“If the essays which follow do not compose a book, collecting resonance from one another,” Stanley Cavell wrote in the foreword to Must We Mean What We Say?, “nothing I can say in introducing them will alter that fact.” “Publishing a volume of essays is an exercise with narcissistic overtones”, E.A. Wrigley confessed in the introduction to People, Cities, and Wealth: “It is difficult not to feel that some justification for such a venture is required.” If doyens of contemporary philosophy and demographic history experience misgivings of this kind, how should I presume to draw this set of studies to the reader’s attention? But let me overcome my bashfulness, complete Wrigley’s opening paragraph, and say as he did that “In this introduction I shall suggest that, despite their apparent diversity, the essays in this volume are all related to a common theme which gives them intellectual coherence.”
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This book is a collection of studies into the presence and activity of discursive ideas or bodies of thought (religious, philosophical, scientific, political, even literary-critical in so far as tragedy is subject of discourse as well as a dramatic form) in works of imaginative literature. But they have a history that must be recounted if they are to collect resonance and illuminate a common theme.
In 2001 I published a book called The Autonomy of Literature. It was a mildly polemical account of the attitudes to imaginative literature to be found in three groups of scholars: some North American philosophers (Richard Rorty, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Martha Nussbaum), some psychoanalysts (Freud himself, but also the Object Relations school, specifically the Kleinian analyst Hanna Segal), and some theorists of history (on the one hand students of historiography such as Hayden White and Paul Ricoeur, and on the other some members of the New Historicist literary-critical school). In seeking to co-opt imaginative literature to projects of their own each group in some way or another misunderstood its autonomy in my view. The philosophers sought to reduce literary works to moral-philosophical meditations (which is one of the things they are, certainly); the psychoanalysts sought to reduce them to the expression of psychological impulses such as wish-fulfilment (which is one of the things they may be, ditto); and the two historical groups collapsed the distinction between literature and history either by arguing that both forms of writing were inherently fictional, or by arguing that the most significant element
The study also devoted space to Jacques Derrida’s general idea and sense of literature. By no means could Derrida be accused of fairly transparent intellectual stratagems of the kind I have just described. On the contrary, I concluded that he possessed a lively sense of literature as a distinct form of human communication; only that at the theoretical level he tended to overplay the power of institutional “contamination” over literature (opposed, binary-opposition style, to some notional “purity” that Platonic and quasi-Platonic thinkers—including the twentieth-century American New Critics, for example—might wish to accord it or be said to have done), and that at the practical level his sense of individual works of imaginative literature was accordingly often enough a un-responsive and over-determinative one: a lecture on Joyce’s Ulysses being a case in point. Rather than deconstruct the purity/contamination dialectic he had discovered, Derrida preferred to occupy one side of it, ramping up (and up, and up) the contaminatory influences that made literature a matter institutional influence, and failing to see how books like Ulysses can in fact meet, controvert, and convert such influences in the name of dramatic truth.
The study attempted to defend literature from such approaches absolutely not by locking it up like Rapunzel or the Lady of Shalott in a tower high above the plains of Deconstruction, moral thinking, psychological impulse, and historical event. It was never its intention either to stop or prevent philosophers, psychologists, and historians from thinking about literature: heaven forbid. Demonstrably works of imaginative literature are part of moral discourse, are the product of psychological impulse, and are historical artifacts. Rather it argued that autonomy is best seen, in poems as in persons, in terms of the activity of an agent, and that the activity of imaginative literature like Ulysses lay precisely in going out to explore the moral, the psychological, and the historical, and to transform them in the process, within itself, by virtue of the inseparably aesthetic and intellectual
I also suggested that it was practically impossible to theorize this process of imaginative supposal and transformation, since every instance of it is inherently specific precisely because of the multifarious and competing moral, psychological, and historical forces that converge on it to be transfigured. “Starting with the kinds of institutional claims made by Jacques Derrida”, I wrote,Jane Eyre may have existed in near relation to the actual seedbed of intellectual discussion in mid nineteenth-century England; it may be a form of “moral commentary”, comparable to Diderot or Kierkegaard; it may even be a continuation of and substitute for the play of childhood…. It may be true that the dangerous supplement means that nothing said in the novel can be in identical relation to anything outside it and that as a direct result it can never achieve moral, ontological, or epistemological closure, that it uses strategies of linguistic figuration which other story-telling animals (like historians) also employ, that in it Brontë faced and expressed her depression, that it is an Aristotelian enquiry into the richness and diversity of the positive commitments of a good person living in a world of uncontrolled happening, and so on. But the most important thing about the book—for Charlotte Brontë even more than for us her readers—is that it constitutes an experience in itself: shattering, confusing, exasperating, enthralling, humiliating, building up and laying waste to the innumerable influences converging on it, undoing and enforcing the categories and hierarchies of everyday understanding that underpin it only when and if it does become an experience in itself, and only by doing so becoming one. When a critic, or a school, or a mode or mood of criticism goes further than merely presenting and pursuing a special interest, but in doing so denies such processes … they have arrested the interest of literature at its source. That having been done the critic discovers a kind of terra nullius. Anything can be done there, and any line of enquiry can swell to dominate the horizon, but the context which gives such things real meaning and substance is absent. Anything can be said about the body in front of you, but nothing you can say will bring it back to life. (214–15)
“We cannot say”, I went on,the ideas of literature offered by some philosophers, psychoanalysts, and theorists of history have been criticized, whereas nothing has been offered in the place of such ideas but an inherent propensity to evasion without which literature would hardly exist: what might otherwise be called intractability, lability, “mobility”, or inexhaustiveness. (202)
“Opportunistically”, I might have added, such is imaginative literature’s zest for such collisions. Literature does not shy away from institutional contamination, or from history, psychology, and ideas, generally speaking—as we shall see in the chapters that follow. It positively seizes upon such things, often enough in a scandalously heedless and voracious way (as philosophers often see the process, anyway). Such “contaminations” are meat and drink to it, as an activity; digesting them is what literature does.how literature “generally”, or “theoretically”, or “normally”, or even “typically” makes the transformations it does to the claims made upon it by other areas of human research or activity, because literature can only make such transformations uniquely, occasionally, and individually. (203)
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The Autonomy of Literature incubated for nearly ten years. During that period and since, I have published standard research articles, generally on nineteenth-century literature, specifically on Romanticism: on Frankenstein, The Pickwick Papers, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Don Juan, The Prelude, The Voyage of the Beagle, Disraeli, Byron in Russia, and Romanticism in Australia and the Pacific, for example. But even before The Autonomy of Literature was published, and increasingly in the last five years, I have published essays with broader perspectives, relating always to the central theme of that book: the capacity of imaginative literature to hatch and generate unexpected patterns of meaning that allow works of literature to transform institutional or “contaminatory” pressure and influence. An article on Wordsworth’s attitude to books was one such; then a string of essays about “contaminatory” ideas in conflict: in Byron’s Don Juan, in the obscure early nineteenth-century Evangelical poet James Montgomery, in Thomas Hardy and his fascination with roads, in Ibsen’s attitude to humanism in Little Eyolf, and in James Kelman’s magnificent collection of short stories from 1983, Not Not While the Giro. There was also one more essay in which, as it were, the process was reversed: in which, rather than discursive ideas infesting imaginative literature, imaginative literature infested the private diary of a great social scientist, Bronislaw Malinowski, with some positive implications for his anthropological thinking. Hopefully these essays were of use to specialists in such fields, just as my common-or-garden literary-critical or literary-historical essays were intended to be. But in my mind they were always connected to the arguments carried out in the book on literary autonomy and so, encountered together, I hope they constitute something more than a set of merely discrete discussions. Hopefully in this guise and arrangement they do “resonate” and do amount to a holistic study into how—in practice rather than in theory—imaginative literature can serve as a unique and inter-actional medium for discursive ideas, paradigms, and bodies of thought.
I see now that the chapters below are necessarily related to a larger issue: as to whether imaginative literature is a truth-bearing medium in the way that philosophy, history, and the sciences are intended or understood to be. If imaginative literature plays host to discursive ideas, and if those ideas are truth-bearing (albeit in differing degrees: the demonstrable, controvertible, and translatable truths of evolution are different to the truths of, say, Christianity or socialism), does this bear on the question of truth in imaginative literature, per se? This is an oceanic debate, and I have no intention of rehearsing it in its totality, even if I could. But the first chapter of the book will constitute a raid on the philosophical discussion of this concern—literary-critical discussion of it being in fairly short supply, for reasons that will become clear. The second will use the work of another philosopher to contextualize that discussion and open it up, because philosophy often and understandably takes certain things for granted in its approach.
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“‘See the Shell of the Flown Bird!’: Wordsworth and Books” and “Byron’s Relativism” were published under my editorship in the Critical Review in 1996 and 1997, respectively. “James Montgomery’s Pelican Island: Imagination, Religion, Evolution” was published in the Wordsworth Circle in 2014; “Opening The Woodlanders: The Road in Thomas Hardy, as Tragic and Evolutionary Convergence” was published in the Thomas Hardy Journal in 2013; “A ‘Nødvendighetens Skinn’?: The Conclusion of Ibsen’s Lille Eyolf and Its Meaning” was published in Scandinavica in 2016; “Politics and Art: James Kelman’s Not Not While the Giro” was published in the Scottish Literary Review in 2014; and “Crucible or Centrifuge?: Bronislaw Malinowski’s Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term” was published in Configurations in 2014. They have all been substantially revised for collection here, but I have not gone out of my way to revisit the scholarship surrounding the now somewhat aged Wordsworth and Byron chapters, for the reason given above, that the essays concerned have transited out of the local scholarship to which they once were intended to contribute into a more theoretical zone.
I am grateful to Marilyn Gaull (at the Wordsworth Circle), Phillip Mallett (at the Thomas Hardy Review), Christine Alexander (at Scandinavica), Gerry Caruthers (at the Scottish Literary Review), and Melissa Littlefield and Rajani Sudan (at Configurations) for permission to reprint—even though sometimes, strictly speaking, no permission was required. Thanks for their blessings, then! Thanks also to Roger Scruton, who sent me two unpublished essays—“Imagination and Truth” and “Poetry and Truth”—referred to below. The anonymous reader at Brill gave me perhaps the most searching as well as most constructive such review of my career: I hope I have been able to make proper use of it. I thank the editors of the Costerus series for their continued support. Masja Horn has been a wonderful commissioning editor, as always, and I thank her and the rest of the team at Brill. Finally—and staying in The Netherlands—special thanks to John Flood, Corey Gibson, Ann Hoag, Hans Jansen, Tekla Mecsnober, Sebastian Sobecki, Irene Visser, Kees de Vries, and Gerry Wakker, who have made me feel so welcome in my new roost at the Moderne Letterkunde at Groningen.
Appelscha, Friesland, September 2017