Notes on Mysticism: Madness, Directness, Tears, and Contingency

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I.	Madness
II.	Menus and Maps
III.	Tears
IV.	At a Loss for Words
V.	The Feeling of Reality
VI.	Madness and Directness as Contingency
VII.	Spiritual Exercises

Madness
I would like to add a few notes about the surface of mysticism, which is to say the language and discourse that surrounds the mystic experience. The rhetoric of mysticism has often dovetailed with the rhetoric of madness. “Enthusiasm,” often used in older ages to describe the Western mystic, comes from the Greek entheos, which means quite literally “full of God,” and is often interpreted as “divine madness.”[fn.1] The rhetoric of mysticism also often uses the diction of directness, such that our common, conventionally appreciated reality is really an appearance behind that which is the real reality (think of maya from the Hindu tradition). A direct appreciation of the real reality, then, will appear mad or crazy to those still within the conventional modes of appreciation. This creates a problem, for we use the epithets “insane,” “mad,” or “crazy” to identify exactly those who are out of touch with reality. So who is right?

So direct of an antithesis is there between the two that rather than go straight at this question, we should perhaps first contemplate their agreement: variance with conventions. Reality or madness lies beyond conventions—perhaps such a consequential gulf embodied in this disjunct is what creates a sometimes thrilling anxiety. Since at least Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (though Freud’s description of neurosis surely got the ball rolling), Western intellectuals have become increasingly aware of how the position of an “outsider,” specifically in this case the “crazy person,” is created by how we count “insiders”—the conventional canons of inclusion. In order to approach the problem of what’s beyond conventions, I should like to briefly investigate how we break conventions, and thus occlude ourselves.

Menus and Maps
To do this, I will recur to two analogies used by Robert Pirsig. Pirsig’s most famous book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (ZMM), did yeoman’s work in bridging typical Western divides between mysticism, art, science, and technology. Its success lay in combining a sophisticated genealogy of the modern scientific mind back to the Greek logos (in the vein Heidegger pioneered) with a down to earth mapping of that mind in the everyday lives of us passive technological consumers. Part of his success, in fact, lies in the fact that he is not a pioneer in any of the vast areas he rambles through, but rather in his vast powers of distillation, synthesis, and communication, using tropes that have floated through the public consciousness but now become welded together as part of a single thematic. As Emerson said, “the artist must employ the symbols in use in his day and nation to convey his enlarged sense to his fellow-men.”[fn.2]

The two analogies I should like to use come from Pirsig’s second book, Lila. The first establishes for Pirsig the mystic sense of reality he seeks to do justice to, which is difficult because for mysticism “the fundamental nature of reality is outside language”—“Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality. Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty-thousand-page menu and no food” (72). What is nice about this figure is that it illustrates how the menu can get between you and the food. It also illustrates nicely the linguistic feature of what is between us and reality, and hooks up with the anxiety Plato inaugurated between onoma (name) and eidos (form) in which the lack of a link between the two eventually led to Saussurean declarations that language is conventional and thus arbitrary (because the names are instituted by us and not by reality).

Pirsig shifts his hold on this structural motif by moving to a second analogy: the map. Pirsig’s purpose in Lila is to create an alternative metaphysical understanding of reality (a “Metaphysics of Quality,” or MoQ) to the dominant understanding, which he calls the “subject-object metaphysics” (SOM). One problem with SOM is that it can’t recognize itself as conventional, and thus cannot have an alternative. The SOM version of the history of inquiry is a gradual unfolding of the single, correct understanding of reality. Pirsig doesn’t want to avoid the notion of a “gradual unfolding,” but he does want to say that our metaphysical assumptions are due for an upgrade:

“saying that a Metaphysics of Quality is false and a subject-object metaphysics is true is like saying that rectangular coordinates are true and polar coordinates are false. A map with the North Pole at the center is confusing at first, but it’s every bit as correct as a Mercator map. In the Artic it’s the only map to have. Both are simply intellectual patterns for interpreting reality and one can only say that in some circumstances rectangular coordinates provide a better, simpler interpretation.” (114-5)

Pirsig, following a conceptual move prepared for by Mill and James, implies rather that it is the utility of particular conventions that should weighed, instead of thinking of an omnivorous Convention that is whatever is correct. The latter leads to the unhelpful circular logic of “whatever is correct is the Convention; and the Convention is correct, so you must be wrong.” This short-circuits inquiry, for every trendsetter was wrong before they set the new right.

Tears
Pirsig’s alternative seeks to include both conventions and mystic reality (which we might define simply and antithetically as “not conventions”). It has to do so in something like this manner: “this conventional understanding of reality includes both an understanding of conventions and of not-conventions, but because understanding is conventional, it can only indicate obliquely where not-conventions are, i.e. at the breakages.”

This is where the power of the map analogy comes into its own, for the notion of a map moves to alleviate anxieties about arbitrariness by tying us to a surface. In Pirsig’s vocabulary, Quality is the primordial, mystic reality from which all unfolds. After the unfolding begins, the locus of any individual object as this particular object is defined as a static pattern of Quality—a rock is an inorganic static pattern, a person an entire rainforest of patterns, at the top of which are our intellectual patterns of conventional understanding. These intellectual patterns are our map. The map qua map does not respond to its environment, the person does. And the person has a pencil, and can keep erasing and adding topographical marks to better negotiate the environment as the person sees fit given the person’s experience.

In the Kantian version of this analogy that Pirsig aims for, however, though we are reacting to the environment, our face is always planted in the map—our mind is conventional, constituted by/as intellectual patterns. So how does one account for the mystic reality, for not-conventions? Not-conventions, in Pirsig’s vocabulary, are Dynamic Quality. Following the old mystic saw about pointing at the moon, think of the mystic reality’s inclusion as the words “Dynamic Quality” written on the map with an arrow pointing at a tear in the map it is next to. This gives us a way of interpreting the diction of directness: when you “look” at Dynamic Quality, perceive the mystic reality, you are actually looking through the map at the ground below. This is one way of describing how Dynamic Quality helps one change the map to evolving circumstances: it describes how we must perceive a hole in which we can fill in new conventions. No tear, nothing new; nothing new, no evolution. On the analogy of maps, one central concern of Pirsig has been to write into our maps a notion of change, of openness, of the element that will always escape Platonic encapsulation (what I've previously called "Quality as an anti-essence").[fn.3] Pirsig wants to bring back down to earth the notion of mystic experience, and one way to do this is to begin the rapprochement at the level of what we all do everyday without thinking: occasionally modify our habits of interaction with the world according to a world that is not our habits.

If this seems to eliminate a lot of the spice of mysticism, I’d like to move back the other direction by considering two basic kinds of tear in the map: perceptual and conceptual. By “perceptual” I mean considerations of reaction based on a novel stimulus from our nonlinguistic environment. Western mysticism has filtered down to us in large part through the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, which is more or less analogous to Pirsig’s reaction to SOM. Consider the similarities between Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Pirsig’s apotheosis of nature and the landscape (Pirsig carries, in fact, on his trip in ZMM a copy of Walden). The modern notion of “aesthetic sublimity” developed by Edmund Burke and Kant came about at the same time as the rise of landscape art as a popular medium. As artisanal technological grasp increased, alongside the spread of democratic egalitarianism (which consequently led to the rise of a customary, polite society), anxieties over a mechanized, conventional life increased. In reaction, we began to conceive of “nature” as an alternative.[fn.4] Though this has had a long tradition in the West, encapsulated by Plato’s antithesis between phusis (nature) and nomos (convention) and Virgilian pastoral, our specifically modern notions are nearer in development. Nature was to be both loved and feared—the sublime, as Burke and Kant conceive it, is scary for the exact reason that it spills over our conventions. “Wild” nature can still kill you. And we can easily see what they mean. Consider the Grand Canyon: the common experience of it is as a “blowing away,” leaving a person “at a loss for words,” “stunned.” These are conventional indications of how the experience of nature can evacuate your sense of how to respond, overflow or tear what Dewey called the “crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness.”[fn.5]

At a Loss for Words
We might call being “at a loss for words” the state of being unable to constitute linguistic meaning. Another kind of experience of the world aside from the perceptual, nonlinguistic variety is the conceptual or linguistic. If regular, conventional, routinized linguistic communication is based on the mutual, correct transference of “what I mean” to “I understand what you mean,” then we can understand a breakdown in communication as itself a kind of tear in the map of understanding. On the Eastern side, we might understand this as the purpose of a Zen koan, what the Greeks called an aporia (literally: “with no way out”). Socrates’ elenchus, his dialectical method of cross-examination, functioned by taking conventional meanings and driving a person using those meanings to their natural ends, where they crashed against walls of conflicting answers—and that was it. Our best accounts of Socrates are that he never moved beyond his professed ignorance, even if Plato did. Partly, no doubt, from his masterful and obsessive use of elenchus-directed-at-aporia, but partly too due to the mask of irony he always kept over him, one of the recurring descriptions of Socrates is of his strangeness: atopia, “being out of place.” Pierre Hadot says of Socrates, with adjectives every one of which link with what I’ve been talking about, “he is atopos, meaning strange, extravagant, absurd, unclassifiable, disturbing.” Hadot then quotes Theaetetus 149a: “I am utterly disturbing [atopos], and I create only perplexity [aporia].”[fn.6]

Socrates’ strangeness is distinctively in language. The tear in the fabric of the map that Socrates represents through irony is a linguistic tear—what has been described as his “silence” is a distinctive kind of linguistic silence, constituted only by the language that surrounds it.[fn.7] Alexander Nehamas heightens this tear when he emphasizes that the peculiarity of irony is that it does not simply “mean its opposite,” but rather more difficultly “not this.”[fn.8] Socrates will always remain a mystery because we will never know what he meant because he never came out from behind his mask. In fact, Nehamas argues that it is the irony—the mask that hides meaning—that produces his reality to us:

“Incomprehensible and opaque, to his author as well as to us, Plato’s early Socrates has acquired solidity and robustness few literary characters can match. That is why he appears more real than fictional. Plato’s implicit admission that he does not understand him, his amazing success in reproducing Socrates’ irony not only toward his interlocutors but also toward himself, is the mechanism that explains why generations of readers have inevitably returned to these texts, convinced that they provide a transparent window that opens directly onto the light of reality.”[fn.9]

The Feeling of Reality
How can this be? How can a conventional creation feel real? This conundrum for literary artists gives us a good window onto the general problem of conventions and mysticism. For “reality” becomes a creation. “Reality” becomes something people sense, and the pattern of that sense becomes the earmarks of a conventional understanding of reality. The gradual unfolding of a better conventional articulation of our sense of reality is partly what a metaphysics is for. As Nehamas points out, we have come to see that it is because Socrates is ultimately unclassifiable, which is to say something that will always escape classification, that we feel he is real, a “transparent window.” This gives us a sense of reality as unpredictable—Socrates lives like a real person because like them he will respond to you occasionally in ways you did not expect.

Frank Kermode charts something analogous to this in narrative fiction. Narrative fiction functions on plot, on the “transformation of mere successiveness” into a meaningful temporal unfolding. The latter is “our way of bundling together perception of the present, memory of the past, and expectation of the future.”[fn.10] Mere chronicity, the mere succession of one damn thing after another (as the old bit about history goes), has no meaning: it is just one thing after another. What creates meaning is a tie between one thing happening and another, causal or otherwise. This creates a past, and as human life moves forward in time, we are always looking forward to another thing happening, and not just any thing (like the endless myriad of occurrences we don’t even register as happening to us everyday) but something we are tied to.

Plot, however, is something artists create: it is a convention. Human meaning, once again, becomes conventional. Kermode recognizes this pattern and calls chronicity, “mere successiveness,” our human sense of reality. As I said, the amount of things we don’t notice and tie are infinitely greater than that which we do, and those unnoticed parts are the overflow of reality over the borders of our conventions. As human culture has progressed, we’ve become more self-conscious about how we are creating the meaning, and this stage is “marked by an understanding that this play of consciousness over history, this plot making, may relieve us of time’s burden only by defying our sense of reality.”[fn.11] So our articulated conventions of meaning “will be humanly serviceable as models only if they pay adequate respect to what we think of as ‘real’ time, the chronicity of the waking moment.”[fn.12] At the same time, we cannot go too far the other way, and Kermode marks both with metaphors of madness. “Schizophrenics can lose contact with ‘real’ time, and undergo what has been called ‘a transformation of the present into eternity.’”[fn.13] This is the collapse of temporally demarcated moments into one single enduring moment, eternity. But too: “To see everything as out of mere succession is to behave like a man drugged or insane.”[fn.14] To see no connections is to behave like no normal person, to function without meaning.[fn.15]

Madness and Directness as Contingency
Partly as a response to triumphalist stories of all kinds, especially of liberalism and its converse Marxism, Foucault theorized and attempted to write his intellectual histories in a way to emphasize the disjuncts, the radical ruptures, of history—to eliminate the connections other histories emphasized. In a Kuhnian vocabulary, this gave the sense of paradigms shifting from one to another for no internal reason (a misunderstanding once foisted on Kuhn that he always had difficulty rubbing away). In an Aristotelian vocabulary, it reinjected what were seemingly accidental features of the essence of a subject (like the history of psychiatry or jails) and showed how they played a live role in their constitution and evolution. In Rorty’s jargon, Foucault emphasized the contingency of events on vast vicissitudes that are only uncovered by the use of a particular vocabulary—and now, after years of recorded history, we can see quite clearly how these particular vocabularies come and go and uncover and recover (both senses) new and old things. Rorty once said that Foucault gives you “a kind of know-how, a way of looking askance and obliquely at contemporary institutions and practices.”[fn.16]

If we put together Kermode’s sense of “mere successiveness” as a kind of madness with this sense of contingency, I think we have a philosophical map for what directness is in the map analogy. What is often qualified as “brute” or “sheer” contingency is the impress of the unclassifiable—you have never encountered it before, but you must encounter it. A vocabulary, on the Kantian version of the map analogy, plots (topographically and in Kermode’s narrative sense) what you see, what you are aware of, but moments of evolution are moments when the map breaks down, when something tears itself through the map unavoidably into your sight.

All of this emphasis on the metaphor of vision will make many post-Heideggerians suspicious (a well-earned suspicion). If we shift from the mode of considering both perceptual and conceptual rifts in a vocabulary (in which it makes perfect sense to say that the sight of the Grand Canyon startles you), we can consider Rorty’s way of describing conceptual contingency: metaphor. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty famously follows Shelley in saying that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.”[fn.17] Rorty expands this notion of poet (Greek for “maker”) to include any “person who uses words as they have never before been used.”[fn.18] This allows him to follow Nietzsche in seeing intellectual history as “the history of metaphor.”[fn.19] So—what is a metaphor? Rorty here follows Davidson in describing metaphor as sheer noise—complete meaninglessness.[fn.20] Pure noise is sheer contingency, a linguistically unclassifiable experience. You can talk about noises, of course, but they don’t mean anything in the sense that you can’t talk with noise. However: talking about the noises, and increasingly with them—as in using them for particular purposes—crushes the metaphor under the weight of intelligibility, thus eventually making it a “dead metaphor” (like the foot of a mountain or the mouth of a river or the purity of a soul). Metaphors, like irony, are linguistic silences, tears in the fabric of meaning, dynamic introductions into a static topography. In terms of our map analogy, the death of the metaphor is the sewing up of the tear in our map, the dynamic, new classification used to pattern our experience.

There’s a sense, then, in which we’ve now classified the mystic tear in reality, or in Pirsig’s vocabulary, Quality. But what kind of classification is this? I called Quality an anti-essence before, and even in the limited Aristotelian sense in which we can still get mileage out of referring to irrelevant accidents, Quality is still an anti-essence: the sense of directness mystics are talking about is that sense in which your sense of relevance changes, in which you notice that which you had previously been blind to. Quality, in another way, is a pure metaphor: so new that it startles, but always just that—the new that startles, the new that calls for attention. If we have a handle on the reality the mystics are concerned about, it is only in the sense of knowing that it is out there, potentially just around the corner, waiting to leap out at us.

Spiritual Exercises
This leads me to the function of mystic practices, which include such sentential attitudes as Zen koans. These practices are what Hadot calls “spiritual exercises.” Hadot, in turn, links the notion of a spiritual exercise to the Greek Christian term askēsis, which means in that context (in Harold Bloom’s version) “self-purgation” or (in Hadot’s) “self-transformation.”[fn.21] In Bloom’s ratios of poetic anxiety-management, an askēsis is the willed curtailment of oneself. One does this, as a poet (always remembering Rorty’s widened understanding), to avoid simply being the repetition of a previous, powerful poet. This, I believe, is the same basic premise of what Eastern traditions call “beginner's mind.”[fn.22] If we are thrown into the world and socialized, then one way to understand the process of individualizing ourselves to break free of the happenstance education we received is to empty ourselves of that which we’ve learned.

If we think of a literal, perspicuous sentence—a sentence that has a “clear meaning”—as having an inferential path from this particular sentence to another (from the first sentence to its meaning, a second sentence), then we can think of poetic metaphor as a moment of dynamic self-creation, a moment in which all of your education fails you and you are allowed/forced to supply something for yourself. For the sentence “love is a battlefield” has no single clear meaning—many paths are available. And even more, “blue is a tree”—what on earth could that mean? The purpose of a mantra in meditation is to help clear your mind, to eliminate it, by saying a phrase over and over until it loses meaning, until what used to be sounds that had meaning become pure sounds, phonemes qua phonemes, not phonemes qua words. And in that moment, when it loses all public meaning, it attains total private meaning for you and you alone, a completely inarticulate meaning lost the moment you turn to articulate it. The practice of attaining inarticulate meanings is thus a purely private exercise—or rather, an exercise of achieving pure privacy. The public benefit of such inarticulate meanings are not the same as those meanings we get from such sentences as “God is Love” or “America is Freedom,” for an inarticulate meaning is nontransferable. Its only public benefit is on the life of the person as a whole. The notion of “inarticulate meaning” is about as close as we are going to get to a meaningful notion of ineffability, which when push comes to shove is the last conceptual bastion of the mystic notion of reality.

Endnotes

[1]E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 70-75—and the whole chapter, “The Blessings of Madness,” generally—is invaluable on the Greeks.

[2]Emerson, “Art,” Essays: First Series

[3]See "Philosophical Antiauthoritarianism: A Reply to Johnston," particularly para. 6-8. For "Platonic encapsulation," see ZMM, 388. For an early use in an exposition of a couple Rorty essays, where I articulate some qualms I had about Pirsig's position, see "Hediegger, Dewey, Pirsig" (I'm not sure I still have these qualms). See also my "Introduction to Pirsig" for a short exposition of what I take to be his philosophical fundamentals (in terms of theses he holds, at least).

[4]This summary discussion is indebted to Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden. In particular, on landscape painting see 88-90 and his discussion of Tench Coxe that builds up to his emblematic discussion of Carlyle’s disgust with mechanism 162-80.

[5]Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 183. This famous passage that Rorty popularized as “breaking the crust of convention” occurs at the end of his chapter, “Search for the Great Community,” in describing the place of the artist in the community.

[6]Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 30. See also his Philosophy as a Way of Life, 158. John McDowell translates this as “What they do say is that I’m very odd, and that I make people feel difficulties.” Cornford as: “the ignorant world describes me in other terms as an eccentric person who reduces people to hopeless perplexity.”

[7]Stanley Fish argues in an analogous way about freedom of speech and first amendment law in the eponymous essay in There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too. Part of Fish’s point is that if silence (i.e., the mystic reality for our purposes) is surrounded by intelligibility, then unintelligibility/silence surrounds intelligibility: “Without restriction, without an inbuilt sense of what it would be meaningless to say or wrong to say, there could be no assertion and no reason for asserting it. The exception to unregulated expression is not a negative restriction but a positive hollowing out of value—we are for this, which means we are against that—in relation to which meaningful assertion can then occur. It is in reference to that value—constituted as all values are by an act of exclusion—that some forms of speech will be heard as (quite literally) intolerable” (103-4). Compare this flip-flop perspective on meaning and unintelligibility to my description of Dynamic Quality as a tear in the map and Pirsig’s picture of Dynamic Quality as surrounding the static patterns in his SODV,13.

[8]The first three chapters of Nehamas’s brilliant The Art of Living are about the different kinds of irony at work in the Platonic dialogues, but see especially on this particular kind 52-7.

[9]Nehamas, The Art of Living, 91. When Harold Bloom discusses the aesthetic power of particular characters he describes them in the same kind of way, as remaining hidden from their authors, which like Nehamas is what then makes them appear more real, as living, breathing personalities than other kinds of characters. The common denominator is that the creation cannot be reduced to this or that description, something always escapes, is unclassifiable. The ability to represent the unrepresentable is the ultimate task, on a Bloomian aesthetics, of every artist—once a culture has learned how to encapsulate a figure or a text it becomes a “period piece.” This is why Bloom argues, for example, that Shakespeare is our mind and that he has not found his “reader”: to be the mind is to do the reading, and to “read” in this sense would be to reduce and thus to kill what was living and irreducible.

[10]Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 46

[11]Kermode, 57

[12]Kermode, 54

[13]Kermode, 55

[14]Kermode, 57

[15]I would go further and argue that, for all practical purposes, the notion of continued "pure immediacy" is both a feeling of eternity and "mere successiveness." This is too large a subject to wade into, but see my discussion of Wyndham Lewis in "Lewis and Ulysses" about what I call "fish-blink" time. See too my discussion of Jameson in "Theoretical and Empirical Schizophrenia" for another metaphorical use of schizophrenia and the linked notions of intelligibility and unintelligibility.

[16]Rorty, “Reply to Jacques Bouveresse” in ed. Brandom, Rorty and His Critics, 149

[17]From the close of Shelley’s “Defense of Poetry.” Rorty does not explicitly refer to Shelley in this regard in CIS, but it was undoubtedly on his mind and became an explicit invocation in his writings at the end of his life.

[18]Rorty, CIS, 28

[19]Rorty, CIS, 16. The allusion to Nietzsche is of course to his famous passage about truth as a “mobile army of metaphors” (Portable Nietzsche, 46).

[20]For the Davidsonian account of metaphor, see CIS 18-9 and the longer defense in “Unfamiliar Noises: Hesse and Davidson on Metaphor” in ORT.

[21]See his essay “Spiritual Exercises” in Philosophy as a Way of Life, particularly 82. See also the chapter “Philosophy and Philosophical Discourse” in his What Is Ancient Philosophy? If we were to embark on an attempt to distinguish between theoretical exercises and spiritual exercises (such that we take on Nehamas’s note that philosophy is a way of life that includes the having of theoretical theses—see The Art of Living, 1-6), we will want to take note of Hadot’s suggestion that physics, for the Greeks, was a spiritual exercise and not an attempt for greater control (even predictive) over nature. This is one issue that animates Hans Blumenberg’s attempt to demarcate the ancient Greek from the medieval, and thence the modern. See especially his discussion of Epicurus in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 145-79.

[22]See ZMM, 291-3.

Philosophy Books for Literature Students

It is a familiar fact that the term “literary criticism” has been stretched further and further in the course of our century. It originally meant comparison and evaluation of plays, poems, and novels – with perhaps an occasional glance at the visual arts. Then it got extended to cover past criticism (for example, Dryden’s, Shelley’s, Arnold’s, and Eliot’s prose, as well as their verse). Then, quite quickly, it got extended to the books which had supplied past critics with their critical vocabulary and were supplying present critics with theirs. This meant extending it to theology, philosophy, social theory, reformist political programs, and revolutionary manifestos. …

Once the range of literary criticism is stretched that far there is, of course, less and less point in calling it literary criticism. But for accidental historical reasons, having to do with the way in which intellectuals got jobs in the universities by pretending to pursue academic specialties, the name has stuck. So instead of changing the term “literary criticism” to something like “culture criticism,” we have instead stretched the word “literature” to cover whatever the literary critics criticize. A literary critic in what T. J. Clarke has called the “Trotskyite-Eliotic” culture of New York in the ’30s and ’40s was expected to have read the The Revolution Betrayed and The Interpretation of Dreams, as well as The Wasteland, Man’s Hope, and An American Tragedy. In the present Orwellian-Bloomian culture she is expected to have read The Gulag Archipelago, Philosophical Investigations, and The Order of Things as well as Lolita and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The word “literature” now covers just about every sort of book which might conceivably have moral relevance – might conceivably alter one’s sense of what is possible and important. The application of this term has nothing to do with presence of “literary qualities” in a book. Rather than detecting and expounding such qualities, the critic is now expected to facilitate moral reflection by suggesting revisions in the canon of moral exemplars and advisers, and suggesting ways in which the tensions within this canon may be eased – or, where necessary, sharpened. (Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 81-2)

Whatever the specifics of Rorty’s picture of what a literary critic is today (I say this partly because Rorty was reflecting on this at the end of the ’80s), the historical picture he sketches in the first paragraph is roughly what happened and gets at the consequences we still deal with. Because of further reactions to the “Orwellian-Bloomian culture,” the present state of becoming professionalized in an English department has become even more complicated, as the addition of what we call “New Historicism” and “cultural studies” adds even more kinds of possible books to be familiar with (such as adding “history” to Rorty’s list, which is all I think New Historicism amounts to, their protests to the contrary). This creates a frenetically anxious environment for the would-be practitioner, just coming through the door wanting to learn what’s what. By the mid-’70s, Said was already describing the situation as “less background, less formal training, less prescribed and systematic information, is assumed before one begins to read, write, or work. Thus when one begins to write today one is necessarily more of an autodidact, gathering or making up the knowledge one needs in the course of creating. The influence of the past appears less useful and, as two recent critics, W. J. Bate and Harold Bloom, have argued, more likely to produce anxiety” (Said, Beginnings, 8).

That’s only kind of what Bate and Bloom meant, and perhaps Said’s somewhat sunny slant on being the autodidact is because he was already so well-learned. The past isn’t “more likely to produce anxiety,” it just does—and particularly when you have less background, less training, and no systematically arranged information to peruse. The situation of the young literature student starting out is similar to that of the amateur philosopher—both are autodidacts, with many avenues of thought that could be pursued, which presents both the freedom and the dilemma: I can only go one way at a time, so which shall it be? Given the limits of time and energy, you don’t want to waste your time. But, too, Rorty’s pragmatic sensibility reminds you that at some point, you’re going to want to get a job doing this, which means you’re going to need to fake knowing something. Every tenured professor has a youthful story about a book that everyone else around them seems to have read but that they didn’t learn about until later. The goal of every student looking into the future is to minimize the length of that list of books.

It is in this situation that I make the following short list. The American education system does not prepare a young student very well to pursue philosophy, and it does this by slighting a historical background in the major thinkers. As a matter of cultural conversation, it doesn’t help to know that they were mainly white men who are now dead—if everyone assumes you know something about them, then you’d better know something about them. Who this unidentified “everyone” is, however, has been shrinking, at least in the United States. The fact is that after the ’60s and ’70s, if you were a budding literary critic, it’s quite probable that you read some Continental philosophy, like Derrida or Foucault or Lacan, because that was hot in those days. The trouble for us now is that it isn’t so hot: which means you are much more likely an autodidact trying to pick it up by yourself.

What makes Continental philosophy difficult is that their frame of reference is often either the history of philosophy or really weird descriptions of “common experience” (think: Being and Nothingness or Being and Time). The latter can be very useful in an ad hoc way, but it’s difficult to feel like you’re getting in the middle of a conversation because Continental philosophers often don’t talk to each other, but rather to the major figures of the past. And if you don’t know how to negotiate through those old figures, you can get lost pretty quick. The only way to get through that problem is to learn something about the past. But, as Said pointed out, there are no how-to manuals lying around. And on top of that, the philosophers who speak your language are nattering on to almost exclusively each other about problems only they (so they say) find interesting—this is why no one knows anything about Anglo-American philosophy either.

The list below is to help with getting into the Anglo-American conversation, to find an entry point into their conversation (unless you already understand Derrida, in which case go to Samuel Wheeler’s Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy). There’s no particular reason why one would need to, but the anglophone philosophical conversation does have some distinctive things it does better and there is the added bonus of knowing something no one else knows (distinguishability is a valuable intellectual-market commodity). In addition, if you want to know more about the Big Dead Guys, you can’t read just any English-speaker’s introductory version, because they often won’t tell you anything relevant to the way the Continental philosophers are talking about them. (Exemplary exception: Robert Solomon’s Continental Philosophy Since 1750. And also, though a Frenchman, Vincent Descombes’s Modern French Philosophy is a brilliant discussion of the Continental mid-century ferment.) And that’s just what a growing intellectual needs: coin to make your way between disciplines, not burrowing into one extra discipline that might never come in handy. Said’s literary critic as quasi-autodidact is very much right insofar as the problems that a student will become immersed in and seek to solve might take them in any number of directions, and the trick is to be able to very quickly sink into a pile of research without getting lost and going the wrong direction (the problem of the red herring).

What makes the list below what it is is that 1) each philosopher was important at some point to the specialized conversations of anglophone philosophy, 2) the books in some way recapitulate facets of those conversations, 3) they are also about much bigger fish than those narrow conversations, 4) they are very well-schooled in the history of philosophy and the books enter into that larger sequence, and 5) they all have an eye towards an even larger intellectual conversation that, for example, includes literature. Because of those 5 things, the list below is designed to not waste a literature student’s time.

After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre—One of the most important books of moral philosophy in the last 50 years, this was MacIntyre’s first extended attempt to link together work in epistemology, philosophy of action, and the fate of our moral and political cultures. And while disagreement with some of its central claims is almost necessary for anyone who doesn’t think God is a necessary presupposition, it is a fascinating tour de force that takes you through the Greeks and the Enlightenment on the composition of communities. In order to get past the notion that Lyotardian postmodernism means the death of continuity and the birth of free-wheeling relativism, one needs a working notion of tradition and practices. MacIntyre offers an excellent version here, while at the same time arguing (as Marxists will love) that liberalism is still undermining their composition. One interesting facet of the book is his treatment of Jane Austen as a moral philosopher.

Sources of the Self by Charles Taylor—Taylor’s book might be an even larger story with a similar perspective as MacIntyre’s, though their titles effectively give you each of their focuses. Taylor’s story is especially important given the kind of sophistication literature students are to show in handling a “character” as a locus of selfhood—for if a character has a self, it might be useful to know how our notions of what a self is have evolved (and thus plunk an author in their own historical milieu). This was a major entry into the debates about “modernity” (even if I think that word is overused), just as Taylor’s recent A Secular Age is a major entry into the somehow still-ongoing debates about secularization. Taylor and MacIntyre were two major thinkers identified as “communitarians”—the position you get when you want to throw away the worst of Marx and keep the best of Hegel. Hegel’s “beautiful soul” is (with good reason) hot right now, and that description of the Romantic self perfectly complements Taylor’s story, which engages heavily with literary traditions, particularly poetry.

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy by Bernard Williams—this book is largely supposed to be about ethics and political philosophy, but it is something like a comprehensive system inasmuch as Williams situates it within a set of relationships with philosophical neighbors like the philosophy of science and of language. The chapters on their interrelations are some of the best of its kind. Williams also has a historical depth of understanding that is nearly matchless, and his unique ability is to distill the past into its heritage for us today without harming it. Transforming the past into a set of problems to be negotiated is an excellent way to make the actual reading of Plato’s Republic or Kant’s Critiques not just a haze of bare understanding of what’s going on.

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by Richard Rorty—while MacIntyre’s book distills his earlier work on the philosophy of the social sciences and of action and Williams his work on science and language, they don’t go into extraordinary detail on those conversations. Rorty’s book is, by itself, the most comprehensive recapitulation of the minute details of the “core subjects” of the first 100 years of analytic philosophy available (roughly, 1880 to 1980—Frege to Davidson). It is beautifully Hegelian in its ability to tell a progressive story about how one philosophical position was transumed by the next up to this present (late ’70s) moment. Even if disagreeable in its conclusions, its ability to lay bare the reasons for one position against another is the ideal starting point to understanding what philosophers of language and of mind are going on about. It also situates these smaller conversations into a larger story stretching back to the Greeks and makes inroads to connecting the anglophone conversation with the Continental one.

Must We Mean What We Say? by Stanley Cavell—if it was difficult to choose one book from the array of useful and powerful books from each of the previous authors’ storehouse (it being very difficult not to choose Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity), it was particularly difficult to choose which Cavell book to single out. However, given my commitment to the utility of the book to introduce an autodidact into the specialized conversations of anglophone philosophy, I chose this book on the basis of each essay’s sterling compactness on an array of relevant issues. The Claim of Reason was difficult not to choose, but Cavell’s discussions of Austin, Wittgenstein, and aesthetics and his general performance in the vein of “ordinary language philosophy” (while offering penetrating insight into what the hell that is) are perfect introductions to their subjects and the occasional weirdness of his later work.

Those are my five suggestions, five being a nice round number, though now I will indulge in four more that more or less fail in the “introduction to anglophone conversation” criterion. These are just brilliant.

The Art of Living by Alexander Nehamas—Nehamas is the most eminent philosophical scholar (a philosopher, not a classicist) of Socrates and Plato living today. This book is, actually, an excellent introduction into a host of scholarly problems about reading Plato, with dense endnotes. Its brilliance, however, is in its humane rendering of what the “philosophical life” is, beginning with the impact of Socrates as a figure in the mind of the philosopher. What follows are amazing discussions of silence, discussion, arête, knowledge, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Foucault and, above all, irony. If you work anywhere in the vicinity of the trope of irony, you cannot afford to pass up this book.

The Sovereignty of Good by Iris Murdoch—this book is worth getting just for its first essay. Murdoch was a novelist in addition to a philosopher, and she was also a Platonist. Every single person on my list is, in an important (and delimited) sense, an anti-Platonist. So what gives? To my mind, Murdoch offers one of the best, distilled accounts of the problem of the modern notion of the self taken for granted by early liberal theory. In my favorite phrase of hers, it is “a happy and fruitful marriage of Kantian liberalism with Wittgensteinian logic solemnized by Freud.” And while Brandom’s Kant, Cavell’s Wittgenstein, and Lear’s Freud should all be friends of ours, Murdoch points out a pressing problem at that stage of the conversation, and in its face presents an excellent discussion of the pressure of context in ethical decision-making. She puts it in Platonic terms of sight, of “contexts of attention,” but its ancestor, I should say, is rather E. M. Forster. For literary critics who want a good illustration of what a “literary point of view” might be as giving a distinct angle on a philosophical topic, there is nothing better than this very short book.

Ordinary Vices by Judith Shklar—if much good moral philosophy these days is “virtue-centered” in its approach (in contradistinction to a Kantian-style search for principles), then Shklar offers an extraordinary meditation on its darker flipside (much as she does for liberal discussion of justice in The Faces of Injustice). Shklar moves easily back and forth between contemporary practical problems (international, domestic, personal), theoretical problems, history both social and intellectual, and sources of our moral thinking as diverse Machiavelli, Montaigne, Christianity, James Madison, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Thackeray, and Hawthorne.

Evil in Modern Thought by Susan Neiman—if Rorty offers a narrative of what he even puts in scare quotes as the “core subjects” of anglophone philosophy, then Susan Neiman offers a tremendous narrative of the history of modern moral philosophy, which she argues was actually at the core (at least at its early stage in the 18th century). Ranging from close readings of Leibniz, Kant, Marx, Bayle, Voltaire, Freud, and a really interesting one on the Marquis de Sade, Neiman’s story centers on the importance, in particular, of two world-historical events that have shaped in sometimes subtle ways thinking about evil: the earthquake at Lisbon in 1755 and the holocaust at Auschwitz. Her understanding of how our thinking about moral responsibility and the sources of evil have changed and might yet still change (with a short, speculative section on September 11) is penetrating and well-worth thinking about.

The Ellisonian Self

Ralph Waldo Ellison is a titan. It is difficult to finish Invisible Man and not be impressed by both depth of thought that clearly went into its making and the execution with which that product of thought was born. It is also difficult to not take very seriously indeed the thought that lies behind his many essays and interviews. An extraordinarily considered and rhetorically skilled writer, Ellison should be considered a philosopher by any other name.

As you dig into the tissue of the relationship between the first three major post-Harlem Renaissance writers, Wright, Baldwin, and Ellison, it quickly becomes apparent how much Baldwin and Ellison wrote in the wake of Wright's early success in Native Son (Wright did, too), and how important coming to grips with Marxism was for all three. Forcing that confrontation was Wright's gift to Baldwin and Ellison, and there was undoubtedly a dramatic (and dramatized) reaction. While Wright became a very early convert to American Marxism, Baldwin and Ellison saw it as something of a curse on the writer qua writer. The interaction between Native Son and Wright's early programmatic essay, "Blueprint for Negro Writing," Baldwin's essays in Notes of a Native Son (especially "Everybody's Protest Novel" and "Many Thousands Gone"), and Ellison's Invisible Man and his essays "Richard Wright's Blues" and "The World and the Jug" provide enough fuel for reflection on a hundred related topics about literature, literary criticism, philosophy, history and politics.[fn.1]

The below takes on the more strictly philosophical side of Ellison's vision. Ellison was a natural pragmatist in his theoretical orientation: while I'm not sure how well-read Ellison was in the work of professional philosophers, Ellison was a natural amateur philosopher and struggled personally with his namesake, Ralph Waldo Emerson (who Cornel West, Harold Bloom, and Richard Poirier have made us realize was the spiritual progenitor of that professional philosophical movement, pragmatism) and enjoyed and used the work of Kenneth Burke (who was also an amateur philosopher, though we do know he read Dewey). Ellison's vision of culture is deep, and includes a vision of the self and its relationship with society (as every Emersonian struggles with). And while I come from Rorty's professional version of what a pragmatist picture of the self should look like, Ellison's picture--which is only too briefly dug into below--provides a fascinating sidelight on essentially the same picture.

References:
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man. New York: Vintage International, 1952, 1980, 1995.

---. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. Ed. John F. Callahan. Preface by Saul Bellow. New York: The Modern Library, 1995, 2003.

Kimberly W. Benston, Ed., Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1987.

Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972.

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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A repeated figure in the first part of Invisible Man is variations on the phrase “I am who I am.” What is striking about the figure is the static finality of the verb, and it should make us wonder if this figure is Platonic or Nietzschean in its roots. For the Plato of the Republic, people have essences, bronze, silver, or gold in his myth, and justice is done when each is in their rightful place. The Nietzsche of the Gay Science, on the other hand, wanted us to become who we are. More generally, the Platonic tradition uses metaphors of discovery and being and the Nietzschean metaphors of creation and becoming. With the Invisible Man’s statement that the “end is in the beginning” (Invisible Man 6), there would seem to be a statement of inevitability, of inescapable essence. Yet, the notion of a static essence that each of us has inside and must conform to seems antithetical to the spirit of anti-conformity in Ellison’s work. What kind of self is the Ellisonian self?

To figure out what Ellison means, we shouldn’t start at the level of philosophy and build a theory of the self, but rather begin at the ground level of experiencing selves and tailor our theory to fit what we find there. The reason for this comes out of Ellison himself. What we find in Ellison is a broad rejection of isolated, programmatic theory. For instance, in Ellison’s essay “Society, Morality, and the Novel,” we find a constant denunciation of the maneuvers of literary critics who attempt to bind the artist with their formulations (often in the mode of a joke): “Critics would give you the formula that would make the achievement of a major fiction as certain as making a pre-mixed apple pie” (Essays 699). In Invisible Man, this comes out of the Invisible Man’s relationship to the Brotherhood, which is a veiled reference to Marxism. In referring to the Brotherhood’s “ideology” (e.g., Invisible Man 359), Ellison is ironically calling attention to the Marxist pretension to “science.” Marxism explicitly is not an ideology, which is a term Marx put into currency to distinguish all other modes of life. Marxism is rather a science, a theory, a method of uncovering our rationalizations of injustices (ideology) in order to find the essential path to justice and truth. It is this pretension that the Invisible Man will eventually reject.

There is something ambiguous, however, about Ellison’s relationship to Marxism that comes out in this passage from Brother Jack: “Remember too, that theory always comes after practice. Act first, theorize later; that’s also a formula, a devastatingly effective one!” (359) Practice before theory is a formula I would commend to Ellison, the pragmatism common to Ellison and Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach.” Ellison’s comment on Marxism would be that, in practice, Marxists don’t put practice ahead of theory, but rather make the evidence fit their theories. This is punched up when the Invisible Man thinks to himself after Jack offers his formula, “He looked at me as though he did not see me…” (359). The metaphor of sight is deployed to register the sense that the Brotherhood’s theories leave out significant portions of reality. “Outside the Brotherhood we were outside history; but inside of it they didn’t see us” (499). What is deficient about the Brotherhood’s interpretation of reality is that they only offer, as Ellison puts it elsewhere, a “statistical interpretation of our lives” (Essays 75): “It was all a swindle, an obscene swindle! They had set themselves up to describe the world. What did they know of us, except that we numbered so many, worked on certain jobs, offered so many votes, and provided so many marchers for some protest parade of theirs?” (Invisible Man 507) The ambiguity in Ellison’s relationship is that though the Invisible Man rebels against the Brotherhood’s classification and organization of reality, he must classify and organize reality somehow. In the moment that the Invisible Man suddenly realizes that he had not been undermining the Brotherhood by working for them, but rather doing exactly what they wanted, he says, “And in defining, in giving organization to the fury, it seemed to spin me around…” (553, emphasis mine). The Invisible Man hasn’t given up classification, but realized a new classification and interpretation of reality. What Ellison rejects is not organization per se, but the idea of a science or theory of organization, the attempt by some to short-circuit the individual’s experience of reality by authoritatively telling them what they are really experiencing (whether they know it or not).

The vision of reality as in need of organization is a typically Kantian one, but in order to avoid epistemological controversies that Ellison pays no heed to, I would call it a rhetorical vision. A rhetorical vision of reality is one that recognizes the constructedness of reality, rooted in the public means of communication. The major problem for rhetoric, however, has been pointed out by Plato in the Gorgias—if rhetoric requires a common vocabulary between speaker and audience, then how is it not just pandering? How does real change occur if public, inferential communication requires a body of common assumptions for understanding? Ellison knows very well the problems of communication, calling the ideal American audience member “the little man behind the stove” (Essays 495), a symbol of the broadly different forms a writer’s readers might take. Ellison says “the novel is rhetorical” (701) and pondered just that question of communicating to a white audience when writing Invisible Man.[fn.2] But if Ellison has to communicate in the terms of a white audience, how can he change them?

This is a difficult practical problem for every writer, and to help to understand Ellison’s solution we might distinguish between two different modes of presentation that Stanley Fish uses: rhetorical and dialectical. A rhetorical presentation is much like Plato would have it: “A presentation is rhetorical if it satisfies the needs of its readers” (Fish 1). However, “this is not to say that in the course of a rhetorical experience one is never told anything unpleasant, but that whatever one is told can be placed and contained within the categories and assumptions of received systems of knowledge” (1). This presents just the problem, for Ellison wishes to overturn the received assumptions about black Americans. To do so, he uses a format for Invisible Man that is dialectical in Fish’s sense, which is “disturbing, for it requires of its readers a searching and rigorous scrutiny of everything they believe in and live by” (1). Fish says of this experience that “it is nothing less than a conversion, not only a changing, but an exchanging of minds” (2).

This is what I think we see in Invisible Man. The novel is a bildungsroman, but the lessons are not didactic, tacking-ons of easily potted moral lessons, but rather shifts in assumptions about the way the world is that the protagonist finds difficult to cohere with the rest of his working body of assumptions. This makes sense of a motif of incomprehensibility that floats along with the Invisible Man. During the battle royal scene, he accidentally grabs onto the leg of a chair: “I feared the rug more than I did the drunk, so I held on, surprising myself for a moment by trying to topple him upon the rug. It was such an enormous idea…” (Invisible Man 28, first and third sets of italics mine). The surprise is the momentary overturning in practice of a conceptual assumption that shapes his reality, one that by itself is too large to work out and fit with the rest of how he thought reality functioned (where you don’t do things like that to whites). When Mr. Norton is passed out in the Golden Day, the Invisible Man thinks to himself that “the very idea that I was responsible for him was too much for me to put into words” (86). In contemplating Clifton’s selling of the dolls, and the possibility that Clifton believed he’d sold out, Ellison writes, “For a moment I weighed the idea, but it was too big for me” (447). In thinking about Rinehart, Ellison writes, “I caught a brief glimpse of the possibilities posed by Rinehart’s multiple personalities and turned away. It was too vast and confusing to contemplate” (499).

The scene in which the Invisible Man is suddenly given new “organization to the fury” begins, “The words struck like bullets fired close range, blasting my satisfaction to the earth” (552). This is emblematic of the experience of conversion that Fish says follows the dialectical presentation. Such radical change in a mental constitution is difficult to comprehend. For example, the lesson that the Invisible Man says that his grandfather never had to learn was that he was human: “Hell, he never had any doubts about his humanity—that was left to his ‘free’ offspring” (580). This thought had suddenly come over the Invisible Man in the psychiatric hospital, though it is forgotten: “But we are all human, I thought, wondering what I meant” (239). The ECT the Invisible Man receives in that chapter is something like a resetting of his personality, an attempt to wipe the slate clean and begin again. But since the process is imperfect, new thoughts fight against old, hence the Invisible Man’s wonderment at meaning. He can’t put the new thought from the new self together with the old thought from the old self, and so lacks a coherent identity.

It is to this purpose in charting dialectical change that I believe enters the role of narrative. The Invisible Man recognizes by the end of the novel that the past is a necessary part of our identity. Whereas Brother Westrum says of Brother Tarp’s leg chain that “things like that don’t do nothin’ but cause confusion,” the objects of the Invisible Man’s past light his way when he falls into the sewer (567-8). The Invisible Man must tell his own story because he has learned that who we are now in the present is partly because of the way we tell the story of our own lives to ourselves.[fn.3] The “end is in the beginning” (6) not because there is an essential telos around which our identity circles, but because the way in which we tell our own story is determined in part by where we are standing when we begin to tell it—in a hole, in the Invisible Man’s case. When he says, “Perhaps to lose a sense of where you are implies the danger of losing a sense of who you are” (577) I take this sense of “where” to be “where in your own story,” which is partly the loss the Invisible Man feels after the ECT. As Ellison says generally, “the novel is obsessed by the relationship between illusion and reality as revealed in duration and process” (Essays 702). Reality is not a static, Platonic notion for Ellison, but is rather generated by the individual’s experience.

Endnotes

[1] "The World and the Jug" was a two-part exchange with the eminent leftist literary critic Irving Howe, whose addition to the conversation between the above texts can be quite profitable. Howe, in "Black Boys and Native Sons" (published in Dissent, Autumn 1963), wrote something like a defense of Wright against his two rebellious younger brothers, Baldwin and Ellison. The frame itself made Ellison a little peevish, and he responded, and then followed a double exchange of Howe's reply and Ellison's further reply. Howe's original essay with two reflections on the incident (one from 1969 and the other from the retrospective vantage point of 1990) can be found in his Selected Writings 1950-1990. Both parts of Ellison's side of the debate became "The World and the Jug." The exchanges between all four of these great men provide a fascinating, agonistic record of internal dialogue between progressive members of the left.

[2] Michel Fabre quotes a letter from Ellison to Kenneth Burke wondering how to write a “Negro character who would incorporate all of the contradictions present in the Negro-white situation in this country and yet be appealing to whites” (“From Native Son to Invisible Man: Some Notes on Ralph Ellison’s Evolution in the 1950s,” in Speaking For You, 213, emphasis mine).

[3] This is a favorite line of mine that I try to reuse as often as possible. It debuted in one of the first original things I wrote for this blog, a weaving of Pirsig, Rorty, and Virginia Woolf, "Phaedrus, the Woolf," and I quickly recycled it in the third part of an extended rethinking of Pirsig's Lila, "Prospectus" (which is the first time I used Fish's distinction to help make this point). My thinking about narrative was deepened after reading MacIntyre's essay, "Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science" (which I talk about here, and which I incorporate in an entangling of this theme with Fredric Jameson and Sherman Alexie called "Narrative and Making Sense").

Wright and the Figures of Slave Narrative

From a seminar on the three largest post-Harlem Renaissance figures, Wright, Baldwin, and Ellison, this is a fairly pedantic, unexciting piece that just cobbles together some continuities between the slave narrative tradition and the African-American literary tradition that succeeded it. There's no real motivation for it into a thesis, however. The precursor to this, from which I think I borrow a few lines about Douglass, is "Literacy as Symbol and Material Means in Douglass." Like that piece, I was still caught in an overbearing fascination with the orality/literacy thematic, an understanding still largely conditioned at this point by Ong's Orality and Literacy and Havelock's Preface to Plato.

References:
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Eds. John W. Blassingame, John R. McKivigan, and Peter P. Hinks. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001

*NOTE* The footnote links won't work unless you're on the specific post page (by clicking on the title link). You'll have to excuse my crappy coding.

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I propose to trace out the functioning of three different figures inherited by Wright from the tradition of slave narrative, taking as emblematic Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: curiosity, literacy, and leisure. I will in each case briefly discuss how they work in Douglass before showing how Wright continues, extends, or alters each figure in the changed cultural landscape some 100 years after Douglass’ escape, though I shall spend most of my time on literacy.

An important theme struck by both Douglass and Wright is the repression of curiosity. In Douglass, this occurs frequently, usually in relation to literacy. Curiosity leads you out of your current nest of experience and into a new experience, thus leading to learning. Douglass, who didn’t even realize that literacy was a forbidden object (much as Wright had to learn his lessons the hard way), was taught the basics by his mistress, Mrs. Auld, before her husband corrected her: “Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. … He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master” (Douglass 31). This is a “new and special revelation” (ibid.) for the young Douglass and it opens up the “pathway from slavery to freedom” (32). Likewise for Wright, in his own first pass at autobiography in “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” when he shows curiosity to learn how to grind lenses, Morrie immediately “grew red.” “Whut yuh tryin’ t’ do, nigger, git smart?” (Wright 228) The notion that blacks might be “uppity” immediately changes the whites’ attitudes to them, as the first hint of it sours situations for both Douglass and Wright repeatedly.

The figure of literacy might be the most important figure in Douglass’ Narrative, functioning as both a symbol for freedom and an actual, material precondition for freedom. Literacy for Douglass is a skill that allows for the free acquisition of knowledge and the ability to negotiate the white man’s world. It is also a precious commodity carefully protected by slave masters, as illustrated before. The pathway of literacy consists in the attainment of “the more valuable bread of knowledge” (Douglass 34), which functions in two ways for Douglass: 1) knowing how to read and write aids materially in his ability to escape from captivity and 2) Douglass learns that slavery is a contingent institution and that one of its main means of enforcement is the stripping of the slave of his humanity.

The first echo we might point to is again in “Ethics.” Wright says, “it was almost impossible to get a book to read. It was assumed that after a Negro had imbibed what scanty schooling the state furnished he had no further need for books” (Wright 235). Wright here, however, doesn’t go into depth about the meaning of literacy, nor play it out much—all we see is that though African-Americans can read, they aren’t allowed access by white-run libraries. We get a much stronger look at how Wright uses the symbol of literacy in Lawd, Today! (his first significant piece of fiction, though only published posthumously). When the protagonist, Jake, goes by the Chicago Library on his way to his friend Bob’s, Jake says to himself, “That’s right. I ain’t never looked around in one of them joints” (69). What is striking is not that he hasn’t been in a library, or thinks there’s a cover charge, but that if he did go into a library, he muses, he could “tell old Bob and Al and Slim all about the big books I seen…” (ibid.). Seen—not read, or even opened.

What’s worse, upon seeing a black boy reading in the library, Jake immediately thinks, right on the heels of his reverie of setting his friends aflame with jealousy at all the books he had seen, that “too much reading’s bad” (ibid.). This is one of a series of stunning reversals of thought that happen within moments of each other, another being the rapid switch in the group’s opinion of the International Negro Uplift Association, from “Yeah, they’s smart” to nine lines later “Aw … They nuts as hell” (109). Jake says of reading that “it was all right to read the newspapers … but reading a lot of books … would drive you crazy.” “It addles your brains, and if you addle your brains you’ll sure have bookworms in the brain” (69). He then recalls, as justification and evidence for his view, that “his poor old grandmother had told him that when he was a child, and he had never forgotten it, and had never had bookworms” (ibid.).

Wright seems to be, at least in part, displaying literacy as a forgotten means of freedom. The psychology of oral vs. literate culture is such that remembered words and phrases, in an oral culture, function as thought-gatekeepers far more than in a literate culture. Words in the mind tumble over each other in sometimes quite odd associations, but the better and easier remembered (like in proverbs, rhymed aphorisms, or bits of wisdom from authoritative sources, like grandmothers), the more likely these bits will be recalled in connection with current experience. For instance, Jake assigns some prestige to books and being in the library, but then Jake sees the black boy, and thinks, “reading’s bad.” Why? Because “his mind went back to his boyhood; he remembered a schoolmate of his who had become queer from trying to memorize the Bible” (ibid.). When Jake saw the boy, he saw his queer schoolmate, and reacted to himself turning queer—his earlier thought (books good, maybe I should go into the library) was derailed by this fragment of memory. And then his mind immediately reinforced this new thought with a further stock association, the wisdom of his grandmother. His brain doesn’t quit, though, and Wright adds a further illustrative crinkle, as Jake then thinks, “But it was all right if you were studying for the pulpit” (ibid.), because God will protect you from going crazy—but then what happened to the kid memorizing the Bible? Jake’s mind has already moved on, however, and such reversals are never brought to account. A mind brought up in a literate culture, however, because of the opportunity to reinforce the ephemeral spoken word with the unchanging written word, has better opportunity to not be led down mental avenues with no hope of returning and asking, “Did anything I just think (say) make sense?” And when you write it down, you can look it over.

There are two other examples with Jake we might recur to for reinforcement. One is the scene in which he reads the newspaper, as he has said is okay to do. The joke of the chapter is that, when Jake reads the newspaper, all he does is read the headline out loud and then run off at the mouth about whatever he thinks about what he thinks the headline means. But there are several telling moments for my purposes. When Jake goes off on FDR and the Democrats, he closes by saying, “I’m going to stick with the Republicans. Old Abe Lincoln is the ship and all else is the sea . . . Now, who said that?” (29) That old chestnut for black electoral politics tells Jake who to vote for, but it is not an actual evaluation of who would be best for him.[fn.1] When Jake attempts to engage with Lil, she says “I wasn’t listening to you reading” (31)—by which she really means, listening to him spout—and Jake replies, “You could learn something if you didn’t keep that empty head of yours stuck into them Gawddamn Unity books all the time” (ibid.). The irony is, of course, that Lil is actually reading, whereas Jake does not (except for advertisements, which he spends much more time reading the entirety of as we see in the following chapter). But what’s more is what Jake says about God: “Gawd’s hooey! It’s a gyp game, that’s all!” It isn’t apparent that Jake is just saying this eristically, but that he truly believes it—at the time, for compare his relative reverence and respect for God in the Library scene discussed above. And finally, there’s the dialectical series between Jake and Lil beginning with his rant about the Communists. Lil counters him on every response, actually challenging him, recurring to the newspaper as a source of her views. Jake, possibly recalling the moment before she interceded having said, “That’s no lie, I was reading it just the other day in the Tribune…” (33), eventually finds himself backed into a corner and says, “Woman, is you a Red?” (ibid.) There are several fascinating points to this exchange: 1) he appears entirely sincere in his thought process and in thinking that Lil must be a Red for challenging him as she does; 2) it isn’t clear at all that Jake is cognizant of having just lost the debate or the jagged shifts in thought; 3) it isn’t clear why he didn’t recur to his response to Einstein, that “these old newspapers sure tries hard to fool folks” (32), when Lil challenged him, and since that is clearly a legitimately open mental avenue for Jake, it just punches up how rough and random any particular turn his mind seems to take.

Possibly the most illustrative example of the oral cast of mind in Jake, and therefore the importance of literacy to the idea of freedom, occurs when Jake is raging about the inspector at work: “You sonofabitch! It ain’t always going to be this way! His mind went abruptly blank. He could not keep on with that thought, because he did not know where that thought led. He did not know of any other way things could be, if not this way. Yet he longed for them not to be this way” (142). Literacy is the key to other worlds, the key to seeing how things might be another way. An imagination that cannot stretch beyond the things told to it by its immediates is an impaired imagination. Reading is what did it for Douglass and for Wright. Reading allows one to escape immediate surroundings and take flight, either to other actual realities (like in nonfiction, history, etc.) or to made-up realities—the effect is the same, as the circle of possibilities expands outwards, thus increasing the flex of mind that allows you to imagine more for yourself.

The last figure of leisure leads directly from here and shows Wright exerting a tremendous alteration over it. For Douglass, leisure time meant time to strategize and to think. The path to freedom lay open, but obscured, and at one point he says, amidst the “perpetual whirl of excitement” of working at the docks in Baltimore, that “I could think of nothing, scarcely, but my life; and in thinking of my life, I almost forgot my liberty” (Douglass 70) The most obvious shift from slave narratives to neo-slave narratives, of course, is that people like Douglass were escaping a fairly literal slavery, while that which holds Wright and his contemporaries is the more intangible cultural slavery left from continued racism. So, in Wright the figure of leisure plays differently. The image of the “lazy” black man is created. But why? Wright tells us—as the group watches some white students get off work, Jakes thinks, “Them white boys always in a hurry to get somewhere. And soon’s they get out of school they’s going to be bigshots. But a nigger just stays a nigger” (117). “Yeah, but ain’t no use of a black man rushing.” “Naw, ‘cause we ain’t going nowhere” (118). Douglass could imagine that slavery could be ended, and that eventually people could co-exist peacefully. Wright, 100 years later, is displaying the crushing, felt defeat at the hands of whites that debilitates the common black imagination and that begins to repeat itself—like Jake’s grandmother telling him that reading is bad.

Endnotes

[1] It was, in fact, Frederick Douglass about the Republican Party. I suspect this was a veiled slap at Douglass by Wright, with regards to the changed landscape of politics and how Douglass stuck by the Republican Party even after its disastrous effort at Reconstruction and subsequent takeover by the rich, of whom Jake says, “them men owns and runs the country!” (29)

One of the Most Important Chapters in the Entire History

I don't think this piece is as interesting as my first piece on the Don, "The Necessity of Adapting to Changing Circumstances," but it fills in a connection with another preoccupation of mine, Romanticism and the form of life it spawns. I use below a trope I like to use to describe that lebensform: a fish-blink life, the life of someone for whom each moment is their first. "Oh, a rhinestone!" [blink] "Oh, a rhinestone!" [blink] "Oh, a rhinestone!" This is an idea that Wyndham Lewis best explicated in Time and Western Man as what the embodiment would be if someone lived the apotheosis of the immediate found in the English Romantics and theorized by Bergson. I find it quite resonate not only with those who philosophize the Quest for Immediacy, but also the regular kinds of people who extol immediacy and the derived mysticisms from that idea. Combine this with Don Quixote's madness, and you have a thesis project.

References are to:
Samuel Putnam's translation of Don Quixote (1949).
The 1971 translation of Foucault's The Order of Things.
Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marin's translation of Jose Ortega y Gasset's Meditations on Quixote (1966).
Anna Bostock's translation of Georg Lukács's The Theory of the Novel.

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Taking well in hand the notice that use of superlative is rife throughout Don Quixote, I think we should yet take special note of Chapter 6, Part 2: “Of What Took Place Between Don Quixote and His Housekeeper, Which Is One of the Most Important Chapters in the Entire History.” This chapter functions as something like a portal in Part 2, which as Cid Hamete Benengeli, our Moorish author, says doesn’t really get started until Chapter 8 (Cervantes 651). What we get in this chapter are a series of repeated figures in Don Quixote, most of which we are quite familiar with by now, but some of which are brought to the fore in a special way.

The chapter opens with the niece and housekeeper noticing that Don Quixote, still caught by “his ill-errant conception of knighthood” (637), is bent on going out on more, as the housekeeper says, “adventures but which I call misfortunes” (ibid.). These revaluations of situations between Don Quixote’s view and on-lookers are, of course, a constant feature, but these two, in particular, call on Don Quixote to give us his view of knighthood, and thereby adventure. When asked why he can’t just stay at court like other knights, Don Quixote gives us a neat division between courtiers and knights-errant. Whereas courtiers, Don Quixote says, “may travel all over the earth merely by looking at a map,” we knights-errant “take the measure of the entire globe with our feet” (638). Don Quixote locks down the significance by saying, “We know our enemies not from pictures but as they really are” (ibid., italics mine), which is extraordinary given how Don Quixote’s reality—how things really are for him—is taken from books of chivalry.

The truly extraordinary event—and fairly new as far as self-evaluations of his own situation go—occurs when Don Quixote then promptly says that “We pay no attention to the childish rules that are supposed to govern knightly duels…” (ibid.). For one who is as intent on following the law and letter of the order and rules of chivalry, such stark scorn is startling. Even as Don Quixote might easily reply that he’s only ever upheld the rules for knights-errant, which is what he’s talking about in contradistinction to courtiers, the repeated figure is still that of the order of chivalry, which does go wider than just knights-errant (as the commonality between Don Fernando and Don Quixote displays). The nearest predecessor to this newer explication is even more startling: “Who is so ignorant as not to know that knights-errant are beyond all jurisdiction…?” (481), this to the Holy Brotherhood at the Inn in Part I.

I’ll come back to this figure, but for now I’d like to continue with Don Quixote’s discourse. What we get in chapter 6 is a window into Don Quixote’s sense of self, his sense of what chivalry and knight-errantry are all about, as a result of his (vain) attempt to persuade his niece and housekeeper that all is right in the world. We get the color of this window when the niece attempts to rebut Don Quixote with the obvious (to us) retort, “your Grace must remember that all this you are saying about knights-errant is a fable and a lie” (639). To this Don Quixote exclaims that this is a “blasphemy you have uttered” (ibid.), which is a curious, religious turn of phrase. You normally would only blaspheme against God and his sacred vassals, but—as Don Quixote later explains—“chivalry is a religion in itself” (657).

That the niece would “presume to criticize these knightly histories” (639) prompts Don Quixote to give another extraordinary discourse, this time on a distinction between knights within knight-errantry. Letting loose his anger, Don Quixote recurs to the great Amadis: “What would my lord Amadis say if he could hear such a thing?” (639) Hearing himself exclaim in such a manner as to figure Amadis for vengeance causes Don Quixote—within each distinct moment as he ever is—to hasten to add, “To be sure, he would pardon you…. But there are others who might have heard you, and in that case it would not have gone so well with you” (ibid.). This distinction between Amadis and “rascals” gives us a picture of knight-errantry much like the double figure of God—both smiter and forgiver.

I think we should take Don Quixote’s exclamation of Amadis as a surprising moment for Don Quixote himself, for which he then has to patch up and look reasoned with his further discourse on the two kinds of knights-errant. I think the niece hits the nail when, after this discourse, she says, “in a pinch you could get right up in the pulpit or go out and start preaching in the streets” (640, italics mine). The reason I think we should take Don Quixote as somewhat surprised at himself is that I think Lukács is describing Don Quixote when he says, “The complete absence of an inwardly experienced problematic transforms such a soul into pure activity” (Lukács 99, italics mine). Don Quixote has the unshakeable “inner certitude” (ibid.) from the centeredness he takes from his faith in the order of chivalry, and so simply enacts that order on the reality that confronts him. Now, Lukács says that such a soul is “incapable of any contemplation” (ibid.), to which the obvious rejoinder in the case of Don Quixote would be—does he not reason quite often and quite intelligently? He does, but Don Quixote does not think, he holds forth in speeches and lectures, all internal functions becoming immediately externalized. There is never an “inwardly experienced problematic,” for there never really is any problem—on the inside. All of Don Quixote’s problems arise from his externalizations.

All Don Quixote ever experiences are external problems, which we can otherwise call “adventures.” As Lukács says, “the life of a person with such a soul,” as Don Quixote has, “becomes an uninterrupted series of adventures” (ibid.). And as Ortega says, “each adventure is a new birth of the world, a unique process” (Ortega 132). Don Quixote moves through the world like a fish—every time the fish blinks, it confronts a new world in isolation from the old, and so mainly too with every new, demarcated adventure. That is what it is to be a being of pure action—like a fish-blink life, your whole set of habits are brought to bear fresh on each situation devoid of context, once the “adventure” signal is given. An exemplary example of this is Master Pedro’s puppet show. Don Quixote interrupts the show twice to critique the proceedings, clearly not caught up in the action of the show, but still not reflective on what’s happening. Don Quixote is rather commenting on it from his inner source of action: he interrupts the second time to say that the bells are inaccurate, full of inner certitude at the bells being “beyond a doubt a great piece of nonsense” (Cervantes 807). To this Master Pedro retorts, “Don’t be looking for trifles,” and Don Quixote—action met with action, in this case speech with speech—backs down (“You have spoken the truth”), not because he’s reflected on the issue, but like a sword being parried by another, he must accept the parry and move on—just like his own parry of himself when he surprisingly figured Amadis for vengeance. And from this context of being completely not caught up in the action of the puppet show, Don Quixote suddenly and inexplicably is, as Ortega puts it, “snatched up in the illusory vortex” (Ortega 133). Typically, we would think of a show like this as bringing people like Don Quixote under a spell, slowly putting them to sleep, but Don Quixote's reactions in this scene are like being wide awake one moment and sawing logs the next. The only plausible explanation is through the Ortegean sense of adventure—Don Quixote suddenly received the mysterious signal that a new adventure had started (“Upon seeing such a lot of Moors and hearing such a din,” Cervantes 808), one that required its own new problematic (the Moors are attacking!) and solutions (save “so famous a knight and so bold a lover as Don Gaiferos,” ibid.).

These adventures are the externalized manifestation of the hero’s reality principle. The hero seeks adventures to prove this reality principle, which is why, as Ortega adds, Don Quixote’s will is “obsessed with one single goal: adventure” (Ortega 136). The adventure is the externalization of the hero’s will, which is to be oneself, which is to bring us around in a circle, for the hero's self is his reality principle. Ortega says, “this will to be oneself is heroism” (149). This radical involution—adventure is the externalized will of the hero; the hero’s will is to be himself; he is his reality principle; Don Quixote’s reality is knight-errantry which is adventure—is at the heart of such surprisingly forthright statements of honesty as “We pay no attention to the childish rules” (Cervantes 638) and “knights-errant are beyond all jurisdiction” (481). The order of chivalry attains primacy for Don Quixote only because of a previous act of will, as he continually intimates at almost all points—e.g., in chapter 6, “Heaven wills, fate ordains, reason asks, and, above all, my own will desires” (642, italics mine). Ortega says at one point, “Far from the tragic originating in fate, then, it is essential for the hero to want his tragic destiny” (Ortega 154). The ultimate act of expression for a titanic will like Don Quixote’s was to will the restraints of the order of chivalry on himself, which at the same time are the restraints of constant adventure and enactment of one’s will, “beyond all jurisdiction.”

If one asks what the external point of all this willing of oneself and seeking of adventure to prove the reality of one’s will (or rather, the will of one’s reality) is, then it can only be the record of that titanic will—fame and immortality. Though we get more and more reflections on fame and eternal glory as we move through Part II, more and more involved with the books on Don Quixote as they come out (and Chapter 8 provides us with the first good treatment of fame), Chapter 6 does have those subtle inflections of essential thematic that are inherent in the reiterable essence of chivalry that is Don Quixote. After his taxonomy of knights and then knights-errant, Don Quixote gives us a theory of people: those on the upswing, on the downswing, always up, and always down. Of the latter, he says they had “neither a good start nor a subsequent history that was in any way out of the ordinary and who accordingly will have a nameless end…” (Cervantes 640, italics mine). They “increase the number of the living without any other claim to fame, since they have achieved no form of greatness that entitles them to praise” (641, italics mine). Don Quixote sees “greatness,” not as money or land, or honor or virtue, but as deeds that are recorded—becoming a “name.” The former list falls out from the attainment of the latter, as the promise of an island is continually held out to Sancho Panza. And that is Don Quixote’s tragedy. Don Quixote’s tragic fate, which he wills and desires, is to be Don Quixote—his will is to be the titanic will of Don Quixote, that laughable figure of titanic will. Don Quixote’s tragic fate is to be the immortal, literary figure of Don Quixote. Which is Ortega’s point about epic—the titanic will is out of place, and Don Quixote is that exemplification of an out of place will, and as such is both tragic and comic, buffoonish and sad.