Thinking in Literature: Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov

Anthony Uhlmann

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781441140562
• eBook ISBN: 9781441199904
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Thinking in Literature examines how the Modernist novel might be understood as a machine for thinking, and how it offers means of coming to terms with what it means to think. It begins with a theoretical analysis, via Deleuze, Spinoza and Leibniz, of the concept of thinking in literature, and sets out three principle elements which continually announce themselves as crucial to the process of developing an aesthetic expression: relation; sensation; and composition. Uhlmann then examines the aesthetic practice of three major Modernist writers: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov. Each can be understood as working with relation, sensation and composition, yet each emphasize the interrelations between them in differing ways in expressing the potentials for thinking in literature.

Part I

Literature and Thinking

This part will consider, first, the manner in which literature might be understood to be thought, and, second, set out why such an understanding might be productive or useful. This will be done by working with philosophical understandings of “thought” that shed light on the nature of literary production and the effects of literature and its connection to thought. The method that will be adopted here involves an interrogation of some of the central concepts developed by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze to better understand the nature of literature. In doing this I will return to those texts, principally by the seventeenth-century philosophers, Spinoza and Leibniz, which Deleuze draws heavily upon in developing his system. In the reading of Spinoza, however, I will draw out ideas that are not developed in detail by Deleuze, in offering my own reading of Spinoza’s “relation.” The part has three chapters: the first develops a reading of Spinoza’s understanding of “relation” or “ratio,” indicating how these terms are intimately connected with the idea of thought itself. The second chapter considers Deleuze’s claim that ideas developed in Leibniz are “a source of all modern literature.” The third chapter develops a reading of the concept of “expression” which Deleuze finds in Spinoza and Leibniz and relates to an understanding of literary expression. Each of these chapters touch upon the three themes or elements of thought that organize this book: relation, sensation (here with regard to the ideas of perception, viewpoint and possibility), and composition.

1

Spinoza, Relation, and Ratiocination

Samuel Beckett made use of Spinoza on a number of occasions, and copied the following lines into his notes of his reading of Wilhelm Windelband’s A History of Western Philosophy: “The order of ideas [for Spinoza] is conceived as identical with order of things” (see Cordingley 2007). Spinoza considered the immanent substance, God or Nature, to express two attributes: Thought and Extension. It is apparent why such an idea would appeal to a writer: if literature is understood to involve a kind of thinking, to be a kind of thought, then an immediate connection between events that are described and some process of thinking is attractive.

Yet, there is a clear problem when one comes to consider the nature of the interaction between things and ideas in Spinoza, at least from the point of view of literature, which concerns itself with the creation of particular sensual experience. This is the problem, at the heart of the Ethics, of the nature of the relationship between natura naturans and natura naturata: the relation between substance as an infinite being whose essence involves existence, and modes, finite beings whose existence, at least when imagined through the first kind of knowledge given to us by our senses, appears to be contingent.

In attempting to draw out how the problem might shed light on the relationship between literature and thinking, I will consider three interconnected positions from the Ethics. First, how “the idea” is defined not to relate directly to words or images but to be, in effect, the process of understanding itself. Second, how thinking — that is, the first, second, and third kinds of knowledge in Spinoza — is identified with the idea of relation, which is also relevant to the existence of bodies, which are conceived through mutual relations or ratios. Finally, I will consider how it becomes possible to develop an understanding of the essence of particular things through the third kind of knowledge, and how this process of development might be understood to involve a kind of creation whose concept sheds light on processes of creation in the arts.

The Idea

Philosophers such as Edwin Curley, Pierre Macheray, and Gilles Deleuze, have long noticed that Spinoza is a philosopher who seems to have a special appeal to non-philosophers, and poets and novelists in particular. Curley lists Novalis, Heine, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and George Eliot (see Edwin Curley’s editorial comments in Spinoza 1985: p. 402), and one might add others, such as Joyce and Beckett, to this list. On an initial reading one might wonder why this would be so. There is little direct mention of the arts in the Ethics: music is briefly used as an example of an object that might be either good, bad, or indifferent to different people in different circumstances (Spinoza 1985: Ethics, IV, Preface, p. 545).⁶ Yet the circle that surrounded Spinoza formed a group, Nil Volentibus Arduum, discussing artistic practice (Nadler 1999: p. 294), and this offers evidence of the early recognition of the possible usefulness of his system for the arts.

Still, there are key problems that emerge when one comes to think about art through the Ethics. If one believes that works of art function, at least in part, through the production of affects and sensations; that they form beings of sensation which produce affects in us — as Deleuze and Guattari contend in What is Philosophy?, for example — then how can this be reconciled with Spinoza? For Spinoza affects and sensations pertain to the first kind of knowledge, the imagination, and he clearly states that this kind of knowledge is the sole cause of error (see Spinoza 1985: Ethics, II, P41, p. 478). Second, if one wishes to contend that literature develops a kind of thinking, one immediately confronts the further obstacle provided by Spinoza’s clear statement in Part II, Proposition 49, to the effect that images and words (which, when one remembers that images for Spinoza involve every kind of sensual material, are necessary to the production of any work of art) only concern the body and are not related to thought:

[T]hought … does not at all involve the concept of extension … an idea (since it is a mode of thinking) consists neither in the image of anything, nor in words. For the essence of words and images is constituted only by corporeal motions, which do not at all involve the concept of thought. (Spinoza 1985: Ethics, II, P49, p. 486)

Yet, notwithstanding these apparent problems, I would contend that one does not have to read Spinoza against the grain to find material that might be of use to artists.

Ideas are not identified with words or images; rather, “the idea” is the very process of understanding. Spinoza insists upon this point, making it more than once, in more than one way, over a number of propositions in Part II. In the scholium to Proposition 43 he states:

To have a true idea means nothing other than knowing a thing perfectly, or in the best way. And of course no one can doubt this unless he thinks that an idea is something mute, like a picture on a tablet, and not a mode of thinking, viz. the very [act of] understanding. And I ask, who can know that he understands some thing unless he first understands it? I.e., who can know that he is certain about some thing unless he is first certain about it? (Spinoza 1985: Ethics, II, P43, p. 479)

The metaphors are extremely interesting here: a picture on a tablet, a painting, for example, is thought of as “mute,” or, as Shirley translates it, “dumb” in the sense of mute (Spinoza 2002: Ethics, p. 273). Again, such reasoning seems initially unpromising for someone interested in art: here the image itself does not speak. Yet it is worth trying to attend to the nature of the contrast. The idea must, in some sense, speak to us directly. It is the very act of understanding and we immediately understand that we understand. The idea, then, as conceived here, already carries something of the third kind of knowledge: it strikes us immediately and intuitively. Might this mean we do not come to think, or learn to think, that rather, insofar as we understand we are already in thought?

It would no doubt be possible to attempt to understand Spinoza’s point more fully by turning to the ideas of some of those who influenced his own work. The Ancient Stoics, for example, whose work Spinoza knew through his reading of Justus Lipsius who published epitomes of the Stoic doctrines on Ethics and Physics at the beginning of the sixteenth century (see Saunders 1955; Lagrée 1994). The Stoics distinguished between bodies and incorporeals arguing that while words are bodies because they pass as sound through the air or are written down, meaning or sense itself is not in the words; rather, meaning is attributed to the words and is incorporeal (see Bréhier 1997, p. 15).⁷ For Spinoza the word is not adequate to or necessary to the idea, that is, ideas both exceed and precede the human signs that seek to relate them. I would argue that one can link artistic thinking to this very excess: rather than it being the kind of sign system that seeks to link signs as precisely as possible to their intended meanings, like mathematics or an ideal rational language such as that imagined by Wittgenstein in his Tractatus, art requires us to understand what is not present in, or goes beyond the linguistic signifier, what is in the idea rather than in the word. Paradoxically, then, rather than this inhibiting someone who writes literature, it might very well be understood to open possibilities: that words might be so related that they invoke moments of immediate understanding in a reader, moments of understanding, which are intended to exceed the expression of the words, getting beyond words through words, by making use of signs — such as the music of language or powerful images, for example.

First, as we will see, feeling is not only involved in the first kind of knowledge (those images derived from the sensations) but also in the third kind (an immediate, intuitive, understanding). Second, while Spinoza states that images and words are only related to bodies and not thought, it is nevertheless clear, through his system, that there would necessarily be an idea parallel to an image, an idea parallel to a word. Parallel lines of course, at least in Euclidean geometry, do not meet. One fails to see how they might be related, unless one understands relation itself to involve the parallel, a gap, a ratio, a proportion that persists and resonates. Tradition passes on the story that Pythagoras not only discovered certain mathematical laws through ratios but also immediately applied these to the art of music.

I want to argue that for Spinoza relation itself is crucial to the generation of any kind of human thought, including thinking in the arts, which, too, proceeds through relations. That is, if we understand relation to involve a kind of linking or connection that proceeds across gaps, urging flashes of insight to emerge, to speak from ourselves to the mute tableau, as a lightening flash leaps from the sky to the ground, or a signal across a synapse.

The term “relation” itself is immediately tied to thought in Spinoza: a core meaning of the word “ratio” itself is “reason,” or more generally, “thought,” as in the English word ratiocination. A ratio, in turn, is a proportional relation between things. A definition in scientific terms of ratio is “the quantitative relation between two amounts showing the number of times one value contains or is contained within the other” (Oxford English Dictionary). Further, it is the ratio of speeds and slownesses that defines the particular nature of each body; or to put this another way, each body has its own logic.

Yet the indentification of ratio or relation and thought is clarified when we turn to Spinoza’s definitions of the three kinds of knowledge: (1) the imagination; (2) rational logic; and (3) intuition — which comprise what we can know of the world, for Spinoza. In Proposition 40 of Part II he states that he can explain each kind through a single example that concerns proportional relations, or ratios, between numbers: for example, 1 is to 2 as 3 is to 6 as 4 is to 8, and so on (that is, each first number in the series is multiplied by 2 to reach the second number). Spinoza states:

Suppose there are three numbers, and the problem is to find a fourth which is to the third as the second is to the first. Merchants do not hesitate to multiply the second by the third, and divide the product by the first, because they have not yet forgotten what they heard from their teacher without any demonstration,⁸ or because they have often found this in the simplest numbers, or from the force of the Demonstration of P7 in Bk. VII of Euclid, viz. from the property of proportionals.⁹ But in the simplest numbers none of this is necessary. Given the numbers 1, 2, and 3, no one fails to see that the fourth proportional number is 6 — and we see this much more clearly because we infer the fourth number from the ratio which, in one glance, we see the first number to have to the second. (Spinoza 1985: Ethics, II, P40, p. 478)

The use of ratio, or proportional relation, as the material for the example here is not accidental; rather, relation, ratio, and proportion inhabit thought itself.

The first kind of knowledge commonly involves the association of ideas. Spinoza offers many examples of this when he comes to consider the nature of the affects: we connect, through the imagination, an affect or emotion with an external cause. For example, love is the affect of Joy related to the idea of an exterior cause. In the example cited above, the Merchants might come to the correct answer via the first kind of knowledge, because they associate the response to the problem to a formula they have learnt by rote (without adequately understanding how it might work). The second kind of knowledge would be made use of by someone who understood common notions such as those described by Euclid in his Elements. This person has read Euclid and been convinced by, in Spinoza’s words, “the force of the Demonstration”; that is, they have, through the intellect, understood a process of causation, and such a process is, in effect, nothing other than a set of necessary interrelations. Through the third kind of knowledge, however, no set of associations needs to be triggered, no logical sequence needs to be traced; rather, one understands the relation of terms immediately, with an intuitive understanding which grasps the relations involved as understanding. Intuition, that is, is also a kind of relation, but one in which the related terms — the thing perceived and the thing understood — involve what might almost be thought to be an identification, or to put this another way, one is adequate to the other.¹⁰

It remains to be seen, then, how this notion of thought as “relation” might be brought into contact with artistic practices. In discussing Film, Samuel Beckett’s work for cinema, Gilles Deleuze contends that Beckett allows us to recognize key potentials of the filmic medium because he exhausts or negates those elements (Deleuze 1997). The same principle of exhaustion or negation might be seen in Beckett’s aesthetic writings where he develops the concept of “nonrelation” in art, which he opposes to an artistic tradition that, he states, has always emphasized relation and the power of relation.

In his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932) Beckett describes an aesthetic theory that emphasizes the connections or relations between things rather than the nature of those things themselves (Beckett 1993). In a later letter to Georges Duthuit (written in 1949) Beckett outlines a somewhat different aesthetic understanding, one that emphasizes nonrelation or the refusal to fully draw connections or relationships. Beckett states:

As far as I’m concerned, Bram [van Velde]’s painting … is new because it is the first to repudiate relation in all its forms. It is not the relation with this or that order of encounter that he refuses, but the state of being quite simply in relation full stop, the state of being in front of … [T]he break with the outside world implies the break with the inside … I’m not saying that he doesn’t search to re-establish correspondence. What is important is that he does not manage to. (Beckett 2006: p. 19)

In “Peintres de l’Empêchement” (first published in 1948) Beckett states that all works of art have involved the readjustment of the relation between subject and object (Beckett 1983: p. 137), a relation that he claims has now broken down. He announced this crisis over a decade before and prior to World War II in 1934 in another review, “Recent Irish Poetry” (Beckett 1983). Elsewhere I have argued in detail how Beckett moves from making clear links in his works, through allusion and other means, to occluding the ele...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Literature and Thinking
• Part II: Thinking in Modernist Fiction
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• eCopyright