strether will find his way into in Europe). And then Wittgenstein adds, parenthetically, a quite wonderful image of our epistemological emergence with such a web: “Light dawns

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gradually over the whole.”33 So rather than starting with what Wittgenstein calls the “single axiom,” he reminds us “the child learns to believe a host of things,” and Wittgenstein then adds precisely what Peirce identified as the true manifestation of a belief and the mark of its genuine presence: “I.e. it [the child] learns to act according to these beliefs.”34 And as Strether will show, as older persons we can learn to act according to new beliefs. But Peirce, recall, wrote above, in connection with what certainty is, “If I were really convinced, I should have done with reasoning, and should require no test of certainty.” Wittgenstein, with numerous remarks concerning this very point, often describes the epistemic circumstance in terms of grounds we can give on the one hand (where, in Peirce’s sense, we are still reasoning, where there is still room for reasoning) and groundless belief on the other. Or one might say: this latter case is where belief is so deeply embedded in our action and our practices that the request for a reason in support is disorienting—it is not part and parcel of the language-game (where this game interweaves action as well as words and possible speech as well as actual speech). The picture suggesting that we start with a single foundational proposition invites the question asking for the explicit reasoning that supports it— the testing that undergirds that one proposition. But again, like Peirce and here again using the same word, Wittgenstein asks the seemingly simple question, “Doesn’t testing come to an end?”.35 With equal brevity, he asks: “Can I be in doubt at will ?”36 And so again: if doubt is not volitional, and the meaning of “doubt” is invariably tied to our practices, tied to public and not private (in the metaphysical sense) matters, and emerging from often intricate circumstances, then meaning is not private: rather, “Our talk gets its meaning from the rest of our proceedings.”37 Our talk cannot be reduced to a set of declarative statements that can be fact-checked by observing any statement’s correspondence to the state of affairs in the world it describes; words cannot be reduced to a set of names; nor are names in any sense the essence of meaning lying beneath all the apparent variability and complexity of language as used. What we say, and what we would say, is not mere “surface noise” beneath which we need to dig; rather, what we say is for

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Wittgenstein of profound philosophical and conceptual importance.38 With all of this in mind, he writes: Doubting has certain characteristic manifestations, but they are only characteristic of it in particular circumstances. If someone said that he doubted the existence of his hands, kept looking at them from all sides, tried to make sure it wasn’t “all done by mirrors”, etc. we should not be sure whether we ought to call that doubting. We might describe his way of behaving as like the behaviour of doubt, but his game would not be ours.39

To reflect on what we would and would not say (as, indeed, literary authors so often do) is to reflect on the content of our concepts; to reflect on why a person or character says and does not say certain things is both to understand our language and the meaning-determining “rest of our proceedings” and to understand that person or character. We see how and where words (as deeds)—however subtle—make a difference; or how, in Pierce’s terms, “our conception of these effects” is in practice the substance of our clarified understanding. And so one might now ask: will that clarified understanding invariably, or usually, or at best, lie at the end of a single chain or reasoning? Recall Peirce’s third major methodological tenet of the tradition he is polemically engaging: I referred to it above as “the presumption that it is the single thread of inference that will generate or uncover the strongest truth.” Wittgenstein writes: And now if I were to say “It is my unshakeable conviction that etc.”, this means in the present case too that I have not consciously arrived at the conviction by following a particular line of thought, but that it is anchored in all my questions and answers, so anchored that I cannot touch it.40

Such anchors are part—indeed a large part—of what “pragmatism” means. And such anchored agreement is also a large part of what Wittgenstein means by his phrase “a form of life.” If this agreement were a matter of opinions, one could ask for the support for the given opinion, for its explicit grounding. But if one is asked why one believes one has

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not set foot on the moon (assuming one is not an astronaut or some such scenario), there will not be an answer parallel to “Why do you believe that what is good for General Motors is good for the country?” or “Why do you believe education budgets should be slashed?” And the fact that we can so easily and often agree about what we would and would not say (given that the particularities are first sufficiently described) shows the extent to which the kind of agreement Wittgenstein is alluding to here is agreement in language (where the word “language” is itself understood in a suitably capacious, indeed pragmatic, manner). He writes, “It is what human beings say that is right or wrong; and they agree in the language they use. This is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.”41 As we saw above, Peirce repeatedly underscored the importance not of the single or autonomous individual but rather “the community of philosophers” for whom certain of their established practices will be (in the sense considered just above) beneath, or deeper than, grounding—what is shared is a form of life.42 This meaning of “shared” is not reducible to the kind of sharing of opinion one has on having found an interlocutor’s explicit brief line of reasoning convincing. This meaning of “shared,” rather, is conveyed in long-form narrative. Before moving ahead to what James shows, there remains one further area of Wittgenstein’s philosophical work to which I alluded above that calls for at least brief discussion. In seeing that there is a problem contained with the second item (certainty as a matter of individual consciousness) on his initial list, a problem so severe as to render the philosophy that stems from it “absolutely inexplicable,” Peirce may have had something in view that is remarkably similar to the conceptual issues Wittgenstein worked through as “the private language argument.”43 The details of this matter extend far beyond present purposes, but even the briefest sketch may show something of this possible point of commonality. And whether this link is explicit or not, there is in any case an indisputable methodological affinity at a profound level that emerges from the two philosophers’ independent reflections on these parallel matters. The kind of private language Wittgenstein is discussing is not, one needs to make clear at the outset, what we might call a private code or indeed private language; cases would include a mafia don in prison

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giving instructions through coded language (e.g., “It’s time to weed the garden,” etc.) or Leonardo da Vinci writing coded diary entries. In those cases, the language we are all using is already established, and the content that is encoded is already linguistic content. It is hidden, but in a non-metaphysical sense—the privacy is still public. The target of Wittgenstein’s reflections is a language that not only is not understood by others, but a language that could not be understood by others, for the reason that the referents of the language are inner experiences that are private to the experiencer. In such a language, the private linguist would make naming-linkages between private sensations and signs indicating those sensations. But already (and we are just starting) there are two inexplicable problems: first, the language in which we are describing this private language is already public—we are using the concepts of “sign,” of “naming,” of “linkage,” and indeed of “private experience” and “sensation.” If this were to constitute the origin or beginning point or first act of meaning (if this were to locate meaning “in the individual consciousness”), then we know far too much too soon—the first appearance of the first sign should be intelligible from the first identified sensation and first word linked to it. (“Word” is also, of course, a word, so we cannot start with that concept either.) Second, there would be no independent criterion for correctness or rightness in terms of any future employment of the sign that is attached to the sensation, because we might get the connection incorrect by linking the same sign to a different sensation (or vice versa). And with no independent criterion for rightness, Wittgenstein says (making a strong pragmatic point) here we cannot really talk about “right.”44 With no distinction between being right and seeming right, the word “right” has no more meaning than the blanket-skeptical “doubt” to which Peirce objected. Here again: it is the same sound, but not the same word. (We will see James present a world in which characters search for the right word, consider reformulations of what they have said and meant, compliment others on having said it better, articulate implications from a realm of the not-yet-stated, and sometimes do so, as we say, privately so or in solitary reflection. But importantly, this is never in the imagined interior of metaphysical pre-linguistic privacy that Wittgenstein is criticizing, and the sense of the rightness of an utterance, a way of saying or expressing something, is always public. However

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private the reflections, James’s characters—like us—are always in, and never before, language.) But then with Wittgenstein’s point in mind, another problem emerges: it is all to easy here to use the word “private” in the ordinary sense (the mafia don) and the special philosophical sense (metaphysical privacy), as though this is another fork in the road, with ordinary-language philosophers going one way and metaphysicians the other. But the point is that the meaning of “private” is falsely borrowed, misleadingly smuggled across this divide, in order to create the illusion that we understand perfectly well the second meaning of “private.” The matter is complex, but simply stated: we do not. We would have to answer the two, and now three, preliminary problems before we could begin to render this concept intelligible. One could then attempt to say that the private linguist makes and follows a rule (e.g., connect sensation S to the sign “S”), but then this presupposes both that we now pre-understand “rule,” “connect,” “follow,” “make” or “establish,” and so forth, and (still worse for the philosophical picture of a metaphysically private linguist) that we can make sense of the following of a rule not only in the mafia don’s sense but in the ultimately private metaphysical sense. Here again, the false image or vague sense of comprehension is generated by the smuggling of sense, from the intelligible public use (one should question that polemicallygenerated term as well because the public-private dichotomy is not, on Wittgenstein’s examination, at all what we might initially picture it to be) to the attempted private use. In Peirce’s terms, the picture the privatelanguage model paints is incoherent; to methodologically start here is to generate philosophy that is, indeed, from the first (attempted) word, “absolutely inexplicable.” “Private naming” is the conceptual analogue of an optical illusion; it is in truth not naming at all. Wittgenstein suggested that we look at particular cases of “operating with signs,” and he has done so here. It was Peirce who said that single individuals are not the absolute judges of truth; Wittgenstein here shows that single individuals are not the absolute creators of meaning. And so we might now further reconsider Peirce’s statement above: “We have no power of Introspection, but all knowledge of the internal world is derived by hypothetical reasoning from our knowledge of external facts.” And:

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“We have no power of thinking without signs.” To which a Wittgensteinian could add: and that means real signs, not philosophically illusory ones. Strether is not the absolute judge of truth, nor, like all of us, is he the absolute creator of meaning. We have seen a number of deep parallels between Peirce and Wittgenstein, deep points of methodological agreement, and a deeply shared understanding of how to change, redirect, and expand our way of seeing philosophical progress.45 But before moving on to the very particular application of these thoughts to one particular work of literature, to situate this discussion into a larger frame of reference, one might ask where one could take these reflections; in what directions do they lead and how far-reaching are they? The full answer is: to all the areas of philosophy to which Peirce and his fellow pragmatists took them (which is in fact every sub-discipline of the field: aesthetics, education, ethics, language, logic, metaphysics, mind, and others). But for the present in an effort to show something of the larger frame surrounding what is to follow, I would like to very briefly consider aesthetics and philosophical questions concerning the arts. Drawing desiderata simultaneously from Peirce and the pragmatic dimension of Wittgenstein, (a) we might ask if the generalized or universal question concerning the property or condition that makes an object into an artwork is a question perhaps too parallel to the “doubt” problem, i.e., “What if all artworks we know were mere non-art objects; what would be required to transform them into art?” Or (b) we might remain mindful of the misleading power contained within the presumption that the individual consciousness is the central determinant of artistic meaning, or (c) we might be aware of the difference between genuinely rooted interpretive and classificatory questions and those questions that are de-contextualized and “thin” or dependent on borrowed meaning as a result. And (d) with an abiding suspicion concerning generic questions bequeathed to aesthetics from other areas of philosophy (e.g., the Platonic essentialism or “common-property” model), we might (e) investigate the multiform ways in which art is and is not like language (where “language” is understood in pragmaticWittgensteinian terms as opposed to other reductive visions of what language is). One could (f ) begin an inquiry with a primary focus on practices (rather than say, abstract definition), or (g) consider the parallel

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between speakers thinking in, and not before, signs and artists thinking in, and not before, the materials of the art form. We might (h) consider how an artist’s beliefs are shown in artistic action or manifest in the work, and thus (i) see how artistic meaning can be generated in terms not of hermetic intentional content but in terms of what the work in question (pragmatically) does or what we could see as its use. One could (j) consider the intricate differences between the idea of meaning as coexisting with a sign and meaning inseparable from and “resident” in the sign or (k), like a sentence, consider how understanding a single work might entail or require the much larger understanding of the whole of which that particular work constitutes only one small part, or seeing a genre as “a whole system of propositions.” But then (l), how does that single work resonate inside the “chamber” of that larger whole, and how does it interact with other “sentences,” other artworks, within it? We could (m) rethink the image of a work as the carrier of inward or “occult” content, as a delivery system from a psychic enclosure, or (n) rethink the model of artistic meaning as “attached” or (o) think in a focused way about how art “gets its meaning from the rest of our proceedings.” We could achieve some grasp of how artistic or aesthetic beliefs are “anchored” in our other interconnected “questions and answers,” or (p) look closely into how interpretive or critical argumentation actually works in practice, against the oversimplifying picture of unitary deduction or a single line of reasoning. And (q) we might consider how art can and cannot be compared to a code, and how easy and natural it may initially seem to think of art as (or analogous to) a metaphysically private language but then how misleading this picture actually is. Similarly, we often hear of a work “making a statement,” but (r) we could reconsider the many pragmatic ways in which language functions and whether all artistic cases are best seen on a “declarative statement” model and how that model might itself impose a “one-sided diet”; we do many things in and with language, and the arts may aesthetically instantiate these variations. All of these ways forward would yield, and have yielded, illuminating results. But back to our smaller frame, our central focus here is: if one were required to say in most compact form the single issue that

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most deeply connects Peirce and Wittgenstein, it would be the underlying concern with sense, with meaning. For both of them, philosophy can all too easily fall under the spell of misleading analogies and overgeneralized philosophical pictures or schematic simplifications that from the outset obscure our view of meaning-determining contextual particularities. And for both of these philosophers, it is the closely attentive and often hard-won grasp of those circumstantial nuances that will truly clarify our concepts. Breaking such spells is what literature, among many other things, can do; it can capture meaning-determining particularities; and it can show us the kind of non-reductive understanding that close attention to extensively described particular cases can deliver.

The Ambassadors as an Adventure of Self-Knowledge From the first paragraph of this novel, we see an approach to the nature of selfhood that positions James into the conceptual world of pragmatism: Mrs. Newsome, the mother of Chad, is deeply concerned about what she fears to be his inappropriate romantic entanglement with a woman in Paris.46 This concern itself is based on an implicit conception of relational selfhood: she is concerned about what she regards as an inappropriate liaison and its influences, and so she is concerned about who and what Chad will become in that circumstance. His identity is not hermetic, not contained within. And in sending Lambert Strether, her companion and at this stage probable marriage partner, as her ambassador to Paris from Woollett Massachusetts to retrieve him, she is sending Strether to return her son to the network of relations that will both restore Chad to what he was and further develop his identity along the lines she endorses, with herself at the center of that relational web. This sets in play one fundamental theme, as we have seen of an essentially pragmatic kind, of the entire book that will across its long arc be shown most fully in the case of Strether: what will become his life-changing expansion of selfhood is something that we might call inner transformation. But as James will show, it isn’t truly what that description might philosophically suggest. Rather, it is self-transformation of a kind that is

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effected by outward relations, comparisons, engagements, aesthetic and ethical distinctions made at an ever-finer level of perceptual and descriptive acuity, and inward reflection of a kind that does not stay within a contained consciousness. In Book First (James titles his chapters “Book First,” “Book Second,” etc.), we see Strether, in his first days in Paris and just arrived from Woollett, already finding within himself a newfound sense of leisure—and more than that, a newfound intimation of expanded possibility. But as Peirce and Wittgenstein have argued, the words “within himself ” can prove misleading: the sense of psychological expansiveness is an outerto-inner phenomenon, and not the reverse. And so we see in this first chapter James initiating the central focus of the novel’s narration—what we call his mental life. But with both Peirce and Wittgenstein and the pragmatic approach in mind, what we see is not any attempt to capture a ghostly interior, but rather to display (as we’ll see in some detail in the following) the mind-in-language. And language is itself, as we saw both Peirce and Wittgenstein in their related ways show, always public, always in the sense discussed above, externally interconnected. And so in Book First we see, in James’s descriptions of that mind, what Strether sees— but his visual experience is always described as inflected, as colored, by the prior contents of his consciousness. And we see the present thoughts, thoughts often concerning non-present past experiences, that are occasioned by the visual experience in Paris that he is presently having. When Henry’s brother William made the distinction between empiricism (e.g., Locke on sensation and Hume on impressions) and what he called radical empiricism (William James’s own work in The Principles of Psychology), he had this in mind: properly speaking, there is no such thing as pure atomistic or presently-wholly-contained sensory experience—these will always be inflected in precisely the way that Strether experiences Paris from the moment of his arrival. Relational identity and relational perception are interrelated, as the pragmatists have shown.47 When early in Book Second Strether meets Miss Maria Gostrey, an American expatriate in Paris who becomes his good friend and guide, he encounters an observational and descriptive acuity about the world and the persons in it that on a macrocosmic scale brings the constrained nature of life in Woollett and the language

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attending it out in high relief. And moving down to a microcosmic perceptual moment, when he dines with her in Paris, as he visually perceives and records in his thoughts concerning the striking fashion of Miss Gostrey, there emerges within his mind a comparison to Mrs. Newsome. He had been to the theatre, even to the opera, in Boston, with Mrs. Newsome, more than once acting as her only escort; but there had been no little confronted dinner, no pink lights, no whiff of vague sweetness, as a preliminary; one of the results of which was that at present, mildly rueful, though with a sharpish accent, he actually asked himself why there hadn’t. There was much the same difference in his impression of the noticed state of his companion, whose dress was ‘cut down’, as he believed the term to be, in respect to shoulders and bosom, in a manner quite other than Mrs. Newsome’s, and who wore round her a throat a broad red velvet band with an antique jewel -- he was rather complacently sure it was antique – attached to it in front. Mrs. Newsome’s dress was never in any degree ‘cut down’, and she never wore round her throat a broad red velvet band: if she had, moreover, would it ever have served so to carry on and complicate, as he now almost felt, his vision? (p. 56)

The hint of ruefulness, a result of the emergent comparison, presents itself to his mind with slightly sharp critical edge—the comparison tells him about himself, his long-entrenched unadventurous complacency, and the blandness of the content of his experience in Woollett. And the red band around the neck, seen as an artifact in a network of relations, some present to sensation, some of the imagination and memory, assumes meaning from which he learns. This is not, nor in this novel will Strether ever have, simple perception. Indeed, as Henry’s brother William also showed, the very idea of simple perception may be a philosopher’s myth that pragmatism works through and supplants. And is our perceptual content of a kind enriched by connotation, association, and implication a matter of our choosing, a matter of internal intellectual volition? Henry James shows that this is itself not a simple matter: we put thoughts into play, and they resonate and bring out emergent personal significance.

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It would have been absurd of him to trace into ramifications the effect of the ribbon from which Miss Gostrey’s trinket depended, had he not for the hour, at the best, been so given over to uncontrolled perceptions. What was it but an uncontrolled perception that his friend’s velvet band somehow added, in her appearance, to the value of every other item – to that of her smile and of the way she carried her head, to that of her complexion, of her lips, her teeth, her eyes, her hair? What, certainly, had a man conscious of a man’s work in the world to do with red velvet bands? He wouldn’t for anything have so exposed himself as to tell Miss Gostrey how much he liked hers, yet he had none the less not only caught himself in the act – frivolous, no doubt, idiotic, and above all unexpected – of liking it: he had in addition taken it as a starting-point for fresh backward, fresh forward, fresh lateral flights. The manner in which Mrs. Newsome’s throat was encircled suddenly represented for him, in an alien order, almost as many things as the manner in which Miss Gostrey’s was. Mrs. Newsome wore, at operatic hours, a black silk dress – very handsome, he knew it was ‘handsome’ – and an ornament that his memory was able to further identify as a ruche. He had his association indeed with the ruche, but it was rather imperfectly romantic. (p. 56)

Given over to uncontrolled perceptions; the velvet band functioning in aesthetic interaction with her features; catching himself in an unexpected reflective-appreciative act of the mind; this perceptual moment now reaching and resonating backward and forward in time and laterally in flights of association that again enhance significance; the alien distance of Mrs. Newsome’s self-presentation from what he now sees before him; the de-romanticizing and quietly saddening power of a word that fits: “handsome”—these are the contents of a mind in action. From James’s description of only this one moment, one can see the hopelessness of any reductive or simple answer, such as “the red velvet neckband,” to the question “What was Strether just thinking about?” And similarly to the question asking, “What was Strether perceiving?” Pragmatism, rejecting reductive simplicities, says this; James is showing it. So is what James has captured here the full version of mental life against which the oversimplifying reductions should be compared?

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All sorts of things in fact now seemed to cover over him, comparatively few of which his chronicler can hope for space to mention. (p. 57)

But James is showing still more at the same time and within the same words: this is the seed being planted of Strether’s new perceptual style, his new sensibility, with present visible features themselves emerging in higher mental relief in light of imaginative juxtapositions to past visual experience, just as those imaginative-memory contents, oscillating with the present, themselves then emerge in higher mental relief. As we shall see, this dinner is itself a precursor in miniature of how he will ultimately perceive—through oscillating comparison with his past self—himself. But what happens at this dinner before the theater shows more. Miss Gostrey deduces, from a web of separate implications, Strether’s mission; she is not told directly. That is, she articulates from within a conversation something that has not been said, but that is in a sense waiting to be said. And indeed she is described as a person who mentally lives in the space between what is explicitly said and what is implied; the space between literal quotable utterance and the implication-sets of those utterances. It came up for him with Miss Gostrey that there were things of which she would really perhaps after all have heard; and she admitted when a little pressed that she was never quite sure of what she heard as distinguished from things such as, on occasions like the present, she only extravagantly guessed. ‘I seem with this freedom, you see, to have guessed Mr. Chad. He’s a young man on whose head high hopes are placed at Woollett; a young man a wicked woman has got hold of and whom his family over there have sent you out to rescue. You’ve accepted the mission of separating him from the wicked woman. Are you quite sure she’s very bad for him?’. (p. 59)

She perceives what one might call conversational interlineations, or the kind of content that, until moved into propositions, resides between, and not within, sentences. Both Peirce and Wittgenstein saw that phenomenon clearly. But then James shows how one realization can be contained within another: Strether, realizing inwardly that he has never dined with a woman before attending the theater, within the frame of that realization realizes the cloistered and limiting character of his life as

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it has been lived. What is important to see here is that he of course knows this, but in a wider sense, a sense revealing its true significance, he did not know it. He knew the simple statement without having grasped the network of meaning of which it is a part. His mind is opening to what he has just seen demonstrated in Miss Gostrey—figuring out, thinking beyond the reach of, what is explicitly said. And upon extending his thought out into that larger network, James shows how this brings into his mind the intimated sense of impending internal or personal change. With Peirce, this is the mind learning of its contents from the outside; with Wittgenstein, this is the mind moving within a language-game. These events happening in Strether’s mind further occasion reflection from a newfound distance on his life with Mrs. Newsome. Letters from her, he now realizes, show, certainly not directly but as certainly by implication, how little his absence from Woollett is noticed. This is a fact about himself that he not only did not know, but also could not have known, from the inside. And he begins to discover, in his own language and his descriptions of Mrs. Newsome, the emotionally stilted relationship empty of passion, that he has with her. We see Strether, in James’s acute description of his mind, gradually fathoming the deeper significance of, of all things, his own words, his own spoken language. (One says “of all things” here because, on the model of inner transparency of mental and particularly linguistic content, no such thing would be possible; that it is possible, and that it shows us something about the nature of our relation to language, is as we saw perceived clearly by Peirce and Wittgenstein, and now by James.) But James knows that speaking within, and drawing implications from, a language-game can lead to false turns; when Strether hears Miss Gostrey speak approvingly of Little Bilham (Chad’s friend who, entirely won over by Paris and its enriched lifestyle, becomes a kind of confidant of Strether’s and an image, for Strether, of his own younger self living a life he missed), Strether mistakenly takes this as her approval of his mission (to intrude in Chad’s life and bring him back to what and where he was). One can over-read, just as one can read, significance, and James shows this in these passages with the contextualized particularity mentioned above that it is rare for philosophy alone to achieve.

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But more in terms of what he learns from listening to his own words: it is in the third chapter that Strether discovers how comfortable, to a previously not only unimagined, but—this is the point—unimaginable degree, that he has become in Paris in his exchange with Miss Gostrey during the past week (in which she has been away). The conception of Paris as articulated by consensus in Woollett is slowly and steadily being eclipsed by his newfound sense of liberated selfhood. The process of self-discovery (here again following entirely along pragmatic, not Cartesian or any other, lines) is hardly complete at this stage, but one can hear it in his words, as, indeed, he hears it in his words. There is a kind of bootstrapping concerning the evolution of identity here— precisely of the kind Peirce’s and Wittgenstein’s conceptions of language would endorse. The more he finds himself in those words, the more he becomes and personally stabilizes what those words describe; one set of self-descriptions is gradually but steadily eclipsing the other. And a measure of that slow, and now inexorable, eclipse is the frequency of his talk about Paris and his re-enlivening experiences in it. For him, this language is incrementally crowding out his talk of rescuing Chad. He has not declared any such refocusing of attention; that is not yet explicitly in language. But it is nevertheless—and according to the pragmatists more importantly—contained, exhibited, and developed within his verbal and physical actions, his patterns of attention, and the tone of his interactions. Book Fourth begins with Strether, having in the moment recovered his sense of mission, telling Chad that he must renounce his relationship (whatever it is—Strether does not yet know), depart Paris forever, and return not just to Woollett but—as we shall see, more resonantly—to who he is in Woollett. ‘I’ve come, you know, to make you break with everything, neither more nor less, and take you straight home; so you’ll be so good as immediately and favourably to consider it!’ – Strether, face to face with Chad after the play, had sounded these words almost breathlessly, and with an effect at first positively disconcerting to himself alone. (p. 125)

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James intimates here the performative aspect of this utterance: he disconcerted himself (and no one else) by the breathless force with which he delivered it. That is, he speaks so forcefully precisely because he is speaking from a doubled consciousness—half of which is increasingly doubting the validity of his ambassadorial mission. This, in short, is Peirce’s doubt. But what we also see emerging in this dialogue is the Woollett-based presupposition that only a woman could be keeping Chad in Paris. Chad—now much more mature in both appearance and thought—challenges this presupposition, and, in asserting his own volitional autonomy, occasions in Strether the twin thoughts that there is such a thing as independent-minded autonomy and that he, Strether, is beginning to feel its awakening within his being because of Paris. ‘Do you mean,’ the latter asked as they approached the door, ‘that there isn’t any woman with you now?’ ‘But pray what has that to do with it?’ ‘Why it’s the whole question.’ ‘Of my going home?’ Chad was clearly surprised. ‘Oh not much! Do you think that when I want to go any one will have any power -’ ‘To keep you’ – Strether took him straight up – ‘from carrying out your wish? Well, our idea has been that somebody has hitherto – or a good many persons perhaps – kept you pretty well from “wanting”. (p. 132)

James is showing us a mind at a nodal point in its sea change, a mind at a point of equipoise between the Woollett-centered view of Paris as a corrupting influence that will bring personal debasement and social disgrace, and Paris as an instrument of liberation that will bring a form of life that will cultivate sensibility and deepen experience. It is a mind at the intersection of competing sets or webs of descriptions, the retrospective and the prospective, and Strether is beginning to discern within them the possibility of changing his intellectual dwelling from the former to the latter. This circumstantially occasioned twin-thought now spreads out within Strether’s moral psychology, casting further doubt on the validity of his mission. He went to lecture Chad; what happens within this exchange, his intention being inverted, is that Chad, by asking

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Strether about his view concerning volition and the individual person’s power to choose to live and be one way and not another, initiates and amplifies Strether’s finding of himself. It is the older man, by moving within a network of new relations and thus becoming unfrozen, who is learning under the younger man’s gentle counsel. And so in Book Fifth we witness Strether, in conversation with Little Bilham, finding himself, in a way that discloses more to himself than he realized was contained within, pouring out his now-cascading thoughts about his past, his sense of loss, his regrets at experience missed and roads not taken, and he implores Little Bilham, with a strength of passion in his words that almost frightens him (the emphatic force of his speech having reversed sides), to live as he, Strether, now recommends, and not as he actually has all throughout his past in Woollett. Describing himself as being beyond the reach of his own advice, beyond his own newly developing image of a life well and fully lived, his vicarious relation to Little Bilham is now explicit. This much I think is clear—but what James is showing philosophically here about the mind is more subtle than this alone. Strether is obviously in Paris—but he is now perceiving Paris through the lens of his imagination, his image, of who he would be now if he had decades ago escaped Woollett. Thus, there is a sense in which he both is and is not there. He is a man psychically displaced: he is in Paris, but not—the referent of the “he” is painfully doubled because of his wanting to be who he would have been. He thus senses the absence of himself within himself. The passionate voice, surprising to him as he speaks, is the voice of that absent or unrealized persona. Strether’s inner second self initially began to subtly manifest, in the opening of Book First, in his attitude and behavior, but not yet in, or near, his words. When Strether, just after his arrival, met his friend Waymarsh, his impulses, his reactions, his subtle avoidances, suggested a mind already sensing two directions to take, two futures: That he was prepared to be vague to Waymarsh about the hour of the ship’s touching, and that he both wanted extremely to see him and enjoyed extremely the duration of delay – these things, it is to be conceived, were early signs in him that his relation to his actual errand

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might prove none of the simplest. He was burdened, poor Strether – it had better be confessed at the outset – with the oddity of a double consciousness. There was detachment in his zeal and curiosity in his indifference. (p. 22)

What was an unnamed detachment hidden within zeal or unacknowledged curiosity peeking out from behind indifference is now speech delivered with passion to a degree that his unchanged self is frightened. The meaning of this language is not a simple or straightforward matter. It is pragmatically complexly situated, and to understand it, one has to understand the person, and the person’s mind, who is delivering it. Or: the pragmatic force of this speech, for what it says, what it expresses, and what it implies, is not anywhere near reducible to declarative statement-of-fact propositions. By this time, Strether has befriended Madame de Vionnet, a cultivated, alluring woman of deep and long Parisian culture. In his bifurcated state, he in a sense overhears the back of his mind wondering what it might have been like to meet her in Woollett. As quickly, he somewhat darkly realizes—a central point of the pragmatic conception of relational selfhood, of selfhood as the central point of convergence of innumerable external engagements in the world—that the very thought is a telling impossibility: if she had been in Woollett, she would not, and more importantly could not, have been the Madame de Vionnet seated before him. This underscores his deepening sense of displacement and the irretrievability of a self that might have been—all conveying to him all too forcefully a contextual conception of selfhood. The result of these passages in his life is that, paradoxically, Strether becomes anew in seeing that he is too old to become anew. Or, to put this psychological matter another way, he resolves to try to do for the rest of his time in Paris what he knows he cannot do. (We will see below how this knowledge yields a tragedy of personhood.) In Book Sixth, we see Madame de Vionnet asking Strether if Mrs. Newsome has abandoned hope of Strether himself returning to Woollett from Paris and its soul-calling attractions—meaning, will he forsake his expanded vision and expanded selfhood to fulfill Mrs. Newsome’s convention-bound expectations? He has not really asked himself this

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yet—yet the question resides within him, and she perceives that from what we call the outside. This question causes Strether to recognize what he has done on the level of not-yet-articulated pragmatic action of a kind that shows belief wholly or partially beneath the level of statements in language: he recognizes omissions, half-deliberate suppressions of details that in his letters to her could, together, reveal to Mrs. Newsome his changing identity and the emergent self that would, or could, stay and further thrive in Europe. And this realization leads him directly into an identity-stabilizing decision: he will now strongly encourage Chad to stay in Paris because of what he now sees, with new eyes—the profoundly good effects Paris is having on Chad’s entire person. He is giving voice to a self—a mode of perception, an observational style, a way of seeing, an autonomy, a sensibility—that he could not have imagined himself to possess on the day of his departure from Woollett. But James captures still more here as well: Strether is transposing, or psychologically grafting, onto Chad what he sees emerging within himself—stay in Paris and be a different person. But yet still more: James is showing that for Strether, Madame de Vionnet has become a symbol and a beacon: everything absent in Woollett, she is; everything straightforwardly conventional about Mrs. Newsome, she is not. Looking at her, he feels within himself a strengthening magnetism to what is for him a kind of exoticism. In her intellectual atmosphere, he breathes the air of deep culture, history, refinement, and culturally informed verbal interaction. As if an illustration of William James on perception, what he sees in her apartment is of the eyes and of the mind and of the layered and intricate internal dialogue between the two. He had never before, to his knowledge, had present to him relics, of any special dignity, or a private order – little old miniatures, medallions, pictures, books; books in leather bindings, pinkish and greenish, with gilt garlands on the back, ranged, together with other promiscuous properties, under the glass of brass-mounted cabinets. His attention took them all tenderly into account. They were among the matters that marked Madame de Vionnet’s apartment as something quite different from Miss Gostrey’s little museum of bargains and from Chad’s lovely home; he recognized it as founded much more on old accumulations that had

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possibly from time to time shrunken than on any contemporary method of acquisition or form of curiosity. (p. 196)

And so he senses here what the pragmatists saw so clearly about the non-hermetic nature of selfhood—these magnetic attributes pull him in, and her way of being and the world with signifying artifacts of a “private order”—to him almost humming with comparative power—that she has created and cultivated around her will in part make him who he is. Or, as he now half-believes, who he can be. And so Strether presently (in Book Seventh) finds himself in a very delicate psycho-linguistic situation: he is doing nothing less than writing to Mrs. Newsome about Vionnet. A great leap forward in his progress of self-realization, in describing Vionnet to Newsome he is finding in the words of his letters the contrast that can—if he acts and steps through what he senses as a portal to freedom—transform the rest of his life and fulfill the earlier promise he hears calling to him, across the decades of his life, to him now. Writing to her one way will begin to actualize a future of rich experience that he cannot in any detail predict but yet that he strongly senses is still (despite what he said for effect about his chance having passed him by to Little Bilham) awaiting him. And another artifact speaks to him: he has purchased a seventy-volume set of Victor Hugo’s writings, bound in fine leather with red and gold. Now in this context, he asks, Were seventy volumes in red-and-gold to be perhaps what he should most substantially have to show at Woollett as the fruit of his mission? It was a possibility that held him a minute – . (p. 234)

Why the power of that minute? In that minute, he finds himself asking a doubled question: is the anemic and stultified atmosphere of Woollett one that will not inquire as to his experience, his thoughts, his adventures of the mind and of society, but only about material acquisitions? Will the measure of Europe be a seventy-volume set? But then he is also asking himself if the set of books, rather than Chad, is the only thing he will bring back. The part of him pulling back toward Woollett persists: he can write to her another way, with tone and content that solidifies

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her expectations—if he succeeds in the “test” of his mission to save her son—about their future as a couple in Woollett. All too eager to hear her response to his descriptions of Madame de Vionnet by return post, he still wants her approval. So all too like Michelangelo’s “prisoner” sculptures, he is a person partially emerged. His identity is still oscillating: when he receives the telegram from Mrs. Newsome demanding his immediate return, he does not obediently, or conventionally, calmly respond as he reads it. Rather, in a manner uncharacteristic of his former self but unambiguously expressive of his emergent self, crumples it in anger and tosses it aside. To borrow a Nietzschean phrase, he is becoming who he is in his actions, as his actions are telling him who he is. Like Peirce, it is the action that carries the content. And of the letters: he is feeling to an increasing degree, and in instructively sharp contrast to his earlier letters, that the substance, the human content, the sense of genuine personal engagement, is much diminished. Looking down on the page of his own just-written sentences to her, he sees partially or entirely empty words. Habit, convention, and the trajectory of his past carry him through those sentences; the heart of which Peirce spoke does not, and the difference is that between Peirce’s empty word, “doubt,” and the real doubt that emerges in life—and that has, indeed, emerged in his. And this difference between full-blooded and empty words is shown by James in the perceptual styles of people: the Pococks, the team of new “ambassadors” sent by Mrs. Newsome to retrieve Chad both physically and morally, arrive and bring with them and present to Strether everything that is Woollett—the cloistered perceptual range, the suspicion of Paris and its pernicious influences, the single-minded allegiance to the social mores of New England society, and the absence of the intellectual adventurousness that would bring them into a new and potentially transformative appreciation of the old world. Strether, as we have seen, is now both, diminishingly, that and, increasingly, not that. They are thus the perfect human embodiment of the empty word, the word detached from its use, its traction, and its life. Their presence shows Strether the kind of people to whom empty sentences, mere proper form, are rightly addressed. An alarm sounding within, he knows they are the kind of people who populated his pre-Parisian world. And a voice, for

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Strether unprecedented and almost an animal sound, emerges from him in response to that smug moral blindness: It wasn’t at once that he could see all that was in her actual challenge; but when he did he found himself just checking a low vague sound, a sound which was perhaps the nearest approach his vocal chords had ever known to a growl. Everything Mrs. Peacock had failed to give a sign of recognizing in Chad as a particular part of transformation -- everything that had lent intention to this particular failure affected him as gathered into a large loose bundle and thrown, in her words, into his face. The missile made him to that extent catch his breath. (pp. 374–375)

These are all episodes in Strether’s experience, but more broadly, across the long narrative arc, James is representing a mind seeking singleminded stability under conditions of bifurcating change. We have seen that the conceptual picture, the model, of inward transparency of mental contents cannot accommodate this case; James is showing how concepts such as self-knowledge, self-awareness, self-interpretation, inner change, and relational selfhood actually work in the real, intricate, complicated, pragmatic world, against any philosophical oversimplification or mischaracterization of them. And again, he is showing the negative side as well, that is, how self-deception works in that real world. Strether is informed by Vionnet that her daughter Jeanne is going to be married soon, and that Chad has played a central role in arranging it. Strether does not yet know that it is Vionnet who is the woman intimately involved with Chad, and he finds himself puzzled by Chad’s powerful role in this event. He does not yet put the pieces, all independently arrayed before him, together. The observance of Chad’s role causes Strether a disturbance in the network, the Peircean and Wittgensteinian web of his understanding, but—with James uncovering here the structure of self-deception—having blocked himself from putting the pieces into a coherent mosaic, he does not see that Chad is functioning in a step-parental role to Jeanne. The patterns of interaction between Chad and Vionnet imply that their relationship is not exclusively, as Strether calls it, high and virtuous. His bifurcated condition makes this selfdeceptive selective attention possible: although the culture with which he

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has become enamored, with its sophisticated and unconstraining social mores, is right in front of his eyes and very much in his mind, he does not let himself, in Peirce’s sense, doubt in his heart his larger understanding of the situation, precisely by keeping the prudishness of Woollett in mental place as a perceptual veil. Strether’s very uncomfortable meeting with Sarah Pocock, Mrs. Newsome’s daughter and the central figure in the group of new ambassadors, is very uncomfortable precisely for the reason that she is a hermetically enclosed self. As both Peirce and Wittgenstein have argued, there is no Cartesian private mind—that is the philosophical conception of “hermetic” or metaphysical privacy that pragmatism dismantles. But what James shows here is that there is a real-world version of selfenclosure, a real use of the word “hermetic” when applied to a person’s mind. Her mind shields itself from any genuine engagement with the life of Paris and the cultural world of Europe. It is an implacable self that seals itself off from any relationally enmeshed experience or new influence that could bring change. It is a self that is the polar opposite of the new Strether, and it is one that, by providing the starkest contrast, brings out in highest relief the openness that Strether has, over the course of his time in Paris, achieved. Sarah Pocock calls the change that her brother Chad has undergone—the change deeply admired by Strether— hideous; all language articulating the multiform ways the experience of Europe can be liberating and mind expanding false; and she regards, like her mother, all change from Woollett as change for the worse. This is the kind of case that gives the word “hermetic” content, and it is this content that illicitly transfers to the empty and misbegotten philosophical use of the term its illusory or borrowed sense. We have seen that Peirce spoke of the problem of the meaning of the word “doubt,” and we saw that Wittgenstein, in speaking of the word “private” when applied to the mind or language, casts very similar light. These themes are woven into the fabric of James’s narrative. In Chad’s apartment alone, Strether reflects on two phases of his life: his childhood through to his departure from Woollett, and his transformative time since in Paris. James gives us a brief, yet powerful, description of the state of mind within which Strether reflected upon his life; it is a consciousness moving in and through and with the drifts of

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language. (One can see at a glance how little the description “waiting for Chad” would capture.) It was an hour of solitary reflection that would both structure and inform subsequent thought and experience. Strether spent an hour in waiting for him - an hour full of strange suggestions, persuasions, recognitions; one of those that he was to recall, at the end of his adventure, as the particular handful that most had counted. (p. 383)

The remarkable realization to which he comes in this hour is that his recent experience in Paris is more important to him and to who he is now than all of his preceding years in Woollett combined. One could see this as cause for celebration, but given the relative durations, this is for him a darkening reflection on the course of his life. He now, again, is thinking that it is, or may be, too late for an enlightened life to be lived, and so he again displaces what would have been his own advice to his younger self onto Chad when he arrives, urging him to stay in Paris to be ever more fully the person he has become. With a longer passage, James portrays the content and the interconnections of those reflections, where Strether, here again almost as if a pragmatic philosopher of perception, sees (and in his special sense, “hears” or listens to) objects within networks of meaning-determining relations; James brings us into the mind of Strether precisely as it was when he realized Chad had stepped in the room just behind him. He spent a long time on the balcony; he hung over it as he had seen little Bilham hang the day of his first approach…. He passed back into the rooms, the three that occupied the front and that communicated by wide doors; and, while he circulated and rested, tried to recover the impression that they had made on him three months before, to catch again the voice in which they had seemed then to speak to him. That voice, he had to note, failed audibly to sound; which he took as the proof of all the change in himself. He had heard, of old, only what he could then hear; what he could do now was to think of three months ago as a point in the far past. All voices had grown thicker and meant more things; they crowded on him as he moved about - it was the way they sounded together that wouldn’t let him be still. He felt, strangely, as sad as if he had come for

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some wrong, and yet as excited as if he had come for some freedom. But the freedom was what was most in the place and the hour; it was the freedom that most brought him round again to the youth of his own that he had long ago missed. He could have explained little enough today either why he had missed it or why, after years and years, he should care that he had; the main truth of the actual appeal of everything was none the less that everything represented the substance of his loss, put it within reach, within touch, made it, to a degree it had never been, an affair of the senses. That was what it became for him at this singular time, the youth he had long ago missed - a queer concrete presence, full of mystery, yet full of reality, which he could handle, taste, smell, the deep breathing of which he could positively hear. It was in the outside air as well as within; it was in the long watch, from the balcony, in the summer night, of the wide late life of Paris, the unceasing soft quick rumble, below of the little lighted carriages that, in the press always suggested the gamblers he had seen of old at Monte Carlo pushing up to the tables. This image was before him when he at last became aware that Chad was behind. (pp. 384–385)

In the course of his exchange with Chad, Strether volunteers both to talk to Sarah again to try to convince her and to shoulder the burden of Mrs. Newsome’s anticipated disapproval. This “save yourself!” gesture, in its autonomy, its defiance, and its declared independence from his own past preconceptions, is a gesture within which Strether further finds himself. That is, in giving strong advice to Chad, he is giving stability and substance to his own emergent self, and so the self-compositional “bootstrapping” mentioned above continues. But as we have also seen above, he is not free of sustained selfdeception in his new Parisian identity (and it is this fact that gives what is shortly to transpire its power). Having not wrestled free of this element of naïve self-blindness, in conversation with Miss Gostrey she tells him that Chad and Madame de Vionnet will be escaping Paris for a few days together. The veil in place, he misses the obvious. And so he decides to leave Paris himself, where he witnesses two people obviously romantically involved, only moments later recognizing them as none other than Chad and Madame de Vionnet. This rearranges all of the individual pieces of evidence that he possesses into a coherent pattern, now a mosaic of

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evidence, and with the recognition of the couple he recognizes as quickly in himself the great gulf dividing what would have been his pre-Parisian reaction from his immediately-accepting reaction now. He thus further stabilizes his new identity by watching his own reaction, and reflecting upon it and assessing its significance, almost as if he were watching and reflecting upon another—precisely the process of which Peirce wrote. In seeing the loving couple, and then in seeing the accepting reaction— one that eclipses any Woollett-style moral shock—come from within, he sees himself. This is the strongest, deepest, and most characterologically galvanizing moment of self-knowledge in the novel. He, now and in this moment, is who he is. Later, Strether meets with Madame de Vionnet, and after some conversation, and with her firm belief that Chad will return to Woollett to take over the family business, she quite suddenly reveals a good deal and invites Strether to stay with her. She declares that she has become very attached to him, and that it is clear to her that their way forward in life should be together in whatever form he finds acceptable. And when he speaks of going home, she asks, ‘Where is your “home” moreover now - what has become of it? I’ve made a change in your life, I know I have; I’ve upset everything in your mind as well; in your sense of - what shall I call it? - all the decencies and possibilities. (p. 438)

Almost as if she had just been reading Wittgenstein on meaning and Peirce on pragmatism and the action that grounds our words, she is asking what the word “home” now means, and what kind of life he will, or can, live there to give that word meaning. And she is making clear that she knows the contribution she—her way of being, her mode of speaking, her cultured background, her aesthetic sensitivity, the patterns and acuity of her ethical attention—has made to his inward transfiguration. He knows that Mrs. Newsome would never have evinced such sensitivity, such intelligence in human perception, and such insight into another’s transformative experience. He knows he is in the presence of a person of true humane depth:

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He felt what he had felt before with her, that there was always more behind what she showed, and more and more again behind that. (p. 439)

But turning toward tragedy, toward a loss he will forever carry within, he hears himself saying that he must return, even if as a very changed person. The future that Madame de Vionnet offers closed by a countervailing force within him, he shortly later meets with Miss Gostrey, who, indicating that she has loved him all along, and knowing nothing of Vionnet’s proposal, also asks him to stay with her. Speaking of her person, her place, her life, her companionship, her attentiveness, her love, she says, “I wish with all my heart I could make you treat it as a haven of rest” (p. 466). And she too asks, now in her way, about home: It brought her back to her unanswered question. ‘To what do you go home?’ ‘I don’t know. There will always be something.’ ‘To a great difference,’ she said as she kept his hand. ‘A great difference - no doubt. Yet I shall see what I can make of it.’ ‘Shall you make anything so good --?’ But, as if remembering what Mrs. Newsome had done, it was as far as she went. He had sufficiently understood. ‘So good as this place at this moment? So good as what you make of everything you touch?’. (pp. 469–470)

Stopping her sentence within this language-game makes her sentence all the stronger by accentuating the unsaid point and in doing that by adding ethical content (all as if a lesson in pragmatic linguistics): Mrs. Newsome had given him orders and pressed him repeatedly in controlling and managerial ways. Miss Gostrey’s beauty as a person is thus heightened by not finishing the sentence—a sentence he understood for what was said, for what was suppressed, and for what that suppression meant about her as a moral being. And so with newly simplified directness made possible by her previous meaningful incompletion, she says: ‘There’s nothing, you know, I wouldn’t do for you.’ ‘Oh yes - I know.’ ‘There’s nothing,’ she repeated, ‘in all the world.’

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With the promise of a vita nuova now being defeated twice, he declines. What is behind these failures to truly live? Strether realizes that he has been in love with Vionnet (recall that for most of the time he did not know she was with Chad), but because the entire experience of Paris has been fantasy-like or even dream-like, he tragically reverts to the sense that his long and former life in Woollett is the real one. The duration of that life, although in that earlier hour receding in importance to him, now comes hurtling out of the past and looms large, overbalancing the magnetic liberating newness. Despite what he has come to realize in Paris, his long history pulls him back—against the larger part of his will. And his failure to convince Chad to remain in Paris only buttresses this colossal, life-denying mistake: now, Strether’s identification with Chad— a younger self still able to make the life-affirming choice—in a sense backfires, with Chad’s decision to return reflecting back and somehow confirming that the older man should follow the younger man’s implicit advice (as contained within his action, not his words). Having seen both Chad and Little Bilham as younger versions of himself, he hoped to set Chad free. Now, the moral logic inverted, he sees himself as an older version of Chad. All the doors are closing. In Paris, Strether found himself, became himself. Feeling his inward transformation, he clearly knows that it is a changed man who will return to Woollett. But practiced at self-deception, he shields himself from the truth that awaits him in the implications that extend beyond the close of the novel: that changed man will, despite his resolve and despite how he feels now, increment by increment change back, living and thinking within a historically entrenched web of relations that will make him, not who he is, and not who he can be, but who he was.

Strether, the Pragmatics of Language, and the Changing Mind Before closing the circle and returning to the discussion of pragmatism directly, let us stand back and consider some further aspects of this novel and its portrayal of the adventure of a mind; some of the following

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is new, and some will summarize what we have seen in the preceding reading. In his introduction to the novel, Adrian Poole calls attention to one of the themes discussed above, the “double sense of prospect and retrospect” and “Strether’s ability to look before and after” (p. xxviii). Poole notes that “This reaches a climax in the elaborate sentence with which Strether approaches Madame de Vionnet for their final encounter: ‘He knew in advance he should look back on the perception actually sharpest with him…’” (434). This dimension of Strether’s experience—as the pragmatists argue, it is the experience of all of us—shows the mind’s position in time: it is in the present, yet with both the past and the anticipation of the future contained within that present. But more precisely than that, this elaborate sentence shows a mind knowing prior to the event shortly anticipated that it should look back on a sharp and centrally important earlier perception at the signal moment about to transpire, so as to be fully in that future present in a way informed by the past. In doing so, the mind is recalling that past as preparation for the recalling of the past that will in a moment from now be different, because it will be placed within the stream of conversation with Vionnet, and so different, differently relationally constituted as a thought, than it is at this anticipatory pre-conversational moment. If somewhat intricate, this is precisely what William James said about experience, the complexity of our temporal placement within it, and what he regarded as the strict impossibility of the repetition of an experience. Poole captures another centrally important aspect of this philosophical novel: There is also an important contrast between metaphor and platitude. Much of the novel’s comedy depends on the scope for misunderstanding over apparently simple words of approbation such as ‘good’, ‘free’, ‘honest’, ‘virtuous’, ‘straight’, ‘grand’, ‘fine’, ‘wonderful’, ‘magnificent’, ‘sublime’. People hear in these words very much as they see, just what they want or expect to. The rarity is the person, like Strether, who can revise those expectations when they are not confirmed or positively contradicted. Woollett will not change its mind. This is where Strether’s openness to the language of metaphors helps him get in touch with what he really thinks and feels and believes. (p. xxxiii)

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This is a deeply important observation—and it connects directly to the Wittgensteinian side of the broadly pragmatic approach. Words are not mere signs that, as otherwise lifeless sounds, are attached to fixed mental entities called “meanings” that then travel invariantly through language and in and out of varying contexts. Rather, they are the words of persons, and to understand a person, as Poole is saying, one has to understand their inflected usage—the associations, connotations, and implications awakened for and by them in their verbal employments and expressions. I said above that the Woollett mentality is closed while Strether’s is open; to put this point linguistically, Woollett is a language of artificially fixed referents and that fixity’s corollary thoughtlessness, while Strether’s language is Wittgensteinian with that conception’s corollary thoughtfulness. As we have seen, throughout the novel Strether does not merely use language as an inert instrument; he listens to it (his own and others), and learns from it. (“He had grown used by this time to reminders, especially from his own lips, of what he didn’t know,” p. 135.) As Poole is pointing out, for Strether metaphor and figurative expression is not mere rhetorical decoration to be dismissed. Rather, such language can be, if to put it rather grandly, the voice of a soul. This also means that Strether (here again exemplifying a fundamental point of pragmatism on the nature of linguistic meaning) has the capacity to reflect on the words and concepts in play within his interactions, discern their finer differences as they move through varying contexts of usage, and revise or augment those meanings accordingly. (“He made out in a moment that the youth was in earnest as he hadn’t yet seen him; which in its turn threw a ray perhaps a trifle startling on what they had each up to that time been treating as earnestness,” p. 188.) The pragmatic conception of language finds still other expressions in the novel; one aspect of this is the importance of tone in speech. Again, here one example may stand for many: “’Really and truly’, she added in a tone that was to take place with him among things remembered” (p. 204). In showing so frequently the contribution the tone of an utterance makes to the determination of its meaning, or what one might think of as the musicality of its delivery, James is capturing the expressive and interactive life of language—broadly speaking, what Wittgenstein referred to as our linguistic interaction within a form of life. Similarly,

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like the pragmatists and Wittgenstein, James clearly sees the connection between gesture and linguistic utterance and the inflection of the latter by the former: “his plural pronoun was sufficiently reflected in his companion’s face” (p. 459). As we have seen, James captures a number of the intricacies of our relationship to our language. If the “hermetic-mind” picture were accurate, we would always be the full masters of our words, always use them as direct externalizations of mental content—meaning would always be determined by intention, and correct interpretation would always be circumscribed by that intention. But that way of seeing the matter, as the pragmatic approach argues and as James here shows, is a misled and simplifying philosophical model or picture. Our relation to our language is not unitary, and our relations to our words are not always as master of determinate content: He wondered. ‘No - but I’ve been thinking what I meant.’ She kept it up. ‘And not, a little, what I did?’ ‘No - that’s not necessary. It will be enough if I know what I meant myself ’. (p. 219)

And so the closely related picture of direct and unmediated introspective access to the contents of consciousness, the picture that as we saw above both Peirce and Wittgenstein supplant with realistic and practice-grounded details of our mental lives is also shown for its falsity by James: Strether couldn’t have said he had during the previous hours definitely expected it; yet when, later on, that morning - though no later indeed than for his coming forth at ten o’clock - he saw the concierge produce, on his approach, a petit blue delivered since his letters had been sent up, he recognized the appearance as the first symptom of a sequel. He then knew he had been thinking of some early sign from Chad as more likely, after all, than not; and this would be precisely the early sign (p. 429)

And this is connected to the way pragmatists see belief, or the revelation of belief, in action, which James also frequently captures; here is a compressed example:

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Worth while or not, he went around to the nearest telegraph-office, the big one on the Boulevard, with a directness that almost confessed to a fear of the danger of delay. (p. 429)

Our relations to our own language can also take form as turning words loose within an atmosphere of vaguely detectable yet unnamed connections: “and he felt again the brush of his sense of moving in a maze of mystic closed allusions” (p. 222). And this means that Strether shows, in addition to everything else already in play, what it is like to move verbally within a world of statement and possible restatement, where our relation to language takes on a “multiple drafts” aspect—which also shows that there is often not a single correct verbal expression of mental content or intention: “His companion attended deeply. ‘You state it much better than I could’” (p. 226), and “Strether met his eyes with a sense of multiplying thoughts”(p. 458). Similarly, on the pragmatic ground of our verbal practices, we can move near to an utterance without making it, knowing full well that it is “hovering” nearby: “It was as near as they came to saying that she was probably in love with Chad; but it was quite near enough for what Strether wanted” (p. 340). In his final conversation with Miss Gostrey, we get: On which they fronted each other across the table, as if things unuttered were in the air. Strether seemed, in his way, when he next spoke, to take some of them up. (p. 466)

And then also: the relations between our words and our visual images (if there are any such images at all) are highly variable across differing cases; there will be no predictable one-to-one relation. Dreading his meeting with Sarah Pocock, “He saw himself, under her direction, recommitted to Woollett as juvenile offenders are committed to reformatories” (p. 272). Wittgenstein suggested the analogy between moves in a game of chess and the way in which, within language-games or circumscribed contexts of discourse, possibilities are opened, others closed, others are in a sense present yet left unstated, and so forth: “It affected him on the spot as a

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move in a game” (p. 320). And those moves can prove self-revelatory in a way not available to any traditional dualistic conception of introspection; it is self-knowledge that comes from the outside. “It was a question about himself, but it could only be settled by seeing Chad again; it was indeed his principal reason for wanting to see Chad” (p. 447). In his Preface, James identifies the passage in the novel that offers a succinct description of “the situation” and the fundamental germ from which the book grew: The situation involved is gathered up betimes, that is in the second chapter of Book Fifth, for the reader’s benefit, into as few words as possible – planted or ‘sunk’, stiffly and saliently, in the centre of the current, almost perhaps to the obstruction of traffic. “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular as long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had? I’m too old – too old at any rate for what I see. What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t, like me to-day, be with the memory of the illusion”. (p. 1)

There are two things of special importance here: first, the meaning of the phrase “having your life” is itself an illustration of the necessity of understanding a person to (fully) understand language: this phrase could be taken superficially, just as the Woollett contingent might—that is, simply being alive. But to understand its use here, one has, indeed, to read the novel; it is at that length, and with that degree of descriptive acuity, that we grasp what Strether means by it. Second, James’s encapsulation intimates the complexity of the subject of mental life as his mimetic model as he approaches it with his pen. (His brother did much the same, if in a different idiom, in The Principles of Psychology.) Strether is naming not simple freedom of choice, and not the illusion of that volitional freedom, but rather what it is to live later in life with the memory of that illusion of freedom. The illusion, this suggests, is something with which we live knowingly, but where the illusion is productively useful— that is, pragmatic. It is the memory of that illusion that is the mental condition about which he is issuing a warning: what we lose, we lose in a way often beyond our control—but the roads not taken because of a

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failure to act (as though we are in control of more than we actually are) will open a space for regret, a space for the sense of internal loss. This is the content of Strether’s warning, and the psychology of that condition is not easily conveyed with a few psychological verbs or, indeed, in any brief form. Peirce, throughout his writings, has said that facts are what we call stabilized points in epistemology or in life as lived that provide a platform for workable prediction within limits, and that facts are the kinds of things that, however seemingly certain at any given time, await future developments that may unseat them from what we call certainty. (“Strether almost gasped at all he himself hadn’t thought of,” p. 214.) This does not change every claim to knowledge into what we would call a hypothesis, but it does challenge the image of certainty as Cartesian incontrovertibles or Platonic immutables. Again, from a position standing back, James novel is full of this point: Strether is engaged in a four hundred and seventy page search for the self-knowledge that will yield self-identity, and his is an epistemological project of a thoroughly Peircean kind. And we see this come to the surface of the text in the words of other characters as well; in response to his early claim that Chad’s relationship, whatever it is, is surely bad, that it won’t do, Miss Gostrey says, ‘Oh, I don’t know. One never does – does one? – beforehand. One can only judge on the facts. Yours are quite new to me; I’m really not in the least, as you see, in possession of them: so it will be awfully interesting to have them from you. If you’re satisfied, that’s all that’s required. I mean if you’re sure you are sure: sure it won’t do’. (p. 59)

It will be clear that I have been emphasizing the theme of implicationmeaning rather than directly-stated-meaning throughout, but this should briefly be included here to make one more point. The number of times in the novel that James’s characters move and think within the space of implication is great, but if one may stand for many: in an exchange with Waymarsh in Book Third, Strether (still early on in his development) says that “You can’t make out over here what people do know”(p. 97), a line

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intimating the atmosphere of implication surrounding the spoken utterance that frequently leaves the Woollett-trained Strether with the sense that there is much more being said than is being (explicitly) said, and that he does not often know quite how to discern what that is (this grows into one of his internal imperatives in the novel). And when Waymarsh replies, Strether quickly says, “Oh, you’re not one of them! I do know what you know” (p. 97). He has known Waymarsh for a long time as a very good fried—he knows his words. But this “caused Waymarsh again to look at him hard – such being the latter’s doubt of its implications” (p. 97). That is, Waymarsh is responding to the whole of Strether’s remark’s significance. One way to say this, if a bit paradoxical, is that Waymarsh knows how to speak the language of the unspoken; meaning for him is not circumscribed by what a transcript could capture. And so the point: James said in his Preface that, of the “germ” of the novel that it “had been given me bodily, as usual, by the spoken word” (p. 2). This is not the only time James wrote of the strong influence on his imagination of a single remark, a phrase, indeed a word, that lodges in his imagination (sometimes he calls this “the air-blown particle”) and, by working out its implications or internally-contained narrative logic or thematic possibilities and unfoldings, writes a tale, or as in this case a full novel, from it. James, with this method or approach, is thus not only writing mimetic novels, but also novels that contain characters that represent, autobiographically, the workings of his own mind in the act of creation. For him, as writer, there is a crowded and multitudinous rush of thoughts, images, associations, and connections that come to mind, flowing and intertwining together in a state of creative imagination that is protected and enhanced by silence at his writer’s desk. To put it one way (entirely reminiscent of Peirce on meaning), it is the imaginative perception of the expanding meaning of a word. Of Strether’s first sight of the person who, after a moment but not immediately, is recognized as Chad (when he appears in the box at the opera at the last minute and takes a seat near Strether), James writes: The fact was that his perception of the young man’s identity – so absolutely checked for a minute – had been quite one of the sensations that count in life; he certainly had never known one that had acted, as he

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might have said, with more of a crowded rush. And the rush, though both vague and multitudinous, had lasted a long time, protected, as it were, yet at the same time aggravated, by the circumstance of its coinciding with a stretch of decorous silence. (p. 117)

Philosophy in Light of Literature In section “Peirce and the Content of Our Concepts”, I offered an answer to the question “What is, or what kind of thing is, the pragmatic approach as developed by its originator, C. S. Peirce?”. Having this answer in hand is obviously prerequisite to asking how it is that a work of literature might exemplify, cast light on, or offer an occasion for reflection on, that philosophical view, and having those ideas in mind will “frontload” the content that will shape a philosophical reading of an exemplary philosophical novel. In section “Wittgenstein and the Sense of Pragmatism”, I turned to Wittgenstein, who, while not an American pragmatist, nevertheless offers work that shows in particular how a broadly pragmatic approach to language and mind might prepare us to better see this distinctive philosophical stance in literature. Then in section “The Ambassadors as an Adventure of Self-Knowledge”, I suggested how a pragmatic reading of James’s The Ambassadors might unfold, and in section “Strether, the Pragmatics of Language, and the Changing Mind”, I stood back from the novel to consider how the novel casts light on what pragmatism is. And so finally to close the circle, here in a brief section “Philosophy in the Light of Literature”, I will offer reminders of the ground covered in section “Peirce and the Content of Our Concepts” that now might resonate more with literature, or take on a different look or richer texture, given the ground covered since. Peirce observed, recall, that we cannot begin with complete doubt. Strether, coming from Woollett, did no such thing; he came with fixed beliefs. Encounter by encounter, thought by thought, word by word, they were challenged, changed, or supplanted. Closely related, real belief for Peirce is not invariably a matter of direct propositional declarations or always the kind of thing we can express in them; we saw belief, sometimes acknowledged and sometimes not, manifest in action frequently. And

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Peirce observed that what can and cannot be questioned is not as simple a matter as some pre-pragmatic philosophy might make it out to be: Strether does on some occasions see his two futures as equal possibilities (like the possible reversal of the house plan), and then later, succumbing to the weight of habit, he does not. The doubt he experiences about Woollett in general and Mrs. Newsome in particular is not volitional; it is circumstantially emergent; and it is as I said in section “Peirce and the Content of Our Concepts”, not purely a phenomenon of inwardly contained intellection. The word “doubt” comes to life as it is webbed through Strether’s experience. In Strether, we unquestionably see private thought and the private workings of a mind, but this is never metaphysical privacy; the mind shown here is not hermetic in the philosophical sense (nor, as both Peirce and Wittgenstein claim, could we so much as make sense of such an idea). And no inward mental entity is the guarantor of the truth of any claim concerning the progress of that mind: sometimes he knows his inward condition and sometimes, like the rest of us, he does not. Nor is his achieved self-knowledge the result of deductive or syllogistic reasoning; his thinking, across the broad span of the novel, shows much more of the full scope of human thinking, reasoning, figuring out, finding out, and the general search for truth than that one small slice of rationality. Peirce argued that no single individual is the absolute judge of truth; James presents us with a cast of characters moving through perceptions, misperceptions, self-knowledge, self-deception, statements, restatements, and the flux out of which, not eternal or immutable truths emerge, but out of which presently settled conceptions of the way things are emerge. And, like Wittgenstein, the language they use resides not within the metaphysical confines of a mental interior but in the community of interaction; the language James shows us is anything but a system for the externalization of pre-verbal mental content. And so we also see in James the Wittgensteinian variant of Peirce’s point: no single individual is the absolute judge of linguistic meaning and no single speaking mind is determinative of fixed or invariant content. And then recall, Peirce said, “We have no power of thinking without signs”: the great deal of thinking we see here, mainly in Strether but all

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across the others as well, is in Peirce’s sense in signs. Like Wittgenstein’s removal of the private inner object in our thinking about how language works and what language is, Peirce said, “We have no power of introspection, but all knowledge of the internal world is derived by hypothetical reasoning from our knowledge of external facts.” And Wittgenstein said, “The sign, the sentence, gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs.” The word, as I said above (and, as we saw there, like a work of art), is not a delivery system from a psychic enclosure. Also, we saw Wittgenstein, in critiquing this very idea of necessary or metaphysical privacy where the inner object is the referent of a word, point out that there we could not talk about “right” (because in the absence of any external criterion of rightness, anything that seemed right would appear as right as anything that was right). Strether struggles throughout with what is right, what descriptions would rightly fit the shifting conditions in which he finds himself, and what set of descriptions would stabilize his identity, but this process of self-composition is never private in that metaphysical sense. I called these observations in section “Peirce and the Content of Our Concepts” an inversion of the classic dualistic picture, and these anti-hermetic thoughts also open the way to what we have seen as a central pragmatic theme throughout the novel: the relations into which we enter make us who we are. The work James undertakes here is, as we saw, the antithesis of reductionism; belief does not reduce to a single conceptual model, and language does not reduce to essential or circumstantially non-inflected meanings. James thus presents the opposite of or antidote for what I called conceptual impoverishment in section “Peirce and the Content of Our Concepts”. We also saw Peirce say, “The irritation of doubt causes a struggle.” From our present vantage point, looking back across the novel to the discussion of what the pragmatic approach is, one could say: that defines Strether’s plight. Wittgenstein said that to get clear about knowledge, “Socrates does not so much as think of first enumerating cases of knowledge.” One could reread the novel, making a list—it would be an epistemologically instructive very long list—of cases in which a question of knowledge is in

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play. And Wittgenstein said that when the language-game changes, there is a change of concepts. And so here again: one can think of the difference we now see between the word “doubt” as Strether would have used it in pre-Parisian Woollett, how he might have used it in his conversation with Little Bilham, and how he would use it by the time of his final conversations with Madame de Vionnet and Miss Gostrey. And one can then also think of how we would explain these differences: we could not do it with what Wittgenstein called a single proposition, but rather only with “a whole system of propositions” or “a nest of propositions,” where, indeed, in such an explanation of these three phases of a changing concept, “light dawns gradually over the whole.” Three brief dictionary-style definitions could not capture the significance here; what James shows across a broad expanse cannot be said in capsule form. The meaning of the word “wish” came up in section “Peirce and the Content of Our Concepts”; think about how we understand that word in Strether’s world now, having seen him turn to, and then away from, a vital life. We saw Wittgenstein also say, “Our talk gets its meaning from the rest of our proceedings”: one might ask, what single episode of Strether’s experience, and indeed what words of his, would we truly understand without an awareness of the rest of his proceedings? The scale of a novel is not unrelated to what it can show.

Notes 1. See in this connection Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers, ed. Cheryl Misak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), esp. pp. 345–381. 2. C. S. Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities”, originally published in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, vol. 2, 1868, pp. 140–157; reprinted in John J. Stuhr, Pragmatism and Classical American Philosophy, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 54–67. My page references will be to this widely accessible anthology. An earlier version of the first two sections of this

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9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

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chapter appeared in “Peirce, Wittgenstein, and the Sense of Pragmatism”, Special Issue on Wittgenstein and Pragmatism, in Paradigmi, ed. Roberta Dreon, Vol. XXXIV, 2016, pp. 33–50. “Some Consequences”, p. 55. “Some Consequences”, p. 55. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958). “Some Consequences”, p. 55. “Some Consequences”, p. 55. I offer a fuller discussion of this issue in “Wittgenstein, Consciousness, and The Golden Bowl : James’s Maggie Verver and the Linguistic Mind”, in Narrative and Self-Understanding, ed. Garry L. Hagberg (London: Palgrave, 2019), pp. 225–266. “Some Consequences”, p. 55. See in this connection Christopher Hookway, "Inference, Partial Belief and Psychological Laws," in Prospects for Pragmatism: Essays in Memory of F. P. Ramsey, ed. D. H. Mellor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 91–108. “Some Consequences”, p. 55. “Some Consequences”, p. 55. “Some Consequences”, p. 56. “Some Consequences”, p. 56. “Some Consequences”, p. 59. This and the following lines appear in “The Fixation of Belief ”, Popular Science Monthly, vol. 12, 1877, pp. 1–15; reprinted in Stuhr, pp. 67–76, these passages p. 70. “Fixation of Belief ”, p. 71. See also Peirce’s further discussion of the experience of doubt in his “What Pragmatism Is”, in Stuhr, pp. 108– 109 and in his “Issues of Pragmaticism”, in Stuhr, p. 118, where he writes, “genuine doubt always has an external origin”. In “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”, Popular Science Monthly, vol. 12, 1878, pp. 286–302; reprinted in Stuhr, pp. 77–88, these lines p. 81. William James referred to this particular essay as “the birth certificate of pragmatism.” Although beyond the scope of this essay, it is of interest that Peirce here includes a discussion, with graphic examples, of pattern-perception and what we would say about their

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18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

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organization; this too is strikingly similar to Wittgenstein’s (far more extensive) investigation of seeing-as and aspect-perception. In this essay Peirce writes, “there is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice,” “Make Ideas Clear”, p. 81. “Make Ideas Clear”, p. 82. William James illuminatingly discusses the central importance of this idea for pragmatism (and his revival of it twenty years after Peirce wrote it) in “What Pragmatism Means”, in Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907); reprinted in Stuhr, pp. 193–202. Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, p. 4. Blue Book, p. 5. Blue Book, p. 5. Blue Book, p. 5. Blue Book, p. 16. Blue Book, p. 19. Blue Book, pp. 19–20. See also in this connection Renford Bambrough, “Peirce, Wittgenstein, and Systematic Philosophy,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 6, 1981, pp. 263–273. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), sec. 249. On Certainty, sec. 61. On Certainty, sec. 65. On Certainty, sec. 115. On Certainty, sec. 117. On Certainty, sec. 120. On Certainty, sec. 141. On Certainty, sec. 144. Wittgenstein offers a succinct statement of this in sec. 225: “What I hold fast to is not one proposition but a nest of propositions.” To get clear on what he means by “nest,” however, is not a simple matter; this is one reason literature can be of such service to philosophy—to gain from a reflective distance an overview and yet detailed comprehension of how and why a character does what she does within the “nest” of propositions, of

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39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44. 45.

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possibilities, and the language-games of a relationally-intertwined world. On Certainty, sec. 164. On Certainty, sec. 221. On Certainty, sec. 229. It is true that this aspect of Wittgenstein’s philosophical approach does not explicitly appear in Peirce. But it is I think clear that Peirce’s emphasis on the philosophical significance of our verbal life is deeply compatible with, and in a sense anticipates, Wittgenstein’s investigations into linguistic usage as the means of making progress and achieving conceptual clarification—which Peirce did explicitly pursue—in the philosophy of language and mind. On Certainty, sec. 255. On Certainty, sec. 103. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Revised 4th ed., ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), Sec. 241. I discuss Wittgenstein’s use and development of this phrase in Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge (Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 45–83. See Philosophical Investigations, secs. 243–315. See Philosophical Investigations, Sec 258. This matter (the similar conceptions of philosophical progress) could be examined at length. A place to start could be Wittgenstein’s first entry in his Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. A. C. Miles (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1979), where he writes: “We must begin with the mistake and transform it into what is true. That is, we must uncover the source of the error; otherwise hearing what is true won’t help us. It cannot penetrate when something is taking its place. To convince someone of what is true, it is not enough to state it; we must find the road from error to truth” (p. 1). Both Peirce (in his explicit pragmatismas-clarification) and Wittgenstein (in his therapeutic conception of philosophical clarification) see the profound yet easily underappreciated value of excavating and elucidating the intellectual impulses

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and philosophical pictures from which we earn (by finding and traveling Wittgenstein’s “road”) a philosophically distinctive kind of conceptual freedom. 46. The edition I am using here is Henry James, The Ambassadors, Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Adrian Poole (London: Penguin, 2008; orig. pub. 1903; New York Edition 1909). 47. Among the first-generation pragmatists it was perhaps in the writings of George Herbert Mead that this point was most fully developed.

Part IV Seeing the Past, Inheriting Tragedy’s Wisdom

12 The Passing Away of the Past: The Transmutation of Modernism into Postmodernism Rizwan Saeed Ahmed and Akhtar Aziz

To write of time during the modernist era was to write of a quickly shifting world, to write the mutable and the vanishing; it was simultaneously to create a new time and to celebrate, mourn, and eulogize the passing of the old.1 Novelists and playwrights, natural scientists and social scientists, poets, prophets, pundits, and philosophers of many persuasions have manifested an intense hostility to historical thought. Many of our contemporaries are extraordinarily reluctant to acknowledge the reality of past time and prior events, and stubbornly resistant to all arguments for the possibility or utility of historical knowledge.2

After ‘death’ and ‘love,’ the ‘past’ can safely be said to be the most frequently played upon notion in all art forms. The modernists T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf have a profound sense of the past. Eliot is an ardent advocate of the relevance of the past to the present. In “Tradition R. S. Ahmed (B) · A. Aziz International Islamic University (IIU), Islamabad, Pakistan

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and the Individual Talent,” Eliot puts forward his notion of “historical consciousness” stressing the momentousness of the past and the literature of the past: “The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”3 Eliot is thus not only conscious of the distinct character of the past but he also believes in the duality of the past, its pastness and its presence. Similarly, Woolf cherishes the moments of the remembrance of the past to such an extent that she terms them the “moments of being.” She thus describes the enriching influence of the past on the present in her essay “A Sketch of the Past”: “For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else, when the film on the camera reaches only the eye.”4 The modernists are deeply conscious of historical and temporal progression. Their artistic efforts to make the past contemporary are the result of their mindfulness of the fleeting nature of time. That is why Dettmar argues that “the more emphasis and weight the modernists sought to place on ‘contemporaneity’ (to resurrect one of their favorite words), the more rapidly it seemed to recede into the past.”5 Moreover, their texts also reflect an intense awareness of the notion of continuity underlying time and history. Working on The Waves in 1929, Woolf points to the said continuity thus: “Perhaps it may be that though we change, one flying after another, so quick, so quick, yet we are somehow successive and continuous we human beings.”6 Eliot remarks that “indeed, the one thing that time is ever sure to bring about is the loss: gain or compensation is almost always conceivable but never certain.”7 His pronouncement is indicative of the progressive character of time. The postmodernists Samuel Beckett and Graham Swift have a diminishing sense of the past that is antithetical to the modernists’ acute awareness of the past. There is hardly any room for the remembrance of things of past in the postmodernists’ fictional world. Their characters are seldom able to satisfactorily engage with memories of the past. The tramps in Waiting for Godot fail to recall even the blurred images of the past. By the same token, Burroughs goes to the extent of saying that “there is no memory in Beckett.”8 In Waterland , likewise, the amnesiac

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mire to which the protagonist Tom Crick’s beloved, brother and father are consigned does not offer any space to reminisce about the past. The postmodernists are intensely aware of the discontinuity between the past and the present. In their texts, the past seems too distant and ungraspable to be resurrected. In addition, the specters of the past rarely dwell in the prison of the present depicted in their texts. Significantly, the postmodernists do not feel nostalgia for the past and do not idealize it in the same way as the modernists. It is equally important to note that they do not consider memory to be an adequate means of reviving the past. The postmodernist texts question the reality of history and regard historical events with skepticism. Eliot’s Four Quartets signifies a deep sense of “time past” and history. Intriguingly, the poem contains several moments of vision from the poet’s personal past, the past of his family and of the human community to which he feels related. The extensive reach of the poet’s memory includes the references to the mystical figures like St. John of Cross and Julian of Norwich. Douglass says that the poem “attempts to make more fully real the teachings of the Christian mystics, like St. John of the Cross, a significant figure in both Four Quartets and The Two Sources of Morality and Religion.”9 Moreover, the use of metaphors and symbols also seems to be a strategy adopted by Eliot as an expression of his historical consciousness. Pointing toward the symbolic character of the poem, Barbara Everett claims that “Four Quartets is a text that still engages extensively with French symbolist models.”10 Positively, the metaphors such as the echo of footfall in the memory, the rose-garden, the river, the wounded surgeon, the dying nurse, and Adam’s curse revive the past in varied ways. The opening lines of the first quartet, “Burnt Norton,” set it in the context of time; the three temporal aspects which define the reality of mortal existence: past, present and future: Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past.11

The present and the future are gradually transformed into the past. Burnt Norton, which is actually a manor house in Gloucestershire,

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England, arouses passion in the heart and remembrance in the mind of the poet. In fact, Eliot had visited the aforesaid house with his friend Emily Hale in 1935. And both were particularly moved by the beauty of the garden in the house. Perkins maintains that in the first quartet “we overhear the poet exploring and reflecting upon personal memories – memories of the rose garden at the manor house of Burnt Norton.”12 Shortly, the focus of the poet’s contemplation shifts from “all time” to the realm of memories evocative of the past. The depiction of “footfalls echo in the memory” leading into “the rose-garden” (BN , p. 171) indicates that shift and Kukreti claims that “the image of echoing footsteps” represents a sense of yearning and nostalgia in the poet’s heart for the “road not taken.”13 On a side note, Eliot and Hale remained intimate friends but could not unite in marriage. Indeed, the description of the path not taken and “the door never opened” (BN , p. 171) confirms the remembrance of an unrealized dream. The train of memory carries the poet further backward as the spell of the past becomes stronger. Lyndall Gordon writes down in her biography of Eliot that he had declared that “the past is ‘a pit for us still to explore’.”14 Truly, the poet seems to dwell upon a similar exploration of the past in “Burnt Norton.” And the impetus for it comes from the unbroken resonance of the other sounds emanating from the depths of the past: Other echoes / Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow? / Quick, said the bird, find them, find them, / Round the corner. Through the first gate, / Into our first world. (p. 171)

The “rose-garden” and “our first world” are the important metaphors in the above-mentioned lines. Interestingly, both the metaphors seem to work together and complement each other representing an earlier world of splendor, perfection, purity, and innocence. Kukreti asserts that the rose-garden of Eliot is reminiscent of “the garden of Eden” (TCLE , p. 52). Moreover, the presence of the invisible beings in the garden steers one into the farther deeps of history:

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Into our first world. / There they were, dignified, invisible, / Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves. (BN , p. 171)

Fascinatingly, the word “they,” signifying the invisible beings, embraces a variety of subtexts. It may refer to our departed loved ones who despite vanishing into the past remain visible to the eye of our heart. In a similar vein, Stephenson argues that “everyone’s imagination contains dignified, concrete images of loved people or things, who are out of reach, which are beyond contact; invisible and yet so full of reality to our inward knowledge.”15 In addition, the spectral children of Kipling’s story “They” may also be a point of inspiration for the poet and hence another connotation of the word. For childhood represents a state of purity and innocence. And it may even allude to our most ancient forebearers, Adam and Eve during their existence in prelapsarian time. In an analogous way, Tiwari considers the word “they” to be indicative of “Adam and Eve and the garden of Eden before fall.”16 The river, despite being a marker of teleological time, also serves as a metaphor reminiscent of times past in Four Quartets. The Mississippi river stirs in the poet the remembrance of the days spent in its proximity during his childhood and youth. In the same way, Miller describes it as “the river of Eliot’s childhood as well as the river of ‘recorded history’.”17 In “The Dry Salvages,” by raising the status of the river as a god Eliot has sanctified it with an ancient grandeur: I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river / Is a strong brown god – sullen, untamed and intractable.18

In the same section, the river is further described as an entity evocative of deep memories: Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder / Of what men choose to forget. (DS, p. 184)

The river, as an emblem of the passing of time, reminds humans of their fallen existence. Further, it arouses the memory of the unique

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historical moments like the Incarnation, which, being a singular, nonrepeatable event, signifies the teleological pattern in history. The metaphorical expression “the wounded surgeon” is suggestive of the messianic figure, Christ and Dwivedi affirms that “Christ appears as ‘the tiger’ in Gerontion and as ‘the wounded surgeon’ in East Coker.”19 Furthermore, the metaphor has a double importance as it signals the crucifixion of Christ and his art of healing: The wounded surgeon plies the steel / That questions the distempered part; / Beneath the bleeding hands we feel / The sharp compassion of the healer’s art.20

The phrase “the dying nurse,” “whose constant care is not to please / But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse” (EC , p. 181) is reminiscent of the Virgin. Tellingly, both the wounded surgeon and the dying nurse are referring to “Adam’s curse,” which represents the memory of the Fall and the story of life subsequent to it. Woolf ’s vision is suffused with an acute sense of the past and history. She developed her deep awareness of history into a defining feature of her art. In like manner, Deiman claims that “from the beginning of her career through the last year of her life a profound historical sense and perspective informed Virginia Woolf’s thought and development.”21 Further, her fictional works rely on memory as a significant element and the consciousness of her characters is often allured by the memories of time past. Being permeable to the varied, influential manifestations of the past, they eagerly engage in the act of remembrance. Baccolini argues that “Woolf ’s characters in To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and The Waves seem haunted by their memories.”22 The concept of time in The Waves is marked by duality. There is the external time characterized by the clock and there is the inner time represented by the characters’ absorption in the memories of the past. Indeed, memory is a vital element arousing a deep awareness of the past and history in the characters in the novel. To highlight the inevitable and unforeseeable role of memory in the lives of her characters, Woolf describes it as follows:

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Then comes the terrible pounce of memory, not to be foretold, not to be warded off.23

Furthermore, the backward stretch of the mind through the cord of memories serves to breathe a new life into the past. In a compelling manner, Bernard refers to the sweeping range of the “time of the mind” as something “which stretches in a flash from Shakespeare to ourselves” (TW , p. 185). Percival, after his premature death in an accident in India, turns into a potent sign of the presence of the past. Certainly, the minds of the six protagonists of the novel are frequently occupied by his memories. They look upon him as their hero, leader and captain (TW , p. 83). Beer acknowledges that “he is the past, a focus for memory and community.”24 Moreover, the character of Percival is important to the novelist on a personal level as it is suggestive of the remembrance of her brother Thoby Stephan who also died in the prime of his life. White argues that “Woolf ’s memories of her brother Thoby, and the grief for him which she shared with his siblings and friends, inform and are in turn transformed by her novels Jacob’s Room and The Waves”; he further says that “Jacob and Percival are literary incarnations of the dead Thoby.”25 Woolf ’s characters are imbued with a sense of the past that encompasses a much longer period of history. History is looked at as something progressive in the novel. In a similar way, Tymeiniecka asserts that “in The Waves Louis’ sense of history emphasises ‘the long view of historical perspective and continuity’.”26 Louis considers it his obligation to record history and merge its numerous strands as he says, My destiny has been that I remember and must weave together, must plait into one cable the many threads, the thin, the thick, the broken, the enduring of our long history. (TW , pp. 136–137)

His rearward glance embraces the Nile, the ancient “Kings and Queens,” civilizations, and even “all life” (p. 152). And Neville’s view of the extension of historical past, which will be discussed later, goes even further back to the event of the Fall.

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In The Waves, there are the symbols and metaphorical extracts which are suggestive of the characters’ heightened consciousness of the past. For instance, the apple tree is a very significant symbol in the novel. On the one hand it symbolizes death, doom and the end, but on the other hand it signifies the remembrance of the past and even a deep sense of history. Gay maintains that “the tree becomes a symbol of death and mortality but it also serves to crystallise and preserve memory.”27 For Neville, the tree is not only evocative of his childhood memory of “the dead man in the gutter” but also remindful of the death of Percival. He depicts the tree in the following manner: The others passed on. But we are doomed, all of us, by the apple trees, by the immitigable tree which we cannot pass. (TW , p. 17)

The protagonists’ sense and memories of the remote past are mirrored by the novelist’s manipulation of the narrative of the Fall in the Bible, albeit in a non-religious context. Analogously, Ingman affirms Woolf ’s employment of the account of “the Edenic Fall” in To the Lighthouse and The Waves.28 The echoes of the aforesaid biblical tale can be heard in the symbols such as the apple tree and the snake. To demonstrate, Jinny alludes to her hand as “a snake’s skin” and considers Bernard’s face to be “like an apple tree” (TW , p.16). Neville’s inability to stand the presence of shop-girls acts as another reminder of the same story: Their titter, their gossip, offends me; breaks into my stillness, and nudges me, in moments of purest exultation, to remember our degradation. (p. 58)

Truly, the above-described symbols of humanity’s fall denote a deep sense of history. Waiting for Godot ’s two acts depict “waiting” in the slough of amnesia. Declan Kiberd asserts that “on the stage of Waiting for Godot is enacted the amnesia which afflicts an uprooted people.”29 At the very beginning of the play, the idea of the diminishing sense of the past and skepticism of history come into play. Uniquely, the tramps, Vladimir and Estragon are only aware of a perpetually repetitive moment which devours the faintest

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memories of the past like a vortex. Their alienated selves, in the words of Schweiger, “can never make sense of the past.”30 The uncertainty of remembrance emerges from the conversation of the tramps about the two thieves: Vladimir: Estragon: Vladimir: Estragon:

Ah yes, the two thieves. Do you remember the story? No. Shall I tell it to you? No.31

The foregoing dialogue between Vladimir and Estragon is significant for two reasons. Firstly, it is the earliest sign of the tramps’ fading awareness of the past. Secondly, it is a reflection of their, especially Estragon’s, aversion to history. Likewise, Vladimir’s narration of the Biblical story of the two thieves hardly indicates his fascination with the past or history. The story is actually narrated to grapple with their stagnant condition, as Vladimir delusively thinks that such an invention “will pass the time” (WG, p. 14). Forgetfulness afflicts even the best of Beckett’s protagonists. Interestingly, it seems that his characters have drunk from the Lethe in life. To illustrate, Molloy fails to recall the name of his beloved: “The true love was in another. We’ll come to that. Her name? I’ve forgotten it again.”32 The same is the case with the problematic memory of Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot. Vladimir, even with his relatively better memory, is no exception. In like manner, Herlitzius points to the tramps’ almost equally oblivious character in the play: “Estragon remembers nothing and Vladimir’s memories are unreliable and inconsequential.”33 The tramps’ static time-scape, the mire of the present, plays a pivotal role in severing their ties with the past. Valsson describes the past in relation to the time-world of the tramps as “only a vague, dissipating memory which melds into the present.”34 The tramps consider the resurrection of the past a worthless and vain exercise. Estragon’s ineffective talk about the past events elicits the following response from Vladimir: That’s all dead and buried. / There’s no good harking back on that. (WG, 1, p. 51)

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Hence the tramps cannot look back for long. According to Hockman, Beckett indicates that “any memories or allusions to the past can only perpetuate and prolong the meaningless present.”35 Tellingly, the tramps’ unconventional time frame is similar to the postmodern idea of the perpetual present. Grmusa claims that “the defining characteristic of our condition of postmodernity is the shortening of commonsense perceptions of time,” “where the long pasts and futures of our ancestors have collapsed.”36 The dysfunctional memory operates like a contagion in the play. Even the tramps seem to infect each other with the disremembrance of the past, as the native oblivion of Vladimir is aggravated by the frequent memory lapses of Estragon. When the tramps are not able to recall and agree on what they did yesterday, Vladimir addresses Estragon angrily, Nothing is certain when you’re about. (WG, 1, p. 16)

Before his encounter with the tramps, Pozzo lived within the frame of linear and progressive time. Lucky and Pozzo’s linear march along the road confirms it. Hence Pozzo is very fond of his pocket watch which gives him a sense of the passage of time. To demonstrate, Pozze’s response “whatever you like, but not that” to Vladimir’s assertion “time has stopped” also indicates it (1, p. 36). However, when Pozzo steps in the abnormal time-scape of the tramps, which is plagued by the failing memory, he gets infected. He loses his watch and admits that his memory is defective. Al-Aabedi maintains that “when Pozzo comes in contact with Estragon and Vladimir, many things have changed. He becomes blind, loses his watch, his memory malfunctions, etc. It seems as if he were infected by their diseased time and place.”37 In the second act of the play, in spite of the slight signs of change reflected by a few leaves sprouted on the tree, the things essentially remain the same. For instance, Estragon fails to remember that the tree was there yesterday and blames Vladimir for dreaming it (WG, 2, p. 56). He does not even have the memory of their waiting place. In the same fashion, McDonald argues that “the desperate unreliability of memory is reinforced in Act II, as Estragon and Vladimir once again falteringly try to figure out whether they were there the day before or not.”38 A

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little while later, Vladimir is unable to recollect what he was saying at the beginning of the evening. He requests Estragon to remind him of it, to which he disdainfully replies, “I’m not a historian” (WG, 2, p. 61). The ultimate event depicting the breakdown of memory transpires when the tramps meet Lucky and Pozzo the second time. And Vladimir’s attempt to remind the blind Pozzo of their yesterday meeting leads to the following response from him: I don’t remember having met anyone yesterday. But tomorrow I won’t remember having met anyone today. So don’t count on me to enlighten you. (2, p. 82)

Amnesia, the unreality of the past and the devaluation of history are the subject of Swift’s Waterland . At the very beginning of the novel the protagonist, Tom Crick, who is a history teacher, finds himself on the verge of being forcefully retired. And the subject he teaches is also to be discarded. Lewis Scott, the principal of the school announces, Don’t imagine I like it, Tom, but we’re being forced to economize. We’re cutting back on history. You should take early retirement . . . .39

Moreover, the past and history are considered worthless and irrelevant from the practical perspective. Hence the principal, who believes that one can gain nothing by dwelling on the past, declares, And you know the kind of pressure I’m under – ‘practical relevance to today’s real world’ – that’s what they’re demanding. (WL, p. 22)

Contrary to Lewis Scott’s matter-of-fact stance, Price, a bright student of Crick, focuses on the depreciation of the past from the intellectual perspective. He is for the primacy of the present over the past and denies the value of historical knowledge. Remarkably, he argues that “what matters is the here and now. Not the past” (WL, p. 6). To emphasize, the view of Price turns into a resounding declaration that permeates the entire narrative. For the metaphors such as the river that “moves in an eternal circle” and the ever-present silt together with Crick’s occasional

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deliberations concerning his pupil’s standpoint all confirm it. At one point, he addresses Price thus: Your position – am I right? – is that history is a red herring; only the present matters. (p. 165)

Despite being a committed teacher of history, Crick at times makes such remarks and acts in ways that validate that he is also susceptible to the predominance of the present. On one occasion he speaks to his students in these words: But I have not brought history with me this evening (history is a thin garment, easily punctured by a knife called Now). (WL, p. 36)

Importantly, his pronouncement seems to indicate that history begins to lose its reality and substance as soon as it is looked at from the perspective of the present. Indeed, the present complicates our sense of the past. Instead of sticking to the authentic version of history, Crick engages in narrating tales of his family to his students. Woollons (1997) maintains that “Crick undermines the ‘authority’ of history.”40 In a similar vein, Touaf contends that the protagonist’s stated purpose is to undercut “the foundations of historiography’s claim to certainty and its supposedly objective rendering of past events and realities.”41 The reality of the past and history is submerged in the mere fiction of the yarns Crick spins. Crick’s idea of reality also stands in opposition to the concept of historical and temporal progression. In fact, it shapes his vision concerning the unreality of the past and history. Surprisingly, he has more faith in the notions of non-occurrence of things and nothingness. He says, “Reality is uneventfulness, vacancy, flatness. Reality is that nothing happens” (WL, p. 40). His reference to the land inhabited by his family and ancestors as the “nothing-landscape” (p. 52) also affirms his perspective on reality. This nothing-landscape is notably similar to the stagnant temporal and spatial setting occupied by the tramps in Waiting for Godot. To Crick, the past and history look uneventful from the viewpoint of the present. Malcolm claims that Crick’s realism is marked by “a skepticism, a lack of trust in all the great narratives and yarns spun in history.”42 Taking a

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position that is comparable to Crick’s, Keith Jenkins, a historian, depicts the postmodernist stance on the past in this way: “That ‘in and for itself ’ the past contains nothing of obvious significance.”43 Amnesia is a recurrent motif utilized in Waterland to suggest the fading awareness of the past. The protagonist Crick is surrounded by three amnesiac figures whose sole association with the past is characterized by their obliviousness to it. Memory remains unable to connect them with the past. Identically, history seems inadequate to mend their broken bond with the bygone world. Vosloo identifies memory and history as “vulnerable routes to the past.”44 No fruitful engagement with the past is possible for the characters in the novel. Significantly, the breakdown of historical consciousness is a characteristic feature of postmodern culture. Through his treatment of it, Swift may well be interested in bringing out amnesia as a general malaise afflicting contemporary society. Sceats asserts that Waterland “addresses the sense that we inhabit a world that has lost its historical dimension, resulting in collective amnesia and entrapment within ‘the prison of idiocy’.”45 Henry Crick, Crick’s father, is the first of the three amnesiacs. His oblivion is partly caused by his exposure to the atrocities of World War I. If he is asked about his war experiences, he always says, “I remember nothing” (WL, p. 20). Another reason for his amnesia is Dick Crick, his ostensible son, who is in reality born of an incestuous relationship between his wife Helen and her father Ernest Atkinson. Dick is the second amnesiac. His father Atkinson illusively expected him to be the Saviour of the World. Crick portrays the amnesiac temper of his brother in this fashion: That for him present eclipses past? That he possesses those amnesiac, those time – erasing qualities so craved by all guilty parties –? (p. 134)

Gozzi has endorsed that the characters in the novel “long for ignorance or amnesia, for the privileged condition of ‘not knowing’ or ‘not remembering’.”46 Mary Metcalf, Crick’s wife, is the third amnesiac figure. She becomes infertile because of her premarital abortion and her barrenness is the reason for her growing amnesia. Ultimately, the narrator implies

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that “perhaps amnesia’s best” for everyone (WL, p. 330). “The smell of amnesia” (p. 355) pervades the ending of the novel. It may be concluded that the modernists Eliot and Woolf and the postmodernists Beckett and Swift see the past differently. The modernists demonstrate an intense consciousness of the past in their literary creations, whereas the postmodernists depict a fading awareness of the past in their texts. The modernists make use of historical figures, ancient locations, symbols and even biblical narratives to revive the past. Conversely, the postmodernists treat the past and history in a skeptical manner. Unlike the modernists, they look upon the past as dead and buried. The modernists believe in historical continuity. They embrace the concept of the flow of time from the past to the present and from the present to the future. The metaphors of the river and the stream, employed by the modernists, confirm the foregoing assertion about them. Contrarily, the postmodernists are mistrustful of historical continuity. Actually, they give credence to the discontinuity of time and history and see a rupture between the past and the present. Furthermore, unlike the modernists, the postmodernists do not have a long perspective of history. From the standpoint of the present, they consider the past insignificant and uneventful. The modernists have great faith in the power of memory. Notwithstanding their awareness of the ceaselessly withdrawing character of the past, they effectively deal with it and breathe life into it by drawing on the reservoir of their memories. Eliot’s “rose-garden” and Woolf ’s “apple tree” are indicative of the extensive reach of their memory and the depth of their historical sense. Contrariwise, the postmodernists look at memory as an unreliable means of retrieving the past. The failing memory of the tramps and the amnesiac mire engulfing the Cricks highlight the fragility of humans’ faculty of memory. Indeed, mists of amnesia never clear off to allow the characters in postmodern texts to recall the past.

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Notes 1. Gabrielle McIntire, Modernism, Memory and Desire: TS Eliot and Virginia Woolf (England: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 2. 2. Fischer, quoted in Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 87. 3. Thomas Stearns Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Prose: T.S. Eliot, ed. J. Haward (England: Penguin, 1953), pp. 22–23. 4. Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being, 2nd ed., ed. J. Schulkind (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1985), p. 98. 5. Kevin J. H. Dettmar, “Introduction,” in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, eds. D. Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar (Malden: Blackwell, 2006), p. 2. 6. Virginia Woolf, quoted in Angeliki Spiropoulou, Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History: Constellations with Walter Benjamin (England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 41. 7. Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christianity and Culture: The Idea of A Christian Society and Notes towards the Definition of a Culture (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1948), p. 98. 8. William S. Burroughs, The Adding Machine: Selected Essays (Grove/Atlantic, 2013), p. 218, https://books.google.com.pk/books? id=n3WAo0ubf_4C. 9. Paul Douglass, Bergson, Eliot and American Literature (University Press of Kentucky, 1986), p. 96, https://books.google.com.pk/ books?id=3r9ZAAAAMAAJ. 10. Barbara Everett, quoted in Raphael Ingelbein, Misreading England: Poetry and Nationhood since the Second World War (Rodopi, 2002), p. 16, https://books.google.li/books?id=aCoaXEBaWV4C. 11. Thomas Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” in The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot. (Norfolk: Fakenham Press), p. 171; hereafter abbreviated BN . 12. David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry: Modernism and After (Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 25, https://books.google.com. pk/books?id=TTeKPg_zeqsC.

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13. Sumitra Kukreti, “Recurrent Symbols and Images in T.S. Eliots’ Four Quartets and The Family Reuniion,” in Twentieth Century Literature in English, ed. M. K. Bhatnagar (2000), p. 51, hereafter abbreviated TCLE . https://books.google.com. 14. Lyndall Gordon, quoted in Gabrielle McIntire, Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf (England: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 60. 15. Ethel M. Stephenson, “T.S. Eliot and the Lay Reader,” in T.S. Eliot, Vol. 2, ed. Michael Grant (Routledge, 2002), p. 449, https://books. google.com.pk/books?id=RS_bCgAAQBAJ. 16. Nidhi Tiwari, Imagery and Symbolism in T.S. Eliot’s Poetry (Atlantic Publishers & Dist, 2001), p. 139, https://books.google.com.pk/ books?id=CwE0COb06AcC. 17. James E. Miller, T.S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet (Penn State University Press, 2005), p. 29, https://books.google.com.pk/ books?id=CwE0COb06AcC. 18. Thomas Eliot, “The Dry Salvages,” in The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot. (Norfolk: Fakenham Press), p. 184; hereafter abbreviated DS. 19. Amar Nath Dwivedi, T.S. Eliot: A Critical Study (Atlantic Publishers & Dist, 2003), p. 72, https://books.google.com.pk/ books?id=v5jkMedByIwC. 20. Thomas Eliot, “East Coker,” in The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot. (Norfolk: Fakenham Press), p. 181; hereafter abbreviated EC . 21. Deiman, quoted in William A. Evans, Virginia Woolf: Strategies of Language (University Press of America, 1989), p. 211, https://books. google.com.pk/books?id=JJxbAAAAMAAJ. 22. Raffaella Baccolini, “She Had Become a Memory”: Women as Memory in James Joyce’s Dubliners, in Rejoicing: New Readings of Dubliners, eds. R. B. Bosinelli and H. F. Mosher (2015), p. 159, https://books.google.com. 23. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (England: Granada, 1977), p. 179; hereafter abbreviated TW . 24. Gillian Beer, “Introduction,” in The Waves, ed. G. Beer (1998), p. xxviii, https://books.google.com.

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25. Frances White, “The Resisted Influence of Virginia Woolf on Iris Murdoch’s Fiction,” in Iris Murdoch Connected: Critical Essays on Her Fiction and Philosophy, ed. M. Luprecht (2014), p. 15. 26. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Analectahusserliana, Vol. 18 (1980), p. 216, https://booksgoogle.com. 27. Jane De Gay, Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 166, https://books.google.com.pk/ books?id=nN3sUq6TOp0C. 28. Heather Ingman, “Religion and the Occult in Women’s Modernism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers, ed. M.T. Linett (Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 190, https://books.google.com.pk/books?id=lbCpnu_dExgC. 29. Declan Kiberd, quoted in Stephen Watt, Postmodern/Drama: Reading the Contemporary Stage (University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 71, https://books.google.com.pk/books?id=7AkcqS 4uHt8C. 30. Hannes Schweiger, “Samuel Beckett and Friederike Mayrocker: Attempts at Writing the Self,” in After Beckett, eds. A. Uhlmann, S. Houppermans & B. Clement (Netherlands: Rodopi, 2004), p. 157. 31. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 1, p. 14; hereafter abbreviated WG. References are to act and page number. 32. Samuel Beckett, Molly (New York: Grove Press, 1955), n. p. 33. Eva-Marie Herlitzius, A Comparative Analysis of the South African and German Reception of Nadine Gordimer’s, Andre Brink’s and J.M. Coetzee’s works, Vol. 22, (LIT Verlag Münster, 2005), p. 79, https:// books.google.com.pk/books?id=tVxX7JdHL0IC. 34. Jokull Valsson, “Godot is Dead: Nietzsche and Beckett on Salvation and Suffering in a Godless Universe,” (Stockholm University, 2011), p. 16. 35. Dennis Hockman, “Power of Negativity in the Wastelands of T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett: A Study of Absence in The Waste Land and Endgame” (Master’s thesis, University of Montana, 1999), pp. 36–37. 36. Lovorka Gruic-Grmusa, “The Transformations in the Understanding of Temporality in Postmodern Literature,” Americana:

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38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

43. 44.

45.

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E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary IX, no. 1 (2013): n.p., http://americanaejournal.hu/vol9no1/gruic-grmusa. Haidar Kareem Al-Aabedi, Equivocation in the Theatre of the Absurd: Discourse Analysis (Logos Verlag Berlin GmbH, 2015), p. 213, https://books.google.com.pk/books?id=6uChCgAAQBAJ. Ronan McDonald, “Waiting for Godot,” ed. Harold Bloom (Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2008), p. 146, https://books.google. com.pk/books?id=maadMgEACAAJ. Graham Swift, Waterland (England: Picador, 1999), p. 5; hereafter abbreviated WL. Jennifer Woollons, “Authentic Synthetics: Three Novels by Graham Swift” (Master’s thesis, University of Canterbury, 1997), p. 32. Larbi Touaf, “Reality is an Empty Vessell”: Disturbing the “Order of Things” in Graham Swift’s Waterland, accessed January 29, 2019, http://www.academia.edu/16846740/Reality_is_an_empty_vessel_ Disturbing_the_order_of_things_in_Graham_Swifts_Waterland. David Malcolm, Understanding Graham Swift (Univ of South Carolina Press, 2003), p. 87, https://books.google.com.pk/books? id=EttQoAGfCcsC. Keith Jenkins, ed., Why History? (England: Routledge, 1999), p. 2. Robert Vosloo, “Inaugural Lecture,” in Time in our Time: On Theology and Future-Oriented Memory, ed. R. Smith (South Africa: University of Stellenbosch, 2015), p. 9. Sarah Sceats and Gail Cunningham, “Public Power,” in Image and Power: Women in Fiction in the Twentieth Century, eds. S. Sceats and G. Cunningham (Routledge, 2014), p. 174, https://books.google. com.pk/books?id=wH1_BAAAQBAJ. Francesco Gozzi, The complete consort: safi di anglistica in onore di Francesco Gozzi (2005), n.p., https://books.google.com.

13 Spiritual Idealism and Tragic Wisdom: An Essay on King Lear Robert Baker

Many of us have an understanding of spiritual life that comes, in one way or another, from the religious and metaphysical visions that took shape in the ancient world throughout what Karl Jaspers calls the Axial Age or the second half of the first millennium BCE.1 Buddhism, Platonism, and Christianity are representative of these Axial Age visions of reality. They all rethink what human flourishing involves. They all teach, from different perspectives, a new kind of care for the self. It is care for an inwardness irreducible to a social identity, an inwardness radically altered by its awakened relationship to an ultimate reality, an inwardness shaped by an ascetic practice of one sort or another. The self must detach itself from the shadows of the cave, the lures of the world, the things that are impermanent, in order to attain wisdom and virtue, or life in the spirit and love, or enlightenment and kindness. A deepened inwardness, R. Baker (B) University of Montana, Missoula, MT, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73061-1_13

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open to a transcendent or ultimate reality, animates an altered way of inhabiting the ordinary world, inspiring one to relate to others more generously and to respond with poise and compassion to the realities of suffering and death. A startling promise of all these spiritual paths is the promise that, however bad things might become in everyday historical life, a genuinely awakened soul can remain free, wise, aware. Axial Age wisdom traditions disclose paths of existential reorientation. At stake is the search for experiential illumination in a world of loss, injustice, suffering, and death. According to Jaspers, Greek tragedy, too, is an Axial Age innovation. And yet tragedy is something decisively different from other Axial Age paths of wisdom. “The tragic outlook,” as Walter Kaufmann once put it, “can be the religiousness of the irreligious.”2 For the art of tragedy puts other Axial Age spiritual ideals in question. Indeed it puts spiritual idealism in general in question. It does away with dreams, with illusions, with the idealized stories we tell about ourselves. It shows us the breaking of human lives, the going under of human lives, and it stirs us to reflect on the sources of this breaking. Why do things fall apart? There are, Northrop Frye says, two basic ways to misunderstand tragedy.3 The first is to place all the emphasis on the destruction of the tragic hero by a force of necessity: by a divine power, a demonic power, a fate inherent in things, a catastrophe of circumstance. The second is to place all the emphasis on human freedom and guilt: to say that the tragic hero, through some mistake, or destructive passion, or failure of character, brings about his or her own ruin. Frye’s point is that each of these perspectives, taken alone, is reductive. But both of these perspectives, held together, begin to account for what A. C. Bradley characterizes as the mystery, the sorrow, the isolation, and the sense of waste that we feel in tragedy.4 Character is fate, according to Heraclitus, and both this saying and its reverse, that fate is character, go to the heart of the matter.5 Tragedy teaches that we are responsible for our disasters and that at the same time we are in over our head. Different theories of tragedy, one might say, describe different ways in which we are in over our head. According to Hegel, ancient tragedy shows that we lose our bearings amid a conflict of ethical orientations in the social worlds we inhabit. Ancient and modern tragedy, according

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to Nietzsche, show that we lose our bearings in our collision with a destructive force in life beyond reason or control. In one of Philip Roth’s novels, I Married a Communist, a schoolteacher named Murray voices an insight into tragedy as far-seeing as these canonical insights. Reflecting on the rage we so often see in tragedy—“the melancholy, the raving, and the bloodshed”—he concludes that its source is betrayal, or the fear of betrayal, we might add, or self-betrayal, he adds, “though that’s not the same thing.” “The few of us still engrossed in literature’s scrutiny of things,” he says, “have no excuse for finding betrayal anywhere but at the heart of history.” Betrayal can break a spirit as thoroughly as violence can break a body.6 What happens when we see a representation of the breaking of life? What do we experience? Aristotle connects the pleasure we take in tragic drama to the pleasure we take in acquiring knowledge about the world. Tragedy shows us something about human lives as they are. According to Aristotle, tragedy has a cognitive dimension, a recognition of what life is like, of what happens to individuals in over their heads, and an affective dimension, a purging of potentially destructive emotions, in particular fear and pity.7 Every literary genre, in one way or another, points beyond itself to the realm of experience, telling us something about life or about the way we see life, and tragedy has always been not only about suffering but also about the ways in which we cope with suffering. Behind Aristotle’s philosophical account of tragedy lies the chorus of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon: “we suffer and we learn,” or as this is often understood, through suffering we learn.8 That in suffering we might come to see things differently, that in suffering we might be emotionally changed, is an essential theme in ancient Jewish prophecy as well as in ancient Greek tragedy. Yet the prophetic tradition is rarely addressed in accounts of tragedy. The reason for this absence would seem to be clear: if, as the prophets teach, suffering is a passage to renewal and reconciliation, then it is not an irreducible truth of tragedy but a partial and eventually superseded truth of romance. What is the relationship between tragedy and romance? Or, to put this in different but related terms, what is the relationship between tragic wisdom and idealist wisdom? I would like to approach this question by looking in detail at King Lear . It is a tragedy of apocalyptic darkness. At its center, though, as

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Marjorie Garber has underlined, is a turn toward romance, a turn toward redemption and reconciliation, a turn cast in expansive spiritual terms.9 The tragic heroes, Lear and Gloucester, not only come to be reconciled with the children they had betrayed: they also begin to see and feel more deeply than they had seen or felt before they were stripped of nearly everything. They experience a change of vision and a change of heart. This romantic turn, to be sure, is swept away in the tragic conclusion of the play. But it remains a resonant dimension of the play as a whole. What does it mean? What is its relation to the larger tragedy of which it is a part? The greatness of King Lear lies not least in the way it presents a sweeping story of tragic ruin while at the same time exploring an existential concern as old as Aeschylus and the major Jewish prophets: a concern with the transformation of heart and vision in the dark of suffering. A play of great philosophical scope, it helps us to think about the relationship between idealist spiritual bearings and tragic wisdom. ∗ ∗ ∗ King Lear leaves one brooding on the depths and predicaments of its major characters, in particular Lear and Gloucester and Edgar, characters who go through so much. The tragedy has a visionary quality that has led some critics to wonder if it could ever be truly realized on stage. The characters, the existential and natural storms they move through, the cumulative catastrophes they provoke and endure all have a nearly mythic size. As Auden says, this is a drama of Blakean giant forms, of characters who at moments seem less like human beings than like embodiments of human states of being.10 Bradley, characterizing the “peculiar greatness” of the play, speaks of its “immense scope,” “the mass and variety of intense experience which it contains,” “the strange atmosphere, cold and dark, which strikes on us as we enter the scene, enfolding these figures and magnifying their dim outlines like a winter mist,” “the half-realized suggestions of universal powers working in the world of individual fates and passions.”11 This visionary quality of the play emerges in part through the way it represents a human world starkly polarized between good and evil, with two characters, Lear and Gloucester, caught up in the conflict

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between these forces. Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, and Edmund may all seem like ordinary villains at the outset, but they quickly begin to feed on everyone around them, as though they were the “monsters of the deep” that the play evokes on more than one occasion (4.2.51 in Quarto).12 Cordelia, the loving if independent daughter resistant to social pretense and familial manipulation, turns out to be Christ-like in her grace, courage, and forgiving patience, while Kent, the noble servant, risks his life out of loyalty to his master. Swaying between these forces, struggling to keep their heads above the waters of chaos, are Lear and Gloucester and, in a different way, Edgar. The double plot deepens our sense of a human conflict somehow become part of life itself. For the double plot, to cite Bradley again, “does not simply double the pain with which the tragedy is witnessed; it startles and terrifies by suggesting that the folly of Lear and the ingratitude of his daughters are no accidents or merely individual aberrations, but that in the dark cold world some fateful malignant influence is abroad, turning the hearts of fathers against their children and of the children against their fathers, smiting the earth with a curse, so that the brother gives the brother to death and the father the son, blinding the eye, maddening the brain, freezing the springs of pity, numbing all powers except the nerves of anguish and the dull lust of life.”13 Where love is absent, chaos is come again. Yet the play, as I’ve said, is not only a tragedy: a play that represents noble characters coming to ruin and suffering owing in part to their own passions and actions. It is also a play that represents the way these characters change in response to their ruin. We watch Lear and Gloucester try to keep their bearings, strive for a patience that would hold off madness or despair, and we watch them recognize their follies and begin to see and feel, to see feelingly, as they had not seen or felt before. To recall Aeschylus again, they suffer and they learn. But the myth that lends shape to the changes they experience is not the myth of the long tradition of tragedy. The myth is Christian or, ultimately, prophetic. King Lear is at once a tragedy and a meditation on the meaning of tragedy. Seeing and feeling, two of the most important themes in the play, are clearly brought to our attention in the opening scene. The king, having decided that he would “unburdened crawl toward death” (1.1.40),

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having chosen to divide up his kingdom among his daughters, orchestrates a ceremony of giving and receiving: in return for giving his kingdom to his daughters, he believes, he will receive expressions of filial love. The assumption, as Stanley Cavell has said, is perfectly ordinary. But of course the ceremony goes all wrong. Cordelia, offended by what she knows to be her sisters’ hollowness, doesn’t wish her genuine love to be travestied in an exchange of this sort, or to be taken as a piece of conventional flattery (perhaps, too, she is just a touch too concerned with the appearance of her own virtue). Lear, failing to understand her reserve, loses his temper and dispossesses her of a share in his kingdom. Kent has the courage to tell Lear that he is acting rashly and blindly: “Be Kent unmannerly / When Lear is mad” (1.1.22–23); “in thy best consideration check / This hideous rashness” (1.1.48–49); “See better, Lear” (1.1.157). For this he earns banishment. “Out of my sight,” Lear says to Kent (1.1.157), as earlier he had said to Cordelia, “Hence, and avoid my sight” (1.1.122). In fury he blinds himself. His wrath, in one sense, is an expression of disappointed love in all its excess. Its source, in a deeper sense, is what we call narcissism, an alienation from others that comes from seeing them as only objects with which to serve one’s needs. Lear’s inability to see or feel the life of others is inseparable from his inability to understand himself. This doesn’t mean he’s not right when he says later, “I am a man / More sinned against than sinning” (3.2.59–60). He neither knows himself nor knows others. These, alas, are common flaws. In Lear’s case they lead to catastrophe. The second scene, beginning the other half of the double plot, plays a variation on the themes of the first scene. Gloucester is deceived into seeing something that is not there, namely, that his son Edgar is plotting to dispossess him of his wealth and even to murder him. Edmund, who has just returned to the country after an absence of nine years, dupes him with a trick that one would think could not fool a child. And yet darkly hovering over this implausible deception is our knowledge that Regan and Goneril will later indirectly kill their father even after he has given them his kingdom. Gloucester, as we learn when he does all he can to help the abandoned Lear, is a noble, courageous, and compassionate individual. He has something of Lear’s rashness but nothing of

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his narcissism. What, then, is the source of his credulity, his imperceptiveness, at the beginning of the play? Perhaps it is an inability to trust a child he loves. There is a failure of feeling, a failure of vision, in this as there is a failure of feeling, a failure of vision, in Lear’s distrust of Cordelia.14 Again, though, these failures are qualified by the fact that both Lear and Gloucester have children whom they would be very wise to distrust. Their undoing lies not only in their distrust of children they should trust but in their trust of children they should distrust. Seeing and feeling are inseparable from judgment. Judgment, in turn, is caught up in the weather of love and hate. In the first scenes of the play Lear and Gloucester act like fools, it is true, but at the same time they are already in over their heads. The play represents an immense storm of imagined betrayal and actual betrayal. The essential movement of the middle of the play, from the opening scenes through the recognition scenes of Acts IV and V, is a movement of stripping away. At one point Gloucester says that his encounter with Mad Tom made him “think a man a worm,” and the play indeed brings to mind the suffering of Job. Lear and Gloucester, though not characters of Job-like integrity, suffer a Job-like stripping away out of all proportion to their faults. They lose nearly everything before they at last lose their lives. Lear gives away his kingdom, disinherits Cordelia, and banishes Kent— he himself begins the stripping away of what he has. After this, though, the stripping away comes from without. One thing after another is taken away from him: his knights, his privileges, the love or even elementary care of his two eldest daughters, his authority, his dignity, a house to sleep in, and finally his sanity. Gloucester disinherits Edgar and calls for him to be hunted down, but later he shows heart and spirit, lending aid to Lear on the heath though he has been explicitly commanded not to. Then he, too, begins to lose everything: a minimum of concern from his bastard son, the elementary respect of guests in his house, his freedom, his eyes, and finally his will to live. He drifts toward despair as Lear drifts toward madness. These two characters, in their extreme suffering, become versions of “unaccommodated man.” At the speed of dark, as it were, they fall from a protected to an exposed condition. Lear, first as his elder daughters begin to torment him and then when he is on the heath with the Fool and the disguised Kent, struggles to

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be patient. Yet his rage at his daughters’ ingratitude, and his fantasies of revenge, at last tear him apart. He loses his identity and a large measure of his sanity. But the loss of his old identity, the loss of his old perspective, is at the same time a kind of rebirth, as Garber puts it, the discovery of a new perspective. Abandoned on the heath in a night of storm, bewildered, half-mad, he experiences a change in his relationship to himself and to others. He recognizes that he has wronged Cordelia (1.5.24). He recognizes that another, the Fool, is suffering and in need of shelter. “Come on, my boy,” he says, encouraging the Fool to take shelter in a hovel. “How does, my boy? Art cold? / I am cold myself. Where is this straw, my fellow? / The art of our necessities is strange, / And can make vile things precious. Come, your hovel” (3.2.69–74). A little later he urges the fool to enter the hovel before he does. He remains outside, in the storm, expressing a concern for the “naked wretches” of his old kingdom: “Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are, / That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, / How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, / Your looped and windowed raggedness defend you / From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en / Too little care of this. Take physic, pomp, / Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, / That thou may’st shake the superflux to them / And show the heavens more just” (3.4.28– 36). He calls upon kings to do by ethical choice what he has done by force of circumstance: to come to feel what wretches feel. Unsheltered, he enlarges his perspective, as is memorably brought out in his perception of Mad Tom as a philosopher. “First let me talk with this philosopher,” he says to Gloucester as the latter tries to steer him to shelter. Somewhere in his unsettled mind he has recollected the ancient picture of the philosopher as an individual who retains poise amid adversity, who sheds the comforts and illusions of the world in order to see things as they are and live justly. “Noble philosopher, your company,” “I will keep still with my philosopher” (3.1.171–75), he says, persisting in this wise folly. In his madness he begins to see things that matter which he could not see before. Gloucester’s experience of suffering is different from and yet analogous to Lear’s. He, too, struggles to retain a measure of patience. But if for Lear patience is a virtue of calm, a poise set against a passion for revenge, for Gloucester patience is a virtue of resilience, an endurance set against

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suicidal despair. Gloucester barely holds onto his life, owing to the care that Edgar gives him, though Edgar fails to do the one thing that would truly revive his father’s spirits, namely, to reveal himself immediately and express forgiveness. Gloucester, too, in the dark of unbearable suffering, experiences a change in his relationship to himself and to others. He, too, recognizes that he has wronged one of his children—if only because Regan, a moment after his blinding, tells him that he has been betrayed by Edmund. He, too, begins to feel a concern for the poor, the vulnerable, the unaccommodated: “Let the superfluous and lust-dieted man / That slaves your ordinance,” he says to the heavens in words that echo Lear’s, “that will not see / Because he does not feel, feel your power quickly. / So distribution should undo excess, / And each man have enough” (4.2.62–66). He, too, widens his perspective, becoming an unlikely, ragged, desperately insightful philosopher of seeing. “I stumbled when I saw,” he says after he has been blinded and cast out of his own home. “O dear son Edgar, / The food of thy abusèd father’s wrath, / Might I but live to see thee in my touch, / I’d say I had eyes again” (3.7.22–24). His resonant words about the individual “that will not see because he does not feel” anticipate a striking exchange he later has with Lear. “You see how this world goes,” Lear says, to which the blind Gloucester says, “I see it feelingly” (4.5.146–47). This is the heart of the play. The scene at the end of Act IV from which I’ve just cited is an extraordinary recognition scene. Gloucester and Lear, ruined old men, the one blind, the other mad, encounter each other in a field, startle each other, recognize each other, and in a kind of dazed dialogue illuminate the place of seeing and feeling in human life. Gloucester recognizes Lear by his voice: “I know that voice” (4.5.95). When he asks to kiss Lear’s hand, though, Lear says, “Let me wipe it first; it smells of mortality” (4.5.131). They are on the verge of death. Lear, in a weirdly ambiguous line, seems to say both that he recognizes Gloucester by his eyes and that he remembers Gloucester’s now absent eyes: “I remember thine eyes well enough. Dost thou squiny at me” (4.5.134–35). Then, almost as if he were tormenting Gloucester, though we have to think this isn’t quite what he is doing, he tells Gloucester to read a challenge that he has written (he addresses Gloucester as blind Cupid and says that he will

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not love again). Gloucester dryly states that this will not be possible. “O, ho, are you there with me?” Lear says. “No eyes in your head, nor no money in your purse? Your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a light; yet you see how this world goes” (4.5.143–46). Gloucester, in words I cited above, replies, “I see it feelingly” (4.5.147). He means, first, that he sees the world through the sense of touch, and more deeply, that he sees the world through a feeling heart, aware as he is that there are those who will not see because they do not feel. Lear, at first seeming to hear only the literal meaning, presents a parable of the way power works in the world and a brief sermon on the importance of patience. Gloucester, hearing from Lear the same lesson he has been hearing from the disguised Edgar on their way to Dover, is nearly speechless. But Lear does recognize the broken man he is talking to, telling Gloucester that he will give him his eyes if he will weep for his misfortune: “If thou will weep my fortune, take my eyes. / I know thee well enough; thy name is Gloucester” (4.5.174–75). What they share now is sorrow in ruin. Weeping, as Paul Alpers has emphasized, is one of the primary things eyes do in this play: they not only see; they not only express recognition; they express feeling.15 At the end of this scene a gentleman serving Cordelia arrives to rescue Lear, who, still mad, takes flight across a field. Gloucester, seeking a further recognition, asks Edgar who he is. But Edgar continues to evade the reconciliation his father so desperately longs for, saying only, “A most poor man made tame to fortune’s blows, / Who, by the art of known and feeling sorrows, / Am pregnant to good pity” (4.5.219–21). This is a variation on what Gloucester has come to understand about the importance of seeing feelingly. Yet Edgar, bewildered, bewildering, is unable to give his father the undisguised love his father most needs. By this point in the play Edgar has become the chorus or, in a sense, us. Perhaps we, too, the play hints, profess and yet hide from the understanding that Lear and Gloucester reach only in extremity. This is the crucial insight of Cavell’s reading of the play. The last scene of Act IV, the beginning of the end of the play, is a type of recognition scene more familiar in romance: the recognition of a repentant father and a forgiving daughter. For a moment one might almost guess that the tragedy is turning toward tragicomedy. Lear,

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awaking to see Cordelia, initially thinks he is seeing a spirit on the other side of time (4.6.42–46). Apparently Cordelia is crying as he awakens to recognize her. “Be your tears wet?” he says. “Yes, faith, I pray, weep not” (5.1.69). He acknowledges the wrong he has done to her and asks for forgiveness (5.1.69–72). Her gracious “no cause, no cause” echoes her reserved “nothing” at the beginning of the play: love and forgiveness—or, more broadly, the recognition of others in their need and suffering— are beyond the mechanics of causality or the economics of exchange. The recognition scene is further unfolded after the forces of France are defeated. Cordelia, all courage, wants to face her wicked sisters. Earlier, on the heath, Lear had thought he might become a philosopher like Socrates or Diogenes: now, a prisoner with Cordelia, he thinks he might become a mystic, as it were, at one with birds, at one with God, at one with his daughter, watching the ebbing and flowing of political affairs in the distance (5.3.8–19). It would seem that he has renounced all worldly concerns. Is this a deepening of his spiritual insight, or a sign of his broken relationship with reality, or, inasmuch as it involves a blindness to the needs of his daughter, whose life has just been ruined for his sake, a persistence in his old narcissism? Perhaps it is all these things at once. Cordelia, beholding the ruin of her father, says nothing in response to this dream of his. The turn toward romance, in any case, is swept away in the play’s dark conclusion. The forces of evil are destroyed by a counter-violence they have set in motion, as Edmund is killed by Edgar, or they consume themselves, as Goneril and Regan do. Cordelia and the broken tragic heroes die as well. Gloucester dies offstage: we hear of his death from Edgar, who says that his father died of a “burst” heart, torn between joy and grief, when Edgar at last revealed his identity moments before his duel with Edmund (5.3.182–92). Those gathered at the end don’t act in time to save Cordelia from being hanged. Lear returns with her body in his arms, raging at everyone for failing to feel, speak, and weep with a grief that would crack the skies: “Howl, howl, howl! O you are men of stones. / Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so / That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone forever” (5.3.233–37). Lear, in his distress, fails to recognize that Kent has been with him all along: all the promises of romance—recognition, reconciliation, renewal—have vanished now.

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Holding a feather over Cordelia’s mouth, seeking evidence that she is still alive, Lear slips into a state of delusion. Albany breaks off his dialogue with others, pointing to Lear, crying, “O see, see,” simple but resonant words in a play in which feeling and seeing have been so crucial. “No, no, no life,” Lear says. “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, / And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more. / Never, never, never, never, never. / Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir. / Do you see this? Look on her! look, her lips, / Look there, look there—” (5.3.282–88). Lear’s desperate “look there, look there” echoes Albany’s startled “O see, see.” What are we, the audience, to see? A dying old man gone mad with grief? Harold Goddard, in a beautiful essay, has argued that at this point Lear sees in vision the living spirit of his daughter.16 Yet most readers have perceived the moment to be as desolate as the characters standing beside the dying Lear perceive it to be. Lear, then, dies in a last delusion. Albany wants nothing to do with power, and neither does Kent, who says he plans to follow the king he has served into death. Edgar speaks for those left behind and for the audience in the final words of the play: “The weight of this sad time we must obey, / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. / The oldest hath borne most; we that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long” (5.3.300–04). These words bear considerable resonance at this point. The whole tragedy begins with Lear’s misunderstanding of Cordelia’s saying so little lest all the love she feels be travestied. How much we see, how much we fail to see, in part owing to how much we feel or fail to feel of the life of others, is at the heart of the play. What have we, the spectators or readers of the play, just seen and felt? Edgar seems to ask us to reflect on our experience of this tragedy. To approach this question we should first return to a question I raised earlier: what happens to Lear and Gloucester in their experience of unbearable suffering? How are we to understand the changes they go through? The plot of the play recalls, in a dark way, the plot of the pastoral detour at work in so many of Shakespeare’s comedies and romances. The comic or romantic version of this plot is threefold: the action begins in a court threatened by blindness, corruption, or violence, moves to a rural world where characters are allowed to explore their desires free from the pressures of the court, and then returns (or

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prepares to return) to the court in a spirit of reconciliation and renewal. In King Lear the action moves from the accommodated world of the court to the unaccommodated world of the heath and a field near Dover, with an imminent return to the court, at the end, in a spirit of grief, trauma, and exhaustion. Maynard Mack has characterized this as an antipastoral pattern.17 For what we see on the heath is not a pastoral realm of measured abundance, where the characters discover clarity, independence, and virtue, but an anti-pastoral realm of sheer deprivation, where the characters discover their worm-like vulnerability, their helpless bareness. “Thou art the thing itself,” Lear says to Mad Tom on the heath. “Unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art” (3.4.106–07). Hobbes, fifty years later, would echo these words in his account of human life in the state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”18 A Hobbesian version of the state of nature, a dark picture of a pre-social condition, is the antithesis of a pastoral version of life in nature, an idealized picture of a simple social condition. And yet King Lear is not simply an anti-pastoral. For the anti-pastoral pattern is only one of several patterns at work in the play as a whole. Below is a map of these patterns (see p. 336).

COURT CITY HISTORY

— AXIAL AGE

reduction of life to a pre-social “state of nature”: chaotic, monstrous, vicious

ANTI-PASTORAL or HOBBESIAN:

war of all against all: human life as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”

turning through suffering that replaces a heart of stone with a heart of flesh: feeling

turning through suffering that renews a soul’s vision of its source and horizon: seeing

awakening of inwardness, spiritual freedom, love, compassion

detachment (measured or extreme) from the illusions of the world

turn to a simple life open to the transcendent

return to the essential: simplicity, clarity, independence, openness

site of measured abundance, leisure, freedom

turn to a simple rural life or natural life

(turning of soul in passage through suffering)

THE PROPHETIC MYTH:

(turning of soul by letting go)

AXIAL AGE ASCESIS:

PASTORAL:

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The four patterns sketched in the map rhyme with one another in complex ways. All of them involve evaluative oppositions between the city, or the dominant site of historical power, and an unaccommodated or less accommodated site that opens a wider perspective on the city or historical life. At the bottom of the map is what Mack calls an anti-pastoral perspective and what could also be called a Hobbesian perspective: a pre-social state of nature understood as a deficient human condition, a realm of the war of all against all, a condition that the state or the built world of history is meant to overcome. In King Lear , though, as we have seen, life on the heath, deprived and vulnerable as it is, turns out to be not simply solitary, poor, nasty, and brutish: it is also a place where vision and compassion come to be discovered. The accommodated world, where we would hope to find life flourishing, is in fact the place where the war of all against all has been unleashed with ferocity. This is indeed a sign that at least an analog of the pastoral pattern might be at work in the play. At the top of the map is the traditional pastoral pattern we find in many of Shakespeare’s comedies and romances: a rural site of measured abundance that sustains a simple human life, a site of clarity and independence and love, virtues felt to have been ruined in the court of power, corruption, and betrayal. Yet in King Lear this pattern is present only in its absence, as it were, and in its place a different pattern is unfolded: the biblical pattern that I have called the prophetic myth. To see this pattern clearly, to see its relation to both the pastoral pattern and the anti-pastoral pattern, it helps to bear in mind the fourth pattern on the map: the path of ascesis that is taught, in different ways, in certain Axial Age religious and philosophical traditions. As traditional pastoral idealizes a turn to a simple life in the countryside as a turn to clarity, independence, and virtue, so the Greek philosophical tradition idealizes a turn to a simple life open to the transcendent as an awakening of inwardness, independence, and virtue. What these traditions share is an intuition that a detachment from the shadows of the cave, a release from the illusions of the fallen world, is a necessary step on the way to wisdom and virtue, to a transformation of the self. The ascetic sage, it could be said, lets go of the illusions of the world before these illusions are stripped away by catastrophe or necessity. In King Lear this idealist path of ascesis is briefly recalled in Lear’s delirious perception of Mad

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Tom as a philosopher he wants to converse with. In Jewish and Christian traditions the path of ascesis is an elaboration of the vision that emerges in the great Jewish prophets of the eighth through the sixth centuries BCE. The prophetic vision is sketched in the third line of the map. The prophets, faced with the collapse first of Israel and then of Judah, faced with the destruction of the Temple and the Exile in Babylon, present a powerful interpretation of their people’s experience. On an archaic level the experience of ruin and exile is seen as a punishment that God inflicts on his chosen people for their failure to follow his teaching: the punishment will end, the people and their life in Jerusalem will be restored, once they have changed their ways. This archaic level is of little interest to either religious or non-religious people today. On a mythopoetic level the experience of ruin and exile is seen by the prophets as an educational journey: a passage meant to bring about a burning away of the hardness of the heart, a turning and deepening of vision, an existential and social renewal. We know from experience that this is not a descriptive vision. Often suffering hardens and darkens people: sometimes it destroys them. The prophetic myth is a prescriptive vision. It is a call to those in crisis, to those disoriented in their suffering, to those fallen into despair, to find in their experience a way of crossing over to a life of deeper feeling and deeper seeing. It is this pattern, not an anti-pastoral pattern, that resonates in the space of the recalled but missing pastoral pattern in King Lear . For it is the prophetic myth that shapes the way Lear and Gloucester wrestle with their experience once they have been cast out of their homes. They are, again, quite different characters. Lear is a ruined king who, as far as we can tell, has been a volatile and narcissistic man all his life, quick to turn on those who disappoint him in any way. Gloucester is an old nobleman who, if glib or callous at moments, is also generous and spirited. Both of these characters, flawed in ordinary ways, make serious mistakes, and for these mistakes are made to suffer in extraordinary ways. In the dark of suffering they go through, as they search for a patience stronger than either revenge or despair, they come to see and feel otherwise. They come to understand what a heart and eyes are for. They come to see all of life from a wider perspective. Lear, it could be said, does not

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complete the transformation he begins. He is a poignantly human-alltoo-human character, a bewildered father who, having lost everything, remains to the end his passionate self, a storm of self-regard and rage and love. Yet, to some extent, he changes. What do we, the audience, experience in seeing or reading this play? Let us turn again to Aristotle’s account of tragedy. According to this account, our experience of a tragic drama includes a cognitive moment, anagnorisis, a recognition of the identity of the hero and his tragic fate, a recognition of the mystery of freedom and fate in our lives, and an affective moment, catharsis, a cleansing or purging of fear and pity. Martha Nussbaum has made the suggestive argument that what Aristotle means by catharsis is not a cleansing or purging so much as a clearing or clarifying.19 She is concerned, first, to connect ancient Greek tragedy to a modern literary culture in which the working through of emotions is an important part of imaginative experience, and second, to emphasize the vital place of the emotions in shaping the way we think, the way we see our own life and the lives around us. This is part of her larger philosophical presentation of a virtue ethic in which feeling is as essential to our ethical life as thought: a virtue ethic, further, that is grounded in an acknowledgment of our vulnerability to tragic loss. A. D. Nuttall has contested Nussbaum’s unfamiliar interpretation of catharsis in Aristotle. All the evidence, he says, indicates that the traditional interpretation of the term as a cleansing or purging is correct.20 This would mean that Aristotle, though concerned to revise Plato, to find a meaningful place for poetry in the just state, nevertheless shares something of Plato’s bias, something of the suspicion that our emotions cloud our judgment. I am not competent to weigh in on this debate concerning the correct interpretation of catharsis in Aristotle. Yet Nussbaum, I think, presents a more persuasive account of what happens in our experience of tragedy than either Aristotle (according to the traditional interpretation) or Nuttall— and in particular a more persuasive account of what happens in our experience of King Lear . Our encounter with almost any tragic drama seems to involve a certain emotional curve, a slope of intensity followed by a slope of quiet, and this is what makes the familiar notion of catharsis intuitively plausible. Yet an encounter with King Lear clearly involves, too, an imaginative enactment of the larger substance of the play and

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especially of all that Lear and Gloucester go through. This, in the fictive space of art, is what the play would have us experience, and it would seem to involve something more than a purgation. Nuttall himself (in this respect he is close to Nussbaum) characterizes tragic drama as an exercise, a rehearsal, meant to prepare us for the tragic upheavals of life.21 At this point we can see a way in which Nussbaum’s account of tragic drama could be extended further, extended beyond the Greek cultural coordinates that she and Nuttall share. For the transformative experience of the tragic heroes that we encounter in King Lear , as we have seen, is shaped by the Christian myth and, behind that, by the prophetic myth. A crossing through suffering brings about a change of heart and a change of vision. The clearing of feeling and seeing that Nussbaum describes as essential to tragedy has, in King Lear at least, prophetic roots. And yet it is true that the prophetic myth is ultimately a romance of redemption. It sketches a horizon of renewal for those whom it addresses. If it is at work in tragic drama, then, it is at work there in a qualified way. For what tragic literature does above all is give us perspective, sorrowful perspective, on just how little, how late, our wisdom and virtue are likely to be when we find ourselves caught up in those disasters that in some sense we bring upon ourselves, that in some sense befall us. This sorrowful perspective, in turn, may be a source of patience, of capacious understanding, when we see our neighbors caught up in those disasters that in some sense they bring upon themselves, that in some sense befall them. The whole tradition of reflection on tragedy suggests that we are always trying to retrieve some saving wisdom from our ruin. Again and again we find that we are in over our head.22 ∗ ∗ ∗ Tragedy is a story of the breaking of life. It is usually a story of an isolated individual at odds with others, with a community, and with himself or herself: a story of an individual who has been ruined, reduced, betrayed by others, or betrayed by his or her own passion, blindness, and folly. It expresses an acknowledgment of the way life so readily defeats us and, above all, of the way we so readily bring about our own defeat. In the severe light of tragedy, our spiritual ideals, or the ideals of our

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wisdom traditions, begin to look like romantic illusions. The question of romance is relevant here. If tragedy is a story of the breaking of life, romance is a story of the breaking and mending of life. It is usually a story of reconciliation between individuals and within communities. At the same time, at an existential level, it is a narrative expression of our longing to live an awakened life, a flourishing life, a life animated by love and insight, a life inspired by a vision of what matters. Idealist spiritual paths can be characterized as existential versions of romance. Northrop Frye’s A Natural Perspective, a study of Shakespearean comedy and romance, helps us to see what is at stake in this affinity between romance and traditional spiritual quest. Frye’s book is meant to show us what a romantic critic—as distinct from a realist critic—sees in comedy and especially in romance. It is in his account of The Winter’s Tale near the end of the book that Frye most clearly spells out what he finds there. The Winter’s Tale is a tragicomedy with a three-part structure: the first three acts are a tragedy in which a king’s solipsism, jealousy, wrath, and nihilist projection bring about the death of his son, the exile of his daughter, the death or seeming death of his wife, the flight in fear of his oldest friend, and the exile of two of his loyal court counselors; the fourth act is a pastoral detour that includes a lyrical fantasia on nature, love, and the spontaneous idealism of youth; and the last act is a romance of reconciliation in which the lost daughter is restored and her lost mother brought back to life. Wonder, faith, and art are major themes in this final act. The images of the arts, Frye says, are metaphors that point to the larger spiritual horizon of the play. For the action of the play, he says, “is clearly something other than a movement from external to created reality. In the first place, the world of Leontes’ jealousy does not exist at all: only the consequences of believing in it exist. In the second place, the power that revives Hermione and brings the lovers together is identical, first, with the power of nature to bring new life out of death, and second, with the will of Apollo, whose oracle is being fulfilled. The action therefore moves from appearance to reality, from mirage to substance. Once the real world is reached, the mirage becomes nothingness. The real world, however, has none of the customary qualities of reality. It is the world symbolized by nature’s power of renewal; it is the world we want; it is the world we hope our gods would want for us if they

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were worth worshipping.”23 What exactly is this reality that “has none of the customary qualities of reality”? Where is it to be found? Is it only a dream? Why does our ordinary reality leave us thinking that the final act of The Winter’s Tale is only an illusion or an old tale? “If the doors of perception were cleansed,” Blake says, “man would see everything as it is: infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” A critic like Frye is a romantic idealist. He is an idealist in the sense in which the sages and prophets of the Axial Age are idealists. Thinkers in these traditions see all the human predicaments that the rest of us see—illness, suffering, death, hate, blindness, destructive selfishness—but all this, they say, is not what our lives are meant to be. All this is not the last word or the last reality. There is another dimension or region of life: a region we see and enter when our heart and vision are genuinely awakened. The awakening to vision in the final act of The Winter’s Tale is an analog of the sort of awakening to vision taught in older spiritual traditions. There will always be a Thrasymachus around, it is true, to let us know the score: to tell us that the region of life to which the sages and visionaries call us is only a mirage that distracts us from the realities of our lives. The typical Thrasymachus is either a practical or a cynical realist. He neither sees what Socrates sees nor lives the way Socrates lives. He and Socrates, as we sometimes say about such people, inhabit different realities. But there are realists who see further than Thrasymachus. They are tragic realists. They remind us of the reductions to which we are so vulnerable. Tragedy extends our awareness of the crises and catastrophes that come to us, that upend our idealist hopes, that ruin our romances of vision. It emphasizes that what goodness we have, what wisdom we have, is usually far too little when we find ourselves in a crisis. “The one who acts must suffer,” Justice says in a chorus in Aeschylus’s The Libation Bearers, for a moment sounding like a teacher of karma.24 An indirect sign of the pervasive pressure of the tragic is the fact that so many wisdom traditions have encouraged a certain ascetic retreat from life: a retreat to a place above the cave of shadows, to a garden of friends, to a contemplative monastery, to a cabin beside Walden Pond. The allure of such a retreat is an implicit concession to the power of the tragic. The

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idealist we find most admirable, therefore, is the Socrates who returns to the cave to teach, the awakened Buddhist who returns to the world of karma out of a care for suffering beings, the Quaker who holds to an inner light while entering the abolitionist struggle. We cannot live in the world, held by our manifold ties with others, held by all we care for in these ties, and keep free of the tragic.25 Yet a romantic quest or idealist search returns in the space of tragedy. It returns first of all in our attempt to make sense of what we experience when we engage with tragic drama or tragic literature. A long tradition of thinkers has tried to clarify what we see and feel, how we are changed, when we watch or read about human betrayal, catastrophe, ruin. But literature is a kind of rehearsal, as Nuttall has put it, a kind of practice for life, and tragic works of art explore not only the dark of suffering but also the different ways in which we cope with suffering. They help us to see what we might do amid the disasters that in some sense befall us and that in some sense we bring upon ourselves. Aristotle suggests that tragic drama is meant to make us wiser and more poised in response to the mysteries of fate and freedom. Nussbaum suggests that tragic art is meant to make us wiser, more responsive to others in their suffering, and more aware of what it might mean to find in our own lives a precarious balance of independence and openness. Paul Ricoeur suggests that in tragic art there is a movement from “the tragic undergone” to “the tragic overcome,” the latter involving an inward recovery that, while it acknowledges the weight and opacity of the tragic, reaches beyond it toward insight and self-knowledge. The prophets and the Shakespeare of King Lear suggest that in suffering we are called to discover a deeper feeling for others and a wider vision of life. In a recent novel George Saunders suggests that, in wrestling with what undoes us, we might become not only “reduced, ruined, remade” but also “merciful, patient, dazzled” (305). Saunders is a student of Buddhism. Our attempt to understand what we are to make of suffering leads us back toward spiritual paths like those taught in the idealist traditions of the Axial Age.26 There is no simple way to characterize this relationship between spiritual idealism and tragic wisdom. Each is less than the other and more than the other. Each comprehends and is comprehended by the other.

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The dialectic is never closed. The tragic, I would say, is our condition. It involves a recognition of the bare, the disillusioned, the shipwreck of freedom, the ruin of ideals. Spiritual awakening is our vocation. It involves a recognition of the vital, the aware, the grace of reconciliation, the open of flourishing. At its highest pitch it involves a way of life: a vision of what matters lived out. We tell ourselves stories of breaking and mending over and over again. We tell ourselves stories of sheer breaking over and over again. We tell ourselves stories of sheer breaking and then begin to reflect on what they mean and in this way begin to tell ourselves stories of breaking and mending again. Da capo.

Notes 1. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, trans. Michael Bullock (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), pp. 52–61. 2. Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 343. 3. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 209–10. 4. See A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (New York: Penguin, 1991), p. 38. 5. See Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), p. 136. 6. See Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. II, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 1193–99; Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), pp. 56–60; Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic, trans. Paul Fleming (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 15–24, pp. 41–43; Stephen Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Criticism of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 182–220; Philip Roth, I Married a Communist (New York: Vintage, 1998), p. 185. 7. Aristotle, Poetics in Classical Literary Criticism, trans. Penelope Murray and T. S. Dorsch (New York: Penguin, 2000), pp. 64–66, pp. 70–71.

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8. Aeschylus, Agamemnon in The Oresteia, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin, 1977), l. 252 (see also ll. 177–79). 9. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (New York: Anchor, 2004), pp. 688–90. See, too, Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. 262–70. My understanding of King Lear is greatly indebted to Bradley and Garber. 10. W. H. Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Kirsch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 220. 11. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, pp. 228–29. 12. This citation aside, I will cite from the Folio text in King Lear: The 1608 Quarto and 1623 Folio Texts, ed. Stephen Orgel (New York: Penguin, 2000). 13. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 241. 14. On the importance of this issue in the play, see Stanley Cavell, “The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear ” in Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare, updated edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 39–123. 15. Paul Alpers, “King Lear and the Theory of the ‘Sight Pattern’” in In Defense of Reading, ed. Reuben A. Brower and Richard Poirier (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1962), pp. 133–52. 16. Harold Goddard, “King Lear” in The Meaning of Shakespeare, Vol. 2 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951), pp. 262–68. 17. Maynard Mack, King Lear in Our Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 65–66. 18. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 89. On the pre-echo of Hobbes and the antithetical parallel of the Hobbesian and the pastoral, see Garber, Shakespeare After All , p. 669. 19. Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, updated edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 388–91. 20. A. D. Nuttall, Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 5–14. 21. Nuttall, Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? pp. 75–77. 22. I would say, too, that at least in part it is a secularized version of this prophetic myth that shapes the tragic dimension of the

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modern novel, a major achievement of which, as Erich Auerbach has shown in Mimesis, is the representation of ordinary individuals, not only heroic individuals, as “serious, tragic, and problematic”: see Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 31, pp. 454–92. Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), p. 116. Aeschylus, The Libation Bearers, l. 320. This is an essential theme of Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness. See Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, pp. 80–82; Paul Ricoeur, “Sur le tragique” in Lectures 3: Aux frontières de la philosophie (Paris: Seuil, 1994), p. 199, p. 206; George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo (New York: Random House, 2018), p. 305. Ricoeur draws on Karl Jaspers, Tragedy Is Not Enough, trans. Harold A.T Reiche, Harry T. Moore, and Karl W. Deutsch (Boston: Beacon, 1952). “Tragic knowledge,” Jaspers writes, “is not a matter for the unconcerned spectator, interested only in cognition. Rather it is a gaining of knowledge wherein I grow in selfhood by the very manner in which I am achieving understanding, by the way in which I see and feel” (p. 72).

14 Sense and Conscience: Hunting for Certainty in Hamlet Charlie Gustafson-Barrett

Hamlet Why is Hamlet a tragedy? Is it because everyone dies at the end? The play crescendos to mass slaughter: the annihilation of two major families, including Denmark’s royal line. But this doesn’t give us a sufficient explanation of our own investment. Hamlet is one of the most famous, beloved plays of the Western Canon not because of the final bloodbath. So then what is the distinctive, private tragedy of the character Hamlet? Notice Hamlet doesn’t seem much bothered by his own death. He only regrets not being able to tell his story, and denies Horatio the “felicity” of death so that he might live to tell it on Hamlet’s behalf. Yet, isn’t this rather tragic; by the time he dies, Hamlet is indifferent to life? What has led to such resignation? A relentless hunt for meaning. Is the particular tragedy of Hamlet , then, that what allows us to understand our lives as C. Gustafson-Barrett (B) St. John’s College, Santa Fe, NM, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73061-1_14

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meaningful is precisely what, if taken to the extreme, convinces us life is meaningless? Why? Because the capacity to seek meaning—to attempt to understand life, the self, the world—necessarily experiences itself as a failure. Every time we try to get at self or world, they recede, and this consequence to our search convinces us life is meaningless. Meaning is necessarily elusive: once spoken, it is speech—it is mere seeming. So knowledge insofar as it is available to us is necessarily knowledge not of being, but of being insofar as it can seem. At the same time, our capacity to speak is what allows us to understand something as meaningful. What makes us capable of seeking meaning in the world is also what makes us aware of our failure to ever adequately capture the meaningful. So the heart of the matter, the soul of man, always eludes our grasp. What is the most tragic consequence of this failure? To give up. This is the tragedy of the character Hamlet. He gives up. By Act V he is a walking dead man. Now the play as a whole divides roughly in two: First half

Second half

Character Reflection Intention Truth Speech Hearing Interior Soliloquy

Plot Action Expression Will Deed Sight Exterior Dialogue

The play begins with a murder that has been understood as a natural death. Denmark has been deceived; it has taken a metaphor literally— the “serpent” who killed the king was not a serpent but a man—effacing utterly the hand of intention (Claudius’ involvement). This inaugurates a series of speeches and plots designed to uncover motives. The third Act, however, ends with a blind, erroneous murder that utterly misrepresents the intention of its author (Hamlet stabbing Polonius through the arras), but is treated as straightforwardly purposive. And this inaugurates a series of actions that succeed one other at such a breakneck speed it can be difficult to connect them. The intensification of action is matched by a notable lack of reflection; we get one soliloquy from Hamlet in Act IV.

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We hear no more regret from Claudius; his confession before God has spent his guilt before men. This distinction between the first and second half might be understood as a difference in priority. The first half is concerned with truth, the second with will. But then, the truth that the first half seeks to expose is the will of others, and the will the second half expresses is the will as manifest—which shows up as fate. Or another way of understanding the dynamic between the two halves: Act I is framed by the appearance and disappearance of the Ghost, and the question is, what is the status of the Ghost? The Ghost is what starts everything rolling, although not in the sense that a lot happens, but rather a lot of wondering about what should happen, happens. It is precisely not knowing the truth and noticing the truth is unknown, that drives virtually every scene in the first half of the play. Act V, however, is framed by the prominence of a new character, Osric. He delivers the king’s message about the duel, referees the duel, and announces Fortinbras’ arrival. Still, no one pays Osric any mind; the status of his being is treated as a foregone conclusion. He is foolish, inconsistent, and the most openly mocked character in the play. Hamlet says of him, “Let a beast be lord of beasts, and his crib shall stand at the king’s mess” (V.ii.87–88).1 But his name, in old English, means “the rule of God.”2 The rule of God, the most powerful will of all, is a buffoon. Yet Hamlet begins the last scene by observing “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,/ Rough-hew them how we will” (V.ii.8–11). So Hamlet turns himself over to the rule of God, and the rule of God is senseless. The triumph of the will is the triumph of nonsense. Whereas in the first half of the play, Hamlet the character looked mad, now Hamlet the play looks mad. Which brings us to how the play, as a whole, does what the first and second half do between them: Hamlet (the play, the action, the speech, the exterior) versus Hamlet (the character, the speech, the meaning, the interior). The way speech shows up in both is the problem; because the access we have to the inside is to make it outside. In other words, the tragedy of Hamlet is his inability to bring these two halves together— to unify character and plot—to make a whole out of Hamlet . And the play knows this; the structure reinforces its own problematic unification. First, the whole work self-consciously folds in two, which profoundly

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corrupts the distinction between the halves. Second, there is a systematic reciprocity between the development of plot and the development of Hamlet’s psyche. So first we have interior versus exterior, but since speech is on both sides (soliloquy, dialogue), action is on both sides. Second, the self-conscious mirroring performed by the second half upon the first, makes the later scenes corrupted reflections of earlier scenes—which makes their actions corrupted reflections.3 The plot itself displays selfawareness. Hamlet, as the self-conscious play about the self-conscious man, self-consciously reflects upon its own self-awareness such that, rather than forging a unity, it reinforces a division. The work reflects its own lack of coherence as a necessity. Or one might say this is a play in dialogue with itself about what it means to be a play. Likewise, Hamlet’s understanding of himself mimics perfectly the arc of the plot. His self-awareness in the beginning has to do with origins— he is obsessed with his father and is anxious over the authorship of his own story. In the middle he is divided against himself and cannot act—he is always in the middle of to be or not to be. At the end, he reenters Denmark through a graveyard, understanding everything in light of finality. All life leads to death. In Act V, then, Hamlet knows himself as a character in a play—and the author of the play is God. This is what it means to take all things as necessitated: life is prewritten. So looking forward the concern is with truth, because it assumes will; looking backward the concern is with will, because it assumes fate.

Speech Conscience Now, since the play is concerned with getting at the heart of things, let us focus on the heart of the play. Act III is the turning point. It pushes the act of reflection right over the edge into unreflective action. We first hear Hamlet deliver his most abstract soliloquy on the nature of consciousness; we last see him as he drags Polonius’ corpse off stage—the carnage of his least conscious act. Appropriately, then, the question of the Act might be posed as: what is the relationship between having a conscience

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and self-consciousness? Act II ends with Hamlet’s resolve, “The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king” (II.ii.617). In the first scene of Act III, both Claudius and Hamlet use the term. Claudius says, “How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience!” (III.i.49). A few lines later, when Hamlet comes on stage, he says, “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,/ And thus the native hue of resolution/ Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,/ And enterprises of great pitch and moment,/ With this regard their currents turn awry,/ And lose the name of action” (III.i.83–88). Between Hamlet exiting at the end of Act II and his return, the King’s conscience has been caught; Hamlet just misses it. That is some bad timing. Hamlet will have nothing but bad timing for the rest of the Act. However, the two men use conscience in different ways. Claudius means guilt, which he experiences as internal disunity. Feeling the lash of conscience only happens when we become aware that we have one, which happens when we transgress it. And this is painful. Hamlet, on the other hand, uses the term in an older sense—con-science: with knowledge. He is thinking about death in a soliloquy that infamously begins: “to be or not to be?” (III.i.56). This is a stark choice, but is immediately finessed, since death might not be the end, but more like sleep, in which case you are subject to dreams just as you were to fortune. So you shed body, the “mortal coil,” but you can’t be sure you will be rid of mind— here reduced to perception. The problem is you don’t know what you are. You are two in one—body and mind. But since you are unsure how these are synthesized, how the unity of inside and outside works, you cannot be sure ending one will necessarily end the other. Experience has shown we do not know enough to affect the ends we desire. Awareness of this makes us aware that affecting our own end will probably not turn out as we desire. Hence total stasis: we don’t know enough to make the distinction between to be or not to be, much less to act upon it. All we know is enough to posit a distinction—just enough to be cowards, not enough to be brave. Or, just enough not to act, not enough to consummate. Thus consciousness. Hamlet’s meaning, however, is necessary to derive Claudius’ meaning. Perception of being antedates its censure. It also makes the possibility of Claudius’ meaning look tenuous. His conscience presupposes prior

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unity; Hamlet’s is an awareness of essential disunity. This is the problem of Act III. How do we fit together morality and awareness? They look like two incompatible ways of framing soul—morality, which takes its bearings from action, from a unity that experiences itself as a fall way from itself; and awareness, which takes its bearings from reflection, and thus a disunity that experiences itself as the effort to put itself together. Man is only moral insofar as he is aware of his soul, and he seems most acutely aware of his soul when faced with moral questions. Only if Hamlet can find a way to reconcile these can he know, (1) that Claudius is guilty of murder, and murder is an expression of his immoral soul; (2) that murdering Claudius is the right thing to do and expresses Hamlet’s moral soul. How can the same act be the expression of two different souls? How can we know souls are different if all we ever get of soul is action? So this is the problem. Act III, the heart of the play, is about framing; the surface of things is the depth of things. The frame is literally what divides the inside from the outside. It is the most outside edge of the inside, and the most inside edge of the outside. Conscience and conscience, as the simultaneously inseparable and incompatible ways of framing soul—the one concerns action and yet presupposes reflection, and the other concerns reflection and yet is itself an action. Together they point to soul as that which frames. So the awareness that we are framed— that we live under God’s watch (our conscience)—is the other side of our ability to frame the world and ourselves (our consciousness). This is how Hamlet’s uncanny awareness of mortality and his canny poetic machination are of a piece. His awareness that life is framed is what allows him to frame life. An awareness of the supernatural (non-life) is inseparable from the ability to create what is unnatural (art). And yet the fact that, on the one hand, we are framed by the unknown (or the undiscovered country), and on the other hand, our capacity to frame renders us unknown— means we are neither the world nor the self, but the in-between which brings these two together.4 And what is the effect of this state? It looks like consciousness means having a bad conscience: you cannot act with knowledge (con-science), but you must nevertheless act—and thus you must sin. So Hamlet says to Ophelia in the first scene, you “make your wantonness your ignorance” (III.i.148). We know just enough to

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pretend, but not enough to be honest—or we know just enough to play act, but not enough to act.

Claudius The rest of Act III is comprised of two epic attempts to reveal soul, and the epic failure and fall out of each. First Hamlet tries to see Claudius in reflection, which turns out to mean making Claudius self-reflective; then he tries to make Gertrude see herself, which turns out to be a very unreflective action. In the third Act, we get the creation of the self-conscious artistic space within the play. We have to make public what is essentially private. The structure of the whole Act displays the challenge of performing this translation. It is framed by two private conversations spied upon, and thus public, between which we get two public actions misunderstood, and thus private. Moreover, Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” speech is the issue in a nutshell. As a soliloquy that might be a sermon, we cannot know if it is internal monologue or external discourse. Hamlet might know Polonius and Claudius are watching, or if not, he might know Ophelia is. We are therefore unable to put together the inside and outside of Hamlet’s performance, the topic of which is how to put together the mind and body of man. The soliloquy, which generically deals with the problematic frame of life, is itself problematically framed. Just as Hamlet does not know the status of his being, we do not know the status of his speech. Now success with the play—twice named, The Murder of Gonzago and The Mousetrap (once for the action, once for intended effect)—depends upon a double transposition. It must concurrently show Claudius’ transgression by forcing him to transgress himself in public, and free Hamlet of his private perspective if he is to recognize what he is shown with objective certainty. The plan, then, is to make Claudius witness the publication of his own crime—to see himself as he is seen by others, to know himself as seen. This is experienced as shame; shame is the word for a self-conscious conscience. But we know something Hamlet does not. We know Claudius has already experienced the “lash of conscience.”

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Shakespeare, before The Mousetrap, simultaneously alerts us to the fact that Hamlet is wrong about his tactic and right about Claudius. The disclosure turns on twelve or so lines Hamlet inserts—but which are they? The play has three parts; only the middle has any dialogue. There a dying king and his queen, married for thirty years, discuss her fidelity after his death. That they are Hamlet’s parents is clear from the length of their marriage; in Act V the gravedigger tells us Hamlet is thirty. In which case, the king is already dying before Claudius kills him and the crime is gratuitous. The queen poses the problem. She is given permission to remarry, but promises fidelity—a promise Gertrude breaks. So the queen is free and faithless, her remarriage ambiguous. She is given away, but in being given is rendered untrustworthy. The ambiguity of the murder is echoed in the ambiguity of the “effect;” even if Claudius were sure of how to win Gertrude, he cannot be sure of who he has won. So how is “the conscience of the king” caught? The trap is to reveal to Claudius his own ignorance. Hamlet purges the murder of intention, which shows up as a stripping of effects. If conscience as morality presupposes conscience as awareness, by making Claudius know his ignorance, Hamlet can make him know his guilt: Claudius is guilty of acting in ignorance. All he has gained by fratricide is guilt. His crown, his ambition, his queen are not the “trappings and the suits” of soul; they are the scraps of the dead king (I.ii.86). Seeing Claudius see his own guilt, then, might spare Hamlet committing the same crime; he will be guilty of killing a king, but he will not be guilty of ignorance. So the play attempts to turn Hamlet into Claudius and Claudius into Hamlet. The former must be goaded into action; the latter made aware of his ignorance. It fails on both counts. While Hamlet instructs the players to “suit the action to the word and the word to the action,” this is precisely what never happens (III.ii.18–20). First, we get a dumb show that Ophelia does not understand; second, words alone; and third, a combination that is nonsense without Hamlet’s narration. Hence, we don’t know if Claudius reacts to Hamlet or the play, nor why he reacts. Hamlet identifies the poisoner as, “Lucianus, nephew to the king,” which does not implicate, but threatens his uncle (III.ii.250). Claudius might be responding to what he takes for a revelation of Hamlet, not Claudius

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himself. Although action and reflection remain divided, stage and audience never are. Our inability to extract Hamlet from the play bears out his inability to synthesize an objective frame of reference. Just as he fails to escape his perspective, the play fails to escape his reactions. He can put the poisoning on stage (purge action of actor), but not himself watching Claudius watching the poisoning on stage (purge viewer of perspective). Ophelia will comment, “You are as good as a chorus, my lord” (III.ii.251). Yet Hamlet is convinced of success; despite conviction he still doesn’t act. Knowing a man deserves to die is apparently not enough, for divesting Claudius of his “mortal coil” may not likewise divest him of soul. Hamlet doesn’t want to punish with the vengeance of the bereaved son; he wants to damn with the omniscience of a vengeful god. When he finally acts a few lines later, he doesn’t know what he has done much less to whom. Gertrude exclaims, “O, what a rash and bloody deed is this?” (III.iv.28). Polonius surprises him, Hamlet draws before he even speaks; only afterward does he ask if it is the king. Whereas a moment before he could not kill without omniscience, now he kills with nescience. Hamlet leaps before he looks, he has cut down a man yet “full of bread” (III.iii.80). He has not escaped Claudius’ crime; apparently one never knows who is behind the arras. To act at all is to be guilty of ignorance; to be guilty of ignorance is to risk a man’s soul.

Gertrude Polonius’ death interrupts Hamlet’s private conversation with Gertrude in the Queen’s private quarters. Hamlet has just said, “You go not till I set you up a glass/ Where you may see the inmost part of you”—which Gertrude takes literally for a death threat (III.iv.20–21). The Queen is entirely unpoetic and understands the world only as it seems. She alone can’t see the Ghost, yet says, “all that is I see” (III.iv.33). But if Gertrude is what she seems, if she is as superficial in her nature as the world is to her interpretation, there is no deeper unity behind her different unions. If “conscience” was the catchword for Claudius, “sense” is the index for Gertrude. Hamlet tries to make Gertrude sensible to her soul, as he tries to make Gertrude’s soul sensible. To appeal to his mother’s nature,

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Hamlet therefore delivers his most superficial speech, which, by the same token, brings to the surface the root of his obsession with her inconstancy. He forces her to look upon the “counterfeit presentment of two brothers,” demanding to know how she could replace a chimera of Greek gods—a medley of Hyperion, Jove, Mars, Mercury—with a “mildewed ear” (III.iv.57–59, 65). Apparently, Gertrude’s original sin is to replace one man with another. She treats a husband like a generic, not a particular, which raises marriage to the level of speech, mere convention. Her union with Claudius is unnatural and imposed (legal and timely), rather than natural and organic (unholy and timeless). She has revealed the law to be man-made, not God-given. It is not the murder of father, but the remarriage of mother, that has cast Elsinore into darkness. The introduction of conscience into the world—i.e., the awareness we cannot see clearly—undermines our faith in conscience as a surefire measure of right and wrong. There may be higher law, but man can no longer be sure of his obedience. The birth of enlightenment is a prologue to a crisis in confidence.5 Thus Hamlet’s indecision: he has discovered he lives in a fallen world. Unless he can set things right—put back together with the world his mother’s remarriage fractured—he does not know if he can trust himself to do the right thing. He cannot effectively collapse reflection and action. When he performs, he is speechless. It would take God to act otherwise, for whom alone there is no difference between what he says “is” and what “is.” But then doesn’t this mean art—to make imperfectly—is the specifically human act? God is not a poet. He writes life, not a reflection of life. Hamlet, who cannot do but only speak, is therefore man qua man. Yet at what does all his talk aim? Hamlet wants to shape the world according to speech; he wants things to be as he says they are. The poet who means to remake man according to his image desires the potency of God. The potency of poetry is indeed divine; apparently it empowers man to talk his way back into Eden. Just as infidelity proves the core of Hamlet’s fixation on Gertrude, so Gertrude proves the core of his fixation on the Ghost. The first two soliloquies begin with grief over the father and devolve into anger at the mother, whose remarriage Hamlet labels incestuous, as does the Ghost. Might they feel her infidelity less if Gertrude had married a man

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unrelated to her former husband? Which is worse, the haste of her remarriage or the man she remarried? Or does the familiarity of her lover argue the familiarity of his embrace, the urgency of their union that it is not without precedent? Before learning of the fratricide, Gertrude’s marriage seemed strange because it thwarts Hamlet’s claim to the throne. Afterward, given the Danish monarchy is elected, and regicide cannot guarantee anyone ascension, Claudius’ motive becomes suspect.6 Shakespeare refuses to clarify. Particulars add to confusion. The Ghost says Claudius “dispatched” him at once “of life, of crown, of queen,” but fails to mention a son (I.v.75). Gertrude chastises Hamlet after the play for offending his father, without saying whom she means (III.iv.10). Claudius remarks to Gertrude as Hamlet duels, “Our son shall win” (V.ii.288). When Hamlet asks how she likes the play, the Queen says, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” (III.ii.236). When speaking to her alone, Hamlet obsesses over the sexual act; when leaving for England, he calls Claudius mother in farewell. So, if a mother cannot be trusted with her sex—“Frailty, thy name is woman”—how can she be trusted with the identity of a father (I.ii.146)? Laertes will say, “That drop of blood that’s calm proclaims me bastard,/ Cries cuckold to my father, brands the harlot/ Even here between the chaste unsmirched brow/ Of my true mother” (IV.v.116–120). Apparently, the only reason one does not avenge the death of the father is if he is not one’s father, which is to accuse the mother of infidelity. Is Hamlet’s irresolution, then, a tacit accusation of Gertrude? As we listen to his speech comparing her husbands’ portraits, should we be looking for Hamlet’s likeness in theirs? Both he and the Ghost repeatedly note the vast difference between the brothers, but Hamlet’s own appearance is never mentioned. Moreover, a brother can father his brother’s child who looks like his father and no one be the wiser. Gertrude’s remarriage to her husband’s brother shrouds the paternity of the son as her remarriage to anyone else would not. The opening line of the play poses the question: “Who’s there?” Answer: the Prince of Demark. Question: who is the Prince of Denmark, Hamlet or Claudius? On the level of the play’s action, the question of Hamlet’s paternity means Hamlet does not know if the Ghost is his father commanding revenge for his murder, or a devil commanding Hamlet to murder his

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father. Given the instability of the world—the division between being and seeming—Hamlet does not know if his act commits the very crime it is meant to avenge. This is the most extreme context in which to pose the question of self-knowledge (knowledge of the inside) and knowledge of the consequences of your action in the world (knowledge of the outside). Hamlet’s solution? Everyone notices his sexual tension with Gertrude, although unlike Oedipus, it is spoken, never performed.7 But this is Hamlet—all talk. And what does it amount to? His Oedipal attempt to be his own father, his own creator, or a god—requires Hamlet to no longer be what he is, a man.His sexual obsession with his mother is the flip side of his obsession with self-slaughter. The solution to the question, “Who’s there?”—Hamlet or Claudius?—requires answering the question, “Who is the father?”—Hamlet or Claudius? Hamlet’s answer: to become his own father—which requires patricide (the crime that for Oedipus too exposes incest). To know what he is doing, Hamlet has to know who he is; to know who he is, he has to know who his father is; to know his father, he has to become his father; to become his father, he has to commit patricide—which Hamlet is guilty of in speech. Considered in this light, the Ghost’s revelation indicates why Hamlet has understood fulfilling the command to revenge as tantamount to committing suicide. The only way to fulfill his duty as a son to the father is to become the father and take revenge upon the son. Thus Hamlet must be a god to act like a man and a son to act like a father. This is how to resurrect a natural whole upon conventional ground. The undiscovered country of Hamlet is the stage, where the poet’s word is the law and an actor indeed must “take thy fortune” (III.iv.33). Which brings us back to Polonius, the man who dies because Hamlet’s speech is taken at face value. His murder realizes in a single blow the dangerous duplicity plaguing Denmark since the Ghost appeared. On the one hand, Polonius is killed because a metaphor is taken literally; on the other, in killing him, Hamlet metaphorically kills himself. Living in an opaque world is a dangerous business. While the rapier finds its sheath in Polonius’ guts, all that is left of Hamlet after Act III is guts. Ironically the self-aware man is self-ignorant, and consequently he kills off irony. Rather than authoring the mother’s coherence in speech, he authors his own incoherence in deed. The play itself mimics

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the collapse of Hamlet’s character; just as he becomes a divided two, Laertes and Ophelia each literally act out what Hamlet poetically held together. Laertes is interested in nothing but revenge killing—mindless action; Ophelia goes mad—mindless speech. Between them, they miss the mind of Hamlet. So in the first half of the play, Hamlet represents a cohesion of the different roles he plays, but cannot himself be represented. We grasp him negatively, by never mistaking the character for any particular role. The hollowness of his act shows up in the depth of his awareness. Hamlet watching Hamlet playing Hamlet is Hamlet’s madness, and madness is the sign of conscience—which, as we remember, “makes cowards of us all…when the pale cast of thought makes resolution lose the name of action” (III.83–88). That man cannot be and know he is at the same time, means “to be” is necessarily “not to be.” Speech is the act that permits honest duplicity; the soliloquy is the speech by which a man is and knows himself duplicitous: he is actor and audience together. Thus the soliloquy proves affidavit both to Hamlet’s knowledge and to his ignorance. It is how he appears the paradigmatic human being, which is what, in the end, destroys his humanity: a paradigm does not possess that within which passes show. With the murder of Polonius, Hamlet finally shows himself Gertrude’s son. He raises himself into mere speech. His last words of the play will be, “the rest is silence;” unlike his father, he will not return to haunt the living (V.ii.359). There is no afterlife for dead souls.

Action We see the effect of the murder on Hamlet’s behavior immediately. He becomes at once more the idealist and the materialist; his speech is no longer metaphysical but merely physical. Man as body alone leads Hamlet to understand everything in bodily terms, which in turn erases all distinctions. Death is the great equalizer; we are all food for worms. In the purely physical world, man’s closest kin is dust, his highest purpose to feed parasites. So what does Hamlet seem to learn from the murder? His reaction to killing an individual is to kill the individual in everyone.

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First Hamlet struggles to know enough to act. Then he acts; he kills. What does he learn? To act is meaningless. The realm of action—the arena in which a man can touch another man and affect him—is not the realm of the human. For the newly minted nihilist, there is no difference between “to be” and “not to be;” it is no longer a question. His final soliloquy therefore begins, “What is a man,/ If his chief good and market of his time/ Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more” (IV.iv.33–35). Insofar as men can act, they are beasts. Consummation reveals acting isn’t all it’s cracked up to be; in fact it’s even more impotent than reflection. If there is no distinction between king and beggar, no distinction between regicide and murder, no distinction between man and woman, there is certainly no distinction between fratricide and revenge killing. Which means there is nothing to avenge, and revenge is nothing but murder. So in the realm of action, where deeds of men can be measured, what permits us to act and be acted upon is what makes us like everyone else—body. Any further part in Hamlet’s revenge must be acted by God. Insofar as Hamlet can act at all, he can only act against what makes Claudius like any other man; he cannot act against what makes Claudius, Claudius. Revenge is impossible. One can kill the beast in man, but one cannot kill the man in him—and awareness of this kills the man in Hamlet. It reveals the futility of awareness. All that is left is the beast. Hamlet resigns himself to his fate. Conscience and conscience, which were never united in action, are finally united in death.8 Hamlet can therefore seal the deed against Rosencrantz and Guildenstern without a qualm; whether or not they were conscious of their crime is a matter of indifference (V.ii.58). Let’s put this in terms of the play as a whole: in the first half Hamlet is the victim of the very same crime he is guilty of in the second half.9 He is on both sides of the same act; where Acts II through III are driven by Hamlet’s plotting revenge against Claudius, Acts IV though V are driven by Laertes, with Claudius’ assistance, plotting revenge against Hamlet. It is a corrupted reflection of the first plot. Now in the first half, Hamlet thought reflection was not acting, but it turned out to be a kind of action. Choosing not to do something is a choice, because not doing is a variety of doing. But then it turns out to act is not to act, because

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to kill a man is not actually to kill the part of him you were aiming at. When faced with the impotence of action, Hamlet gives up. We might say, then, the first half posed the question of the subject: what is the status of the being who acts, independent of the action? It begins with the question, “Who’s there?” And when we pushed the question far enough—what is the status of the Ghost, what is the status of Claudius, what is the status of Gertrude—we realized we did not know the status of Hamlet. Hamlet literally does not know who he is. He does not know if, as the Prince of Denmark, he is Hamlet or Claudius. Which is ironic, because he does not know if Claudius murdering King Hamlet made him Prince of Denmark. If he is Claudius’ son, his title was mere seeming until now. The second half poses the question of the verb: what is the status of the act, independent of the being committing it? Act V therefore begins with a definition of action, “an act hath three branches—it is to act, to do, to perform” (V.i.11–12). The three branches are redundant but not perfectly redundant. “To act” is identical to the whole; “to do” and “to perform” are synonyms for the whole, but not identical. To perform can be to playact—to simulate an act, independent of effects. Action is not unified; its division is not scientific. It is not precise or systematic. In order to be action, even in analysis it must retain this characteristic of unity; the parts of action are by implication, never explication. Under the unifying “to act,” there is nevertheless a distinction between an act in terms of effects (rooted in the world; contextualized) and in terms of performance (independent of effects; in itself ). Neither gives you the whole. If you measure an act by its effects, you never get at the act in itself; you have displaced your understanding of action onto something other than action. But if it is just performance, it is all show, and cannot be trusted. It is meaningless. Either way, you have not gotten at the nature of action: it is both what it is in itself, and what it does—how it effects things. Now the first half of the play showed us speech is an action, and never adequately brings out the heart of things, and the second half shows us by the same token, action never adequately penetrates to the heart of things. What remains necessarily obscure is the connection between the

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being who acts, and the act—or subject and verb—and hence the possibility of mistaking murder for natural death (King Hamlet’s poisoning), and an accident for suicide (Ophelia’s drowning). Together Hamlet and Claudius model how there is no taking these apart, but different ways of putting them together. There is Claudius, whose success depends upon an incoherence of self; he is the hollow man who commits the meaningful act—the act that exhausts the self—his title becomes the sum of his parts. There is Hamlet, whose failure is the sign of the coherent self that cannot show up without ceasing to be a self. He commits the hollow act insufficient to the actor.10

Heart The play ends with the death of both men guilty of the same crime, each felled by the hand of his victim’s son. Claudius is no more guilty than Hamlet; both the status of knowledge and action are so corrupted, we should have no standing to judge them. Or, to restate the problem: if there is a god with a plan, then there is nothing to do; and if there is no god and no plan then there is nothing to know; either way, man’s existence is futile. Yet we do judge them. So I return to our original question: why is Hamlet a tragedy? Why do we judge? Why do we care? Or put within the play: why does Horatio care? Horatio is the audience on stage; his love of Hamlet is our love.11 And he cares so much, the only reason he lives, is to tell Hamlet’s story; and we care so much we have watched Hamlet for four centuries. What, then, makes Hamlet the character worthy of having his story told? Because Hamlet is the man who in striving to show his soul undoes his soul. This is the sign of a soul in the world: we can only love the man who is not the sum of his actions, who strives and yet necessarily fails to make himself manifest, who has soul. The tragic hero is tragic by virtue of his failure to be a hero. The humanity of a man is his failure to be a success; we love one another for how we strive to be human, not the ease with which we are human. We admire the successful public figure; we honor and esteem him. We call him valiant. Horatio says of King Hamlet—as “this side of our known world esteemed him” (I.i.85). But

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love is private, it is not public, and it loves what is private; it is inspired by what can never be fully explained, because to explain, is to explain away. The Ghost is not what we mourn in the father; we mourn, “that within which passes show.” We cannot mourn the man who is his acts, who is his seeming; we mourn, as we love, the soul, which can never show itself completely. So we love Hamlet for his failure; Horatio’s pain at the loss of Hamlet is the sign of the presence of Hamlet’s soul. So what is at the heart of Hamlet the play? Hamlet’s hidden soliloquy—his speech to another whom he loves as himself: “Give me that man/ That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him/ In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart, as I do thee” (III.ii.73–76). The core of Hamlet is Hamlet’s love for Horatio, whose sole act in the play is to frame the play: called first to name King Hamlet, he is last left to absolve Prince Hamlet’s “wounded name” (V.ii.345). Dying, Hamlet says, “If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,/ Absent thee from felicity awhile,/ And in this harsh world draw breath in pain,/ To tell my story” (V.ii.347–350). Hamlet’s failure to be a man is redeemed by the love of a man. This is all the success available to mortals. It is not that Horatio will be able to tell Hamlet’s story, or that Hamlet can actually survive his own death, but that Hamlet has moved Horatio to want to tell his story, and moved us to listen to it. This kind of redemption—not by God, but by men— is only available to the man who shows his soul in yearning to display soul—who is human by striving to be human. So the tragedy of human life: we can only know ourselves as failures to be ourselves. Insofar as we show up at all, we have ceased to be what makes us worthy of being known—we have ceased to be meaningful beings. And this is tragic. It is tragic that self-knowledge is fundamentally self-destructive, that there is no revelation without corruption. But what is not tragic is that we are able to experience this failure as a tragedy. Our lives are meaningful because we are not gods; we care because we can experience another man’s failure, imperfection, as epic tragedy. So Hamlet is tragic because his capacity to understand life as meaningful is what convinces him it is meaningless; and Hamlet is a tragedy because witnessing this failure of a man is meaningful to us. Hamlet undoing his soul on stage elicits a reaction from us that reveals soul. The trick, however, is that this is only possible through art, and never

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in life. This is the great tragedy of life—it can only be redeemed in art. Horatio may want to tell Hamlet’s story, and his love may be evidence that Hamlet’s life was meaningful, but he will not be able to tell Hamlet’s story. His version will lack all the soliloquies, and as more than one critic has said: Hamlet is seven soliloquies; the rest is stuffing. We cannot do for one another in life what Hamlet asks of Horatio: if you die tomorrow, the story your mother, your brother, your best friend tells of you will not capture you. We need art to do this. We recognize the human in what is universal to us all. We need the archetype, the paradigm, in which to recognize our individual humanity. Yet this recognition, which cannot happen through one of us, but must happen through all of us, is shown to us through one man—Hamlet. We have to see it as a specific character. In our act of working to understand Hamlet, we recognize ourselves. This is how art bridges the gap. It shows you yourself in reflection—in another. The nature of art, or poetry, is the truest revelation of the nature of man, and that it is unnatural, false, incomplete, unsatisfying, temporary, and “seeming,” is the revelation of the possibility of nature, truth, completeness, satisfaction, permanence, and being. Only because we can see when these things are absent do we know they are even possible. But we know of their possibility as always other than what we are—the conventional, partial, desiring, changeable, mortal failures to be gods.

Notes 1. All references are to William Shakespeare, Hamlet (New York: Signet Classics, 1998); hereafter cited by line number. 2. In Anglo-Saxon, the name is a compound of os, “God” and rice, “rich, powerful.” It can be translated as “rule of god,” “divine ruler,” or “divine riches.” 3. Blits argues for this technical self-mirroring in Hamlet, where corresponding scenes in the first and second half of the play literally reflect one another. He sees a similar structure in Act I, such that the first and second sighting of the Ghost (I.i versus I.iv and I.v) are direct counterparts. For a scene by scene analysis, see Jan

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4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

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Blits, Deadly Thought: “Hamlet” and the Human Soul (New York: Lexington, 2001), pp. 16–17, 84–85. For an interesting discussion of how purgatory offers a religious version of this “in-between” in death, see Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 47–101. Since purgatory is a realm purely determined by the moral order, it exposes our expectations about the world—that we want it to be a moral and rational place. Of course, to portray purgatory, the Ghost must violate it. Vengeance still does not belong to man in death, and if the Ghost is more than illusion and purgatory more than fantasy, he will pay further penance, both for seeking that which is not rightfully his, and for tempting another to fall. Only as a god would the Ghost not be a devil. Hamlet is similarly transgressive in his quest for revelation: just as the Ghost discloses the supernatural order by breaching it, Hamlet profanes the natural order to excavate the infostructure beneath the appearance of irrationality. He wants to discover the necessity that shows up as accidental—that is, he wants to discover the plot of life—and turn the world into purgatory. Then he would know what role he ought to play. For the historical context of Hamlet ’s drama, and how it thematizes strains of Renaissance thought, see Paul Cantor, Shakespeare: Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 1–15. For a history of Denmark, see T. K. Derry, A History of Scandinavia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979). The most famous interpretation of Hamlet’s relationship to woman and sex is the psychoanalytic reading suggested by Freud and subsequently developed by Jones. See Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2010). Also see Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus (New York: Norton Library, 1976). Consider in comparison Nietzsche’s interpretation of Hamlet in Birth of Tragedy: For the rapture of the Dionysian state with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence contains, while it lasts,

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a lethargic element in which all personal experiences of the past become immersed. This chasm of oblivion separates the worlds of everyday reality and of Dionysian reality. But as soon as this everyday reality re-enters consciousness, it is experienced as such, with nausea: an ascetic, will-negating mood is the fruit of these states. In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from the excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no—true knowledge, and insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man. (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy And The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Random House, 1967], pp. 59–60)

9. Woodruff makes a similar observation about Hamlet’s criminality in the context of the revenge tragedy tradition. See Paul Woodruff, “Staging Wisdom Through Hamlet,” Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Tzachi Zamir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 59–60. 10. There is broad disagreement in Shakespearian scholarship about what Hamlet learns and how he is changed in Act V, which rather wonderfully amplifies the stakes of the play. Critics who privilege Hamlet’s words argue he is grown wise, and those who privilege his deeds insist he is grown dumb. Consider a brief sampling of alternative interpretations: For a preternaturally mature Hamlet who is measured by his speech, see Harold Bloom, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (New York: Riverhead Books, 2003). For a misguided Hamlet, measured by his deeds, see Paul Cantor, Shakespeare: Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 54– 55. For a non-nihilist Hamlet who is nonetheless a negative portrait

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of self-awareness, given that he fails to forge a practical identity, but is still defined in opposition to normative standards, see Paul A. Kottman “Self-Uncertainty as Self-Realization,” Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Tzachi Zamir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). For a Hamlet who does not believe in providence, but instead has learned to play-act himself, and so is but one self among many potential selves, see Joshua Landy, “To Thine Own Selves Be True-ish: Shakespeare’s Hamlet as Formal Model,” Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. Tzachi Zamir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 166–186. 11. For a similar observation of Horatio’s standing in the play, see Harold Bloom, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (New York: Riverhead Books, 2003), pp. 13–15.

Index

A

Action xiii, 4, 8, 9, 14, 16, 19, 20, 24–26, 33, 34, 37, 38, 43, 46, 55, 85, 142, 159, 161, 178, 179, 184, 188, 217, 231, 246, 253, 255, 260, 266, 270, 273, 277, 279, 284, 286, 289, 294, 327, 334, 335, 341, 348–362 Aesthetic vii, 4–6, 9–11, 13–16, 18–27, 93, 119–124, 139–141, 176–181, 183, 187–190, 229, 232, 238, 239, 246, 265, 266, 268, 270, 284 Allies vii–ix, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 88, 92, 98 Amnesia xii, 312, 315, 317, 318 Analysis viii, x, 4, 6, 8, 9, 12, 33, 46, 116, 139, 154, 164–169, 255, 361 Antidote xiii, 296

Art vii, x, xii, 3–7, 10–15, 18, 19, 21, 22, 25, 39, 80, 81, 122, 124, 125, 138, 144, 157, 165, 170, 176–178, 180, 181, 185–190, 238, 239, 255, 265, 266, 296, 305, 310, 324, 330, 332, 335, 340, 341, 343, 352, 356, 363, 364 Aspect vi, 5, 6, 8, 11, 13, 22, 23, 25, 26, 32, 89, 95, 120, 138, 146, 176, 201, 207, 212, 228, 229, 274, 286–288, 290, 299, 300, 307 Assertion viii, 24, 32–46, 48, 176, 187, 233, 257, 314, 318 Austen, Jane viii, 42, 51, 64 Autobiography 129–131, 133, 139, 206, 293 Axial age xii, 323, 324, 337, 342, 343

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 G. Hagberg (ed.), Fictional Worlds and Philosophical Reflection, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73061-1

369

370

Index

Axiological x, 217 Axiology 211, 214

B

Bakhtin, Mikhail 130, 131 Beckett, Samuel xii, 306, 321 Body x, 41, 42, 86, 90, 111, 114, 115, 130, 134, 140, 160, 176, 180–182, 186, 187, 215, 253, 325, 333, 351, 353, 359, 360 Bootstrapping 273, 283 Borges, Jorge Luis viii, 79 Bronte, Emily 204

C

Calvino, Italo ix, 110, 111 Cartesianism 247, 250, 253 Cause x, 53, 170, 185, 203, 216, 238, 255, 277, 280, 282, 296, 333 Cavell, Stanley 80, 328 Certainty v, ix, x, 84, 97, 154, 161, 165–169, 247, 250, 251, 257, 259, 260, 262, 292, 316, 353 Change v, xii, 10, 32, 52, 53, 59, 115, 134, 146, 182, 183, 185, 212, 233, 259, 265, 272, 274, 280–282, 284, 286, 287, 292, 297, 306, 314, 326, 327, 330, 331, 334, 339, 340 Character ix, xi–xiii, 4, 5, 10, 14, 16, 17, 19–22, 24–26, 40, 41, 43, 44, 51, 53, 55–57, 61–64, 66, 68–70, 81, 85, 87, 90, 110, 111, 113–118, 123, 131–133, 135–143, 145, 146, 157, 168, 186, 188, 190, 203,

208, 219–221, 250, 261, 263, 264, 271, 292, 293, 295, 299, 306, 307, 310–313, 317, 318, 324, 326, 327, 329, 334, 335, 338, 339, 347–350, 359, 362, 364 Christian 203, 208, 209, 215, 217, 219, 220, 307, 327, 338, 340 Civilization 8, 9, 114, 219 Clarification v, 97, 300 Code 10, 168, 262, 266 Cohen, Ted 132 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 47, 205 Conceptual v–vii, xi, 6, 9, 14, 15, 23–25, 45, 86, 135, 233, 249, 252, 253, 255, 257, 261, 262, 264, 267, 280, 296, 300, 301 Condition vii, ix, xiii, 6, 8–11, 14, 16, 36, 57, 58, 124, 140, 145, 178–180, 188–190, 265, 280, 291, 292, 295, 296, 313, 314, 317, 329, 335, 337, 344 Conscious x, xii, xiii, 67, 80, 91, 133, 138, 141, 143, 155, 162, 183, 237, 250, 251, 257, 263, 268, 270, 281, 306, 312, 350–353, 360 Content vi, vii, x, 4–6, 15, 17, 23–25, 33, 37, 41, 90, 130, 203, 229, 246, 250, 252–254, 256–259, 261, 263, 266, 268–272, 278–282, 285, 289, 290, 292, 294, 295 Continuity xii, 234, 235, 306, 311, 318 Convention ix, xi, 34, 35, 42, 91, 111, 155, 156, 158–161, 167, 203, 208, 276, 279, 356, 358, 364

Index

Conversation 4, 5, 22, 24, 26, 32, 65, 113, 121, 207, 216, 271, 275, 283, 284, 287, 290, 297, 313, 353, 355 Conviction 83, 84, 95, 234, 261, 355 Criteria 3, 52, 80, 89, 119, 249–251, 263, 296 Critic 5, 8, 12, 16, 18–21, 26, 38, 85, 176, 178–180, 183–185, 187, 189, 227, 232, 235, 251, 326, 341, 342, 364 Cultivate xi, 177, 178, 183, 189, 274, 276, 278 Culture x, 11, 19, 80, 86, 110, 204, 276, 277, 280, 317, 339

D

Death 19, 24, 27, 80, 86, 87, 141, 142, 157, 160, 161, 178, 182, 184, 185, 188, 202, 214, 215, 235, 305, 311, 312, 324, 327, 331, 333, 334, 341, 342, 347, 348, 350, 351, 354, 355, 357, 359, 360, 362, 363 Descartes, Rene 247 Description vi, 24, 25, 35, 37, 45, 46, 51, 58, 60, 68, 90, 113, 118–120, 140, 161, 207, 228, 229, 233, 235, 267, 268, 270, 272–274, 279, 281, 282, 291, 296, 308 Detective ix, 154, 156, 163, 164, 169–171, 250 Dora ix, x, 154, 155, 158, 162–165, 169 Doubt 34, 67, 85, 94, 95, 161, 166, 180, 232, 247–251, 253–255,

371

258–261, 263, 265, 270, 274, 279, 281, 285, 293–297

E

Eliot, T.S. xii Enemies viii, ix, 56, 69, 79, 84, 98 Essentialism 258, 265 Excavation 253 Existence x, xii, 7–9, 91, 92, 155, 160, 178–180, 182, 185, 187, 189, 190, 236, 250, 254, 261, 307, 309, 324, 326, 338, 341, 362 Experience vii, ix–xi, 4–8, 14–16, 18–21, 23–26, 32, 51, 52, 59, 63, 95, 96, 110, 111, 113–115, 118, 121, 122, 124, 130, 131, 136, 138, 140, 145, 165, 178, 180, 182, 184, 207, 228–239, 249, 259, 263, 268, 269, 271, 273–275, 278, 280–282, 284, 286, 287, 295, 297, 317, 325–327, 330, 331, 334, 338–340, 343, 348, 351, 352, 363 Exploration ix, 80, 136, 308

F

Falsehood v, viii, 31, 32, 36, 39, 40, 46, 57, 58 Feeling viii, 6, 20, 25, 50–59, 61, 63–66, 68–70, 81, 125, 139, 185, 189, 204, 215, 235, 237, 279, 286, 327, 329, 331, 332, 334, 338–340, 343, 351 First person ix, 131, 135, 137, 140, 145

372

Index

Form ix, 4, 6, 12, 14–24, 27, 37, 41, 42, 51, 52, 57, 58, 63, 64, 80–82, 97, 112–114, 116, 117, 120, 122, 123, 130, 138–141, 145, 146, 157, 176–181, 184, 187–189, 206, 228, 229, 233, 246, 248, 252, 255, 261, 262, 266, 274, 278, 279, 284, 288, 290, 292, 297, 305, 326 Framing 64, 352 Freud, Sigmund 153

G

Game 34, 35, 85, 90, 91, 96, 118, 156, 249, 258–261, 272, 285, 290, 291, 297, 300 Genre vii, viii, 3, 6, 7, 12, 13, 21, 22, 26, 27, 124, 125, 160, 188, 266, 325 God 10, 89, 175, 177, 179, 184, 189, 204, 205, 207, 208, 212, 247, 309, 333, 338, 341, 349, 350, 352, 355, 356, 358, 360, 362–364 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von x, 203, 205–208, 210, 212, 216, 221

H

Hamlet xiii, 81, 347–364 Hermetic 250, 253, 254, 256, 266, 267, 278, 281, 289, 295, 296 History vi, xii, 6–9, 11, 26, 65, 83–85, 97, 142, 145, 153, 154, 158, 161, 163, 164, 166,

168, 169, 227, 255, 277, 286, 306–313, 315–318, 325, 337

I

Ideal xii, 8, 9, 83, 87, 90, 96, 112, 113, 116, 120, 125, 180, 185, 189, 216, 228, 229, 232, 324, 335, 340, 344 Idealism xii, 82, 91, 92, 95, 96, 229, 324, 341, 343 Identity ix, x, 4, 7, 13, 130, 132, 134–136, 138, 142, 143, 145, 146, 156, 159–162, 166, 231, 236, 237, 267, 268, 273, 277, 279, 283, 284, 292, 293, 296, 323, 330, 333, 339, 357 Ignorance 317, 352, 354, 355, 359 Illusion v, xii, 264, 291, 324, 330, 337, 341, 342 Imagine vi, vii, 6, 10, 15, 18, 23, 25, 50, 52–55, 59, 69, 83–85, 91, 93, 94, 133, 144, 145, 176, 204, 205, 230, 231, 234, 236, 237, 248, 254, 256, 293, 309, 315, 339 Immersive 115, 116, 120–122, 124–126, 233 Implication v, 11, 110, 113, 115, 117, 134, 137, 214, 263, 269, 271, 272, 286, 288, 292, 293, 361 Inference viii, ix, 41, 43–46, 67, 113, 115, 118, 153–156, 162–166, 170, 247, 252, 253, 261 Infidelity 356, 357 Influence x, 44, 45, 57, 58, 110, 113, 115, 116, 180, 183, 185,

Index

203–205, 216, 221, 235, 245, 246, 267, 274, 279, 281, 293, 306, 327 Information 34, 35, 37, 38, 41, 42, 52, 53, 59, 60, 65–68, 70, 111, 113–115, 117, 119–121, 123, 125 Insight v, xi, 3, 10–12, 26, 69, 70, 121, 135, 139, 142, 169, 235, 284, 325, 332, 333, 341, 343 Interpretation vii, viii, 9–11, 60, 61, 70, 84, 110, 112, 113, 115, 118, 120, 121, 125, 140, 145, 162, 163, 214, 235, 280, 289, 338, 339, 355 Introspection 253, 259, 264, 291, 296 Inwardness xii, 323, 337

J

James, Henry xi, 189, 245, 246, 259, 269, 301 James, William 245, 246, 268, 277, 287, 298, 299 Judgment xi, 51, 64, 68, 70, 112, 155, 178, 219, 329, 339

K

Kant, Immanuel 93 King Lear xii, 325–327, 335, 337–340, 343 Knowledge v–vii, xi, xiii, 5, 7, 9–12, 18, 25, 31, 37, 85, 89, 91, 93, 204, 216, 247, 251, 253–255, 258, 264, 267, 276, 277, 280, 284, 291, 292, 295, 296, 305,

373

309, 315, 325, 328, 343, 348, 351, 352, 358, 359, 362, 363

L

Lambert Strether xi, 246, 249, 250, 267 Lens vii, ix, x, 130, 203, 208, 227, 275 Lie viii, 10, 16, 17, 32, 35, 36, 41, 46, 82, 83, 91, 92, 109, 158, 167, 180, 239, 260, 261, 325, 326, 329 Life v–vii, ix, 5, 7, 8, 11, 16, 17, 19, 22, 24–27, 37, 58, 63, 64, 69, 70, 80, 86, 87, 97, 111, 113, 114, 116, 118, 131, 134, 137, 138, 140, 142–146, 153, 158–161, 163, 165, 176–179, 181–190, 202, 217, 228, 234, 235, 250, 255–257, 259, 261, 262, 267, 268, 270–272, 274–276, 278, 279, 281–286, 288, 289, 291–293, 295, 297, 300, 310, 311, 313, 318, 323–325, 327–329, 331, 333–335, 337–344, 347, 348, 350, 352, 353, 356, 357, 359, 362–364 Linguistic viii, 11, 12, 32–35, 38, 43, 46, 90, 109, 110, 125, 252, 257, 263, 272, 278, 285, 288, 289, 295, 300 Literary v–viii, x, xi, 3–7, 12–14, 16–18, 21–27, 31, 32, 41, 51, 63, 68, 70, 79, 80, 83, 85, 86, 88, 89, 92, 93, 98, 113, 138, 139, 157, 160, 175, 176, 202, 204, 227, 231, 234, 236, 239,

374

Index

246, 252, 261, 311, 318, 325, 339 Literature v–ix, xii, xiii, 4, 12, 13, 16, 26, 31, 32, 38, 41, 47, 61–63, 68–70, 79–84, 91, 97, 98, 130, 135, 176, 183, 204, 205, 245, 246, 248, 249, 252, 253, 265, 267, 294, 299, 306, 325, 340, 343 Love 4, 7, 10, 13, 17, 19, 23, 24, 26, 54, 62, 63, 112, 113, 154, 162, 165–169, 177, 183, 184, 186, 202, 205, 212, 215, 219, 220, 238, 239, 285, 286, 290, 305, 313, 323, 327–329, 332–334, 337, 339, 341, 362–364

M

Make-believe ix, 118 Meaning v, vi, 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 15–21, 23–27, 90, 109, 114, 115, 117, 118, 131, 134, 162, 164, 165, 168, 245, 249, 252–255, 257–267, 269, 272, 276, 281, 282, 284, 288, 289, 291–293, 295–297, 327, 332, 347–349, 351 Memory 114, 120, 131–135, 137–139, 141, 142, 145, 146, 162, 168, 221, 228–231, 233, 235–237, 269–271, 291, 306–315, 317, 318 Mendacity 163, 219 Mentality 288 Metaphor v, ix, 16, 87, 109, 110, 112, 114, 117–124, 126, 145, 308, 348

Metaphysics 10, 83, 86, 208, 251, 265 Mind xi, 9, 13, 18, 19, 21, 23, 26, 34, 38, 39, 53, 60, 67–70, 91, 92, 110, 113, 114, 117, 118, 120, 125, 155, 165, 168, 181, 184, 202, 212, 219, 228–230, 233, 235, 237, 238, 245, 246, 248, 250, 251, 255, 256, 261, 264, 265, 268–270, 272, 274–278, 280–282, 284, 286, 287, 289, 293–295, 300, 308, 311, 329, 330, 337, 349, 351, 353, 359 Misleading ix, 38, 94, 110, 125, 250, 252, 255, 256, 258, 265–268 Modernism xi, xii, 245 Moral viii, x, xi, xiii, 9, 16, 34, 39, 50–52, 57–59, 61, 62, 69, 182–185, 201, 202, 206, 208, 212, 216, 217, 274, 280, 284–286, 352 Murder 157–159, 185, 328, 348, 352, 354, 356–360, 362 Mutation xii

N

Nabokov, Vladimir ix, 130, 131, 133, 134, 136, 138, 140, 141, 146, 148, 149 Name 37, 39, 134, 156, 203, 206, 207, 255, 256, 260, 313, 332, 349, 351, 357, 359, 363 Narrative vii–ix, xiii, 24–26, 32, 36–46, 60, 62–64, 66, 69, 85–87, 89, 109, 118, 120, 123, 130–143, 145, 146, 156,

Index

158, 168, 176, 183, 187, 262, 280, 281, 293, 312, 315, 316, 318, 341 Nietzschean x, 203, 208, 214, 216, 217, 219–221, 279 Nietzsche, Friedrich x, 203, 216, 325 Nonfiction 37, 41, 42, 44, 46, 120, 121 Novel vi–x, 3–7, 12–14, 16, 17, 19, 21–27, 37, 42, 51, 62–65, 68, 70, 85, 110–114, 116–122, 126, 130–133, 135–138, 140, 141, 143, 144, 146, 160, 176, 180, 181, 183, 185–188, 201–205, 208, 209, 215, 221, 246, 267–269, 284, 286–288, 291–297, 310–312, 315, 317, 318, 325, 343 Nussbaum, Martha x, 79, 176, 177, 189, 221, 339

O

Observation ix, 8, 9, 11, 12, 53, 59, 66, 69, 96, 131, 138, 139, 153, 154, 203, 248, 254, 288, 296 Other viii, ix, xi, xii, 5, 7–11, 15, 18, 20, 23, 26, 32–34, 37–41, 46, 49, 52, 53, 55, 60–62, 64, 66–69, 80, 82, 83, 87, 90–92, 94, 95, 111–115, 118–121, 123–125, 130–136, 138, 139, 141, 145, 146, 159, 165, 168, 178, 181–183, 186, 188, 202, 203, 206, 214, 228, 234, 237, 238, 248, 254, 258, 260, 264–267, 269, 270, 273, 277,

283, 314, 343, 360,

288, 324, 348, 361,

375

290, 292, 308, 312, 328, 331, 333, 341, 349, 351, 352, 358, 364

P

Paragon xiii Passion 50–52, 54, 55, 58, 59, 144, 163, 180, 228, 272, 275, 276, 308, 324, 326, 327, 330, 340, 363 Past vii, ix, xi, xii, 87, 130–146, 157, 158, 175, 211, 234, 268, 271, 273, 275, 279, 282, 283, 286, 287, 305–318 Peirce, Charles Sanders xi Perception v, 20, 21, 91, 92, 95, 114, 118, 190, 228, 231, 233, 235, 245, 246, 268–270, 277, 282, 284, 287, 293, 295, 298, 299, 306, 314, 330, 337, 342, 351 Picture 37, 60, 93, 113, 145, 182, 238, 250, 252, 253, 256–258, 260, 264, 266, 267, 277, 280, 289, 296, 301, 330, 335 Plato 10, 82–85, 91, 110, 339 Plot 4, 13, 24–26, 41, 65, 86, 87, 109–111, 113, 115, 116, 118, 123, 137, 142–144, 161, 167, 170, 217, 327, 328, 334, 348–350, 360 Poetry ix, 12, 31, 88, 124, 137, 206, 210, 230, 232, 239, 339, 356, 364 Postmodernism xi Practice 12, 19, 21, 41, 56, 62, 70, 89, 111, 121, 153, 159, 204,

376

Index

208, 238, 247, 250, 252, 259–262, 265, 266, 268, 289, 291, 290, 323, 343 Pragmatism xi, 245, 246, 249, 250, 252, 256, 261, 267, 269, 270, 281, 284, 286, 288, 294, 298–300 Present vi, xii, 6, 33, 40, 64, 66, 87, 110, 114, 117, 131, 133–138, 140, 142–144, 146, 154, 158, 164, 181, 217, 219, 232, 234, 251, 261–263, 265, 268, 269, 271, 277, 279, 287, 290, 295, 296, 305–307, 313–318, 326, 332, 337–339 Private 55, 56, 62, 63, 88, 111, 250–252, 254, 260, 262–264, 266, 277, 278, 281, 295, 296, 347, 353, 355, 363 Progress vi, xi, 8, 19, 57, 256, 265, 278, 295, 300 Psyche x, 163, 167, 168, 171, 350 Psychology viii, 11, 50, 51, 61, 69, 274, 292

Q

Quality vii, viii, 4–7, 13–16, 20, 23, 24, 26, 27, 49, 65, 69, 86, 91, 119, 123, 161, 187, 202, 229, 255, 258, 317, 326, 341, 342

R

Ramsey, Frank vi, 246 Rational xiii, 17, 43 Reading ix, x, xii, 5, 6, 17, 19, 23, 25–27, 43, 60, 62, 67, 70, 110–118, 121–126, 136, 144,

153, 156, 169, 170, 246, 284, 287, 294, 332, 339 Realist xii, 83, 89, 92, 250, 341, 342 Reality v, viii, xii, 5, 7, 9, 14, 16–18, 20–23, 66, 81–85, 87, 89–97, 110, 115, 118, 120, 125, 126, 132, 153, 163, 164, 167, 186, 189, 209, 283, 305, 307, 309, 316, 317, 323, 324, 333, 341, 342 Reciprocity xiii, 350 Reflection v, xi, xiii, 5, 11, 12, 132, 230, 233, 250, 262–265, 268, 272, 282, 294, 313, 340, 348, 350, 352, 353, 355, 356, 360, 364 Rehearsal 340, 343 Repetition 229, 230, 233–236, 239, 287 Republic 10, 83 Ricoeur, Paul 130, 343 Rightness 263, 296 Romance ix, x, 25, 62, 116, 140, 156–162, 166–168, 170, 325, 326, 332–334, 337, 340–342 Ruin xii, 83, 89, 324, 326, 327, 332, 333, 338, 340, 342–344

S

Self-identification ix, 133 Self-knowledge vii, xi, xiii, 85, 267, 280, 284, 291, 295, 343, 358, 363 Sense v, vii, xii, 7, 20, 33–35, 37, 43, 45, 52, 53, 59, 64, 70, 82, 87, 91–93, 95, 97, 115–117, 120–122, 124, 130–132, 135, 137, 138, 140, 142, 145, 164,

Index

165, 167, 170, 177, 182, 184, 185, 188, 202, 215, 228–231, 233–235, 250, 256, 257, 260, 262–264, 267, 268, 271–273, 275, 276, 278, 279, 281–284, 286, 287, 290, 292, 293, 295, 296, 300, 305–308, 310–314, 316–318, 324, 327, 328, 332, 340, 342, 343, 349, 351, 355 Sense and Sensibility 51, 64, 65, 67, 70, 235 Sensibility xi, 59, 64, 230, 235, 246, 271, 274, 277 Shakespeare, William 80 Sherlock Holmes ix, x, 153–163, 166–170 Signs 80, 85, 90, 144, 156, 182, 186, 254, 256, 257, 263–266, 275, 280, 288, 289, 295, 296, 311, 313, 314, 333, 337, 342, 359, 362, 363 Smith, Adam viii, 49 Sophistication xi Soul 143, 180–183, 185–187, 202, 206, 211, 213, 276, 288, 324, 348, 352–355, 359, 362, 363 Spectator viii, 49–62, 64, 66, 68–70, 179, 187, 188, 334 Spiritual xii, 17, 20, 179, 180, 217, 237, 323, 324, 326, 333, 340–344 Stage xiii, 59, 139, 258, 267, 273, 312, 326, 350, 351, 355, 358, 362, 363 Story viii, ix, xii, 5, 6, 12, 13, 16, 18, 24, 25, 37, 41, 42, 79, 81–90, 109–116, 118–121, 123, 124, 126, 131, 133, 135–138, 140–143, 145, 146,

377

153, 156–161, 163, 169, 170, 205, 206, 217, 309, 310, 312, 313, 324, 326, 340, 341, 344, 347, 350, 362–364 Style viii, 26, 51, 64, 66, 67, 80, 85, 86, 88, 155, 156, 204, 271, 277, 279, 284, 297 Sublime x, xi, 32, 227–239, 287 Suffering xii, 56, 66, 157, 178, 179, 182, 184–186, 188–190, 324–327, 329–331, 333, 334, 338, 340, 342, 343 Swift, Graham xii, 306, 322 Sympathy 50–55, 57, 58

T

Tell xii, 35, 46, 60, 69, 83, 130, 131, 156, 157, 160, 162, 170, 179, 181, 185, 204, 207, 269, 270, 283, 313, 324, 328, 331, 338, 342, 344, 347, 354, 362–364 Temporal x, 25, 89, 136, 138, 142, 146, 188, 229–231, 233–235, 239, 287, 306, 307, 316 The Ambassadors xi, 246, 252, 267, 294 The Gift ix, 130, 131, 133, 135, 136, 140, 145 The Odyssey ix, 123, 156–162 The Picture of Dorian Gray x, 176–179, 186, 188–190 Thinking v, vi, xiii, 4, 12, 25, 41, 67, 118, 132–134, 140, 170, 254, 256–258, 265, 266, 270, 272, 282, 286, 289, 295, 296, 342, 351 Third person 130, 131, 137

378

Index

Time x–xii, 5, 9, 18–20, 23, 26, 32, 35, 54, 56, 57, 59, 60, 82, 85–87, 96, 97, 116, 120, 124, 126, 129, 134–136, 142, 154, 155, 157, 161, 170, 176, 178, 180–184, 202, 204, 205, 208, 209, 212, 213, 216, 227, 229, 234–239, 246, 263, 270, 271, 276, 278, 281–283, 286–288, 292–294, 297, 305–311, 313–318, 324, 326, 329, 330, 333, 334, 341, 347, 348, 359, 360 Tintern Abbey x, 227, 237–240, 242, 243 Tragedy xi–xiii, 7, 14, 16, 23, 25, 276, 285, 324–327, 332, 334, 339–343, 347–349, 362–364 Transcendence x, xi, 161, 176–180, 184, 188–190, 228, 237 Transhumanist x, 175, 178, 187 Truth v–ix, 7, 9, 17, 19, 26, 27, 32–35, 37, 38, 40–43, 45–47, 79–84, 89, 91, 93, 96, 97, 109, 110, 118, 119, 125, 154, 161, 162, 167–169, 186, 187, 206, 210, 217, 249–252, 255, 261, 264, 265, 283, 286, 295, 300, 325, 349, 350, 364 Type vii, 3, 4, 6–12, 14–16, 19, 20, 23–26, 33, 34, 54, 96, 122, 123, 137, 169, 177, 186, 189, 212, 332

U

Understand ix, xi, xii, 12, 17, 34, 36, 37, 39, 41, 46, 67, 70, 95, 117, 119, 122, 202, 206, 214,

246, 258, 261, 264, 276, 288, 291, 297, 328, 332, 334, 338, 343, 347, 348, 354, 355, 359, 363, 364 Usage v, vi, 215, 249, 253, 257, 258, 288, 300

V

Veil xi, 17, 186, 190, 281, 283 Vengeance 168, 355 Verification v, 11, 161 Vicarious ix, 275 Victorian 162, 163, 245 Vision vi, vii, xii, 17, 18, 26, 61, 82, 171, 176, 178, 179, 227, 231–234, 237, 265, 269, 276, 307, 310, 316, 323, 326, 329, 334, 337, 338, 340–344 Voice xi, 42, 66, 125, 136, 137, 154, 166, 206, 236, 275, 277, 279, 282, 288, 325, 331

W

Wilde, Oscar x, 176, 188, 190 Wisdom vii, xi, xii, 22, 323–326, 337, 340–343 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 88, 298–300 Woolf, Virginia xii, 305, 310, 319 Words v–vii, 9, 12, 14, 18, 20, 23, 34, 37, 41, 82, 91–94, 109, 111–113, 117, 119–121, 130, 132, 133, 141, 157, 161, 168, 170, 188, 206, 211, 215, 229, 230, 249, 250, 253–255, 257–264, 268, 270–273, 275, 278–281, 284, 286–297, 306, 309, 313, 316, 331, 332, 334,

Index

335, 342, 349, 353, 354, 358, 359 Wordsworth, William x, 227–230, 232–235, 237–239 Work vi, vii, ix, x, 3–6, 10, 12–14, 16–18, 21–23, 25–27, 33, 38, 41–45, 51, 53, 57, 59, 60, 62–64, 67, 68, 70, 80, 81, 83, 84, 87–89, 92, 94, 95, 119, 120, 124, 125, 138, 139, 144, 153, 159, 160, 180, 181, 185–190, 202, 205, 206, 216, 217, 231–233, 246, 249, 250, 253, 255, 262, 265, 266, 268–270, 280, 294, 296, 308, 310, 332, 334, 335, 337, 340, 343, 349–351 World i, v–vii, ix, xi, xii, 9, 14, 16–20, 22, 26, 27, 32, 37, 38,

379

42, 47, 51, 53, 54, 61, 62, 66, 69, 70, 80, 82–84, 90, 92–97, 109–112, 114–126, 133, 137, 139, 140, 143, 146, 153, 156, 158–162, 166, 167, 170, 171, 175, 176, 178–180, 182, 183, 186–190, 202, 206–208, 210, 211, 213, 216, 219, 228, 229, 231, 233, 250, 253–255, 259, 260, 263, 264, 267, 268, 270, 276, 278–281, 285, 290, 296, 297, 300, 305, 306, 308, 309, 313, 315, 317, 323–327, 330–332, 334, 335, 337, 341, 343, 348, 352, 355, 356, 358, 359, 361–363 Wuthering Heights x, 201, 202, 204, 205, 208, 209, 214, 221