by Hale Chatfield
Copyright 1992-1995 by Hale Chatfield.
This essay may be freely quoted or distributed if proper credit is given to its author and to POETRY WORLD, where it was published for the first time in October, 1995.
During these final years of the twentieth century, the criticism of literature has been characterized by its responsiveness to a perceived challenge from the natural sciences to make itself more objective. This sense of challenge from science or even of competition with science arises, at least by the way, in countless contemporary commentaries on literary criticism. For example, in Beyond Deconstruction, Howard Felperin describes "the current paradigm shift toward theory" as "the transformation of a humanist discourse, deriving its terms from the wider, broadly moral, cultural currency,, into a more scientific and specialist . . . one"(p. 1), and Terry Eagleton, in Literary Theory: An Introduction, writes: ". . . as North American society developed over the 1950's, growing more rigidly scientific and managerial in its modes of thought, a more ambitious form of critical technocracy seemed demanded."(p. 91)
Of course this "paradigm shift" from "criticism" to "theory" demonstrates in itself a preoccupation with the lexicon of science. More specifically, structuralism, deconstruction, and even Marxist and feminist theories share an impression of themselves and their goals that they are more objective, indeed more "scientific,"* than such predecessors as biographical criticism ("Great Man" or "Great Person" approaches) or New Criticism. They have also shared with much of science a view that it is inappropriate to attribute discovery or insight to conceptual accomplishments of specific human beings. It has increasingly come to seem absurd to see the Four Quartets specifically as an emanation from the man T.S. Eliot, quite as it has seemed absurd to attribute concepts of Space-Time Relativity to the person of Albert Einstein.
Students of literature are made dizzy by a proliferation of literary theories, which has become sufficiently chaotic for Joseph Natoli to refer to it employing imagery of a "theory carnival" throughout his Preface to and his first essay in Tracing Literary Theory (e.g., pp. xix, 5, 8, 13, 22, etc.).
Without seeking to amplify or otherwise increase challenges to specific discourses of literary theory beyond the confrontations they offer to each other, it may be possible to challenge a little their widely shared confidence in two of their premises: first, that the manipulability ("usefulness") of its data authenticates a critical discourse by making it more "scientific," and, second, that science itself is characterized chiefly by the manner in which its different (and even nominally competing) disciplines consciously cooperate in a long march toward Truth.
This essay proffers such a challenge constructed for the sake of argument from two perhaps unlikely perspectives outside of literature itself: religious philosophy (Martin Buber) and thermodynamics (Ilya Prigogine), which is to say, from religion and science. The argument from Buber proposes that the over-objectifying of literary criticism radically disables it. The argument from Prigogine proposes that as an access to Truth science differs from the arts less than we had thought.
Let us propose, arbitrarily, that the essential task of literary criticism is to help make literature more accessible to its audience.
In a way, Martin Buber's argument in I and Thou is quasi-literary at the outset. Buber asks us to consider as primal words "I," "Thou," "It," "I-Thou," and "I-It." Buber asks us to imagine a human being (maybe the very first human being, or perhaps a child) having his or her first encounter with someone or something else. This first encounter is intense, and fully occupies the person experiencing it. The experience itself, says Buber, contains two elements: "I exist ('I') and you exist ('Thou')," and for a moment that is all of it, for a moment that is everything. Imagine you are alone in your room reading a book; you look up and see a bear looking at you. You and the bear for a moment look intently at each other. That look and that moment are everything. Surprise and interest drain off any other knowledge, thought, or awareness. Although no actual word is spoken, Buber calls this experience the "primal word" I-Thou. It is a full awareness. It involves two components. If there were a word for it, it would mean something like "I-Thou."
The instant that this moment is past, the encounter is literally history. The "Thou" half of the experience is gone--and has become "It." So the relationship we have ever after, even in talking about what happened, has become "I-It," no matter how highly we regard or have regarded the experience.
Buber thinks that the religious experience consists of learning how to have "I-Thou" encounters. We can have them with other human beings, with God, or even with objects (no doubt if the "bear" above had been an approaching ball of fire, it still would have produced an "I-Thou" experience in the setting described). In the world outside the encounter itself, our only experiences are "I-It," says Buber: even our experience of God. Thus the world is the repository of the raw materials ("Its") for "I-Thou" experiences. Our awareness, no matter how keen, of an "It" must always be an "I-It" rather than an "I-Thou" experience: "The world has no part in the experience. It permits itself to be experienced, but has no concern for the matter. For it does nothing to the experience . . . . 11 (p. 5). Buber goes on:
"The world of It is set in the context of space and time.
"The world Thou is not set in the context of either of these.
"The particular Thou, after the relational event has run its course, is bound to become an It.
"The particular It, by entering the relational event, may become a Thou.
"These are the two basic privileges of the world of It. They move man to look on the world of It as the world in which he has to live, and in which it is comfortable to live, as the world, indeed, which offers him all manner of incitements and excitements, activity and knowledge." (pp. 33-34)
For those of us who are interested in literature, it is easy to see that literary texts are among the "Its" which offer "all manner of incitements and excitements," and the example of literature may abundantly serve to demonstrate for us how an "I-It" experience may become an "I-Thou" experience as we pick up a book and become fully engaged with it. Buber's own book considers this question from an author's perspective:
"THIS IS THE ETERNAL SOURCE OF ART: a man is faced by a form which desires to be made through him into a work. This form is no offspring of his soul, but is an appearance which steps up to it and demands of it the effective power. The man is concerned with an act of his being. If he carries it through, if he speaks the primary word out of his being to the form which appears, then the effective power streams out, and the work arises." (pp. 9-10)
In the terms of Martin Buber, the more literary criticism seeks to be as removed from its object as science seems to be removed from its own objects, the more the text is shoved away into the world of "It." Paradoxically, this tends in Buber's terms to make the literary text not more real, but less real, for it increasingly distances the text from what Buber calls "relation." Literature only works as an "It" which returns us to our "Thous," the most immediate and proximate of which is our relation** with the text itself.
"The real," said Wallace Stevens, "is only the base. But it is the base." (p. 160) Buber is not a mystic who would ask us to reject the world. On the contrary, the world is the only source for the vital relations which arise in the "I-Thou" experience. Yet we must be careful not to think of this world merely in terms of its utility, which caution we can properly apply to our critical discourses, "for the development of the ability to experience and use comes about mostly through the decrease of man's power to enter into relation--the power in virtue of which alone man can live the life of the spirit." (pp. 38-39)
Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine is chiefly known for his argument that neither entropy nor chaos is truly disorderly--that perhaps order originates from chaos. A by-product of this idea is his assertion that science does not proceed step-by-step toward the stewardship of a body of knowledge but instead opens a series of windows on the knowable. Indeed, that these windows are arranged in any sort of "series" at all is to Prigogine more a function of culture than an attribute of Truth. That is, the discoveries of science are not necessarily empirical. Prigogine writes:
"It is often said that without Bach we would not have had the 'St. Matthew Passion' but that relativity would have been discovered without Einstein. Science is supposed to take a deterministic course, in contrast with the unpredictability involved in the history of the arts. When we look back on the strange history of science . . . we may doubt the validity of such assertions." (p. 307)
The history of science, like our other histories, is a human history:
"To appreciate the reconceptualization of physics taking place today, we must put it in proper historical perspective. The history of science is far from being a linear unfolding that corresponds to a series of successive approximations toward some intrinsic truth. It is full of contradictions, of unexpected turning points." (p. xxviii)
What is more, these turning points often have been orchestrated by the presence of the human observer:
". . . it seems that some more universal message is carried by science, a message that concerns the interaction of man and nature as well as man with man." (p. 7)
Of course it would be a distortion of Prigogine's argument to say that he wishes to convey an idea that modern science suggests that man is sometimes the "author" of nature, but such a hint is certainly present in Prigogine, when he points to an analogy between the work of science and musical composition or the writing of fiction:
". . . Each language can express only part of reality. Music, for example, has not been exhausted by any of its realizations, by any style of composition, from Bach to Schoenberg. . . . One of the reasons for the opposition between the "two cultures" may have been the belief that literature corresponds to a conceptualization of reality, to 'fiction,' while science seems to express objective 'reality.' Quantum mechanics teaches us that the situation is not so simple. On all levels reality implies an essential element of conceptualization." (pp. 225-226)
There is little room for doubt that Prigogine wishes us to share with him a conclusion that art and science collaborate and even overlap:
". . . one aspect of the transformation of a natural object, a stone, to an object of art is closely related to our impact on matter. Artistic activity breaks the temporal symmetry of the object. It leaves a mark that translates our temporal dissymmetry into the temporal dissymmetry of the object." (p. 312)
The main impact of these observations by Prigogine upon our observations here is that science and literature are not in any sort of relation that should urge one to try to be more like the other, for they have a natural resemblance, undertake surprisingly similar tasks, and cooperate harmoniously.
What, then, do Martin Buber and Ilya Prigogine have in common? We can say that they share an interest in chaos--Buber in the metaphorical chaos which occurs when we have pressed the world too far toward mere utility to allow ourselves to enter and re-enter life-affirming and spiritually rewarding relation with it, and Prigogine in the literal chaos which we use as the vehicle for our metaphors. Also, we see that they share a vital interest in space and time, which might well reward our attention in its own right. Yet for the purposes of this essay, they have chiefly in common the fact that they are prominent non-literary figures of the twentieth century who see the cosmos as fundamentally relational, and who, in their separate ways, serve to caution literary criticism against drifting from its own orbit.
Happily, the carnival chaos of literary theory has not done great damage to art or life, nor has any admiration for science usurped the literary kingdom, beyond the simple fact of the "carnival" itself. As Felperin points out:
"The search for a theoretical metadiscourse has so far yielded only a proliferation of sub-discourses that shows no sign of consolidating into a common language and methodology comparable to that which lends a semblance of coherence to the practices of science and some credence to the notion of a scientific community." (p. 2)
It would hardly be a helpful critical discourse that sought either to disavow the relational character of the literary experience or to enrich its own status as a scientific inquiry by misrepresenting the nature of science.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Marxism and feminism are not the exceptions one might be inclined to think. Says Eva Corredor, "Althusser assumed the role of a 'super-reader' who liberated Marx from his customary audience. Perceiving parallels between Lacan's scientific psychoanalysis and his own scientific socialism, he decoded Marx . . . ." (p. 117) Carolyn J. Allen observes, "Feminist semiotician Kaja Silverman suggests that the subject is constituted by 'the relationship between ethnology, psychoanalysis, and semiotics' always with 'very precise historical and economic determinants.'" (p. 279) And K.K. Ruthven writes, "But the gynocritical contribution of Lakoff's essay is its attempt to specify certain lexical, syntactical and intonational features as characteristic of 'woman's language' and which have come to be known subsequently as IWL features'." (P. 95)
**We should not fail to observe, of course, that many of today's sub-discourses help us considerably to understand the "relation" between author or reader and the text. Still, much of that very study of such relations is self-consciously "scientific" (see Berg).
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Allen, Carolyn J. "Feminist Criticism and Postmodernism." (In "Natoli," below, pp. 278-305.)
Berg, Temma F. "Psychologies of Reading." (In "Natoli," below, pp. 248-277.)
Buber, Martin (1958). I and Thou. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.
Corredor, Eva. "Sociocritical and Marxist Literary Theory." (In "Natoli," below, pp. 105-126.)
Eagleton, Terry (1983). Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Felperin, Howard (1985). Beyond Deconstruction. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Natoli, Joseph (1987). Tracing Literary Theory. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Prigogine, Ilya and Isabelle Stengers (1984). Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature. Boulder and London: New Science Library.
Ruthven, K. K. (1984). Feminist Literary Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Stevens, Wallace (1957, 1982). Opus Posthumous. New York: Vintage Books.