In Praise of Literature

Zygmunt Bauman, Riccardo Mazzeo

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781509502691, 9781509502684
• eBook ISBN: 9781509502721
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

In this new book Zygmunt Bauman and Riccardo Mazzeo examine the contentious issue of the relation between literature (and the arts in general) and sociology (or, more generally, a branch of the humanities claiming scientific status). While many commentators see literature and sociology as radically different vocations, Bauman and Mazzeo argue that they are bound together by a common purpose and a shared subject matter. Despite the many differences in terms of their methods and their ways of presenting their findings, novels and sociological texts are not at cross-purposes. Indeed, it is precisely their differences that make them at once indispensable to each other and mutually complementary. The writers of novels and of sociological texts may explore their world from different perspectives, seeking and producing different types of 'data', but their products bear the unmistakable marks of their shared origin. They feed each other and depend on each other in terms of their agenda, their discoveries and the contents of their messages. In a world characterized by the continuous search for new sensations and the fetishism of consumption, they bring fundamental existential questions back to the public agenda. Literature and sociology reveal the truth of the human condition only when they stay in one another's company, remaining attentive to each other's findings and engaged in a continuous dialogue. For only together can they rise to the challenging task of untangling and laying bare the complex intertwining of biography and history as well as of individual and society that totality we are constantly shaping while being shaped by it.

1
The Two Sisters

Riccardo Mazzeo You have clearly articulated the reasons why literature is so important for sociology, to the point of considering the two disciplines as ‘sisters’: both are indeed disposed to constantly shredding the veil of pre-interpretation¹ – as Milan Kundera puts it – as seen in the work Don Quixote by Cervantes.

To heed the complexity and the infinite variety of human experience as it is intimately perceived and lived, individuals cannot be reduced to homunculi, identified and described as models and statistics, as data and objective facts. The nature of literature itself is ambivalent, metaphoric and metonymic. It is able to express solidity and fluidity as well as homogeneousness and plurality, the smoothness and even the ‘acrid, rough and crunchy’² nature of our existences. We not only lack the words to say who we are and what we want, but we are also spoon-fed, gorged and saturated by words which are as empty and lifeless as they are glitteringly attractive and seductive – the ubiquitous words that are repeated by the sirens of celebrity, used for amazing, new hi-tech devices and the latest irresistible must-have products which allow us to take our place in society in the way we are expected to.

And so, ‘if you wish to cooperate with your readers in their urge (conscious or not) to find the truth of their own way of being-in-the-world and learn about the alternatives which lie unexplored, overlooked, neglected or hidden’,³ it is essential that sociology and literature work together to increase our capacity to judge and reveal the authenticity which is obscured by the veils that surround us, and to provide the freedom to follow our needs.

I had been thinking of calling this new series of conversations Sister Literature (even if the title will be In Praise of Literature – all things considered, not so different from my original idea) in recognition of the considerations in your last book, whose aim is summarized above and at the heart of all your sociological work, which has always been nurtured by literature. It is also a title partly inspired by two books written by friends of mine who tried, in different ways, to demonstrate how literature is extraordinary in making sense of our existences and the events of our time that we experience together.⁴

Naturally, the idea of the original title is also partly due to my own inclination, since I graduated a long time ago with a thesis on Oedipus by Marcel Proust and I had wanted to go to Paris to study with Lacan. It took getting to know and love your work in the early 1990s for me to enhance my awareness and my view of society without losing sight of the individuals who form it.

I would like you therefore to pursue your enlightened sociological reflections primarily as a narrative author, of course, but also using psychoanalysis or other human sciences because the partitions which divide these disciplines are anything but impervious.

In your latest book, What Use Is Sociology?,⁵ you take pains to underline from the first chapter the primary importance of using the right words to describe reality. For example, you note that, in your distinct way of looking at sociology as a conversation with human experience, the English language is an obstacle because it does not have two separate words to describe ‘experience’. These do exist in German: Erfahrung, meaning objective aspects of experience, and Erlebnis, meaning subjective aspects of experience.

The task of a sociologist with the necessary imagination to fulfil it is to expand the reach of the Erlebnisse and bring people out of their shells (‘like ships in their bowls / they’re in their melody’, to use Mario Luzi’s words)⁶ to realize that many of the experiences they live individually, as if they were unique, are actually generated socially and can be manipulated (replacing ‘with the aim of’ with ‘because of’). The sociologist has to expand his/her scope by submitting the Erfahrungen to a similar assessment. These objective experiences are like the market which, as Coetzee clarifies, was not made by God or the Spirit of History but rather by us human beings and therefore it is possible to ‘unmake and remake it in a more acceptable way’.⁷ These experiences can themselves be changed by taking a more critical and active role. Sometimes everything can take a lead from an authentic understanding of the words we use to describe our life and the world which surrounds us.

I have the impression that words in our liquid-modern world are under increasing pressure. As you point out, not only is their number falling but the words are also being shortened and reduced to a series of consonants in electronic messages which are now the increasingly dominant vehicle of communication. But even the words which continue to be pronounced fully are tending to be merged into a smaller area and chosen for emotionalhedonistic reasons. Clicking through the channels aimed at young people on television, such as MTV, M20 and DJ Television, the most striking visual aspects are the images of half-naked bodies, male and female, scrupulously representing a variety of ethnic groups to ensure the fig leaf of political correctness is preserved. But the ear is struck by the incessant repetition of a few key words: party, dance, sex, drink, night, fun. Pop music has always revolved around descriptions of love, predominantly the unhappy kind, so that ordinary people can easily identify with the ordinary lyrics. Any aliens watching ‘youth’ TV today and observing the scenes would think earthlings do nothing other than dance, get drunk and have sex, mostly at night, in an unrestrained and flamboyant frenzy. Obviously, if you consider the precarious nature of, and dearth of opportunity in, the lives of our children, the evidence provided by television is worse than antiphrasis, it is completely misleading.

The vocabulary of youth has been impregnated with an equally dangerous disease: the relentless spread of phrases that are simplified to the bone, ready-made so that everyone can sing them or decipher them even when their knowledge of English is very modest. It would certainly be a positive development if all non-Anglophones were able to master the basic vocabulary of what has become the ‘language of communication’, but the terminology in the lyrics of these songs is more than just basic, it is so skimpy and shrivelled as to become a sort of zero-grade verbalization, which is as monotonous as it is compartmentalized with words designed to penetrate the mental fabric of the kids, to invade their imagination, colonize their tastes and preferences, and dictate the direction of their enjoyment. For some months now, whenever a new song is released – such as ‘Roar’ by Katy Perry or ‘Bonfire Heart’ by James Blunt – for several weeks the video shows only the words of the song instead of images. This is to ensure a karaokelike experience to ensure everyone can learn them quickly and easily. Only once they have been learned can the cheerful verbal barrage of banality give way to the images, which contain varying degrees of salaciousness, comical adventurousness in Katy Perry’s ‘Roar’, and star a well-meaning motorcyclist in ‘Bonfire Heart’. Apart from the subdued and saccharine tone of the messages in these songs – or, as happens in other cases, the energetic and unrestrained erotic charge – what is most striking is the erosion, withdrawal and dilution of the language.

The oversimplification of language echoes the oversimplification of music, as Milan Kundera poetically complained in a book translated from Czech in 1978, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.⁸ The writer had been excited by the twelve-tone innovations of Schoenberg, who managed to rethink music in an audacious way, but it has been followed by a creative wasteland which, rather than being silent, pours out endlessly cheesy music everywhere:

Schoenberg died, Ellington died but the guitar is eternal. The stereotype harmony, the banal melody, the rhythm which is as insisted as it is monotonous, this is all that is left of music in this eternity of sounds. Everyone can feel united by the simple combinations of notes because it is like they are together shouting jubilantly, ‘I am here!’. There is no more fragrant and unanimous communion than simple, shared existence. In this world, the Arabs can dance with the Jews and the Czechs with the Russians, bodies move in time with the rhythm of the notes, inebriated with the awareness of existing. That is why no work by Beethoven has been lived with the same collective passion as the hits churned out on a guitar.⁹

It is the same with words; they have been reduced to a mass of throw-away slogans. The progressive decline of the most important medium for articulating our vision of the world, without being hostage to received ideas, is truly frightening.

How can we free language from the grips of this spiral which is dragging it towards a deceitful and deadly Land of Toys?

Zygmunt Bauman Be it Katy Perry or Marcel Proust and Lacan who would have something important to say about the unconscious premises of their consciousness – or you and I with all the rest of their readers or listeners – whatever we all and any of us see, think of seeing, or believe we are seeing, and whatever we do as a consequence, is woven in discourse.

‘We live in discourse as fish live in water’ – so suggests David Lodge in his latest novel¹⁰ through the mouth of the hero, Desmond Bates – a man of many weaknesses, but a linguist of rather impeccable knowledge and feel of both langue and parole (two concepts coined by Ferdinand de Saussure, and elaborated by Claude Lévi-Strauss, to denote, respectively, the system of language and its uses):

Systems of law consist of discourse. Diplomacy consists of discourse. The beliefs of the great world religions consist of discourse. And in a world of increasing literacy and multiplying media of verbal communication – radio, television, the Internet, advertising, packaging, as well as books, magazines and newspapers – discourse has come more and more to dominate even the non-verbal aspects of our lives.

Indeed, we eat discourse, we drink discourse, we look at discourse, ‘we even have sex by enacting the discourses of erotic fiction and sex manuals’, Bates concludes; and – by the way – Lodge confirms, Riccardo, your observation that ‘pop music has always revolved around descriptions of love […] so that ordinary people can easily identify with the ordinary lyrics’, when he adds that Professor Bates threw a reference to sex into his above-quoted welcoming speech to his first-year students in order ‘to capture the attention of even the most bored and sceptical student’.

Lodge/Bates was right in this – as he was in all other parts of his laudation of linguistics. We are indeed made by discourse and live by it. It is discourse that sets us free; and it is discourse that sets the limits to our freedom and spurs us to transgress and transcend limits – already set, or yet to be set in the future. Discourse is that by which we are made while making it. And it is due to discourse, and its endemic urge to peep beyond the boundaries it draws to its freedom, that our being-in-t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• 1 The Two Sisters
• 2 Salvation through Literature
• 3 The Pendulum and Calvino’s Empty Centre
• 4 The Father Problem
• 5 Literature and the Interregnum
• 6 The Blog and the Disappearance of Mediators
• 7 Are We All Becoming Autistic?
• 8 Metaphors of the Twenty-first Century
• 9 Risking Twitterature
• 10 Dry and Damp
• 11 The Retrenchment Within ‘Oneness’
• 12 Education, Literature, Sociology
• End User License Agreement