Know Thyselves
What is fiction for? Bernard Harrison's answers to the question are the traditional ones long taken for granted by almost all those who care about plays, short stories, and novels. Literature, if it is any good, is "one of the chief engines of self-understanding." At the same time, literature has the power to "immerse us" in an unfamiliar situation and society and, "moreover, to immerse us in it as participants rather than as impersonal observers."
Literature reveals "aspects of the human condition . . . in such a way as to bring them before the bar of critical scrutiny and self-examination." Furthermore, as readers of the classics of East and West have always known, the "audience for the great literature of any age of any culture is not limited to the people of that culture or age, but extends . . . to all mankind."
This long book provides an innovative, rigorous philosophical defense for "merely what every common reader has always taken to be involved in 'talking about books.' " The common reader is right, Harrison argues, to believe that literature offers valuable insights into human life that cannot be replaced or duplicated by psychology, sociology, or any of the social sciences. Belief in literature's ability to offer insights into individuals, societies, and the human condition itself has long been the basis for claiming "academic literary studies as a cornerstone of the humanities."
Within the academy, however, defenders of the traditional study of literature—what Harrison calls "literary humanism"—have been overwhelmed in recent decades by attacks launched by French theoreticians such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, seemingly proving the theoretical impossibility of literature providing any insights at all. Foucauldians, deconstructionists, Marxists, and the other factions of the campus left agree that high culture in general, and literary culture in particular, serves no purpose other than "to disseminate false but persuasive visions of the human condition" designed to legitimate one or another form of exploitation.
Harrison's theoretical innovation in answering such views is to call on the account of meaning and language provided by Ludwig Wittgenstein. Using the philosopher in this way undoubtedly seems perverse to devotees of the cult of Wittgenstein, who take him to be a postmodernist avant la lettre. Harrison insists, however, that it is wrong to think of Wittgenstein as "a Viennese or Cambridge version of Derrida." Convinced that the notion of literature as imitation or mimesis is vulnerable to postmodernist critique, Harrison challenges contemporary theory's thesis that "meaning is determined internally to language" and thus "can offer no possible access to any reality transcending language" by adopting Wittgenstein's view of language as "a public institution."
In Harrison's exposition, language is not a self-contained unit but, instead, a "system of publicly recognized practices that are so contrived as to afford roles in their conduct to linguistic expressions." Words, sentences, and other verbal entities are thus connected to the world not because they represent discrete objects but because "our ways of using words" are grounded in the "underlying practices" that make up the human world.
Because language is inextricably connected to human activities— including both interaction between human beings and with the natural world—writers, even writers of fiction, cannot use words without implicitly referring to human life. Harrison points out what would-be creative writers learn early: A writer cannot "make language obedient to his wishes." As Wittgenstein insisted, there is no such thing as a private language. The language a writer uses "is recalcitrant to his will because it is not his property." It is "also the property of a community that extends across a span of time far greater than his lifetime." Wittgenstein's conception of language has implications for the reader or critic as well as the writer.
Postmodernists like Stanley Fish insist that arguments about the meaning of any text—the Constitution, for example—are merely struggles for power, since the Constitution (like any text) has no meaning in itself. Arguing against those who worry that arbitrary interpretations of the Constitution drain the document of meaning, Fish says there is no need to worry: "[T]he Constitution cannot be drained of meaning because it is not a repository of meaning." In contrast, the notion that language is connected to human practices—to the human world outside the text—implies that a text is not merely a void ready to be filled by whatever interpretation those in power may offer but is, instead, itself something real. As Harrison puts it, "the literary text is capable of fighting back."
Though Harrison's defense of "literary humanism" allies him with a critical tradition beginning with Aristotle and continuing through Samuel Johnson, Matthew Arnold, and Lionel Trilling to the present, he singles out F. R. Leavis for anticipating Wittgenstein's ideas about the relation between meaning and the human world. Leavis's emphasis on literature's relation to "life," often criticized for vagueness, can be given philosophical precision by understanding "life" as referring to the human world constituted by socially recognized "practices" rather than either the physical universe studied by the natural sciences or the Cartesian notion of the individual mind.
A glance at Leavis's occasionally intemperate prose finds him often "needlessly playing into the hands of his detractors." But Harrison applauds Leavis's view of literary criticism as, in principle, an ongoing debate:
Literary criticism—decent literary criticism—is never just a matter of parading emotional responses or "gut feelings," but always a matter of advancing claims that give hostages to further inquiry in the shape of textual analysis, in a manner entirely analogous to the way hypotheses in science give hostages to further inquiry in the shape either of experiment or critique of theory.
If Harrison is willing to overlook Leavis's flaws because of an underlying philosophical agreement, he is unwilling to make any such concessions to the New Criticism and, especially, to Cleanth Brooks. Harrison distances himself from the New Critical notion (exemplified in Brooks's The Well Wrought Urn) that one mark of literary excellence is the ability of the writer to draw a text's "various elements into a single coherent unity." He believes that in regard to the concept of unity, at least, the attacks of "Derrida, de Man, Foucault, Kermode, and a host of others" cannot be answered. The prudent literary humanist gives up unity and with it "the notion of 'the meaning of the literary work' . . . in favor of the notion of the bearing, or bearings, of the work." Harrison quotes, disapprovingly, Cleanth Brooks's assertion that the best literature does not merely imitate the confusions and discordances of reality but, "at its higher and more serious levels, triumphs over the apparently contradictory and conflicting elements of experience by unifying them into a new pattern."
Though Harrison wants to distinguish his own "reactive" criticism from that of Brooks and the New Critics, the examples he offers—impressive in their own right—seem to involve notions of meaning and unity indistinguishable from those employed by the New Criticism. Harrison's thoughtful analysis of Book IV of Gulliver's Travels concludes that the book's "structure . . . was devised both to evoke the philosophical psychology of rational universalism and to test to destruction its claim to provide an adequate and exhaustive account of the options facing human beings in morals and politics." Very well—but doesn't this perceptive account make use of the concepts of "meaning" and "unity" Harrison claims to have left behind?
Similarly, in his discussion of Tristram Shandy, Harrison's close reading reveals that Laurence Sterne "clearly is out to propagate some coherent view of morality" and, in so doing, reveals the shallowness "of some of the most popular intellectual shibboleths of his age." Harrison's readings are convincing, but it is hard to see how they differ in kind from the best New Critical readings, including Cleanth Brooks's analyses in The Well Wrought Urn.
The main issue, of course, is not Harrison's differences with the New Criticism but his powerful philosophical defense of literary humanism against the assaults of postmodernist theorizing. All those who care about literature, including admirers of the New Criticism, are indebted to Bernard Harrison for demonstrating, at length and in painstaking theoretical detail, the philosophical validity for the twenty-first century of "merely what every common reader has always taken to be involved in 'talking about books.'"
James Seaton, professor of English at Michigan State, is the author, most recently, of Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism: The Humanistic Alternative.
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