Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 5 Number 1, April 2004

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William S. Haney, II Culture and Consciousness: Literature Regained. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2002. pp. 197. ISBN 0-8387-5529-1. Hbk, $ 39.50

 

Reviewed by

 

James Tipton

 

College of Marin, USA

 

William S. Haney’s new work of literary criticism, Culture and Consciousness: Literature Regained, gives us a much needed new critical language in which we can actually think.  Haney¹s approach comes to us out of the tradition of the ancient mystic philosophers, such as Plotinus and Shankara, and of the great American poets of transcendental insight—Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Kenneth Rexroth, Gary Snyder, and Mary Oliver. His book is solidly in the forefront of the new interdisciplinary field of consciousness studies. Haney¹s explanation of consciousness in his first three chapters is both so universal and specific in its terms that readers can take these terms and apply them where they will.  Haney himself applies them in works as diverse as Samuel Beckett and Kurt Vonnegut, giving us new insights into those texts and even changing the way we read them.  On the basis of Haney¹s clearly outlined theory, it is implied, then, that after he has given us a start with Beckett, Pinter, Vonnegut and DeLillo, the list can continue ad infinitum, as the readers apply his terms virtually to any work of imaginative literature.

What Haney has really accomplished, then, is to have given us a new tool for understanding cultural and literary studies by giving us a new language in which to grasp and articulate the experience of literature.  This is the experience of the protagonists as well as the experience in the minds of the readers themselves.

 

Haney’s new language combines ancient Indian literary theory and postmodernism.  He suggests that what Western literature and theory has been pointing to all along is “what Indian aesthetics describes as the transpersonal, transcultural state” (8).  This in itself is a bold and fresh enough angle to make this book worth reading.  Critics have exhausted all the deconstructionist and postmodernist terms, and we have seen them applied over and over, and to what effect?  Ultimately to devalue literature, one could say, to deconstruct it until it is so relative or so subjective that it could mean anything or nothing.  Haney says that in postmodernity “all values are replaced by interpretation, which becomes the foundation or essential feature of the universe” (24).

 

As Haney’s subtitle implies, he is working to “regain literature” by forging a new approach that values consciousness itself, the underlying basis of the literature and the underlying basis of thought for the writer, for the protagonist, and for the reader.  Haney’s book also “regains literature” by heightening an awareness of the fundamental interconnectedness of being, to which the interconnectedness of the work of art gives access.

 

What are some of Haney’s terms, then, his new language to approach literature?  Of course it is not new at all, but is ancient terms reapplied. Haney’s audacious angle is to take us to the earliest philosophical terms--Vedic/Indian--and to use them as a universal basis to gain insight into modern literature.  Haney is as at home quoting from the Mandukya Upanishad, the Rig Veda, or the Yoga Sutras as he is in quoting from Derrida, Kant, or William James.

 

In Chapter One Haney takes our mind in a new critical direction by using the “Indian theory of rasadhvani, the flavor of the subtle sentiments leading toward liberation or moksha” to explain the literary phenomenon of “the timeless present” or “a moment of eternity” (22).

 

He defines consciousness in terms of “purusha or consciousness itself,” as distinguished from “prakriti or matter, which includes all psychological faculties: intellect, ego, mind, sense capacities...” and tells us that “the mistake of the intellect is to identify the intellect, ego, and mind with consciousness” (43).  The moment of moksha, then, or “the timeless present” is a moment lifted out of the flux, when the protagonist in literature or the reader--sometimes through the style and structure of the literature itself, as Haney argues is the case in Beckett and in Pinter--is brought to the liberating awareness of identifying itself with the transpersonal

prakriti or consciousness.

 

Haney points out that Atman or self is actually this transpersonal pure consciousness, separate from all the aspects of prakriti or matter.  This reminds us of Whitman’s lines

 

    Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,

    Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary...

    Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.

                                (“Song of Myself,” part 4)

 

Haney, using Indian poetics, would call this “the transpersonal state of witnessing awareness” (8).  His Vedic explanation of the self chimes also with Whitman’s notion of the universal self.  The “mistake of the intellect,” or sometimes of the literary critic, would be to identify this notion of Whitman’s self with the ego rather than with the all embracing cosmic self. 

 

One place Haney’s discussion can take us is to issues of identity in literature.  An early premise in the book is that  “basic questions about identity and truth...cannot be resolved solely on the basis of the mind or reason,” (7) but on a larger perspective of consciousness studies.

 

According to Haney, the nature of the self as separate from matter is only part of the story, though.  He explains in Chapter Two how, “ironically, the hybridity and supermodernity of the world, instead of merely producing ever greater complexity, may also be taking us toward the realization of simplicity: that of a nonpluralistic phenomenon--open not only to the individual but also collectively to the intersubject” (66).  This “nonpluralistic phenomenon” is the non-dualistic nature of consciousness itself, or what Haney, quoting from the Indian mystic Shankara, refers to in Chapter Three as “qualityless, without parts” (81).  In other words, pure consciousness or purusha is ultimately also matter, prakriti.

 

This realization of non-duality of spirit and matter and of self and transcendental absolute Whitman expresses as

 

    I have said that the soul is not more than the body

    And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,

    And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one¹s self is...

                                (“Song of Myself” part 48)

 

Haney leads us to an awareness of the fundamental interconnectedness of all things through swinging us back and forth from deconstruction to Sanskrit poetics.  The style and scope of the book itself is an interconnecting, a non-dualism between the thought and poetics of East and West.

 

Haney’s breadth and documentation is impressive, both in his theory and in application.  I, myself, think that Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five is one the great, original works of he twentieth century, so I very much enjoyed Haney elucidating it as “shaking up or unsettling memory and thereby driving the individual toward an experience of the interstices of light, or the flashes of being underlying the social construction of the self”  (133).

 

In Haney’s last chapter he takes us to new, but related territory—that of the ethical challenge regarding the postmodern “man machine” as indicated in fiction—“the relation between ethics, free will, and consciousness” (160).  He argues that “any insentient (or nonconscious) being--robots, androids, and finally perhaps posthumans” lack “a true intersubjectivity based on the experience of nonphysical presence” (163).  Or, to use his earlier terms, since they do not have access to pure consciousness and an ability to realize their connection with it, if we were to rely on them we would “rely on the intellect at the expense of feelings and the capacity for pure experience” and we would “undermine the holistic field of human experience” (173).  Haney, in a short book, has gone from Plotinus and nondualism to science fiction and the posthuman, amazingly using Sanskrit and deconstructionist terms throughout.

 

What I have done a few times with Haney’s terms and Walt Whitman is what I think Haney¹s book encourages readers, critics, and teachers to do—to take these ancient, fundamental terms of Sanskrit poetics, which he concretely explains and applies, and expand our appreciation of literature, or “regain literature,” by using them ourselves.  As such, his book serves as the basis for many more like it, in the burgeoning field of consciousness studies.