Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 7 Number 3, December 2006
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Rudrum, David, ed. Literature and Philosophy: A Guide to Contemporary Debates, Hampshire: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2006, 246 pp, ISBN 1 – 4039 – 4773 – 2, £50.00
Reviewed by
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India
The postmodern world saw the breaking down of rigid disciplinary boundaries, often with beneficial results. As more and more apparently heterogeneous disciplines come together to graze on pastures new, those that had always shared common territories strive for a more fruitful bonding. The discourses of philosophy and literature have always overlapped one another; most literary movements have their roots deep down in philosophical soil and philosophy has sought to explicate itself through the fruits that literature bore. However, the interface between these two disciplines and even their very survival is being called into question today, prompting those in these areas to introspect the nature of their discourse and attempt to speculate of what the future holds.
“Literature and Philosophy: A Guide to Contemporary Debates”, is an anthology of critical essays edited by David Rudrum. As the title of the book indicates, the essays are about the sometimes embattled, somewhat fractious terrain that the disciplines of literature and philosophy have traveled, without for a moment gainsaying the fact that the two are interconnected, and that it is to the mutual benefit of the two to be so interconnected.
The anthology is divided into six parts, all of them dealing with various aspects of the relationship between literature and philosophy. The first three are about the encounters between literature and the three main streams of Western philosophy—Anglo-American, French and German. Part IV is about ethical problems, Part V about reading philosophical works as literature and the last part ‘Approaching the End’ looks into the future of these two interconnected disciplines.
This division facilitates the easy identification for the reader of major issues in the field, mapping as it does an evolution of sorts. The editor David Rudrum’s introductory essays that preface each of these parts are concise and function as excellent ready-reference pieces of introduction to the subjects of discussion that follow. These essays also mention a list of books by other authors that act as pointers to people who are interested in further reading in the area.
Part I, “Encounters with Literature in French Philosophy” explores the philosophical underpinnings of two writers—F. Scott Fitzgerald and Samuel Beckett respectively. Anthony Larson’s First Lessons: Deleuze and the Concept of Literature strikes the right opening note by raising pertinent questions: “How can something as quaint as literature and philosophy be of any use to us today? How can we use literature and philosophy today when everything seems to point away from such disciplines and towards the means-ends relationship of business?” (13) The answer to this is reached through Deleuze, who was concerned with the ‘how’ of things, with practical philosophy and its exemplification through literature. Larson chooses an alternative approach, based on the Deleuzian idea of literature as a concept that interrogates its very conditions of creation, to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. He traces the double movement in the novel, the relation of Gatsby-the-text and Gatsby-the-character, which by extension can be seen as the relation of oneself and life. Larson thus underscores that literature and philosophy are mutually enabling discourses, a point that Derval Tubridy’s piece on Beckett also takes up. Tubridy provides an insight into the philosophical ideas that inform Beckett’s work and also the writer’s ideas that in turn played a role in the corpus of French philosophical thought that developed after him.
The interface between literature and Anglo-American philosophy is detailed in the essays by Bryan Vescio, Garry L. Hagberg and Brett Bourbon and deal with metaphors, the role of memory in autobiographies, and the style of Gertrude Stein. Vescio notes Donald Davidson’s writings on metaphor and argues that his views on metaphor can be extended to the activity of literary criticism in general. In a lucidly argued essay, Vescio foregrounds the views of Rorty and Davidson that literature fosters diversity; a contemporary tendency to privilege a few interpretive strategies might lead to stagnation, he warns. Bourbon’s provocatively titled essay “What Can My Nonsense Tell Me about You?” centres on the “aesthetically motivated nonsense” (66) of Gertrude Stein. He analyses the use of the pronoun ‘I’ in Stein and contends that her attempt to create an expressive language by distorting it, is artificial and serves no purpose.
The other main school of philosophy to influence literature—the German—is the focus of “Encounters with German Philosophy in Literature”, and takes up Husserl, Heidegger, and Walter Benjamin. Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei raises a very interesting question of the ‘poeticization of philosophy’ through the problematic figure of Heidegger who gained notoriety for his Nazi leanings. The notion of poetry as rendering you incapable of rational thinking can be traced back to Plato and Heidegger’s susceptibility to Nazism was construed as an outcome of his too poetic a sensibility. Gosetti-Ferencei systematically undermines this idea that the poetic is dangerous and succeeds in proving that it was precisely the poetic in Heidegger that finally absolved him of his errors in judgment. Gosetti-Ferenci’s essay is extensively researched and lucidly written. Ralph Strehle looks at a series of relationships—between the self and the other, and self and time—that links the novels of Virginia Woolf and the phenomenological concepts of Edmund Husserl. Richard J. Lane examines Walter Benjamin’s dislike for theory and his emphasis on the literary as a fitting vehicle for his ideas.
The fourth section enters a relatively difficult terrain as the signposts of philosophical schools are missing and the reader is left to grapple with abstractions; but “Ethics in Literature” deals with the oft asked question: “How does literature affect people?” Mary C. Rawlinson, in a brilliant essay that touches on the question of moral agency within gendered and racist paradigms, goes against the traditional concept that literature supplements the concepts and projects of moral philosophy and argues that it actually challenges the ideas of moral good and justice. Interestingly, Rawlinson goes to detective fiction because, according to her it displays “concepts of agency, judgment, and sociality that more adequately address our genuine experiences of ethical urgency than do those of moral philosophy” (131) She articulates the problematic of moral agency through the Hannibal trilogy of Thomas Harris and the Harlem novels of Chester Himes, drawing attention to the fact that literature forces us to “take on the obligations of moral agents with none of the reassurances that moral philosophy gives” (140). Rupert Read, in a clever piece of argument that verges on sophistry, discusses the question of forgiveness. Read looks at Salman Rushdie’s oeuvre, which he considers to be an extended meditation on the difficult act of forgiving and the beauty of actual forgiveness. However, the central eponymous question, “Is Forgiveness Ever Possible At All?” seems to remain unanswered.
If other sections are looking at the philosophical underpinnings of literature, “Reading Philosophy as Literature” attempts to view the textuality of philosophy, an undertaking that is likely to be frowned upon by ‘purist’ philosophers. A branch of literary studies that devotes itself entirely to literary style is available to us, but the style of philosophers has remained relatively untouched. Robert Eaglestone and Michael Eskin discuss the metaphorical style of philosophers like Derrida and the ‘how’ of reading a text as philosophy or literature. Jonathan Ree discusses the problematic of the style best suited to philosophers, or in other words, the question, ‘Does philosophy need a style that is direct and lucid’? The ‘gibberophobia’ as Ree terms it, inhibit most philosophical writings and is a hindrance to the commitment to exactitude. Ree draws upon the American philosopher Brand Blanshard to draw up an apologia for the convoluted and often incomprehensible style of philosophers like Derrida. David Rudrum notes the Bakhtinian dialogism in Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations” and points out how the text gains if we are receptive to its myriad nuances, intertextuality and perspectival multiplicity.
The last part, although rather ominously titled “Conclusion: Approaching the End”, provides hope for an interdisciplinary future for the two discourses. Was Adorno right in saying that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz? The two essays here consider the position of aesthetics in a hopelessly mercantile and utilitarian contemporary world. Josh Cohen analyzes art, both sculpture and fiction, to look at its vestigial nature in contemporary times. Simon Malpas points to new horizons for aesthetics when he says that aesthetics becomes the site for contesting the totalization and reification of the culture industry. This provides an ending on a note of hope to the volume that talks about two discourses that are currently under siege for being superfluous in a commercial age. Moreover, this adequately answers the question raised by Anthony Larson in the first essay of the anthology: What use is literature and philosophy in contemporary times?
The topics in the volume are representative of ongoing debates in the fields of literature and philosophy, but two notable omissions are studies on Derrida and Foucault. This is surprising, given the primacy of these two philosophers to post-structuralist literary theory. Most of the essays talk of the application of philosophical ideas to literature but not the reverse, which somehow suggests the ascendancy of philosophy over literature.
However, the anthology is comprehensive and covers most of the streams of thought that have informed the discourses of literature and philosophy. It is immensely helpful both to the novice and the expert, as it combines critical overviews with meticulously researched pieces on specific topics. The essays are refreshingly jargon-free, without being simplistic or banal. A collection of this sort definitely adds to the existing body of work on the two disciplines that share more than just boundaries.