Literature and the Human

Criticism, Theory, Practice

Andy Mousley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415614672
• eBook ISBN: 9781134107179
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Why does literature matter? What is its human value? Historical approaches to literature have for several decades prevailed over the idea that literary works can deepen our understanding of fundamental questions of existence. This book re-affirms literature's existential value by developing a new critical vocabulary for thinking about literature's human meaningfulness. It puts this vocabulary into practice through close reading of a wide range of texts, from The Second Wakefield Shepherds' Play to Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Individual chapters discuss:

• Literature's engagement of the emotions
• Literature's humanisation of history
• Literature's treatment of universals and particulars
• The depth of reflection provoked by literary works
• Literature as a special kind of seeing and framing

The question at the heart of the volume, of why literature matters, makes this book relevant to all students and professors of literature.

1 Emotion

Key terms: animation; cathexis; incarnation

Main works discussed: The Wakefield Second Shepherds’ Play; Samuel Beckett, Endgame; Kate Chopin, The Awakening

Regard for the affective dimension of literary texts and literary experience has waxed and waned in the professional study of literature because concern for our emotional engagements with texts has not always been considered sufficiently rigorous, objective or historical. Nevertheless, the affinity between literature and emotion reaches back into classical antiquity and has been subsequently affirmed by innumerable writers, critics, philosophers and theorists. In the classical cultures of Greece and Rome, literature was closely aligned with oratory and rhetoric, and oratory and rhetoric were understood to be powerful means of making knowledge lively and persuasive through the appeal that they make to the emotions. For classical authors such as Aristotle, Horace, Cicero, Quintilian, the aims of poetry, oratory and rhetoric were docere, to teach, delectare, to please – or ‘interest’ as Brian Vickers translates it – and movere, to stir the emotions (Vickers 1999: 15). This last aim required what might now be called emotional intelligence. Among the various qualities deemed by Cicero in De Oratore to be vital in the ideal orator is a ‘thorough acquaintance with all the emotions with which nature has endowed the human race, because in soothing or in exciting the feelings of the audience the full force of oratory and all its available means must be brought into play’ (Cicero [written 55 BC] 2001: 61). Emotion, and in particular the emotions of pity and fear, are also at the heart of the West’s first, influential theorist of tragedy, Aristotle.

The resurgence of classical learning and rhetoric in the Renaissance was therefore by definition a resurgence of the science of the emotions advocated by the likes of Cicero, with the numerous handbooks on rhetoric/poetry that appeared during the Renaissance describing, among other things, the emotional effects of various figures of speech (see, as examples: Wilson [1553] 1585, Puttenham [1589] 1936, Erasmus [1512] 1978). Even as the links between poetry, rhetoric and oratory were severed because the perceived artificiality of rhetoric sometimes came to be seen as an obstacle to the heartfelt expression of emotion, the importance of emotion persisted in both the practice and theory of post-classical, vernacular literature, most notably, though not exclusively, in the Romantic tradition. In the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads (1798), Wordsworth argues that the ‘truth’ aimed at by poetry does not stand upon ‘external testimony’ but is ‘carried alive into the heart by passion’ (Wordsworth [1798] 1992: 73). Later, in the early twentieth century, the modernist T. S. Eliot, in reaction against what he saw as the Romantics’ and especially Wordsworth’s attempt to turn poetry into emotional self-expression, would deliver the dictum that ‘poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion’; yet this was not intended as an embargo upon emotion but as a way of (re)focusing attention upon ‘the emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet’ (Eliot [1932] 1951: 21, 22). Given the persistence of the connection between literature and emotion to which these and other writers attest, the recent resurgence of interest in literary affect might best be understood less as a radical innovation than as a return to literature’s and literary criticism’s heartland (as examples of this resurgence, see Altieri 2003, Robinson 2005, Keen [2007] 2010, Hogan 2011).¹

But there is a question that needs asking here. If human life is already ‘lively’ because emotions are integral to it, why do we need literature to enliven that which is already lively? The answer lies in literature’s emotional intensity. When we say that a novel, play or poem is emotionally captivating, we are testifying to the way that literature can paradoxically be ‘livelier than life’. And it is the intense emotional life that is in literature that can also bring back to life phenomena that in other domains have become or are in danger of becoming disengaged: ideas can become purely cerebral; thinking can lack passion; the past can be perceived to be dead or else be treated as the object of emotionless enquiry; aspects of human life in the present can become emotionally sterile; people can be used as objects; the natural world can be regarded as an inert resource. Vitality can leak from our connection to thought, things, nature, the past and other people, resulting in disaffiliation and alienation. Emotion is one way in which vital connection can be restored. To have an emotional connection to something, whether or not the emotion is positive or negative, is to have cause to be bothered about that something. Any slight expression of emotion is better than emotional indifference, so they say. Or as Richard Eldridge says it, without the ‘animation or ensoulment’ that emotion brings to bear upon experience, ‘human life threatens to be dull, disengaged, dispirited, and evacuated of human subjectivity’ (Eldridge 2009: 9).

As contrasted with the disabling over-investment of emotional energy in an object or person denoted by the term ‘cathexis’ in the context of psychoanalysis, literature may thus be thought of as a positive kind of cathexis, albeit one that may mutate into idolatrous obsession (as the narrator at one point in Bruce Chatwin’s Utz, discussed in Chapter 2, suggests). The positive work of cathexis that literary works perform should not be taken to mean, however, that literary works never represent the deadness of our connections to the world. Many a modernist text (but not only modernist texts) represents the paralysis of exhausted affiliations, T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ ([1925] 1948) and The Waste Land ([1922] 1948) being two conspicuous examples. Samuel Beckett’s Endgame ([1958] 1964), discussed later, is another. But in these examples, paralysis may provoke a strong emotional reaction, principally of anxiety about the very loss of meaningful connection to the world. The forlorn images in Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ of human beings with ‘dried voices’ whispering together ‘quiet and meaningless / As wind in dry grass / Or rats’ feet over broken glass / In our dry cellar’ are disconcerting (Eliot [1925] 1948: 75). ‘Wind’, ‘dry grass’, ‘rats’ feet’, ‘broken glass’, ‘dry cellar’ are less ‘things’ existing in some external and externalized relationship to us than emotionally charged images inciting anxiety about the haemorrhaging of meaning from human life.

The notion that art may be in part defined by its transformation of external objects into sensuous, emotionally charged ‘subject[s] for human concern’, to recall John Gibson’s phrase from the Introduction (Gibson 2009: 483), is an important current in modern philosophies of the aesthetic. For Georg Hegel, for example, the ‘poetic imagination’ does not ‘set before our eyes the thing itself in its external reality (even if that reality be produced by art) but gives us on the contrary an inner vision and feeling of it’ (Hegel [1835] 1975: 1111). A Marxist variation on this idea is played by Theodor Adorno. The ‘object’, when it takes the form of an aesthetic image, writes Adorno, ‘instead of following the bidding of the alienated world and persisting obdurately in a state of reification’ is ‘spontaneously absorbed into the subject’ (Adorno [1977] 1980: 160). By ‘object’, in this Marxist context, is literally meant any ‘thing’ or, non-literally, any activity or experience the human aspect of which has been obscured by becoming thing-like or reified. The mug of tea standing on my desk got to be there as a result of complex human arrangements and processes, but these are ‘objectified’ in the thing/mug that appears to exist independently of them. Capitalism routinely transforms human into inhuman processes, as exemplified in invocations of ‘the market’ and ‘the economy’ as complex impersonal mechanisms that seem to be beyond human control. These are examples of ‘objects’ that, as Adorno puts it, have followed ‘the bidding of the alienated world’ and stand aloof from human-shaped desires, agencies, purposes and concerns. The human is what Adorno here means by the ‘subject’ and what Marx meant by our species being. If emotion defines one aspect of our species being, then one reason why an aesthetic object is able to be ‘spontaneously absorbed into the subject’ is because works of art appeal to the emotions.

There is a democracy in sentiment. You do not have to have specialized historical knowledge to recognize the pangs of conscience that Macbeth comes to experience or the grief felt by Ophelia. However, not all works of art equally permit the spontaneous absorption of emotion for the reason that the emotions they provoke are either un-obvious or else mixed and complex. An example of a simple emotional expressiveness is the medieval seasonal lyric, ‘Svmer Is Icumen In’, celebrating fertility and renewal. The emotion of joy is obvious and mainly unalloyed:

Sing cuccu nu [now], sing cuccu!

Sing cuccu, sing cuccu nu!

Svmer is icumen in,

Lhude [loud] sing cuccu!

Groweth sed and bloweth med [the meadow blooms]

And springeth the wde [wood] nu,

Sing cuccu!

Awe [the ewe] bleteth after lomb,

Lhouth [lows] after calue cu,

Bulluc sterteth [leaps], bucke uerteth [farts],

Murie sing cuccu!

Cuccu, cuccu,

Wel singes thu cuccu,

Ne swik thu nauer nu! [Now don’t ever stop!]

(Silverstein 1971: 37–38)

There may be some disquiet in the plea in the last line for the mood associated with spring, and therefore growth, to continue. Nevertheless the poem’s driving emotional orientation is clear. This cannot be said of Ezra Pound’s imagist poem, ‘In a Station of the Metro’ (1913):

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

(Pound 1975: 53)

The poem is atmospheric, and atmospheres create moods that can be effective for not being identifiable, for a mood exists on the tantalizing edge of consciousness. Pound’s poem creates an element of emotional mystery out of its disjunctive combination of pared-down images, the key to which is not given.

Whether literary texts express emotion simply or complexly, however, emotion, to reiterate this chapter’s principal theme, is one of the ways that literature animates whatever it represents, thereby giving, adding or restoring ‘life’ to its chosen objects of representation, and positively cathecting or re-cathecting our relationship to them. Thus, if you want a systematically developed, concept-driven theory of capitalism, read Karl Marx’s Capital ([1867] 1990) (though parts of Capital, it should be said, are devoid neither of emotion nor vividness). However, if you want to vicariously experience how early twentieth-century capitalism emotionally affected particular working-class individuals and their communities, read Jack Common’s autobiographical novel, Kiddar’s Luck ([1951] 1990) or Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists ([1914] 1993). Marx abstracts for analytical purposes what he takes to be the concepts that drive the economic and social system of capitalism (use value, exchange value, commodification, class division, alienation). Common’s and Tressell’s books demonstrate how some of these concepts were lived out, embodied, incarnated, felt. Tressell states in his preface that his book ‘is not a treatise or essay, but a novel’, written with the aim of producing a ‘readable story full of human interest’ (Tressell [1914] 1993: 14). Tressell’s novel is not a concept-driven analysis but an approximation of how life was experienced. A single-paragraph summary of Common’s or Tressell’s novels might extract the salient facts about the lives that each book represents, but it would eradicate the bodily experience of those ‘facts’. Or, if we were to say that Common’s autobiographical novel, like Tressell’s book, is informed by socialist ideas and an advanced level of class consciousness, then this would be to identify one of the important conceptual kernels of their books, but, again, it would eradicate the way these ideas are made flesh, are incarnated and animated through their attempted simulations of lived experience, one key component of which is the experiencing of emotion.

Clearly, not all literary texts arouse our emotions to the same degree or in the same way. The novelistic representation of the lives of working-class individuals in Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists deals far more densely and in detail with the affective lives of its characters, than, say, the dramatic representation of the proletarian Mother Courage in Bertolt Brecht’s play of that name (Brecht [1949] 1976). Brecht did not want his audiences to become so emotionally absorbed in his dramatic characters that they lost their capacity to reflect upon the historicity and transformability of ‘human feelings, opinions and attitudes’ (Brecht [1949] 1974: 193). For a Marxist playwright writing in Nazi Germany, total emotional identification was one step on the way to an audience becoming duped as ‘a cowed, credulous, hypnotized mass’ (ibid.: 188). Even so, it is hard to read or see Mother Courage without responding to the situation of its characters emotionally. For Brecht, critical thinking and political action, rather than emotional engagement, were paramount. Critical thinking and political action nevertheless have their source in the anger that the play directs at economic and social injustice.

From just the few examples so far given, it is clear that what literary texts may seek to cathect, re-cathect or intensify the emotional significance of, can be far-flung: spring; a metro station; the effects of capitalism; broken glass; wind, dry grass, rats’ feet. Because literature taken in its capacious entirety has no prescriptive content, the objects of its animation are many and various. Wordsworth says something along these lines in the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads ([1798] 1992). Although we may stereotypically think of Wordsworth as the poet of nature, he is open to the idea that poetry can animate virtually anything and everything. ‘The objects of the Poet’s thoughts,’ he writes, ‘are everywhere; though the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his favourite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings’ (Wordsworth [1798] 1992: 77). Scientific discoveries may seem unlikely topics for poetry, especially Romantic poetry, but Wordsworth does not rule out the possibility of botany, chemistry and mineralogy becoming the subject-matter of poetry:

If the labours of Men of Science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present, but he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of Science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the Science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective Sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.

(Wordsworth [1798] 1992: 77)

If science meets poetry half-way, by taking on ‘as it were, a form of flesh and blood’, then the poet will aid and abet the process of positive cathexi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Emotion
• 2. History
• 3. Universals and particulars
• 4. Depth
• 5. Beholding
• 6. Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index