Lamarque, Peter The Philosophy of Literature.  Blackwell Publishing 2009 Pp. xi + 296.  (Paper: ISBN: 978-1-4051-2198-9)

 

Reviewed by

 

Jeffrey Strayer

Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne

 

 

Peter Lamarque’s The Philosophy of Literature is the third volume in Blackwell’s ‘Foundations of the Philosophy of Arts’ series, edited by Philip Alperson.  The style and content of the book make it a good fit for the scope and intent of this series, but it could stand alone as an excellent introduction to its subject.  Lamarque has written extensively on the philosophy of literature, and this work shows that he has both a fine appreciation of the depth and complexities of this area of philosophical aesthetics, and a broad knowledge of the literature of that pertains to it.  This is not a book, however, that is written by a philosopher purely for philosophers.  Rather, Lamarque is interested to communicate the sort of philosophical questions that can be raised about literature as art to what might be termed a ‘reflective audience’ - a group of thinkers that would include critics, literary authors, and perceptive readers. (vii)  Although the method of attempting to answer these questions is analytic, Lamarque has an appreciation of other kinds of philosophical procedure, and an apothegmatic view of what might account for individual adoption of one or another way of philosophizing.  I have long suspected that one’s philosophical predilections have as much to do one’s sense of intellectual beauty as education, and although Lamarque does not quite say that one becomes a pragmatist or a phenomenologist because of an aesthetic attraction to one or another type of philosophical methodology, he does maintain that “Styles of philosophizing are largely a matter of temperament and training.” (vii)  Surely one’s aesthetic sense is part of his or her temperament?  In any case though, the goal remains the truth, something that Lamarque recognizes in the sentence following the aphorism quoted when he says, “In the end what is important is the illumination that is afforded.” (vii)  The commitment to that illumination means that, although Lamarque is an analytic philosopher, continental thinkers are not excluded, and both Barthes and Foucault are well-represented.  

 

The book is divided into seven chapters, each identified by a single word, beginning with ‘Art’ and ending with ‘Value.’  For Lamarque, the central question in the philosophy of literature is ‘What does it mean to see literature as an art form?’  Attending philosophically to literature as art includes raising the question of what sort of thing literature is.  Early in the first chapter, Lamarque argues that literary works are not entities that are separate from criticism and discussion of them.  Literary works then depend not only on authors but on an understanding public, a public that identifies and responds to the works as artifacts intentionally directed to an audience rather than natural objects having no relations to human intentions or expectations.  Literary works are entities that invite reaction and evaluation.  As such they are at least in part the products of critical discourse. (7)  Further, Lamarque says that artistic literature is a kind of artifact that “is capable of affording distinct kinds of pleasure.” (16)  This kind of pleasure is typically termed ‘aesthetic.’  However, the relation between art and the aesthetic is controversial, and even for those who insist on the importance to art of the aesthetic, it is notoriously difficult to specify the relation between the two because the notion of the aesthetic is not particularly perspicuous.  Much of the first chapter of The Philosophy of Literature is devoted to looking at aesthetic experience and aesthetic qualities as part of the consideration of aesthetics and literature.

 

The chapters of The Philosophy of Literature are divided into sections written in bold type which may be further partitioned into subsections identified by italicized titles.  For instance, Chapter Two ‘Literature’ includes Anti-essentialism about Literature - the view that there are no necessary conditions that are jointly sufficient to mark off a literary artwork from everything that is not a literary artwork - which itself includes Family Resemblances (Morris Weitz); Cluster Theories (Berys Gaut); Disjunctive Definitions (Robert Stecker); and Different Expectations - the concluding subsection that notes the possibility of defining literary artworks by ostension, or by noting how they differ significantly from other kinds of non-literary thing.  As an antidote to Weitz’s anti-essentialism, the institutional accounts of art of Arthur Danto and George Dickie are nicely outlined, and subsections on not just the sociological, but, more importantly, the analytical conception of an institution are included.  The second chapter ends with the very thorny issue of the ontology of art.  This includes consideration of whether literary works are physical objects - mounds of ink on paper; mental entities - ideas or mental states of authors or of readers; or abstract types of which physical copies of works are individual tokens.  According to this latter Platonist view, works of art, perhaps counterintuitively, are discovered  not created by artists.  This view, if correct, allows for the possibility that two or more authors discover the same work by writing the same text independently of one another at the same or different times - a view that supports the textualist identification of a work with its text. (74) Contextualists who argue that when, where, and why a work was produced figures in its artistic identity argue that two different works could in theory share the same text. (77)  Lamarque’s consideration of these issues is well-informed and well-documented in the many footnotes that can be found at the bottom of nearly every page.  (May I take this opportunity to encourage all authors to insist on footnotes in the future and politely but forcefully object to the travesty of endnotes?)   Having recognized Lamarque’s scholarship, perhaps some attention to Karl Popper’s view of cultural entities - such as artworks - that, although abstract, have a causal relation to human intention - and thus as created types are different from the Platonist view of eternal entities - might have been usefully considered in relation to the textualist-contextualist debate of the section on ontology. 

 

Chapter Three looks at authors and relations between them and their literary works.  Here four theses pertaining to the “complex web of ideas and arguments” (105) of Barthes and Foucault that Lamarque names “the author-is-modern,” “the author-is-dead,” “the author function,” and “the Écriture” are clearly and concisely stated and are fairly examined for their strengths and weaknesses.  The theoretical issue of how an author’s intentions should figure in critical practice is the subject of the sections Anti-Intentionalism and The Intentionalist Response.  Several pages are devoted to why anti-intentionalists, such as Wimsatt and Beardsley, deny that any authorial intention is a legitimate standard either for judging the value of a work or determining its meaning.  Philosophers who argue for the relevance of intentions are broadly divided by whether they defend either ‘actual’ or ‘hypothetical’ intentionalism.  For Lamarque, determining who has the better argument about authorial intentions is not easy.  This is because it is not clear “where the nub of the debate lies.” (130)  In voicing that view he raises four questions about meaning, intention, autonomy, and evidence that are pertinent to any attempt to identify what the focus of discourse should be.

Interpretation of a work is fundamental to literature as art, and interpretation as a philosophical matter is considered in the next part of the book titled “Practice.”  A principal question here is whether the interpreter finds something in the work that is intentionally put there by its author, or the interpreter herself is responsible for what she finds.  Lamarque says that answering this question involves recognizing the distinction between a text and a work.  A text has certain linguistic properties that determine the content of a text.  These properties are the result of public rules that are known to authors and readers.  A work differs from a text in being “contextualized . . . grounded in a time and culture . . . [and conforming] to the conventions of an ‘institution.’” (153)  In addition, interpretation applies importantly to works, not texts.  Interpretation not only pertains to the issue of authorial intention, but to audience expectation and the relation of that to literary conventions, and so to the institutional framework in which works are produced and consumed.  The view that literary works do not exist independently, but are constructed in acts of reading and interpreting them, is considered in this chapter, as is the possibility that the ‘same’ work could support incompatible interpretations.   Interestingly, incompatibility does not itself threaten intentionalism since an author might intend his work to support more than one interpretation. (166)  The chapter concludes with looking at appreciation and its relation to understanding and to pleasure.

 

What sort of thing, philosophically speaking, is fiction?  Does Hamlet - either the play or the protagonist - exist in some sense?  What do we mean when we say that certain things are true of a character of fiction?  To what do we refer when we speak of a work or character of fiction?  If a work is fictitious can it nevertheless contain truths?  If so, how?  Can we legitimately ascribe properties, such as being witty or temperamental, to a fictitious character as we do to living humans?  Questions of this sort that intersect with issues in metaphysics and philosophical logic form the subject matter of Chapter Five.  Lamarque does a nice job of sketching two main views of the metaphysics of fiction that he calls “eliminativism” - descending from Russell and his Theory of Descriptions (188), and “accommodationism” - which comes from Meinong’s view “that there are nonexistent as well as existent objects” (191) - (in a sense of “are,” I might add, that is non-ontological and is often misunderstood).  The chapter concludes with an examination of fiction and emotion.

The penultimate chapter of the book is about multifarious connections between literary fiction and truth.  Can literature, as fictitious, be a source of truth, perhaps even as much as science or philosophy?  Might any truth that literature has be different from either scientific or philosophical truth?  Must literature be in some sense truthful to have value?  Lamarque provides some historical background for the relation between truth and literature with Plato and Aristotle before looking at different notions of literary truth: one that says that literary truth is analogous to science and philosophy and the other that takes it to be sui generis.  One might suppose that there would be a near consensus of what it means for literary truth to be sui generis for adherents of the view that it is, but Lamarque suggests that there may be “no unified conception of a sui generis truth for literature.” (226)  When one speaks of philosophical truth, however, the paradigm “is the true proposition” (227), at least among those philosophers who are analytic.  And for Lamarque, “propositional truth, as favored by philosophers, does have a role to play in the characterization of the content of even the most overtly fictional works.” (239, my italics)  It need not be maintained that any cognitive benefit of literature is necessarily propositional, but the preceding quote suggests that “literary works derive at least some of their value from a truth-like component or a component to do with human cognition.” (253) That having been noted though, the nature of that component “remains murky.” (253)

 

Literature as art would seem to have something to do with value, perhaps necessarily, at least for those works that become part of the canon, and the book concludes with the topic of value.  While we normally think of an instrumental value of literature in terms of an effect it has on the reader, and that a work’s intrinsic value has to do with being valued for itself, Lamarque says that the “intrinsic value of a work of art cannot be independent of all effects because works of art only have value for human beings.  The very existence of works of art is dependent on the responses of humans to art.” (264)  This is a complicated assertion.  I agree that nothing can have the property of being a work of art without the possible recognition by human beings of the intended identity of the work.  And the understanding of that identity is itself a kind of response.  However, it is not necessarily one that has a value component.  One could comprehend that something is meant to be a work of art without supposing that it is valuable.  This simply recognizes Dickie’s distinction between the classificatory and evaluative senses of artwork.  The issue is further complicated by the fact that some artworks - such as certain works of Conceptual art - are meant to be identified with things that cannot be experienced.  And although it may be possible to speak of responses to such works - responses that would presuppose apprehension of objects on which understanding the intended identity of the works depended - they would be different from responses to traditional works that can in some way be experienced.  The first part of Lamarque’s assertion though is quite correct.  It is simply nonsense to talk about the intrinsic value of any artwork apart from a person who, minimally, appreciates the value of the work in virtue of understanding the intended identity of the work.

 

This is a rich and worthwhile book that contains many things of value that restrictions of time and space did not allow me to mention.  It is well-organized, well-researched, and well-written.  Supplementary readings are appended to each chapter and the book has an excellent bibliography.  The index is thorough.  The Philosophy of Literature could profitably serve as either the textbook for an introductory course in its subject, or as part of an advanced course in that topic.  As earlier noted, the work should be of interest to critics, and to writers and readers of fiction, in addition to philosophers and aestheticians.