After a long hiatus I have decided to resume writing this blog. I wish to announce, however, a slight change in direction. For some time I have wanted to develop a theory of aesthetics, principally related to literature but, if possible, extending to all kinds of arts. What I intend to do now is use this blog to explore some ideas related to literary theory.
Let’s make a start shall we?
What (to begin with) is the subject matter of literature? It is tempting to say that this subject matter is life, in all its complexity. Stendhal, in the novel Crimson and Black offers this comment as an aside:
“…. A novel is a mirror journeying down the high road. Sometimes it reflects to your view the azure blue of heaven, sometimes the mire in the puddles on the road below. And the man who carries the mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror reflects the mire, and you blame the mirror! Blame rather the high road on which the puddle lies and still more the inspector of roads and highways who lets the water stand there and the puddle form.”
The notion of a novel as a mirror of life, with all the moral ambiguity and complexity found in life, while useful as a programmatic statement, is on analysis quite inadequate. We must reject it as being trite to the point of meaninglessness. Why? Because it fails to answer the important question: whose life? I myself have no personal experience of the nineteenth century French social milieu; it does not reflect my life; I have no basis of comparison to determine its truth-value. And yet I can enjoy the novel, despite, or perhaps even because of, the fact that it is bears so little relation to my own situation. Probably, if I were to read a book documenting an existence that really resembled the existence I myself own, I would become bored. This is because the life I lead is boring. I read\ because I am bored.
The claim that art is a mirror to life suggests that its value lies in its correspondence to reality, in its truth-value. It is this claim that we must reject.
Am I arguing that literature is necessarily escapist? Not necessarily (I don’t want to get ahead of myself). I will however make the following statement: the subject matter of literature, of enjoyable literature, is the interesting. Whaling is interesting; hence, the subject matter of Moby Dick is interesting. Police procedurals are interesting; consequently the Rebus novels by Ian Rankin are interesting, as is the TV series Bones. Aliens and spaceships are interesting, so science fiction is interesting. Even paedophilia can be interesting, so Nabakov’s Lolita is interesting. So we shall take as axiomatic that a requirement of literature is that it be interesting.
This observation, while not being trite, may seem trivial. It also might seem that I am replacing one imponderable -the subject matter proper to literature- with another- the odd category of the interesting. It is however a beginning, and will be used as a jumping off point for further discussion. In the next instalment I shall consider truth and falsity in more detail, with regard to the human-subject in its phenomenological setting.
Here’s to a new beginning!