How Literature Changes the Way We Think

Michael Mack

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781441119148
• eBook ISBN: 9781441137630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

The capacity of the arts and the humanities, and of literature in particular, to have a meaningful societal impact has been increasingly undervalued in recent history. Both humanists and scientists have tended to think of the arts as a means to represent the world via imagination. Mack maintains that the arts do not merely describe our world but that they also have the unique and underappreciated power to make us aware of how we can change accustomed forms of perception and action. Mack explores the works of prominent writers and thinkers, including Nietzsche, Foucault, Benjamin, Wilde, Roth, and Zizek, among others, to illustrate how literature interacts with both people and political as well as scientific issues of the real world. By virtue of its distance from the real world-its virtuality-the aesthetic has the capability to help us explore different and so far unthinkable forms of action and thereby to resist the repetition and perpetuation of harmful practices such as stereotyping, stigma, exclusion, and the exertion of violence.

1 Death Again: Reimagining the End

1.1 The Humanities, the Demography of Aging, and the Philosophy of Birth

But people change, don’t they? One minute we’re one thing, and then another. Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

It is the inclination of our age to await change. Barack Obama in the US and David Cameron in the UK have capitalized on this inclination. In different but related ways they have both won elections with rather vague, hazy and not fully substantiated slogans that promote a rather ill-defined desire for change. At the beginning of the century, we are less driven by the hopes inspired by various traditions of political thought, or modes of artistic representation, than by the desire to establish something that marks a clear break with what has preceded us, our society and the kind of politics with which we are familiar. No doubt this desire for change emerges from a profound disillusionment, disappointment and dissatisfaction with the various utopias, ideologies and social experiments that have marked scarred and scared modernity, from the European via the industrial revolutions to left and right-wing forms of totalitarianism of the past centuries. It is with deceptive promises of what we took to be authentic claims of ideologies that we have become livid.

Socialism and capitalism’s respective pledge to provide for emotional and material fulfilment have turned out to be rather hallow and of course quite shallow in its intellectual and spiritual implications. This sense of disappointment with secular ideologies is apparent in some aspects of popular culture, in ‘popular modes of horror and science fiction’.¹ Our disappointment with these conflicting promises that seemed to offer valid alternatives to various roads to a better and more flourishing future for humanity might also have given rise to a wide-spread sense of futility, cynicism, anger and depression. Despite all the glamour of late capitalism with its spectacular display of advertisements, pop art and culture we seem to live in a decrepit and evermore deteriorating world. The various deficits in commercial, private and public finances may appear as the tip of the iceberg that crowns our current cultures of dissatisfaction. Whether it is broken Britain, the broken economy or the entropy of both energy use and ecological sustainability, we seem to be faced with an almost infinite variety of decline and catastrophe.

There is an overwhelming sense that we live at the edge of an aged age, of an age that has become almost synonymous with aging. Discussing age in such a metaphorical way (as aged age) may partake of a metaphysical approach. As Helen Small has recently pointed out, ‘for Adorno, metaphysics has a recurrent connection to old age ²’. Aging itself is, however, a pressing physical demographic issue. Due to the medical advances and the considerable increase in living standards, our life expectancy tends to move on an upward tangent. How can we account for this discrepancy between the medical or clinical fact of increased longevity and our rather dreary prospects for life? The clear gulf that opens between the tremendous technical expertise offered by medical services and the often depressing and debilitating experience of life that shapes much of our outlook on a social as well as on an individual scale warrants a cultural analysis, which is the domain of humanities. Yet it would be unhelpful to focus only on this discrepancy between biomedical as well as other forms of techno-scientific enhancement of life and the cultural, politico-social dissatisfaction with the world we actually share and live in. Rather than circumscribing this inquiry to the current state of affairs, this book attempts to uncover ways out of our present malaise. It does so by propounding what I call a philosophy of birth that has a literary blueprint in the so far neglected impetus that propels works of art beyond the sphere of mimetic replication into the regions of the new, which break with established forms of living, interacting and thinking.

Works of art have a mimetic element: they represent something or someone, the state of society, a historical epoch or psychological conditions (the list could go on and could of course include animals, landscapes and so forth). Every representation changes, however, what it represents. A satirical depiction does not proffer an exact copy of its subject matter and yet nevertheless purports to bring some truth to the fore which we tend to neglect when we look at the world in a one-dimensional way (and one meaning of the word satire denotes precisely the multi-layered and polyphonic).³ We could say that this is the domain of art we are familiar with: art as being primarily engaged in representing conditions of society and humanity, albeit in a way that is critical and can enable us to see what may be wrong with us or with some forms of our acting, interacting and thinking.

There is another dimension to literature (and by extension to music and the visual arts); one that creates a space not only for representation but also for experimentation. Victoria Nelson has analyzed the transformative potential of arts in her discussion of the grotesque:

The grotesque is a mode that is first and foremost about crossing into a different and transformative order of reality, and second about the unexpected recombination events, objects, species we encounter once we are inside. And for centuries it has been a secular society’s only path back to the transcendent. We crawl into the hole—the grotto, the Symmes Hole, the black hole of the cosmos, the hole in our own heads—in the unspoken and often unconscious hope of undergoing change.⁴

This book focuses on how such transformation is not peculiar to one genre, period, or artistic style—the grotesque which is the exclusive focus of Nelson’s more specialist discussion—and how a natal or transformative energy informs literature and arts in all their diverse forms.

Artistic transformation is also complementary to scientific and medical discoveries and revolutions. Innovation, testing and experimentation are frequently associated with the sciences. They are, however, also part of the humanities. Indeed they are a substantial element of what is called thinking. Thought is a form of experimenting. As we shall see in the following chapter, there are, however, rather dreary and mind-occluding aspects to pre-ordained and pre-formulated tests and there are rather wearying ways in which we test something. In theses cases the outcome of the test has already been established before it has begun. Here the test serves to confirm an established belief or truth: it does not promote free inquiry but reassurance of the validity of what we already take to be true. The test could, however, also be conceptualized as an open exploration where we can investigate the cogency of what has so far not been contemplated. Here testing is indeed conducive to innovation and creativity; and this not only in the sciences but also in humanities and arts.

The creativity and innovation that lie at the heart of arts and humanities are capable of scooping out the mental space in which we can rethink what it means to be aged and/or born. As social science research has recently shown, demographic changes and the current economic crisis are driving a shift in the perception and socio-political categorization of age. The recent economic upheavals in housing and the stock market have resulted in drastic decrease in the value of retirement accounts: in the US alone, they have been devalued by 1.6 trillion dollars or 18.3 per cent.⁵ Increased longevity brings about a radically changing demography in the developed as well as in the developing world. The increase in longevity is due to huge advances in biomedicine. The biomedical changes have profound effects on our society and culture because they not only facilitate the absence of early death but also prolong the period of mentally alert and physically stable lives.

These biomedical changes have, however, not been matched by social and cultural innovations. As Small has recently argued, ‘one of the questions that the philosophy and literature of old age therefore requires us to ask is how far conventional attitudes are rooted in reality, how far in prejudice and fear’.⁶ The prejudices and fears apropos old age are, however, not isolated phenomena: ‘Rather than isolate the old as the difficulty, we need to think in terms of (for example) the deeper causes of a gross disparity in national life expectancy around the world; rather than thinking about the ‘burden of retirees,’ we should think more broadly about the wider nature and purpose of work.’⁷ What role do self-perpetuating representations of old age and other marginal groups play in the persistence of social exclusion? In order to address this question, I discuss economic, medical and political issues as part of a larger discussion that concerns mimesis. The topic of old age instigates investigations into how harmful social practices are abetted and promoted by certain forms of representation. As regards the economics and politics of disparity, the authors of the recent medical-social scientific study The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone pose the following crucial question: ‘How is it that we have created so much mental and emotional suffering despite levels of wealth and comfort unprecedented in human history?’⁸ One important proposition of this book is to argue that a novel approach towards representation can assist us in adequately addressing questions like these.

Humanities and arts have a crucial role to play here. Martha C. Nussbaum’s recent book ‘Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities’ makes a powerful and persuasive plea for their social and political relevance. Nussbaum argues, however, to some degree within a certain mimetic paradigm of the arts, which (as will be shown in Chapter 3) has shaped much of the traditional and contemporary discussion. Nussbaum discusses in what ways the humanities further abilities that are central to democracy and global citizenship. The education that nourishes such abilities is lost in the single-minded public endorsement of nothing else but economic growth and career advancement, which governs the current mind-set of parents and policy makers.

In a discussion of the TV series ‘Mad Men’, we shall see how such a single-minded society dedicated exclusively to economic growth operates along the lines of what I call ‘flat mimesis’. Nussbaum appraises artistic and humanistic ways of representation that are not flat but complex, multilayered and thus train us to think as well as act within an increasingly interdependent global society. Nussbaum lists the following abilities that she maintains ‘are associated with humanities and arts: the ability to think critically; the ability to transcend local loyalties and to approach world problems as a ‘citizen of the world’; and, finally, the ability to imagine sympathetically the predicament of another person’.⁹ The abilities listed here combine a certain capacity for nuanced representation with one that furthers innovation.

Nussbaum does not neglect the innovative aspect of arts and humanities, which makes them compatible with the sciences (another major topic of the present book); and she advances a strong case for their economic importance in this context arguing that: ‘Although it is difficult to construct a controlled experiment on such an issue, it does seem that one of the distinctive features of American strength is the fact that we have relied on a general liberal arts education and, in the sciences, on basic scientific education and research, rather than focusing more narrowly on applied skills.’¹⁰ Education that narrowly focuses on applied skills operates within the logic of the copy, because it is exclusively concerned with the mechanistic replication of the already existing forms of thinking and acting. The ability to think critically, by contrast, is premised on an analysis of the current state of affairs as well as on reflection upon alternatives that might transform the status quo. In a similar way we need to combine mimesis with both the imagination and the creation of the new, if we attempt to see the world from someone else’s point of view—be that as a ‘citizen of the world’ or as a friend, parent or partner.

Arts and humanities are thus dependent on mimesis and they also go beyond what they, in various and complex forms, represent. The innovations they provide are to do with changes in perception. The creation of novel ways of seeing our society and the world are therefore not simply a question of mimesis. They go beyond the mimetic, while of course not abandoning issues of representation. Representation here transcends itself; it is capable of representing not only a copy of what we already know—however complex rather than flat such a copy may be—but also an image of what is new and what makes us stare and startle as if we have been witnessing a scientific experiment that brought to the fore the so far unthinkable.

A strong case could be made for giving humanities and arts the furlough and the social recognition of facilitating changes of cognition and perception. These cognitive changes may help us discover human potentials which could be beneficial for a coming to terms with new realities of what it means to be born and what it means to be of age. Our traditional identities of age and growth have become subject to change. The binary opposition between age and birth may well be subjected to experimental questioning. As we will see throughout this book, literature offers the free space for such mental experiments. Literature not so much as representational but as an experiential mode of scientific inquiry into our transforming life and our ever more transmogrifying world, could help enable legal-socio-political as well as cultural changes. The cognitive upheavals, which literature initiates and impels, could match the changes in age and longevity that are due to advances in biomedicine.¹¹

Aging thus requires change. This means that we cannot discuss aging outside the context of what is a new beginning; and perhaps the most powerful metaphor for new beginnings is that of birth. By coupling age with birth, the two seemingly opposed terms become unstable so that they are capable of referring to each rather than opposing each other. Such cross-referencing is already at work in the term aging, because it denotes a process of change and change is of course the force at work in the new beginning manifested in birth. In a way similar to which birth changes the world by enriching it with new life, we and our society undergo changes. These changes may appear lugubrious in terms of getting older and ill. Age and aging is frequently represented in terms of illness and debilitation but it does not need to be so. As we shall see in the discussion of Philip Roth’s novels (in the concluding chapter to this book), literature questions rather than copies an apparent causal link between aging and danger. This causality turns out to be fictitious but is nevertheless a powerful one that governs much of our current discourse.

We live in an aged and aging world. Age and aging are here synonymous with illness and debilitation. This perception might be technically or biomedically wrong (various forms of technology and biomedicine are of course capable of prolonging our life as well as of mitigating the effect of aging) but it is nevertheless a perspective that shapes our attitudes to politics, science and the economy. It is as though our societal dissatisfaction with broken promises, broken politics, the disturbing sight (oil spills and other images of ecological crisis) and side of technology were in fact the unarticulated presence of the humanities within the everyday life of our society. Arts shed light on what we would ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Think Again: An Introduction
• 1  Death Again: Reimagining the End
• 2  Revisiting Torture and Torment
• 3  Revisiting Clones: Change and the Politics of Life
• 4  Rethinking Suffering: Self and Substance
• 5  The Birth of Literature
• 6  The Birth of Politics out of Literature
• 7  Rethinking Birth and Aging: A Conclusion
• Selected Bibliography
• Subject Index
• eCopyright